The quality of care that is _available_ in the US is the highest in the world. Yep, its expensive - we have a sue-happy society that sends malpractice lawsuits into court more than anywhere else in the world and that is expensive because it causes hideous malpractice insurance premiums. Also, our drug companies spend billions of dollars developing new drugs that they then send to other places in the world out of altruism, because those places have price controls on the drugs. If being straight capitalistic, the drug companies would say, "Nope, this is the price. If you don't want to pay it, you don't get this drug" but they don't do that. What they do instead is to charge AMERICANS enough money to cover the costs of the development of the drug, while giving the rest of the world an almost-free ride. And, of course, you have to pay doctors commensurate with the education required to be doctors. The most intense electrical engineering program I came across when considering careers was Ohio State's at 5 years to get it all done, but doctors are just getting started at 5 years. And, thanks to the profusion of gov't money available to students via the student loan programs, the Universities, as do all similar offerers of goods and services that perceive a bottomless pit of gov't money, have jacked up their tuition prices to suck as much of it as they can out of the students and gov't and into their coffers. Additionally, the US has, more than other countries, a proliferation of illegal aliens are poor, and also put other Americans out of work making them poor as well, so there are hordes of people that show up at hospitals that cannot pay for the services, while the US laws say the hospitals have to treat them. So they do. How do they do that and avoid bankruptcy? They charge those that _can_ pay a much higher price. Hospital bills for the most innocuous visits to the emergency room can range to 1000's of dollars. They're making up for the losses from all corners as just described.
What is not a ridiculous comparison is that, if the USA institutes "socialized medicine", the superior care that is available to US citizens that can pay for it will go away, cease to exist. It will be gov't run boondoggle that takes its place, and our cancer cure rates, for example, will fall to match those in other countries. As a cancer survivor, I'm against that - I may have to attempt to survive yet another cancer before its over, and I don't want _less_ capable cancer care than exists now. I could end up dead before it's really necessary. That's my big objection - dying earlier than absolutely necessary. The solution isn't to degrade our healthcare to the level of the rest of the world, it is to make our healthcare available to all our citizens. As I said, the best way to do that is to restore prosperity. Pass the Fair Tax, and that will happen.
Yes it is, but it is a delivery issue, not a healthcare quality issue. We need to work on being able to get healthcare to everyone. Unfortunately, this is one of those things that the government absolutely cannot do at the same quality level as people buying their own healthcare. As soon as someone other than the recipient of the care starts paying for it, those providing it start NOT caring how much it costs, and do everything that they can to make it more expensive because they perceive a bottomless pit of money that is supposedly the government, and are going to ensure that they "get theirs." They also cease to seek ways to make it cheaper.
The solution to this is restore prosperity to the USA, and reject this "globalization" idea that has made the rich richer and the poor poorer, and get back to fair trade instead of free trade, and tariffs where appropriate. We ran the whole country on tariffs and excise taxes before the income tax was passed in 1913 (at the behest of the rich, of course, who were tired of paying almost 100% of the costs of running the country, since these were both consumption taxes and the rich were the only ones with significant money to be able to consume. America was hoodwinked into passing the 16th Amendment, and the income taxes have been dragging down the economy ever since. We need to abolish the income taxes, go back to a consumption tax as described by "The Fair Tax", and make the economy roar. Then everyone would have the money to buy their own healthcare, except for those comparative few (compared to the millions on welfare now) that would be left that still couldn't provide for themselves.
"It's like a C average student claiming: "I'm really a straight-A student! I got As in all the classes I didn't flunk. (And BTW, for some reason my education cost twice as much as that of any other student.)" "
I don't think that's a descriptive analogy for this case. I think the better analogy is that the schools in City X are capable of delivering the best education in the world, _if_ you can get into them and pay for all the class fees, but the fact that the residents can't all afford the class fees for chemistry, physics, or even the shop class means that a significant number of students graduate without the skills that are taught in these classes. Those less knowledgeable students are our "lower income" citizens that also don't get the best healthcare that America has to offer. It doesn't change that America has best healthcare on the planet, but the problem is that our AVERAGE healthcare outcomes are lower than the rest of the world because of those not receiving care, or receiving minimal care.
Lets abolish the income taxes, all of them, and make our economy roar, and this problem will become light-years easier to manage.
No, "better healthcare outcomes" is a measurment anomaly. When an American CAN PAY FOR his healthcare, either directly or by insurance, the US healthcare systems beats the pants off the furriners. Where the distortion comes in is that many Americans _can't_ pay for healthcare, so they get limited or no healthcare, and they die at accelerated rates that drag down our average. Our average cure rates suck because the less-well-monied have much worse outcomes, which drags down the average. But if you compare out "best" with their "best", we win, hands down. You don't think all those foreign political leaders and rich business guys fly themselves and their cancers to the USA because we do a worse job, do you?
