Popping pills is not necessary but in the most severe cases. I get this too as a software developer with a mentally demanding job, it is essentially overstimulation.
Try reading up on Zen as well as meditation techniques. Practice breathing exercises. Decrease sugars and processed foods heavy in complex carbs. Take up full body exercise that is demanding but not stressful. Do not run or lift weights, it is too stressful on your body. Walking, tai-chi and yoga help. All of this balances me out and calms my mind. I sleep so much better and I wake so much more rejuvenated than ever before.
I would suggest that you underestimate the intelligence and capability of citizens these days. In the first place, they are better educated than ever before in the entire history of mankind. Furthermore, having a myriad of sources for information, rather than confuse, I would suggest allows us to form an educated opinion far faster than ever before.
I do not underestimate the capability and education of citizens. I agree with this statement that we are better educated than ever before. I was once terribly uneducated and misinformed and the Internet helped me to change my world view. I do find social psychology fascinating however. My world view is that while we are intellectually more capable, we are still emotionally driven. Given a choice people will choose a familiar and comfortable hell over an unfamiliar and strange heaven. This holds true for what we DECIDE to believe as well, as ultimately it comes down to a persons decision about what they choose to believe. Did Obama sign NDAA into law? I believe he did in light of evidence but I chose to believe that since I did not see him do it in person. Do I believe he is a muslim? No I do not choose to believe that because I don't think there is evidence for it.
The bottom line is that acceptance of an unconvenient truth may be satisfying to our logic, however emotionally distasteful to our belief structures, our world views, our culture that we grew in and became familiar with, or the consequences of that thing being true are too distasteful for us to accept. We may be smart, but we have an innate nature to use that very intelligence to try and rationalize and justify viewpoints that are tolerable to our fragile emotional states. The bottom line is that while I respect your optimism, I truly believe that humanity is deeply flawed in this way and will always be so for a long long time.
we have instant access these days to our trusted social networks through which we may filter our opinions. Clearly I take an optimist view here.
Our trusted social networks are hand selected by the most biased source imaginable, ourselves. We may pick friends and family but those who disagree with us give us emotional turmoil and upset relative calm and balance. We will choose to socialize with others whom we have more in common with and that generally means that we subconciously pick sites, forums and media that are primarily comprised of like-minded individuals (unless of course if we get a thrill at being a rabble rouser on the opposing sides team). If anything this means we filter the massive amount of available information to that which is most savory to ourselves, further alienating ourselves from opposing viewpoints and information sources that could potentially challenge and threaten our beliefs and world view.
Your example of the NYT article perfectly demonstrates this. The large number of left-leaning commenters is because the NYT is more savory to left leaning individuals than right leaning individuals. You would get a completely different commentary for the exact same article if it was posted on the Cato Institutes or Heritage Foundations site. This is the same false sense of mass mentality that we can witness on Slashdot commentary. If Slashdot was a true sampling of the average person, the average person would mostly consist of software developers, engineers, scientists and IT professionals and would primarily be Liberal-Left or Libertarian. Very few people in the world are actually Liberal-Left or Libertarian.
The days when corporations and special-interest lobby groups could operate behind the smokescreen of media reporting are over.
There are hundreds of thousands of people interested enough in different issues to monitor the news, Parliament, Congress, twitter accounts, websites, and God knows what else for hints of abuse of the rights of citizens over the power of government and business.
What that means is it's virtually impossible to have another Watergate without someone tweaking to it well before it can escalate into such a debacle.
While this is technically true, it should be pointed out that because of the very free flow of information we now experience we are also highly subject to massive amounts of information overload. This makes it very difficult for the uninformed person to make an accurate judgement on the information that is presented to them and when they get 18 different wildly different viewpoints, how do you know what to believe? Clearly some of these are exaggerations of the truth. Some are pretty close to the truth. Some are disingenous or ill informed themselves. Some are just downright lies fueled by a hidden agenda. Then you find 200 disparate sources arguing over whether the hidden agenda for opinion X even exists or not.
So the flow of information can no longer be controlled, but it can be obfuscated for the vast majority to the point where you create bitter divides and polarities in society allowing you more control and freedom to gain more power and influence. The game has changed, the vast majority are still misinformed and greatly outnumber the handful of people who actually see and can understand what is actually going on, so the powers that be pretty much can just ignore them.
