Why is it that people expect premium health care when they can't afford premium food, cars, clothes, or a big-screen TV?
Nobody needs premium food, cars, clothes, or entertainment. If you can afford it, enjoy it, but you can certainly live your life without it.
In my opinion, everyone should have access to the best health care possible, however: this is not only in the best interests of the individual, but in the best interests of society, where a healthy population is more productive, happy, and indicative of the success of your country. Why should the rich have better medical benefits granted unto them? Is a CEO of a major corporation who rakes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year more important than a researcher who is paid much, much less but makes important contributions to medicine, and thus entitled to a prompter, higher quality of treatment?
The US attitude that you should be able to buy better medical care baffles my mind. Then again, I'm a Canadian, so I was raised with an entirely different mentality. Furthermore, I have Crohn's Disease and am currently seriously ill (I have been for a few months as my doctors try to figure out a treatment that functions for me). With constant fevers of 101 F+ and crippling pain, I am for now unable to work: fortunately, I don't have the added stress of medical bills or even the worry that I could be completely denied treatment because of no group insurance coverage. There is no insurance company that would willingly agree to take me on as a client as my medications cost about $400 / month, and some Crohn's patients run up around $100k / year for a disease whose cause is largely unknown and is thus completely out of our control.
My hypothesis is that this is a product of a society that has grown "too safe"; our programmed fight-or-flight mechanisms are still an inherent part of us and yet rarely do they have a reason to be triggered. To compensate, we seem to thrive on artificial, constructed fears, like toxins, or in the case of the general US population, terrorism (which is *highly* unlikely to kill you). I believe that anxiety and depressive disorders are on the rise, and this is in part responsible. (FWIW, I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder, i.e. irrational anxiety about unpredictable things, and I feel that if my anxiety was "directed" towards real threats that my condition wouldn't be an issue. To me, this is evidenced by the fact that when real trauma or dangerous situations occur, I tend to be highly functional and the deeply intensified fear serves a purpose, and when the situation is over, I am left calm for quite some time.)
Just because it is a right doesn't mean that it should be exercised. It's my right on the streetcar in the morning to stay seated and leave a poor, elderly lady who can barely stand up seatless, but it certainly isn't particularly courteous to do so; I don't see how expecting basic courtesy, whether socially or in business interactions, is a bad thing.
...make sure all the technology you install is fully and easily upgradeable. If you're going to be spending some years to come in this house, you don't want to be saddled with obsolete equipment because of oversight in the construction.
I just saw this now! Thank you for this information. I'm in the middle of a major flare that's been going on for six months and I can't seem to get it under control no matter what I do.
I will definitely get my hands on some of this and hope that it helps. Again, thanks for relaying this to me, and best to your wife and her health. Also, it is great to hear from supportive spouses of people with this disease; I can imagine it must take a lot of patience and understanding to live with someone with this condition, and it's excellent to see that there are kind and caring people out there who are willing to do so.
Am I the only one who would prefer a link to the crappiest videos? I could use a good laugh this morning:-). I've watched a few from the beginning, and #4 is just painfully bad so far.
It is far too soon to assess the effect of our increased chemical consumption on things like life expectancy, IMO. The number of artificial agents in our food has been increasing dramatically over the last few decades, and hence, we have not yet seen the long term effects of this: our great grandparents' and grandparents' diets were far more natural than those of our parents, which were likely far more natural than ours were during crucial developmental stages. As we, to date the heaviest consumers of these chemicals, are still alive and relatively young, I'm not sure that we can be taken into account when measuring life expectancy and hence the safety of these agents.
In 50 years or so, I think we'll have a better handle on how the preservatives, flavour enhancers, etc. of this generation affect health; of course, by that point, there'll be all new additives, so the learning process will have to keep beginning anew.
The viewers made an investment of their time and effort (i.e. arranging their schedule to watch their show). While the networks are under no obligation to do so, if they feel compelled to cancel a show, it would be respectful to their viewers to produce one more episode to wrap things up as best as possible and bring completion to the series as opposed to leaving it hanging and unresolved.
When you actually work for a living instead of staying at home and finding new and creative ways to bitch about how you are not getting supported properly by the nanny state, you get this thing called a "Health Plan".