I didn't ask for it, I want the gov't the H out of the healthcare inner workings. I'm just fine with written paper records, and see no advantage to having them in a computer - just lots of disadvantages including malware such as ransomware as well as data entry errors, which had me supposedly taking a drug I've never heard the name of before, as well as the wrong dosage of a drug that I am taking. Got those worked out, but probably the best thing to do for this is to build screens that patients can work with - I'll enter what drug I'm taking, the dosage, how many dozen operations I've had (I'm 69, and have had a LOT of them) and other medical history, yada yada. And you know what? I'll save it off on a CD (not an thumb drive that can introduce a virus to your computer) and sneaker-net it to the next medical provider. Just like the time-honored way of the financiers who use OPM - Other People's Money - this thing needs set up so that much of this burden can be transferred to OPL - Other People's Labor, as in data entry, which I could mostly do... Oh, and give me a scanner, and I'll just bring in my bottles of drugs and scan them in, and it'll be faster yet....
No, the root cause is _not_ competition from all over the world. What is the root cause is the USA not winning in the competition. The competition is not that strong - they are using manual labor for a lot of things and paying their workers peanuts to do it. They're in poverty, and forcing us into poverty.
But how can that do that? I mean, there are things like shipping costs and other things like tariffs, which we don't have any of. Oh, THEY have tariffs against our goods, but we don't tariff anything because of a political mindset of the elite in both the Democratic party and the Republican party, that are BOTH taking bribes from the big businessmen that want this particular status quo. IOW, our politicians betray us and US prosperity daily.
So, they fail to make good trade deals, and they hike taxes to nearly 40%, which are the highest corporate taxes on the planet. Our industries flee the taxes, not our labor rates, and open factories overseas.
So, want to fix it? Pass the Fair Tax. The Fair Tax totally, 100% untaxes American business. Bill Archer, former head of the House Ways and Means Committee, commissioned a survey of 500 foreign CEOs, asking what they would do if the USA passed the Fair Tax. 400 of them said they would build their next factory in the USA, while the remaining 100 said they would move their headquarters here.
Without an income tax, the US economy would soar. Estimates put 1st-year GDP rise of 10.5%. The Fair Tax completely untaxes the poor (who at present send 15.3% of their wages to Washington for the payroll taxes to support social security and Medicare, and it still isn't enough because there are so few working). The Fair Tax abolishes all the income taxes, and 100% kills the IRS dead forever, and collects taxes on new items sold at retail (except the poor escape paying these taxes via a "prebate" that the gov't sends them to pay all the Fair Tax on the items they buy up the the value of the poverty level for their family size - bigger families get bigger prebates.)
I found all the movies you list to be quite entertaining. If they flopped at the box office, that may be another matter, but the movies themselves I thought to be quite interesting.
After already shelling out about $300 to my cable company for TV, many premium channels, internet access, and telephone service, I draw the line. Either they get it on my cable for no extra charge, or they can forget it. They don't have anything, nor will they, that I'm going send any additional $$$ anywhere for. This is getting ridiculous.
I've been reading, and one article is saying that at this point, the production of electricity via terrestrial wind (as opposed to off-shore wind) is the cheapest form of power generation.
Another article says that the 2020's will be the decade that the electric car comes into its own as battery prices become good enough that everyone can afford them.
Still another article is seriously proposing a world-wide grid of high-voltage power distribution, so that we can get power from, say, from Spain if the wind stops blowing and the solar is plagued with clouds or night.
The beauty of it is that charging automotive batteries is not the sort of urgent power requirement that, say, operating your iron lung is. If your wind turbine isn't working for a lack of wind, you can just wait to charge your car battery until the wind _is_ blowing.
This is strongly resembling energy independence as well as a dramatically lower effective energy cost for transportation as we substitute electricity that is used at about 90% efficiency for gasoline that is used at about 20% efficiency.
You must be a Democrat, because you obviously don't understand how things work. Doing things in business is forced on you, including using illegal aliens, because if you don't, the higher wages paid to American workers makes the price of your product too high, and nobody will buy it. Then you go out of business. Same with the slave owners. If you try to pay your fellow Americans to pick the cotton, you have to raise the price of your cotton in order to pay the American workers you hire, instead of using the free slaves, so nobody buys your high-priced cotton. And as far as Trump doing anything for the big corporations, remember that he cannot be bought - he has all the money he needs already. He will make the big corporations wealthy ONLY if they move their factories back into the USA, where he will have lowered the corporate tax rate to 15%. Then they can make money hand over fist, and Americans can go to work for the big corporations and everyone will have prosperity again, not just the go-to-college bunch.