Even if his vote had been overridden, taking a stand against a bad bill like this would have increased his political capital among his voters. The problem with Obama is that he doesn't care about his voters, he only cares about getting re-elected, so he's brazenly assumed that all the Democrat voters are automatically going to turn out and vote for him in November, so he doesn't have to do anything to keep them happy, so all his moves are to act like a Republican, so that he can get as many "swing" voters as possible, plus as many on the right as possible.
Here is a brief lesson in American politics. Republican voters don't win elections for Republican presidents. Democrat voters do not win elections for Democrat presidents. It is the hopelessly ignorant, easily led astray masses of Independents and Undecideds that are highly susceptible to media blitz campaigns that decide the President.
When that bill ended up on Obamas desk, you could have heard Admiral Ackbar screaming, "ITS A TRAP!" from a mile away. It was designed such that Republicans could manufacture a political disaster for him in the upcoming election if he had veto'ed the damn bill. The lesser of two evils here applies. If you turn around and vote for Romney then I guaran-FUCKING-tee you the first thing on his agenda will be to privatize social security, giving all of your retirement away to his ass-hat yachting buddies on Wall Street. You will never see that money as long as you live. Please God tell me the American people are not this ignorant.
Let's start with the fact that corporations don't have the freedom of speech. They're not endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.
However, corporations are composed of people who are so endowed. Those people do not lose their rights just because they choose to form a corporation. That is the basis for the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United. The Supreme Court found that the people who formed Citizens United had the right to form such a corporation in order to say certain things and the fact that they had formed a corporation did not diminish their right to say those things.
And this has what to do with speech = money? And even if we accept that speech = money, are the people that compose a corporation spending their own money/speech on political bribes... er.... I mean advertisements?
We never built any real sort of professional standing army, most men had their training right in the heat of battle in their home towns.
I advise you pick up a history book. We had a relatively well organized professional standing army consisting of multiple generals (Washington, Greene, etc...) and they provided a lot of training. The problem was that they were outgunned, outskilled and outnumbered by the British regulars, but then again, every nation was. The British military was the envy of every nation.
Everything back then was Napoleanic style so the measure of your army was really in the structure, order, rigid discipline and morale that you instilled in your men. Each side reloaded, shot, repeated and marched, and if you were in the front of the line and didn't piss your pants or rout then your army would overcome. This is why well supplied and well troops were important because they had more morale which gave them less fear, which meant less soldiers running away in terror. Washington and many of the officers knew all of this and had the top British military training being veterans of the French-Indian war. The troops had top training, just poorly supplied, poorly fed and poorly equipped.
Pittsburgh sort of makes this all work if it weren't being run into the ground by corrupt management. I can either commute one way 40 minute drive with a 10 minute walk or take the bus which is 1hr one way, then a 10 minute drive or 20 minute bike from the last bus stop to my house. Even with the expensive fares in this city it is still cheaper when you consider how expensive parking is, and I can nap for an hour, which is frowned upon while you are driving.
You have to understand something about Pheonix... Everybody there, and I do mean just about everybody wants first world government services but are so damn Conservative that they also gripe when they have to pay a fraction of the taxes of a normal city. Then public services suffer, and everybody gets up in arms about how this is proof that government does nothing right and how it is failing them. So they cut and cut and layoff public workers until mass transit is in shambles.
Then to make it worse, some idiot politician decides to privatize the very thing they destroyed by defunding it to oblivion and this generally means paying out to a private company TWICE what the public service cost the government, then the private company turning around and charging more to the people who actually used to use the public service.
Both you and the GP seem to have no idea how the world oil markets really work. The big oil corporations make record profits on volume not on price gouging. The people making the killing are the Wall Street speculators investing in oil futures. They typically bring a stable price to the oil companies who would otherwise would potentially suffer from fluctuations in price. They would rather take the guaranteed amount from the speculators than accept potential risk from market fluctuations.
Likewise building a pipeline doesn't really affect the price of gas in the US. It doesn't even affect supply, it just decreases the transportation cost from getting oil in tar sands from Canada to refineries in the US and makes it so that oil companies don't have to invest in building any new refineries (which consequently, would create a LOT more jobs than building a pipeline). These are all costs that only have a modest affect on the price of oil and even then it just increases the supply on the global market more meaning that China could still double demand in the next 10 years and the price of oil STILL goes up!