I love how that's such a simple solution in the mind of your average, healthy American.
I have a chronic, incurable, and at times very debilitating illness called Crohn's Disease. I am typically fine about 85% of my life, but even with very strong medications with possibly disastrous long term side effects, for the other 15%, I am far too sick to work. Unfortunately, that 15% can manifest itself as serious flareups, which result in me being bedridden for several months at a time, and can require many expensive appointments and procedures (gastroenterologist checkups, CT scans, colonoscopies, surgeries). Even when I am well, I am essentially a ticking time bomb, never sure when the next bout of illness will explode upon me, but aware that it could happen at any time.
This makes it difficult enough to find and secure long-term employment, as you can imagine, since employers generally aren't amenable to the idea that their employees might have to take, every couple of years or so, several months off for illness. Furthermore, if this occurs between jobs and I was living in the US, I would be absolutely screwed: unable to even seek a job, and not covered by any insurance. I cannot obtain insurance independently that will cover my Crohn's Disease expenses because no company in their right mind will willingly pay for the large number of expenses associated with this condition. (Remicade, one of the newer and much more effective medications, for example, costs between $20,000 and $100,000 per year.)
You may not have to deal with things like this, but for a significant minority of the population, they're a real issue, and your cut and dry solution treats these people as if their illnesses are their fault while happily supporting people with self-imposed sicknesses like cigarette-induced lung cancer, obesity, etc.
Thank god I live in Canada where I'm not punished for a condition over which I have virtually no control. When I'm ill, the last thing I need to worry about on top of everything else is insurance.
I understand the convenience of carrying around an "all-in-one" gadget as you've described, but I know many people on whom this would be wasted. Example? Me.
I don't want a cell phone or a portable e-mail / IM device. I don't like the idea of being that accessible and when I'm out, I want to be disconnected from the phone / cyberworld. Furthermore, whenever I look as a curiosity at cell phone plans up here in Canada, the price and lack of service amazes me. I can't believe people are willing to pay those kind of rates for such an abysmal set of features. I love my land line, which costs me $20 a month. I can't in good conscience support such an industry.
I also don't need a PDA; my head organizes my appointments just fine, and has memorized the essential phone numbers (most of which I never need anyways when I'm out, since I don't carry a phone with me).
I will admit that the digital camera feature does appeal to me, but with small cameras these days, it's no more effort for me to bring my iPod and a tiny digital with me than it would be to bring a cell phone.
Better off, the money my partner and I save on not indulging in things like cell phones, digital cable, etc. allows us (me being a grad student and him being a low paid administrative assistant) to go on a lovely tropical vacation each year. All my friends, who generally have slightly to significantly higher incomes, always comment on how for a poor student, I go on a lot of trips and express their jealousy. I just don't have their monthly service bills.
I'm Canadian, and the majority of Canadians I've spoken to don't have the (seemingly) common US mentality about health care being about the individual. (e.g. "Why should I have to pay money to treat someone who overdoses on heroin?") Here, health care is viewed collectively as being about the people, and yes, some people require much more of the health care dollars than others, but in the end, it brings us a better society as a whole, which benefits us all.
Sorry: this seems like a really bad analogy to me. A better one that matches the situation with most electronics would be to have all of the indicator lights on your dashboard regarding things like oil, seatbelts, etc. flash brightly and obnoxiously when everything is fine, and then turn off when something is wrong.
Many of the lights in modern electronics are completely superfluous. For example, when I put my PowerBook into sleep mode, it has a light that "snores" on the front that is bright enough to light up and subsequently dim my bedroom. I have to put it under the bed facing the back wall just to prevent it from interrupting my sleep.
I'm just baffled at how bad the design of the new Hotmail was done. For example, say I want to read a message in my junk folder. To do so, I click on the junk folder and select the message. This brings the header information onto the screen. A yellow bar at the top of the e-mail informs me:
Messages in the Junk folder never get opened automatically.
and invites me to click an "Open message" link to have the message load in full. I do so. This presents the message, but any links contained therein are disabled. This is indicated by another yellow bar at the top of the e-mail saying:
Attachments, pictures, and links in this message have been blocked for your safety.
with a link saying "Show content", which finally brings about the message how I desired it, which should have happened in the first place when I clicked on it.