I've considered the situation for those coming into the labor market now, and if it was me, I'm not sure I would go tech again. The education is horrendously expensive, requiring student loans that preclude prosperity for a long time while keeping you out of the job market for 4 years while you do it. Then you get treated like this.
I think that all things considered, I'd do whatever it takes to become a railroad engineer. No, not somebody building the railroad, but a locomotive driver. They make pretty good money, it doesn't take 4 years at school to learn, doesn't appear to be "manual labor" like digging a ditch, and everything would be an adventure. I like adventure, and I think I"d enjoy it. Yeah, I made more money in STEM, but it came at a price. The price is much lower for someone like that. And driving? Driving cars, I've been doing that for 50 years, and have had only one significant sheet-metal bender, nobody hurt. If I hadn't swerved, we'd all have been dead, but I just lost track of what was going on, partially, I think, from not being able to fully process the images from my new cataract-replacement multifocal lenses, which were throwing starburts and concentric rings of light from any point source of light. Stopped tail lights on the interstate caused me to almost rear-end the last car in a very long line of cars right around midnight. I don't think that would happen today, I'm used to the lenses now, but they were new to me at the time. But drive a locomotive safely - I think I'd be above average.
It does matter, because one of the things that a union does besides striking is suing. Yeah, if they're going to outsource to India, that's different, but if they're bringing in H1B like we've been talking about, that's illegal, and the union can and will sue their asses off. That's one of the things that unions are about.
Yeah, Trump has done some of those things as a businessman, but he didn't necessarily like it, it was just forced upon him if he wanted to win the bid.
Its like the founding fathers. Some were even slave owners, but every last one of them hated the institution of slavery, and wanted to abolish it. They couldn't, tho, or they wouldn't have been able to form a union of states amongst the southern states which depended on slaves to operate their great plantations. There would have been less than 13 colonies in the original USA if they had insisted.
Send all the illegals back home, and enforce the laws against the H1B abuse that is technically illegal right now, and make America for Americans again. I think Trump will do it. Voting for him gives us a chance. Most of the other politicians will lie to us and tell us they will help us, but go to Washington and do exactly the opposite. The ones that try simply don't know how to do it, the wall for instance. They're saying, in spite of China building a wall 13,000 miles long 1000 years BC, that its too big a job to build a 1000 mile wall in 2016. Trump says, "A wall? A wall is easy. You want to know what's hard? A 95 story building is hard. I can do that too!" He can at least do it, and I believe he will try. That, right there, is way ahead of any other politician.
Yeah,its a marvel how supposedly smart IT workers are not as smart as their blue-collar parents that knew that without a union, they were going to get shit and shoved in it. If you are an employee of any type, you need a union or you're going to get screwed, its that simple. So just continue being high and mighty, and go get in line at the unemployment office. Oh, and vote for Trump, who will end this crap.
Sure, lets give everyone absolute security, including the terrorists, so that when they do think up something horrific, like taking out 9 key electrical substations which would bring the power grid down completely for 18 months, thereby destroying the USA completely with about a 95% mortality rate with the only survivors being the cannibals, we won't be bothered with the inconvenience of being able to see it coming and prevent it. Sure, let the bad guys communicate in secret. Right.
Pretty much for jailing any of these outlaws that act independently to interfere with others on their own. Doesn't matter who they're interfering with, don't care if its bin Laden, doesn't matter, they don't have the right to act independently and maliciously. If they want to make a difference to wrongdoers, they can gather data and tell the FBI to "sic 'em."
I'm talking about the USA. Yeah, other countries are small enough, most of 'em, to build public transport that allows more people not to have cars. But they still transport stuff by trucks to get it to markets, as, unlike the US which has the best freight rail on the planet, they' re using their rails to transport people instead. And of course there's lotsa countries that aren't modernized at all, and people live in mud huts and subsistence farm. But OUR population is artificially dense, and will mostly die off without fossil fuels.
You're being deliberately dense to apply your rare situation of being within walking distance of either everything you need, or within walking distance of public transportation. About 99% of everyone else has to drive, or ride in a car driven by someone else, to get where they need to go. I'm 20 miles out in the freakin' boonies. I can't get where I want to go by walking or even bike-riding, I'm not going to be able to pull it off at the age of 68. If I could ride a bike to town and back (40 miles) I wouldn't, and all the businesses I support with my purchases would lack my support, and probably go out of business like I said. And you're not going to be doing farming without fossil fuels, you're not going to be transporting the food without fossil fuels, and you that think you're existence is fossil-fuel-free are going to arrive at your Starbucks and there's going to be no coffee, no food at the grocery, and so forth.