You don't have to worry about it in the US either. The dirty little secret that most people don't know is that a hospital can't put a lien on your property for failure to pay medical bills. They can get collections agencies to frighten and harass you, but they have no teeth, they are all bark, no bite.
The people who go into financial ruin because of medical expenses are tricked or scared into attemptingto paying them down by forgoing their more important obligations like mortgages, taxes, student loans and car payments. Of course the hospital or doctor won't ever provide you non-emergency care ever again if you do this but I digress.
Exactly.
Moreover, despite the implications of the report in The Daily Caller (which has right-wing leanings), there doesn't seem to be much "there", there.
Exactly. This whole non-story just reeks of another right-wing think tank attempt to paint the picture of a corrupt administration that sneakily gets away with things all the time. And just in time for the 2012 election cycle as their golden boy Mitt is close to clinching the Republican nomination.
Look for this to be plastered all over the conservative rags and Faux news for the next several months. The sad thing is that the people will just eat it up because they want so badly to believe that Obama is a corrupt president.
Money represents the cumulative output of our society. Your share is dependent on the number of hours you put in. No life is more precious than another and therefore no hour spent investing in the production of goods and services that improve quality of life is more valuable than another. People who believe themselves more valuable than others are living on sheer ego. So NO you didn't earn it. If you have more than your share than you have it at the expense of everyone who is working equally hard or more hard than you and has less.
I agree to a point but this will actually in itself only be fair if the share you are given actually represents the amount of time, effort, education and training went into getting you into your chosen profession. It would not be fair for a manager at Blockbusters to make the same wage as a neurosurgeon. One had 8 years of schooling, 3 years of interning and another 1.5 to 5 years of fellowship and shadowing before legitimately practicing his/her trade. The other might have had a two week retail management training course. The neurosurgeon invested significantly more time and energy so should get paid significantly more.
Using your example, the French citizen who allegedly solicited to have somebody assasinated likely broke the law in France as well. If this is the case then even though they are well in their rights to extradite the Frenchman to the US, because he has committed a crime in France as well then he can be tried and punished under the French system.
This is where extradition treaties come into play. France likely will prefer to try the person in France because he is in fact a French citizen.
However, I do agree with the first part of his post. Manning committed treason.
Even that is debatable. One is to follow orders of a superior but the case could be made that whistleblowing on treasonous and egregious coverups is not treasonous at all.
Nothing and nobody in my mind is more patriotic and demonstrates a man who loves his country more than what Manning did. The stewards of our nation are the real traitors.
What they meant was the Camel TOE was the gateway to heaven. Not really sure how the back door aspect comes into all this.
If you knew my wife like I do, you would know that getting a camel through the eye of a needle is far more possible than me entering through the backdoor.
If I were the submitter then hosting and server costs would be the least of my worries (although he can find MUCH better prices on bandwidth). It won't be long before the RIAA goes after people who stream free music and just record the audio stream directly from their sound card input.
You are not taking into account that providers markup bandwidth specifically because they are selling hosting (VPS, shared, etc...) as well as support, backups and software services that make configuration and deployment a breeze and all this at cost or sometimes even loss.
This argument is flawed that everybody is trying to rip you off a little bit more. There are a lot of providers out there and the competition is tight. If this were true, it would just take one provider to break from the pack and offer insanely low prices on bandwidth and put the other guys out of business. For this kind of price gouging to be maintained, all of the players would have to be in collusion, while not impossible, would seem highly unlikely amidst a market where new competitors spring up on a weekly basis.
Inflation only matters if the price of stuff is going up without wages also going up.
Inflation matters as long as you don't spend every penny you make every month.
Anything you save is worth less next year than this year.
This encourages people to not accumulate significant wealth, since most anything significant will require you to save money until you can afford it. And any money you save is worth less as time progresses.
Isn't this why the banks exist? So that they can sell us capital and wealth? God forbid we have a dollar pegged to gold because then we can save for things like a new house or a new car and we wouldn't need the banks nearly as much anymore would we?