I don't like being treated like I'm a severely brain damaged five year old.
Sure it FEELS GOOD, but, that could have been doing something much more useful than just sleeping in a pocket.
In my opinion, feeling good is highly underrated. If the psychological joy of getting money back on taxes outweighs the joy from interest incurred from having that money early for someone, then I don't see a problem. God knows we pay enough in entertainment costs in a year to make ourselves feel good.
Here's a collection of articles on how Canada made the change to the metric system back in the 1960s. I'm amazed that the US still follows the old imperial system; indeed, only three countries do not use the metric system, and those are the US, Liberia, and Myanmar.
Check out the forums at redflagdeals.com. They have heads up on stores in the GTA receiving them. That's how I got mine at Toys 'R Us a couple months back.
I have one. I wasn't intending to engage in any drastic measures to get a hold of a Wii. During the December break, I was visiting a friend, who had bought one to resell it on eBay, but ended up making the mistake of "just trying it out". After a few hours, said that anyone who wanted it would have to pry it from his cold, dead hands. I also made the mistake of trying his out, and a few weeks of scouring online tip sites and arriving at a Toys 'R Us at 5:30 AM, I was victoriously armed with my Wii, which is just seven different flavours of fun.
I've lived in Toronto for about two years now, and I come home to find shopping carts, piles of clothes, and small appliances on my front porch. While the shopping carts are annoying, the clothes and the appliances appear to be in good condition. Very strange people in this world.
Seriously, is ALL pharmaceutical research on tanning, boners, and other non-life threatening shit?
No, not all, of course. At the same time, is it necessary that every pharmaceutical endeavour be focused on HIV, cancer, H5N1, etc? Artificial tanning agents and drugs for erectile difficulties are important to many people. Saying that they're not worth researching because there's life-threatening shit could continue to be extrapolated ad nauseum to the point where we could say that it's absurd that business people focus on business, which in many cases isn't really necessary, and instead should have gotten careers in medical research to cure ailments.
Even more strange, but along the same lines, is the new and coming drug, Bremelanotide. It was created with the intention of being an artificial tanning agent, at which it succeeded, but a large number of the test subjects, both male and female, reported highly increased sexual arousal during the tests.
It's fairly far along in clinical trials and seems very promising, making it the first recognized effective pharmaceutical aphrodisiac.
Now, I'm currently stuck back living in Ottawa (which I utterly detest despite being my "home town"), and there are lottery kiosks all over the place, probably more than 100 of them in the city, to say nothing of tickets sold. Therefore, these people don't know basic math.
That's an absurd remark. Did it ever occur to you that some people play the lottery for fun? I've certainly been to casinos a handful of times, and while I expect to lose money each time I go, I still do put some down and enjoy my time there.
I spend money to attend an amusement park in the same vein, with no payoff apart from entertainment. That doesn't speak ill of the amusement park or of myself.
While it is perhaps plausible that excessive lottery playing and low income go together, the two factors could certainly be measured and evaluated for importance separately and do not necessarily find a strong correlation with the number of lottery terminals.
The criteria for an intelligent, technologically-advanced society evolve over time. Two hundred years ago, no one had phones. That doesn't mean that cultures of that era were dumb, but now we'd definitely view phones as a hallmark of a modern civilization.
I'd wager that, without proper introduction and instruction, Usenet is probably beyond the capacity of most non-tech folk, who probably would have a great deal of difficulty figuring out how to use it on their own and likely don't even know what it is.
Frankly, I find digging through Usenet to be an unpleasant task, and I'd rather simply pay someone a few pennies for quality ripped tracks with properly populated tags. Yes, I am an AllOfMp3 user, although not frequently, because much of the music I like is not offered on there.
Coeliac disease is a very serious condition. I know all about digestive system disorders, having Crohn's disease myself. These conditions are largely misunderstood and often dismissed, and as they can already be very physically debilitating, to have them looked at trivially by a large chunk of society adds a huge dimension of emotional suffering and stress to an already horrible situation. I urge people to donate for medical research to these often ignored causes, which seem to be increasing steadily in incidence in first-world countries for reasons that are yet unknown.
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Why is it that people expect premium health care when they can't afford premium food, cars, clothes, or a big-screen TV?
