> The problem is that a lot of gun nuts think its a good idea to carry their weapon anywhere they are allowed to carry it, regardless of who may be nearby.
The only "problem people" in this regard are thugs. Anyone else who is a potential victim actually benefits from someone being armed.
The only need to "conceal" is driven by hysterical man-children that brag about doing stupid things in response to seeing someone carry a gun. Even small children are less dangerous than your average blithering liberal.
...except you don't "need" the single most expensive option. You only need a working option. If you are genuinely poor, then you pick the cheapest acceptable solution. Rather you should. If you don't then you shouldn't get any sympathy from bleeding hearts with no clue.
This stupid shit is how people don't have money for unexpected emergencies.
Internet, hands down. It's pretty easy. Cell phones are an expensive luxury.
You would think that members of the peanut gallery were poor-ish at least when they were first on their own and should have SOME experience with making those kinds of choices.
Relating to this stuff shouldn't require growing up in the hood or a ghetto.
Do you like to use any of those streaming video services?
If so, then mobile internet is out. You will blow through your cap in an evening.
Keeping the wired broadband makes a lot of sense if you're not so poor that you have to do without Netflix, Amazon Prime, or HBO Now. On the other hand, cheap wired internet is still going to be cheaper than any mobile plan.
I would tend to attribute the mobile fixation of poor people on innumeracy and stupidity.
Yeah, but this is a Mac and Mac users we're talking about here. They're all about the cloud and iTunes and if you actually own large amounts of local media, you will be labeled a pirate.
Are you kidding? Sanders doesn't even do well against Democrats if they aren't all pasty white. As soon as you add minorities into the mix, the state election results skew dramatically to Clinton.
Bernie's communism seems to sit poorly with people who might actually have suffered from government benefits. I could see why they might not want to be in the clutches of the welfare state or see it expanded. People who buy into it most seem to be rather well off people with a "White Man's Burden" complex that the actually working class don't agree with.
If Bernie is polling well now, that's only because people are too busy hating on Hillary and don't know enough about Bernie yet.
Except the Democrats aren't representing my interests either. They want to destroy personal responsibility, discourage self-reliance, make people more dependent on the state, and destroy the economy with communist nonsense. It's gotten so bad that a communist is even running in the Democratic primaries.
I want the upcoming generations to be able to support me in my old age and for the quality of medical innovation to continue. I don't want the destruction of economic incentives that Democrats of all kind seem so fond of.
BOTH parties could do with a massive "rollback" to more sane positions.
Anyone that wants to subject you to Medicare is your enemy. So is anyone that wants to tear down Big Pharma. They make really cool stuff for diseases you've never heard of. They need to continue.
Castrate Skrelli but leave the guys still doing R&D out of your little purge.
Given the razor thin margins that ANY candidate has won by since 2000, I think your remarks are just the usual clueless partisan nonsense. It's like you're trapped inside your own reality distortion chamber where you only ever encounter people with the same biases as you.
> Every bigot in the history of time has had a rationalization for why their bigotry is actually justified.
That has absolutely no relevance.
Islam is a religion. It cuts across all racial boundaries. It has nothing to do with race. Hating on muslims simply does not satisfy the definition of the word racism.
You don't get to redefine words to suit your political agenda or because you are to FUCKING LAZY to use the right term.
It funny how the "science followers" get just as butthurt when you try to dismiss their prophets. You would think that "science followers" would not be quite so fixated on figureheads. They seem a bit more like religious types than scientists.
If you're not willing to challenge Nye as much as Palin is, then you should turn in your "science card" because you really don't get it at all.
Engineers merely apply the rules created by other scientists and engineering. They might not even broaden the state of the art in their particular branch of engineering. They are most certainly not going to be contributing to the state of the art in science.
The vernacular understanding of a scientist is more than just believing in the scientific method or even using the scientific method.
Mature modern engineering fields do include quite a bit of "follow the same basic recipe".
If I couldn't break their DRM, I would not have bought my rather sizeable collection of media. Content is really much more useful once it's liberated from physical media and DRM servers. It's more valuable to the customer.