For what it's worth, in my own experience, I have never, ever, ever met a woman that isn't interested in some part of the wide variation of naked people touching each other that exists on film
Sure I have had a few female partners in my life that would occasionally indulge in the scandalous affair that is adult film. I have never personally been with a girl that watches porn to the extent that most guys do though where they would be jilling in front of their computer all night every night, but then nobody is saying that these individuals don't exist. On a biological level women tend not to have the same neural responses to erotic imagery as men. This is a proven fact based on research studies with MRI machines. This just happens to coincide with my worldly experiences. Men tend to take in the visual beauty, women tend to take a macro perspective of the whole thing from all senses.
Human sexual behavior on a macro scale is most apparent at its most primitive form in chat rooms, it is quite fascinating to just watch really. Usually an 10 to 1 or 8 to 1 ratio of men to women. The men are highly competitive for the women, many resorting to flashing their genitals like peacocks. The women are outnumbered because most women are not actively sexual by themselves, but are situationally sexual or sexual when the situation they happen to be in feels right for them. The few women that are there in the chat room are actively seeking a sexual experience but the way they tend to behave in the chat room is uniquely feminine. They will look provacative and behave sexually, tease with glimmers of imagery, and revel in the male competition for their attention. They tend to look for the right partner, the one that stands out and piques their interest. They have the luxury of being picky.
You can witness a more PG version of this very behavior in just about any bar or lounge. Even the unattractive women could probably go home with someone that night if she waits long enough, because some guy will eventually give up on the others and settle for what he can get that night.
Yes, very different drugs, but ecstasy has a similarity with heroin to where it overloads and fries the pleasure centers of the brain to put in lay terms. But thank you for that astute observation Etymology Man. http://xkcd.com/1010/
Methadone is typical for people so addicted that cold turkey would kill them, that's at least pretty much what I've been told.
That may have been the intent originally, but you have unfortunately been told wrong.
As someone who is related to a few heroin addy's, one ex-addy, they typically tell me that methadone feels in many ways like a more powerful drug and it is indeed more addictive than heroin itself. The point of the methadone clinic is that they would rather have you on a controlled substance that is more powerful and addictive, but is dosed and quality controlled correctly than having people buy heroin off the street. Remember, heroin was invented to be the cure for morphine addiction!
This is all well and good but when you are addicted to heroin, then it is possible to be physically and mentally freed of that addiction through hard work, dedication, committment, and a LOT of time. One friend of mine was able to do this despite the fact that he was repeatedly told that it can't be done and that his only option was methadone.
They purposely try to convince you that you are not strong willed enough without methadone simply because it is cheaper and easier to treat hundreds of addicts by dispensing methadone than it is through extended rehab, therapy and a strong social support group.
If a vaccination makes one non-responsive IV opiate drugs like heroin then it must be making significant and lasting changes to neural chemistry. Who knows what all affects that might result in, given or still limited understanding of the brain?
Something tells me that people who willfully take heroin, ecstacy or similar drugs for pleasure are not all too concerned about significant and lasting changes to their neural chemistry.
I don't think conviction of a non capital crime should permit the state to make permanent changes to persons body. That is slippery slope our society needs to stay the heck away from. I really think no matter how good an idea it might seem, no matter how many people it might "help" we really need to agree that there are lines we just won't cross because they run counter to the character of our society.
Agreed, however I think it is important that society makes the choice available. What good is our freedom and liberty if the society in which we live does not allow for or offer the opportunities and range of choices that allow for us to implement or freedoms and liberties?
We may not have had much in the way of web surfing, because while most of my neighbors had AOL and were confined to their little playground, I was in middle school and toying with text based browsing, email and IRC chats all over my dad's dialup through his work and this was all in 93-94 as I recall. I was king shit in my neighborhood in 95 too because I had the top-dog gaming machine with a 200mhz Pentium processor and 32mb of ram all with a blazing 28.8kbps modem so gaming was a breeze for me.
True online gaming hadn't really come into its own yet at that point but many games had direct dialup connection options so multiplayer was possible with friends in my neighborhood and people I met on chat. Needless to say I usually hosted because of my specs at the time.
Me and nearly all of my neighbors did, but then again we lived in a suburb close to many large IT employers at the time. The internet was prevalent enough in 1995 for it be featured in popular media. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/
Slashdot Mirror
Popping pills is not necessary but in the most severe cases. I get this too as a software developer with a mentally demanding job, it is essentially overstimulation.