Nobody needs premium food, cars, clothes, or entertainment. If you can afford it, enjoy it, but you can certainly live your life without it.
In my opinion, everyone should have access to the best health care possible, however: this is not only in the best interests of the individual, but in the best interests of society, where a healthy population is more productive, happy, and indicative of the success of your country. Why should the rich have better medical benefits granted unto them? Is a CEO of a major corporation who rakes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year more important than a researcher who is paid much, much less but makes important contributions to medicine, and thus entitled to a prompter, higher quality of treatment?
The US attitude that you should be able to buy better medical care baffles my mind. Then again, I'm a Canadian, so I was raised with an entirely different mentality. Furthermore, I have Crohn's Disease and am currently seriously ill (I have been for a few months as my doctors try to figure out a treatment that functions for me). With constant fevers of 101 F+ and crippling pain, I am for now unable to work: fortunately, I don't have the added stress of medical bills or even the worry that I could be completely denied treatment because of no group insurance coverage. There is no insurance company that would willingly agree to take me on as a client as my medications cost about $400 / month, and some Crohn's patients run up around $100k / year for a disease whose cause is largely unknown and is thus completely out of our control.
My hypothesis is that this is a product of a society that has grown "too safe"; our programmed fight-or-flight mechanisms are still an inherent part of us and yet rarely do they have a reason to be triggered. To compensate, we seem to thrive on artificial, constructed fears, like toxins, or in the case of the general US population, terrorism (which is *highly* unlikely to kill you). I believe that anxiety and depressive disorders are on the rise, and this is in part responsible. (FWIW, I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder, i.e. irrational anxiety about unpredictable things, and I feel that if my anxiety was "directed" towards real threats that my condition wouldn't be an issue. To me, this is evidenced by the fact that when real trauma or dangerous situations occur, I tend to be highly functional and the deeply intensified fear serves a purpose, and when the situation is over, I am left calm for quite some time.)
Just because it is a right doesn't mean that it should be exercised. It's my right on the streetcar in the morning to stay seated and leave a poor, elderly lady who can barely stand up seatless, but it certainly isn't particularly courteous to do so; I don't see how expecting basic courtesy, whether socially or in business interactions, is a bad thing.
...make sure all the technology you install is fully and easily upgradeable. If you're going to be spending some years to come in this house, you don't want to be saddled with obsolete equipment because of oversight in the construction.
I just saw this now! Thank you for this information. I'm in the middle of a major flare that's been going on for six months and I can't seem to get it under control no matter what I do.
I will definitely get my hands on some of this and hope that it helps.
Again, thanks for relaying this to me, and best to your wife and her health. Also, it is great to hear from supportive spouses of people with this disease; I can imagine it must take a lot of patience and understanding to live with someone with this condition, and it's excellent to see that there are kind and caring people out there who are willing to do so.
Am I the only one who would prefer a link to the crappiest videos? I could use a good laugh this morning :-). I've watched a few from the beginning, and #4 is just painfully bad so far.
It is far too soon to assess the effect of our increased chemical consumption on things like life expectancy, IMO. The number of artificial agents in our food has been increasing dramatically over the last few decades, and hence, we have not yet seen the long term effects of this: our great grandparents' and grandparents' diets were far more natural than those of our parents, which were likely far more natural than ours were during crucial developmental stages. As we, to date the heaviest consumers of these chemicals, are still alive and relatively young, I'm not sure that we can be taken into account when measuring life expectancy and hence the safety of these agents.
In 50 years or so, I think we'll have a better handle on how the preservatives, flavour enhancers, etc. of this generation affect health; of course, by that point, there'll be all new additives, so the learning process will have to keep beginning anew.
The viewers made an investment of their time and effort (i.e. arranging their schedule to watch their show). While the networks are under no obligation to do so, if they feel compelled to cancel a show, it would be respectful to their viewers to produce one more episode to wrap things up as best as possible and bring completion to the series as opposed to leaving it hanging and unresolved.
When you actually work for a living instead of staying at home and finding new and creative ways to bitch about how you are not getting supported properly by the nanny state, you get this thing called a "Health Plan".
I love how that's such a simple solution in the mind of your average, healthy American.