So, be sane for a moment and admit our population depends 100% on the burning of fossil fuels, for now. Again, if you want to change that, invent for us the magic battery.
"And, in order to survive the adjustment we will have to make is to stop emitting fossil CO2."
Want to see you achieve this. We absolutely have to drive cars to get to and from work, recreation, etc. If we don't go to these things, those that are providing the work and the recreation will go out of business, and be on welfare with everyone else. We absolutely have to have fossil fueled transportation bring us goods and services, we just don't know how to do it any other way. We have a population that is artifically high, and depends on fossil fuels to exist. If we don't burn fossil fuels, probably 90% of our population dies, and the only survivors are the cannibals.
So, if you really want to attack this, get your PHD in materials science and electrochemistry and get your butt into a lab and invent for us the magic battery to enable electric cars, trucks, locomotives, airplanes, and ships. The magic battery has to be cheap and small and cheap and high capacity and cheap and quick charging and cheap and power dense and cheap. We don't have anything like that, and until we get it, we're not going to be able to run everything off the grid that hopefully will be more easily powered with non-CO2 sources such as wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, tidal, etc. That can eventually work, but only if someone invents the magic battery.
They're driving up your driveway because you haven't put up a "Private Drive" and/or a "No Outlet" sign down at the main highway to let them know its not a thru road. How else are they supposed to know? The frappin' GPS sure doesn't.
My friend and I attempted to follow a GPS route thru Death Valley. It left the main road, we drove 40 miles, and it turned onto a road that had a lot of large broken rocks with sharp edges, and a sign, "No Services Next 70 miles." There was an issue with having enough gasoline in case we got to the 69 mile mark and punctured a 2nd tire after cutting one on one of the sharp rocks, or encountering a bridge out or some-such, so we drove the 40 miles back to the main road and got out of DV with the car just breathing gasoline fumes. Have to be careful...
"[The] governor [is] constitutionally the commander of the militia of the State, that is to say, of every man in it able to bear arms." --Thomas Jefferson to A. L. C. Destutt de Tracy, 1811.
Yeah, 4th Amendment. My brain fart. Anyway, the courts will probably someday say that the gov't can collect up all the guns, too. They will be wrong then, as they are wrong now with this. A right is a right, and its not subject to being abridged because someone is afraid. Note that the 4th doesn't say that people can't be screened before getting on an airplane, it just says that the gov't can't be doing it.
Search and seizure before boarding an airplane with no probably cause for believing there has been wrongdoing on the part of the specific person to be searched, and therefore without a court order to do so, is in direct violation of the 5th Amendment. The _government_ is not permitted to do that. The airlines can get together and hire _private_ security to do that, but the gov't is prohibited from doing it.
Of course, the gov't routinely ignores the constitution nowdays, so I guess they can do anything they want - come into your house and search it any time they feel like it (while killing your dog, of course), take your guns, anything they want - the constitution no longer applies... because they said so...
Lets see of Disney fires 250 more employees and replaces them with H1B's if each is going to cost the $110,000 a year! Bet they don't, and that's what this is trying to stop. I've seen news reports that say that _all_ the job gains in the USA since the year 2000 are amongst only immigrants of one flavor or another - H1B's, illegals, legals, etc. Its a war on prosperity, basically, with the middle class wages being forced closer and closer to poverty in every occupation.
Scientists and engineers the world over are working on alternative energy solutions that don't involve digging anything out of the ground so we can generate grid electricity and run our vehicles. They have already had great successes in bringing down the price of PV solar panels that are beginning to make sense for commercial power generation. The IEEE has recently had a magazine article suggesting the construction of a global DC power grid that would allow us to use solar electricity at night because it would be generated in the Ukraine or in the Sahara. Also at work are scientists attempting to build a battery that will allow electric cars to outperform and be less expensive to fuel than gasoline cars, at somewhere close to the same purchase price as a gasoline car. They haven't succeeded yet but they probably will. If they don't, we're going to then have to solve the problem of using grid electricity for our cars and trucks and airplanes and ships, whether it is sending it through the air on a laser beam or inventing a really long extension cord. But we will either do it or we won't, but nobody has to incentivize this research because it is already incentivized by the big bucks at the end of the rainbow for whoever is successful first.
IOW, we can relax, this problem is going to solve itself via ordinary market forces, and we don't have to quit driving nor pass oppressive laws that raise energy prices and kill 1000's of millions of people by casting them into poverty. All we have to do is to promote prosperity so there are many corporations and universities that have the money to work on the problem.
So, relax. The problem is being worked to the best efforts of those that are capable.