Artistic megalomania blinds content companies to the truth of this.
Software has no real value, only what someone is willing to pay for it. Now a bit of physical media has a cost associated with it. It's what the merchant paid for it. You will do real harm to a merchant if you steal any of their physical items.
You will do no damage to a copyright holder by copying their work.
Clearly you can't even devalue their work in the process. That's what record ticket sales demonstrate. What piracy actually happens does no harm.
Degenerate pirates and poor people are no real loss to the industry. If anything, they provide exposure and the potential for future sales.
If you want to prove real damages, you are going to need more than righteous indignation and wishful thinking.
If you screw my wife then you've attempted rape. Although more likely you've suffered grave injury and will bleed out before the cops catch up with you.
Movies aren't real property. They are copies. You can't have sole possesion of them like with real property.
Now if you can clone my wife and manage not to get yourself killed then you are welcome to try.
A lot of people are idiots that are full of themselves and it doesn't occur to them to stop and think that there may be an aspect of the situation they aren't aware of.
In general, I don't fear "fraud". I fear the knee-jerk reaction to the claim of fraud. I think this is generally what makes the US unsuited to social welfare. Some journalist will make a mountain out of a molehill to fill airtime, or just make sh*t up. Proles will take that at face value and blind faith and a pointless, mindless backlash will ensue. Ultimately the program in question will be destroyed to the point you're better off avoiding it.
> Why does someone who can't work need a degree? Let alone go into debt to get that degree?
They don't. They probably went into debt before they became disabled. Debilitating medical conditions can hit you at any time and at any age. Then there's auto accidents and work injuries.
I would wonder how they managed it. Morbid obesity might be in the regulations. They're easy enough to check out. They're online. However, the process is not easy. I would suspect they would need a crooked beaurocrat to be in on it.
I've seen a lot of firsthand accounts about this stuff.
I could be a counter-example myself and you would try to deny my relevance just because it's not on the web somewhere.
Beyond that, are you seriously expecting a magical reservoir of relevant statistics to be sitting out there on the web somewhere?
Ultimately, you're just buying into a lot of media hype generated by muckrakers that need to fill airtime. If you want to talk about actual "evidence", there really is none. You're as much "full of shit" as anyone here. More so actually because you don't actually know anyone with direct experience.
Regardless of any other nonsense anyone wants to blather on about, that 100K will at the very least be taxed as if you made 100K. So that's going to still be a big chunk of change just based on you making 100K.
The person on disability is certainly not going to be able to come up with that. Their entire "benefit income" for the year probably won't cover the tax on 100K.
...not only are there gatekeepers present that will (and do) happily deny very valid claims, you also have to re-apply for your disability every 3 years.
Much more importantly, butter is a known quantity. Margarine could be ANYTHING.
This completely blows away any comparison you could make between now and when Margarine was first discovered harmful. It started getting a bad rep because of trans fat. But today's margarine has probably been re-formulated to get rid of that.
I dumped margarine before dumping margarine was cool because I didn't trust what it was. That and it tastes like sh*t. Plus I don't actually use enough of butter for it's "evilness" to be a problem.
>> It seems unlikely to me that successful disability fraud would be all that common, because it's so damn difficult to get disability payments with a genuine disability
> Do YOU have any references?
I dunno. Why don't you go and actually look. While all of the references I could provide are private and would include actual personal details, I am sure you can find some more public patient forums where people complain about this.
Of my cohort, I can't think of anyone that had an easy time of getting their disability status granted. Most required lawyers and appeals. This is despite the condition coming with acceptance criteria that's very simple to measure, verify, and document with a lab report.
> while many of these individuals are truly disabled.. social security disability fraud is not what you'd call a rare thing. i hope they aren't using that as the criteria.
Utter nonsense. It is exceedingly difficult to get approved for SS disability even if your case has merits. Quite often it requires multiple appeals and the intervention of a lawyer that's a specialist in this particular are.