I have a chronic, incurable, and at times very debilitating illness called Crohn's Disease. I am typically fine about 85% of my life, but even with very strong medications with possibly disastrous long term side effects, for the other 15%, I am far too sick to work. Unfortunately, that 15% can manifest itself as serious flareups, which result in me being bedridden for several months at a time, and can require many expensive appointments and procedures (gastroenterologist checkups, CT scans, colonoscopies, surgeries). Even when I am well, I am essentially a ticking time bomb, never sure when the next bout of illness will explode upon me, but aware that it could happen at any time.
This makes it difficult enough to find and secure long-term employment, as you can imagine, since employers generally aren't amenable to the idea that their employees might have to take, every couple of years or so, several months off for illness. Furthermore, if this occurs between jobs and I was living in the US, I would be absolutely screwed: unable to even seek a job, and not covered by any insurance. I cannot obtain insurance independently that will cover my Crohn's Disease expenses because no company in their right mind will willingly pay for the large number of expenses associated with this condition. (Remicade, one of the newer and much more effective medications, for example, costs between $20,000 and $100,000 per year.)
You may not have to deal with things like this, but for a significant minority of the population, they're a real issue, and your cut and dry solution treats these people as if their illnesses are their fault while happily supporting people with self-imposed sicknesses like cigarette-induced lung cancer, obesity, etc.
Thank god I live in Canada where I'm not punished for a condition over which I have virtually no control. When I'm ill, the last thing I need to worry about on top of everything else is insurance.
I understand the convenience of carrying around an "all-in-one" gadget as you've described, but I know many people on whom this would be wasted. Example? Me.
I don't want a cell phone or a portable e-mail / IM device. I don't like the idea of being that accessible and when I'm out, I want to be disconnected from the phone / cyberworld. Furthermore, whenever I look as a curiosity at cell phone plans up here in Canada, the price and lack of service amazes me. I can't believe people are willing to pay those kind of rates for such an abysmal set of features. I love my land line, which costs me $20 a month. I can't in good conscience support such an industry.
I also don't need a PDA; my head organizes my appointments just fine, and has memorized the essential phone numbers (most of which I never need anyways when I'm out, since I don't carry a phone with me).
I will admit that the digital camera feature does appeal to me, but with small cameras these days, it's no more effort for me to bring my iPod and a tiny digital with me than it would be to bring a cell phone.
Better off, the money my partner and I save on not indulging in things like cell phones, digital cable, etc. allows us (me being a grad student and him being a low paid administrative assistant) to go on a lovely tropical vacation each year. All my friends, who generally have slightly to significantly higher incomes, always comment on how for a poor student, I go on a lot of trips and express their jealousy. I just don't have their monthly service bills.
I'm Canadian, and the majority of Canadians I've spoken to don't have the (seemingly) common US mentality about health care being about the individual. (e.g. "Why should I have to pay money to treat someone who overdoses on heroin?") Here, health care is viewed collectively as being about the people, and yes, some people require much more of the health care dollars than others, but in the end, it brings us a better society as a whole, which benefits us all.
Sorry: this seems like a really bad analogy to me. A better one that matches the situation with most electronics would be to have all of the indicator lights on your dashboard regarding things like oil, seatbelts, etc. flash brightly and obnoxiously when everything is fine, and then turn off when something is wrong.
Many of the lights in modern electronics are completely superfluous. For example, when I put my PowerBook into sleep mode, it has a light that "snores" on the front that is bright enough to light up and subsequently dim my bedroom. I have to put it under the bed facing the back wall just to prevent it from interrupting my sleep.
I'm just baffled at how bad the design of the new Hotmail was done. For example, say I want to read a message in my junk folder. To do so, I click on the junk folder and select the message. This brings the header information onto the screen. A yellow bar at the top of the e-mail informs me:
Messages in the Junk folder never get opened automatically.
and invites me to click an "Open message" link to have the message load in full. I do so. This presents the message, but any links contained therein are disabled. This is indicated by another yellow bar at the top of the e-mail saying:
Attachments, pictures, and links in this message have been blocked for your safety.
with a link saying "Show content", which finally brings about the message how I desired it, which should have happened in the first place when I clicked on it.
I don't like being treated like I'm a severely brain damaged five year old.
Sure it FEELS GOOD, but, that could have been doing something much more useful than just sleeping in a pocket.