Try reading up on Zen as well as meditation techniques. Practice breathing exercises. Decrease sugars and processed foods heavy in complex carbs. Take up full body exercise that is demanding but not stressful. Do not run or lift weights, it is too stressful on your body. Walking, tai-chi and yoga help. All of this balances me out and calms my mind. I sleep so much better and I wake so much more rejuvenated than ever before.
I would suggest that you underestimate the intelligence and capability of citizens these days. In the first place, they are better educated than ever before in the entire history of mankind. Furthermore, having a myriad of sources for information, rather than confuse, I would suggest allows us to form an educated opinion far faster than ever before.
I do not underestimate the capability and education of citizens. I agree with this statement that we are better educated than ever before. I was once terribly uneducated and misinformed and the Internet helped me to change my world view. I do find social psychology fascinating however. My world view is that while we are intellectually more capable, we are still emotionally driven. Given a choice people will choose a familiar and comfortable hell over an unfamiliar and strange heaven. This holds true for what we DECIDE to believe as well, as ultimately it comes down to a persons decision about what they choose to believe. Did Obama sign NDAA into law? I believe he did in light of evidence but I chose to believe that since I did not see him do it in person. Do I believe he is a muslim? No I do not choose to believe that because I don't think there is evidence for it.
The bottom line is that acceptance of an unconvenient truth may be satisfying to our logic, however emotionally distasteful to our belief structures, our world views, our culture that we grew in and became familiar with, or the consequences of that thing being true are too distasteful for us to accept. We may be smart, but we have an innate nature to use that very intelligence to try and rationalize and justify viewpoints that are tolerable to our fragile emotional states. The bottom line is that while I respect your optimism, I truly believe that humanity is deeply flawed in this way and will always be so for a long long time.
we have instant access these days to our trusted social networks through which we may filter our opinions. Clearly I take an optimist view here.
Our trusted social networks are hand selected by the most biased source imaginable, ourselves. We may pick friends and family but those who disagree with us give us emotional turmoil and upset relative calm and balance. We will choose to socialize with others whom we have more in common with and that generally means that we subconciously pick sites, forums and media that are primarily comprised of like-minded individuals (unless of course if we get a thrill at being a rabble rouser on the opposing sides team). If anything this means we filter the massive amount of available information to that which is most savory to ourselves, further alienating ourselves from opposing viewpoints and information sources that could potentially challenge and threaten our beliefs and world view.
Your example of the NYT article perfectly demonstrates this. The large number of left-leaning commenters is because the NYT is more savory to left leaning individuals than right leaning individuals. You would get a completely different commentary for the exact same article if it was posted on the Cato Institutes or Heritage Foundations site. This is the same false sense of mass mentality that we can witness on Slashdot commentary. If Slashdot was a true sampling of the average person, the average person would mostly consist of software developers, engineers, scientists and IT professionals and would primarily be Liberal-Left or Libertarian. Very few people in the world are actually Liberal-Left or Libertarian.
The days when corporations and special-interest lobby groups could operate behind the smokescreen of media reporting are over. There are hundreds of thousands of people interested enough in different issues to monitor the news, Parliament, Congress, twitter accounts, websites, and God knows what else for hints of abuse of the rights of citizens over the power of government and business. What that means is it's virtually impossible to have another Watergate without someone tweaking to it well before it can escalate into such a debacle.
While this is technically true, it should be pointed out that because of the very free flow of information we now experience we are also highly subject to massive amounts of information overload. This makes it very difficult for the uninformed person to make an accurate judgement on the information that is presented to them and when they get 18 different wildly different viewpoints, how do you know what to believe? Clearly some of these are exaggerations of the truth. Some are pretty close to the truth. Some are disingenous or ill informed themselves. Some are just downright lies fueled by a hidden agenda. Then you find 200 disparate sources arguing over whether the hidden agenda for opinion X even exists or not.
So the flow of information can no longer be controlled, but it can be obfuscated for the vast majority to the point where you create bitter divides and polarities in society allowing you more control and freedom to gain more power and influence. The game has changed, the vast majority are still misinformed and greatly outnumber the handful of people who actually see and can understand what is actually going on, so the powers that be pretty much can just ignore them.