It is NOT an easy system to abuse.
You're just demonstrating the common, charity-hostile attitude in the US that makes any social welfare here problematic.
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> The problem is that a lot of gun nuts think its a good idea to carry their weapon anywhere they are allowed to carry it, regardless of who may be nearby.
The only "problem people" in this regard are thugs. Anyone else who is a potential victim actually benefits from someone being armed.
The only need to "conceal" is driven by hysterical man-children that brag about doing stupid things in response to seeing someone carry a gun. Even small children are less dangerous than your average blithering liberal.
Small children have more sense.
...except you don't "need" the single most expensive option. You only need a working option. If you are genuinely poor, then you pick the cheapest acceptable solution. Rather you should. If you don't then you shouldn't get any sympathy from bleeding hearts with no clue.
This stupid shit is how people don't have money for unexpected emergencies.
> you still need a phone.
You don't need a smart phone.
You don't need a mobile phone either.
It's just a luxury you've grown accustomed to.
You don't "need" the single most expensive option available both in terms of service costs and the price of equipment.
Internet, hands down. It's pretty easy. Cell phones are an expensive luxury.
You would think that members of the peanut gallery were poor-ish at least when they were first on their own and should have SOME experience with making those kinds of choices.
Relating to this stuff shouldn't require growing up in the hood or a ghetto.
Do you like to use any of those streaming video services?
If so, then mobile internet is out. You will blow through your cap in an evening.
Keeping the wired broadband makes a lot of sense if you're not so poor that you have to do without Netflix, Amazon Prime, or HBO Now. On the other hand, cheap wired internet is still going to be cheaper than any mobile plan.
I would tend to attribute the mobile fixation of poor people on innumeracy and stupidity.
Yeah, but this is a Mac and Mac users we're talking about here. They're all about the cloud and iTunes and if you actually own large amounts of local media, you will be labeled a pirate.
Are you kidding? Sanders doesn't even do well against Democrats if they aren't all pasty white. As soon as you add minorities into the mix, the state election results skew dramatically to Clinton.
Bernie's communism seems to sit poorly with people who might actually have suffered from government benefits. I could see why they might not want to be in the clutches of the welfare state or see it expanded. People who buy into it most seem to be rather well off people with a "White Man's Burden" complex that the actually working class don't agree with.
If Bernie is polling well now, that's only because people are too busy hating on Hillary and don't know enough about Bernie yet.
Except the Democrats aren't representing my interests either. They want to destroy personal responsibility, discourage self-reliance, make people more dependent on the state, and destroy the economy with communist nonsense. It's gotten so bad that a communist is even running in the Democratic primaries.
I want the upcoming generations to be able to support me in my old age and for the quality of medical innovation to continue. I don't want the destruction of economic incentives that Democrats of all kind seem so fond of.
BOTH parties could do with a massive "rollback" to more sane positions.
Anyone that wants to subject you to Medicare is your enemy. So is anyone that wants to tear down Big Pharma. They make really cool stuff for diseases you've never heard of. They need to continue.
Castrate Skrelli but leave the guys still doing R&D out of your little purge.
Given the razor thin margins that ANY candidate has won by since 2000, I think your remarks are just the usual clueless partisan nonsense. It's like you're trapped inside your own reality distortion chamber where you only ever encounter people with the same biases as you.
> Every bigot in the history of time has had a rationalization for why their bigotry is actually justified.
That has absolutely no relevance.
Islam is a religion. It cuts across all racial boundaries. It has nothing to do with race. Hating on muslims simply does not satisfy the definition of the word racism.
You don't get to redefine words to suit your political agenda or because you are to FUCKING LAZY to use the right term.
It funny how the "science followers" get just as butthurt when you try to dismiss their prophets. You would think that "science followers" would not be quite so fixated on figureheads. They seem a bit more like religious types than scientists.
If you're not willing to challenge Nye as much as Palin is, then you should turn in your "science card" because you really don't get it at all.