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The quality of care that is _available_ in the US is the highest in the world. Yep, its expensive - we have a sue-happy society that sends malpractice lawsuits into court more than anywhere else in the world and that is expensive because it causes hideous malpractice insurance premiums. Also, our drug companies spend billions of dollars developing new drugs that they then send to other places in the world out of altruism, because those places have price controls on the drugs. If being straight capitalistic, the drug companies would say, "Nope, this is the price. If you don't want to pay it, you don't get this drug" but they don't do that. What they do instead is to charge AMERICANS enough money to cover the costs of the development of the drug, while giving the rest of the world an almost-free ride. And, of course, you have to pay doctors commensurate with the education required to be doctors. The most intense electrical engineering program I came across when considering careers was Ohio State's at 5 years to get it all done, but doctors are just getting started at 5 years. And, thanks to the profusion of gov't money available to students via the student loan programs, the Universities, as do all similar offerers of goods and services that perceive a bottomless pit of gov't money, have jacked up their tuition prices to suck as much of it as they can out of the students and gov't and into their coffers. Additionally, the US has, more than other countries, a proliferation of illegal aliens are poor, and also put other Americans out of work making them poor as well, so there are hordes of people that show up at hospitals that cannot pay for the services, while the US laws say the hospitals have to treat them. So they do. How do they do that and avoid bankruptcy? They charge those that _can_ pay a much higher price. Hospital bills for the most innocuous visits to the emergency room can range to 1000's of dollars. They're making up for the losses from all corners as just described.
What is not a ridiculous comparison is that, if the USA institutes "socialized medicine", the superior care that is available to US citizens that can pay for it will go away, cease to exist. It will be gov't run boondoggle that takes its place, and our cancer cure rates, for example, will fall to match those in other countries. As a cancer survivor, I'm against that - I may have to attempt to survive yet another cancer before its over, and I don't want _less_ capable cancer care than exists now. I could end up dead before it's really necessary. That's my big objection - dying earlier than absolutely necessary. The solution isn't to degrade our healthcare to the level of the rest of the world, it is to make our healthcare available to all our citizens. As I said, the best way to do that is to restore prosperity. Pass the Fair Tax, and that will happen.
Yes it is, but it is a delivery issue, not a healthcare quality issue. We need to work on being able to get healthcare to everyone. Unfortunately, this is one of those things that the government absolutely cannot do at the same quality level as people buying their own healthcare. As soon as someone other than the recipient of the care starts paying for it, those providing it start NOT caring how much it costs, and do everything that they can to make it more expensive because they perceive a bottomless pit of money that is supposedly the government, and are going to ensure that they "get theirs." They also cease to seek ways to make it cheaper.
The solution to this is restore prosperity to the USA, and reject this "globalization" idea that has made the rich richer and the poor poorer, and get back to fair trade instead of free trade, and tariffs where appropriate. We ran the whole country on tariffs and excise taxes before the income tax was passed in 1913 (at the behest of the rich, of course, who were tired of paying almost 100% of the costs of running the country, since these were both consumption taxes and the rich were the only ones with significant money to be able to consume. America was hoodwinked into passing the 16th Amendment, and the income taxes have been dragging down the economy ever since. We need to abolish the income taxes, go back to a consumption tax as described by "The Fair Tax", and make the economy roar. Then everyone would have the money to buy their own healthcare, except for those comparative few (compared to the millions on welfare now) that would be left that still couldn't provide for themselves.
"It's like a C average student claiming: "I'm really a straight-A student! I got As in all the classes I didn't flunk. (And BTW, for some reason my education cost twice as much as that of any other student.)" "
I don't think that's a descriptive analogy for this case. I think the better analogy is that the schools in City X are capable of delivering the best education in the world, _if_ you can get into them and pay for all the class fees, but the fact that the residents can't all afford the class fees for chemistry, physics, or even the shop class means that a significant number of students graduate without the skills that are taught in these classes. Those less knowledgeable students are our "lower income" citizens that also don't get the best healthcare that America has to offer. It doesn't change that America has best healthcare on the planet, but the problem is that our AVERAGE healthcare outcomes are lower than the rest of the world because of those not receiving care, or receiving minimal care.
Lets abolish the income taxes, all of them, and make our economy roar, and this problem will become light-years easier to manage.
No, "better healthcare outcomes" is a measurment anomaly. When an American CAN PAY FOR his healthcare, either directly or by insurance, the US healthcare systems beats the pants off the furriners. Where the distortion comes in is that many Americans _can't_ pay for healthcare, so they get limited or no healthcare, and they die at accelerated rates that drag down our average. Our average cure rates suck because the less-well-monied have much worse outcomes, which drags down the average. But if you compare out "best" with their "best", we win, hands down. You don't think all those foreign political leaders and rich business guys fly themselves and their cancers to the USA because we do a worse job, do you?