Even if his vote had been overridden, taking a stand against a bad bill like this would have increased his political capital among his voters. The problem with Obama is that he doesn't care about his voters, he only cares about getting re-elected, so he's brazenly assumed that all the Democrat voters are automatically going to turn out and vote for him in November, so he doesn't have to do anything to keep them happy, so all his moves are to act like a Republican, so that he can get as many "swing" voters as possible, plus as many on the right as possible.
Here is a brief lesson in American politics. Republican voters don't win elections for Republican presidents. Democrat voters do not win elections for Democrat presidents. It is the hopelessly ignorant, easily led astray masses of Independents and Undecideds that are highly susceptible to media blitz campaigns that decide the President.
When that bill ended up on Obamas desk, you could have heard Admiral Ackbar screaming, "ITS A TRAP!" from a mile away. It was designed such that Republicans could manufacture a political disaster for him in the upcoming election if he had veto'ed the damn bill. The lesser of two evils here applies. If you turn around and vote for Romney then I guaran-FUCKING-tee you the first thing on his agenda will be to privatize social security, giving all of your retirement away to his ass-hat yachting buddies on Wall Street. You will never see that money as long as you live. Please God tell me the American people are not this ignorant.
Let's start with the fact that corporations don't have the freedom of speech. They're not endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.
However, corporations are composed of people who are so endowed. Those people do not lose their rights just because they choose to form a corporation. That is the basis for the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United. The Supreme Court found that the people who formed Citizens United had the right to form such a corporation in order to say certain things and the fact that they had formed a corporation did not diminish their right to say those things.
And this has what to do with speech = money? And even if we accept that speech = money, are the people that compose a corporation spending their own money/speech on political bribes ... er.... I mean advertisements?
We never built any real sort of professional standing army, most men had their training right in the heat of battle in their home towns.
I advise you pick up a history book. We had a relatively well organized professional standing army consisting of multiple generals (Washington, Greene, etc...) and they provided a lot of training. The problem was that they were outgunned, outskilled and outnumbered by the British regulars, but then again, every nation was. The British military was the envy of every nation.
Everything back then was Napoleanic style so the measure of your army was really in the structure, order, rigid discipline and morale that you instilled in your men. Each side reloaded, shot, repeated and marched, and if you were in the front of the line and didn't piss your pants or rout then your army would overcome. This is why well supplied and well troops were important because they had more morale which gave them less fear, which meant less soldiers running away in terror. Washington and many of the officers knew all of this and had the top British military training being veterans of the French-Indian war. The troops had top training, just poorly supplied, poorly fed and poorly equipped.
Pittsburgh sort of makes this all work if it weren't being run into the ground by corrupt management. I can either commute one way 40 minute drive with a 10 minute walk or take the bus which is 1hr one way, then a 10 minute drive or 20 minute bike from the last bus stop to my house. Even with the expensive fares in this city it is still cheaper when you consider how expensive parking is, and I can nap for an hour, which is frowned upon while you are driving.
You have to understand something about Pheonix... Everybody there, and I do mean just about everybody wants first world government services but are so damn Conservative that they also gripe when they have to pay a fraction of the taxes of a normal city. Then public services suffer, and everybody gets up in arms about how this is proof that government does nothing right and how it is failing them. So they cut and cut and layoff public workers until mass transit is in shambles.
Then to make it worse, some idiot politician decides to privatize the very thing they destroyed by defunding it to oblivion and this generally means paying out to a private company TWICE what the public service cost the government, then the private company turning around and charging more to the people who actually used to use the public service.
Both you and the GP seem to have no idea how the world oil markets really work. The big oil corporations make record profits on volume not on price gouging. The people making the killing are the Wall Street speculators investing in oil futures. They typically bring a stable price to the oil companies who would otherwise would potentially suffer from fluctuations in price. They would rather take the guaranteed amount from the speculators than accept potential risk from market fluctuations.
Likewise building a pipeline doesn't really affect the price of gas in the US. It doesn't even affect supply, it just decreases the transportation cost from getting oil in tar sands from Canada to refineries in the US and makes it so that oil companies don't have to invest in building any new refineries (which consequently, would create a LOT more jobs than building a pipeline). These are all costs that only have a modest affect on the price of oil and even then it just increases the supply on the global market more meaning that China could still double demand in the next 10 years and the price of oil STILL goes up!