In my opinion, feeling good is highly underrated. If the psychological joy of getting money back on taxes outweighs the joy from interest incurred from having that money early for someone, then I don't see a problem. God knows we pay enough in entertainment costs in a year to make ourselves feel good.
Here's a collection of articles on how Canada made the change to the metric system back in the 1960s. I'm amazed that the US still follows the old imperial system; indeed, only three countries do not use the metric system, and those are the US, Liberia, and Myanmar.
Check out the forums at redflagdeals.com. They have heads up on stores in the GTA receiving them. That's how I got mine at Toys 'R Us a couple months back.
I have one. I wasn't intending to engage in any drastic measures to get a hold of a Wii. During the December break, I was visiting a friend, who had bought one to resell it on eBay, but ended up making the mistake of "just trying it out". After a few hours, said that anyone who wanted it would have to pry it from his cold, dead hands. I also made the mistake of trying his out, and a few weeks of scouring online tip sites and arriving at a Toys 'R Us at 5:30 AM, I was victoriously armed with my Wii, which is just seven different flavours of fun.
I've lived in Toronto for about two years now, and I come home to find shopping carts, piles of clothes, and small appliances on my front porch. While the shopping carts are annoying, the clothes and the appliances appear to be in good condition. Very strange people in this world.
To switch between applications on OS X: Cmd-Tab
To switch between windows in an application on OS X: Cmd-~
Frankly, I'm glad that they made the distinction between an application and a window, unlike the Windows world. It makes a lot more sense, IMO.
Seriously, is ALL pharmaceutical research on tanning, boners, and other non-life threatening shit?
No, not all, of course. At the same time, is it necessary that every pharmaceutical endeavour be focused on HIV, cancer, H5N1, etc? Artificial tanning agents and drugs for erectile difficulties are important to many people. Saying that they're not worth researching because there's life-threatening shit could continue to be extrapolated ad nauseum to the point where we could say that it's absurd that business people focus on business, which in many cases isn't really necessary, and instead should have gotten careers in medical research to cure ailments.
Even more strange, but along the same lines, is the new and coming drug, Bremelanotide. It was created with the intention of being an artificial tanning agent, at which it succeeded, but a large number of the test subjects, both male and female, reported highly increased sexual arousal during the tests.
It's fairly far along in clinical trials and seems very promising, making it the first recognized effective pharmaceutical aphrodisiac.
Now, I'm currently stuck back living in Ottawa (which I utterly detest despite being my "home town"), and there are lottery kiosks all over the place, probably more than 100 of them in the city, to say nothing of tickets sold. Therefore, these people don't know basic math.
That's an absurd remark. Did it ever occur to you that some people play the lottery for fun? I've certainly been to casinos a handful of times, and while I expect to lose money each time I go, I still do put some down and enjoy my time there.
I spend money to attend an amusement park in the same vein, with no payoff apart from entertainment. That doesn't speak ill of the amusement park or of myself.
While it is perhaps plausible that excessive lottery playing and low income go together, the two factors could certainly be measured and evaluated for importance separately and do not necessarily find a strong correlation with the number of lottery terminals.
The criteria for an intelligent, technologically-advanced society evolve over time. Two hundred years ago, no one had phones. That doesn't mean that cultures of that era were dumb, but now we'd definitely view phones as a hallmark of a modern civilization.
I'd wager that, without proper introduction and instruction, Usenet is probably beyond the capacity of most non-tech folk, who probably would have a great deal of difficulty figuring out how to use it on their own and likely don't even know what it is.
Frankly, I find digging through Usenet to be an unpleasant task, and I'd rather simply pay someone a few pennies for quality ripped tracks with properly populated tags. Yes, I am an AllOfMp3 user, although not frequently, because much of the music I like is not offered on there.
Coeliac disease is a very serious condition. I know all about digestive system disorders, having Crohn's disease myself. These conditions are largely misunderstood and often dismissed, and as they can already be very physically debilitating, to have them looked at trivially by a large chunk of society adds a huge dimension of emotional suffering and stress to an already horrible situation. I urge people to donate for medical research to these often ignored causes, which seem to be increasing steadily in incidence in first-world countries for reasons that are yet unknown.