I didn't ask for it, I want the gov't the H out of the healthcare inner workings. I'm just fine with written paper records, and see no advantage to having them in a computer - just lots of disadvantages including malware such as ransomware as well as data entry errors, which had me supposedly taking a drug I've never heard the name of before, as well as the wrong dosage of a drug that I am taking. Got those worked out, but probably the best thing to do for this is to build screens that patients can work with - I'll enter what drug I'm taking, the dosage, how many dozen operations I've had (I'm 69, and have had a LOT of them) and other medical history, yada yada. And you know what? I'll save it off on a CD (not an thumb drive that can introduce a virus to your computer) and sneaker-net it to the next medical provider. Just like the time-honored way of the financiers who use OPM - Other People's Money - this thing needs set up so that much of this burden can be transferred to OPL - Other People's Labor, as in data entry, which I could mostly do... Oh, and give me a scanner, and I'll just bring in my bottles of drugs and scan them in, and it'll be faster yet....
No, the root cause is _not_ competition from all over the world. What is the root cause is the USA not winning in the competition. The competition is not that strong - they are using manual labor for a lot of things and paying their workers peanuts to do it. They're in poverty, and forcing us into poverty.
But how can that do that? I mean, there are things like shipping costs and other things like tariffs, which we don't have any of. Oh, THEY have tariffs against our goods, but we don't tariff anything because of a political mindset of the elite in both the Democratic party and the Republican party, that are BOTH taking bribes from the big businessmen that want this particular status quo. IOW, our politicians betray us and US prosperity daily.
So, they fail to make good trade deals, and they hike taxes to nearly 40%, which are the highest corporate taxes on the planet. Our industries flee the taxes, not our labor rates, and open factories overseas.
So, want to fix it? Pass the Fair Tax. The Fair Tax totally, 100% untaxes American business. Bill Archer, former head of the House Ways and Means Committee, commissioned a survey of 500 foreign CEOs, asking what they would do if the USA passed the Fair Tax. 400 of them said they would build their next factory in the USA, while the remaining 100 said they would move their headquarters here.
Without an income tax, the US economy would soar. Estimates put 1st-year GDP rise of 10.5%. The Fair Tax completely untaxes the poor (who at present send 15.3% of their wages to Washington for the payroll taxes to support social security and Medicare, and it still isn't enough because there are so few working). The Fair Tax abolishes all the income taxes, and 100% kills the IRS dead forever, and collects taxes on new items sold at retail (except the poor escape paying these taxes via a "prebate" that the gov't sends them to pay all the Fair Tax on the items they buy up the the value of the poverty level for their family size - bigger families get bigger prebates.)
Fix this economy overnight - pass the Fair Tax.
I found all the movies you list to be quite entertaining. If they flopped at the box office, that may be another matter, but the movies themselves I thought to be quite interesting.
Nope, its not going to be on the air, only on internet for a price. OBTW, its still a "FU" for the price - I'm not paying.
After already shelling out about $300 to my cable company for TV, many premium channels, internet access, and telephone service, I draw the line. Either they get it on my cable for no extra charge, or they can forget it. They don't have anything, nor will they, that I'm going send any additional $$$ anywhere for. This is getting ridiculous.
I've been reading, and one article is saying that at this point, the production of electricity via terrestrial wind (as opposed to off-shore wind) is the cheapest form of power generation.
Another article says that the 2020's will be the decade that the electric car comes into its own as battery prices become good enough that everyone can afford them.
Still another article is seriously proposing a world-wide grid of high-voltage power distribution, so that we can get power from, say, from Spain if the wind stops blowing and the solar is plagued with clouds or night.
The beauty of it is that charging automotive batteries is not the sort of urgent power requirement that, say, operating your iron lung is. If your wind turbine isn't working for a lack of wind, you can just wait to charge your car battery until the wind _is_ blowing.
This is strongly resembling energy independence as well as a dramatically lower effective energy cost for transportation as we substitute electricity that is used at about 90% efficiency for gasoline that is used at about 20% efficiency.
You must be a Democrat, because you obviously don't understand how things work. Doing things in business is forced on you, including using illegal aliens, because if you don't, the higher wages paid to American workers makes the price of your product too high, and nobody will buy it. Then you go out of business. Same with the slave owners. If you try to pay your fellow Americans to pick the cotton, you have to raise the price of your cotton in order to pay the American workers you hire, instead of using the free slaves, so nobody buys your high-priced cotton. And as far as Trump doing anything for the big corporations, remember that he cannot be bought - he has all the money he needs already. He will make the big corporations wealthy ONLY if they move their factories back into the USA, where he will have lowered the corporate tax rate to 15%. Then they can make money hand over fist, and Americans can go to work for the big corporations and everyone will have prosperity again, not just the go-to-college bunch.