You don't have to worry about it in the US either. The dirty little secret that most people don't know is that a hospital can't put a lien on your property for failure to pay medical bills. They can get collections agencies to frighten and harass you, but they have no teeth, they are all bark, no bite.
The people who go into financial ruin because of medical expenses are tricked or scared into attemptingto paying them down by forgoing their more important obligations like mortgages, taxes, student loans and car payments. Of course the hospital or doctor won't ever provide you non-emergency care ever again if you do this but I digress.
Exactly. Moreover, despite the implications of the report in The Daily Caller (which has right-wing leanings), there doesn't seem to be much "there", there.
Exactly. This whole non-story just reeks of another right-wing think tank attempt to paint the picture of a corrupt administration that sneakily gets away with things all the time. And just in time for the 2012 election cycle as their golden boy Mitt is close to clinching the Republican nomination.
Look for this to be plastered all over the conservative rags and Faux news for the next several months. The sad thing is that the people will just eat it up because they want so badly to believe that Obama is a corrupt president.
Money represents the cumulative output of our society. Your share is dependent on the number of hours you put in. No life is more precious than another and therefore no hour spent investing in the production of goods and services that improve quality of life is more valuable than another. People who believe themselves more valuable than others are living on sheer ego. So NO you didn't earn it. If you have more than your share than you have it at the expense of everyone who is working equally hard or more hard than you and has less.
I agree to a point but this will actually in itself only be fair if the share you are given actually represents the amount of time, effort, education and training went into getting you into your chosen profession. It would not be fair for a manager at Blockbusters to make the same wage as a neurosurgeon. One had 8 years of schooling, 3 years of interning and another 1.5 to 5 years of fellowship and shadowing before legitimately practicing his/her trade. The other might have had a two week retail management training course. The neurosurgeon invested significantly more time and energy so should get paid significantly more.
Using your example, the French citizen who allegedly solicited to have somebody assasinated likely broke the law in France as well. If this is the case then even though they are well in their rights to extradite the Frenchman to the US, because he has committed a crime in France as well then he can be tried and punished under the French system.
This is where extradition treaties come into play. France likely will prefer to try the person in France because he is in fact a French citizen.
However, I do agree with the first part of his post. Manning committed treason.
Even that is debatable. One is to follow orders of a superior but the case could be made that whistleblowing on treasonous and egregious coverups is not treasonous at all.
Nothing and nobody in my mind is more patriotic and demonstrates a man who loves his country more than what Manning did. The stewards of our nation are the real traitors.
What they meant was the Camel TOE was the gateway to heaven. Not really sure how the back door aspect comes into all this.
If you knew my wife like I do, you would know that getting a camel through the eye of a needle is far more possible than me entering through the backdoor.
Someone please mod this up.
If I were the submitter then hosting and server costs would be the least of my worries (although he can find MUCH better prices on bandwidth). It won't be long before the RIAA goes after people who stream free music and just record the audio stream directly from their sound card input.
You are not taking into account that providers markup bandwidth specifically because they are selling hosting (VPS, shared, etc...) as well as support, backups and software services that make configuration and deployment a breeze and all this at cost or sometimes even loss.
This argument is flawed that everybody is trying to rip you off a little bit more. There are a lot of providers out there and the competition is tight. If this were true, it would just take one provider to break from the pack and offer insanely low prices on bandwidth and put the other guys out of business. For this kind of price gouging to be maintained, all of the players would have to be in collusion, while not impossible, would seem highly unlikely amidst a market where new competitors spring up on a weekly basis.
Inflation matters as long as you don't spend every penny you make every month.
Anything you save is worth less next year than this year.
This encourages people to not accumulate significant wealth, since most anything significant will require you to save money until you can afford it. And any money you save is worth less as time progresses.
Isn't this why the banks exist? So that they can sell us capital and wealth? God forbid we have a dollar pegged to gold because then we can save for things like a new house or a new car and we wouldn't need the banks nearly as much anymore would we?
Seriously, you should be modded insightful just for remembering Gopher protocol!