I've considered the situation for those coming into the labor market now, and if it was me, I'm not sure I would go tech again. The education is horrendously expensive, requiring student loans that preclude prosperity for a long time while keeping you out of the job market for 4 years while you do it. Then you get treated like this.
I think that all things considered, I'd do whatever it takes to become a railroad engineer. No, not somebody building the railroad, but a locomotive driver. They make pretty good money, it doesn't take 4 years at school to learn, doesn't appear to be "manual labor" like digging a ditch, and everything would be an adventure. I like adventure, and I think I"d enjoy it. Yeah, I made more money in STEM, but it came at a price. The price is much lower for someone like that. And driving? Driving cars, I've been doing that for 50 years, and have had only one significant sheet-metal bender, nobody hurt. If I hadn't swerved, we'd all have been dead, but I just lost track of what was going on, partially, I think, from not being able to fully process the images from my new cataract-replacement multifocal lenses, which were throwing starburts and concentric rings of light from any point source of light. Stopped tail lights on the interstate caused me to almost rear-end the last car in a very long line of cars right around midnight. I don't think that would happen today, I'm used to the lenses now, but they were new to me at the time. But drive a locomotive safely - I think I'd be above average.
It does matter, because one of the things that a union does besides striking is suing. Yeah, if they're going to outsource to India, that's different, but if they're bringing in H1B like we've been talking about, that's illegal, and the union can and will sue their asses off. That's one of the things that unions are about.
Yeah, Trump has done some of those things as a businessman, but he didn't necessarily like it, it was just forced upon him if he wanted to win the bid.
Its like the founding fathers. Some were even slave owners, but every last one of them hated the institution of slavery, and wanted to abolish it. They couldn't, tho, or they wouldn't have been able to form a union of states amongst the southern states which depended on slaves to operate their great plantations. There would have been less than 13 colonies in the original USA if they had insisted.
Send all the illegals back home, and enforce the laws against the H1B abuse that is technically illegal right now, and make America for Americans again. I think Trump will do it. Voting for him gives us a chance. Most of the other politicians will lie to us and tell us they will help us, but go to Washington and do exactly the opposite. The ones that try simply don't know how to do it, the wall for instance. They're saying, in spite of China building a wall 13,000 miles long 1000 years BC, that its too big a job to build a 1000 mile wall in 2016. Trump says, "A wall? A wall is easy. You want to know what's hard? A 95 story building is hard. I can do that too!" He can at least do it, and I believe he will try. That, right there, is way ahead of any other politician.
Yeah,its a marvel how supposedly smart IT workers are not as smart as their blue-collar parents that knew that without a union, they were going to get shit and shoved in it. If you are an employee of any type, you need a union or you're going to get screwed, its that simple. So just continue being high and mighty, and go get in line at the unemployment office. Oh, and vote for Trump, who will end this crap.
Sure, lets give everyone absolute security, including the terrorists, so that when they do think up something horrific, like taking out 9 key electrical substations which would bring the power grid down completely for 18 months, thereby destroying the USA completely with about a 95% mortality rate with the only survivors being the cannibals, we won't be bothered with the inconvenience of being able to see it coming and prevent it. Sure, let the bad guys communicate in secret. Right.
Pretty much for jailing any of these outlaws that act independently to interfere with others on their own. Doesn't matter who they're interfering with, don't care if its bin Laden, doesn't matter, they don't have the right to act independently and maliciously. If they want to make a difference to wrongdoers, they can gather data and tell the FBI to "sic 'em."
I'm talking about the USA. Yeah, other countries are small enough, most of 'em, to build public transport that allows more people not to have cars. But they still transport stuff by trucks to get it to markets, as, unlike the US which has the best freight rail on the planet, they' re using their rails to transport people instead. And of course there's lotsa countries that aren't modernized at all, and people live in mud huts and subsistence farm. But OUR population is artificially dense, and will mostly die off without fossil fuels.
You're being deliberately dense to apply your rare situation of being within walking distance of either everything you need, or within walking distance of public transportation. About 99% of everyone else has to drive, or ride in a car driven by someone else, to get where they need to go. I'm 20 miles out in the freakin' boonies. I can't get where I want to go by walking or even bike-riding, I'm not going to be able to pull it off at the age of 68. If I could ride a bike to town and back (40 miles) I wouldn't, and all the businesses I support with my purchases would lack my support, and probably go out of business like I said. And you're not going to be doing farming without fossil fuels, you're not going to be transporting the food without fossil fuels, and you that think you're existence is fossil-fuel-free are going to arrive at your Starbucks and there's going to be no coffee, no food at the grocery, and so forth.
So, be sane for a moment and admit our population depends 100% on the burning of fossil fuels, for now. Again, if you want to change that, invent for us the magic battery.
"And, in order to survive the adjustment we will have to make is to stop emitting fossil CO2."
Want to see you achieve this. We absolutely have to drive cars to get to and from work, recreation, etc. If we don't go to these things, those that are providing the work and the recreation will go out of business, and be on welfare with everyone else. We absolutely have to have fossil fueled transportation bring us goods and services, we just don't know how to do it any other way. We have a population that is artifically high, and depends on fossil fuels to exist. If we don't burn fossil fuels, probably 90% of our population dies, and the only survivors are the cannibals.
So, if you really want to attack this, get your PHD in materials science and electrochemistry and get your butt into a lab and invent for us the magic battery to enable electric cars, trucks, locomotives, airplanes, and ships. The magic battery has to be cheap and small and cheap and high capacity and cheap and quick charging and cheap and power dense and cheap. We don't have anything like that, and until we get it, we're not going to be able to run everything off the grid that hopefully will be more easily powered with non-CO2 sources such as wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, tidal, etc. That can eventually work, but only if someone invents the magic battery.
They're driving up your driveway because you haven't put up a "Private Drive" and/or a "No Outlet" sign down at the main highway to let them know its not a thru road. How else are they supposed to know? The frappin' GPS sure doesn't.
My friend and I attempted to follow a GPS route thru Death Valley. It left the main road, we drove 40 miles, and it turned onto a road that had a lot of large broken rocks with sharp edges, and a sign, "No Services Next 70 miles." There was an issue with having enough gasoline in case we got to the 69 mile mark and punctured a 2nd tire after cutting one on one of the sharp rocks, or encountering a bridge out or some-such, so we drove the 40 miles back to the main road and got out of DV with the car just breathing gasoline fumes. Have to be careful...
"[The] governor [is] constitutionally the commander of the militia of
the State, that is to say, of every man in it able
to bear arms." --Thomas Jefferson to A. L. C. Destutt de Tracy, 1811.
Yeah, 4th Amendment. My brain fart. Anyway, the courts will probably someday say that the gov't can collect up all the guns, too. They will be wrong then, as they are wrong now with this. A right is a right, and its not subject to being abridged because someone is afraid. Note that the 4th doesn't say that people can't be screened before getting on an airplane, it just says that the gov't can't be doing it.
Search and seizure before boarding an airplane with no probably cause for believing there has been wrongdoing on the part of the specific person to be searched, and therefore without a court order to do so, is in direct violation of the 5th Amendment. The _government_ is not permitted to do that. The airlines can get together and hire _private_ security to do that, but the gov't is prohibited from doing it.
Of course, the gov't routinely ignores the constitution nowdays, so I guess they can do anything they want - come into your house and search it any time they feel like it (while killing your dog, of course), take your guns, anything they want - the constitution no longer applies... because they said so...
Lets see of Disney fires 250 more employees and replaces them with H1B's if each is going to cost the $110,000 a year! Bet they don't, and that's what this is trying to stop. I've seen news reports that say that _all_ the job gains in the USA since the year 2000 are amongst only immigrants of one flavor or another - H1B's, illegals, legals, etc. Its a war on prosperity, basically, with the middle class wages being forced closer and closer to poverty in every occupation.
Scientists and engineers the world over are working on alternative energy solutions that don't involve digging anything out of the ground so we can generate grid electricity and run our vehicles. They have already had great successes in bringing down the price of PV solar panels that are beginning to make sense for commercial power generation. The IEEE has recently had a magazine article suggesting the construction of a global DC power grid that would allow us to use solar electricity at night because it would be generated in the Ukraine or in the Sahara. Also at work are scientists attempting to build a battery that will allow electric cars to outperform and be less expensive to fuel than gasoline cars, at somewhere close to the same purchase price as a gasoline car. They haven't succeeded yet but they probably will. If they don't, we're going to then have to solve the problem of using grid electricity for our cars and trucks and airplanes and ships, whether it is sending it through the air on a laser beam or inventing a really long extension cord. But we will either do it or we won't, but nobody has to incentivize this research because it is already incentivized by the big bucks at the end of the rainbow for whoever is successful first.
IOW, we can relax, this problem is going to solve itself via ordinary market forces, and we don't have to quit driving nor pass oppressive laws that raise energy prices and kill 1000's of millions of people by casting them into poverty. All we have to do is to promote prosperity so there are many corporations and universities that have the money to work on the problem.
So, relax. The problem is being worked to the best efforts of those that are capable.