For what it's worth, in my own experience, I have never, ever, ever met a woman that isn't interested in some part of the wide variation of naked people touching each other that exists on film
Sure I have had a few female partners in my life that would occasionally indulge in the scandalous affair that is adult film. I have never personally been with a girl that watches porn to the extent that most guys do though where they would be jilling in front of their computer all night every night, but then nobody is saying that these individuals don't exist. On a biological level women tend not to have the same neural responses to erotic imagery as men. This is a proven fact based on research studies with MRI machines. This just happens to coincide with my worldly experiences. Men tend to take in the visual beauty, women tend to take a macro perspective of the whole thing from all senses.
Human sexual behavior on a macro scale is most apparent at its most primitive form in chat rooms, it is quite fascinating to just watch really. Usually an 10 to 1 or 8 to 1 ratio of men to women. The men are highly competitive for the women, many resorting to flashing their genitals like peacocks. The women are outnumbered because most women are not actively sexual by themselves, but are situationally sexual or sexual when the situation they happen to be in feels right for them. The few women that are there in the chat room are actively seeking a sexual experience but the way they tend to behave in the chat room is uniquely feminine. They will look provacative and behave sexually, tease with glimmers of imagery, and revel in the male competition for their attention. They tend to look for the right partner, the one that stands out and piques their interest. They have the luxury of being picky.
You can witness a more PG version of this very behavior in just about any bar or lounge. Even the unattractive women could probably go home with someone that night if she waits long enough, because some guy will eventually give up on the others and settle for what he can get that night.
Yes, very different drugs, but ecstasy has a similarity with heroin to where it overloads and fries the pleasure centers of the brain to put in lay terms. But thank you for that astute observation Etymology Man. http://xkcd.com/1010/
Methadone is typical for people so addicted that cold turkey would kill them, that's at least pretty much what I've been told.
That may have been the intent originally, but you have unfortunately been told wrong.
As someone who is related to a few heroin addy's, one ex-addy, they typically tell me that methadone feels in many ways like a more powerful drug and it is indeed more addictive than heroin itself. The point of the methadone clinic is that they would rather have you on a controlled substance that is more powerful and addictive, but is dosed and quality controlled correctly than having people buy heroin off the street. Remember, heroin was invented to be the cure for morphine addiction!
This is all well and good but when you are addicted to heroin, then it is possible to be physically and mentally freed of that addiction through hard work, dedication, committment, and a LOT of time. One friend of mine was able to do this despite the fact that he was repeatedly told that it can't be done and that his only option was methadone.
They purposely try to convince you that you are not strong willed enough without methadone simply because it is cheaper and easier to treat hundreds of addicts by dispensing methadone than it is through extended rehab, therapy and a strong social support group.
If a vaccination makes one non-responsive IV opiate drugs like heroin then it must be making significant and lasting changes to neural chemistry. Who knows what all affects that might result in, given or still limited understanding of the brain?
Something tells me that people who willfully take heroin, ecstacy or similar drugs for pleasure are not all too concerned about significant and lasting changes to their neural chemistry.
I don't think conviction of a non capital crime should permit the state to make permanent changes to persons body. That is slippery slope our society needs to stay the heck away from. I really think no matter how good an idea it might seem, no matter how many people it might "help" we really need to agree that there are lines we just won't cross because they run counter to the character of our society.
Agreed, however I think it is important that society makes the choice available. What good is our freedom and liberty if the society in which we live does not allow for or offer the opportunities and range of choices that allow for us to implement or freedoms and liberties?
We may not have had much in the way of web surfing, because while most of my neighbors had AOL and were confined to their little playground, I was in middle school and toying with text based browsing, email and IRC chats all over my dad's dialup through his work and this was all in 93-94 as I recall. I was king shit in my neighborhood in 95 too because I had the top-dog gaming machine with a 200mhz Pentium processor and 32mb of ram all with a blazing 28.8kbps modem so gaming was a breeze for me.
True online gaming hadn't really come into its own yet at that point but many games had direct dialup connection options so multiplayer was possible with friends in my neighborhood and people I met on chat. Needless to say I usually hosted because of my specs at the time.
Ah the good ol' days... NOW GET OFF MY LAWN!
Me and nearly all of my neighbors did, but then again we lived in a suburb close to many large IT employers at the time. The internet was prevalent enough in 1995 for it be featured in popular media. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/