Engineers merely apply the rules created by other scientists and engineering. They might not even broaden the state of the art in their particular branch of engineering. They are most certainly not going to be contributing to the state of the art in science.
The vernacular understanding of a scientist is more than just believing in the scientific method or even using the scientific method.
Mature modern engineering fields do include quite a bit of "follow the same basic recipe".
That would make any patent lawyer an engineer.
If I couldn't break their DRM, I would not have bought my rather sizeable collection of media. Content is really much more useful once it's liberated from physical media and DRM servers. It's more valuable to the customer.
Artistic megalomania blinds content companies to the truth of this.
Software has no real value, only what someone is willing to pay for it. Now a bit of physical media has a cost associated with it. It's what the merchant paid for it. You will do real harm to a merchant if you steal any of their physical items.
You will do no damage to a copyright holder by copying their work.
Clearly you can't even devalue their work in the process. That's what record ticket sales demonstrate. What piracy actually happens does no harm.
Degenerate pirates and poor people are no real loss to the industry. If anything, they provide exposure and the potential for future sales.
If you want to prove real damages, you are going to need more than righteous indignation and wishful thinking.
If you screw my wife then you've attempted rape. Although more likely you've suffered grave injury and will bleed out before the cops catch up with you.
Movies aren't real property. They are copies. You can't have sole possesion of them like with real property.
Now if you can clone my wife and manage not to get yourself killed then you are welcome to try.
A lot of people are idiots that are full of themselves and it doesn't occur to them to stop and think that there may be an aspect of the situation they aren't aware of.
In general, I don't fear "fraud". I fear the knee-jerk reaction to the claim of fraud. I think this is generally what makes the US unsuited to social welfare. Some journalist will make a mountain out of a molehill to fill airtime, or just make sh*t up. Proles will take that at face value and blind faith and a pointless, mindless backlash will ensue. Ultimately the program in question will be destroyed to the point you're better off avoiding it.
> Why does someone who can't work need a degree? Let alone go into debt to get that degree?
They don't. They probably went into debt before they became disabled. Debilitating medical conditions can hit you at any time and at any age. Then there's auto accidents and work injuries.
I would wonder how they managed it. Morbid obesity might be in the regulations. They're easy enough to check out. They're online. However, the process is not easy. I would suspect they would need a crooked beaurocrat to be in on it.
Are you kidding?
I've seen a lot of firsthand accounts about this stuff.
I could be a counter-example myself and you would try to deny my relevance just because it's not on the web somewhere.
Beyond that, are you seriously expecting a magical reservoir of relevant statistics to be sitting out there on the web somewhere?
Ultimately, you're just buying into a lot of media hype generated by muckrakers that need to fill airtime. If you want to talk about actual "evidence", there really is none. You're as much "full of shit" as anyone here. More so actually because you don't actually know anyone with direct experience.
You're a moron.
Regardless of any other nonsense anyone wants to blather on about, that 100K will at the very least be taxed as if you made 100K. So that's going to still be a big chunk of change just based on you making 100K.
The person on disability is certainly not going to be able to come up with that. Their entire "benefit income" for the year probably won't cover the tax on 100K.
...not only are there gatekeepers present that will (and do) happily deny very valid claims, you also have to re-apply for your disability every 3 years.
Much more importantly, butter is a known quantity. Margarine could be ANYTHING.
This completely blows away any comparison you could make between now and when Margarine was first discovered harmful. It started getting a bad rep because of trans fat. But today's margarine has probably been re-formulated to get rid of that.
I dumped margarine before dumping margarine was cool because I didn't trust what it was. That and it tastes like sh*t. Plus I don't actually use enough of butter for it's "evilness" to be a problem.
You know, that whole "moderation" thing...
>> It seems unlikely to me that successful disability fraud would be all that common, because it's so damn difficult to get disability payments with a genuine disability
> Do YOU have any references?
I dunno. Why don't you go and actually look. While all of the references I could provide are private and would include actual personal details, I am sure you can find some more public patient forums where people complain about this.
Of my cohort, I can't think of anyone that had an easy time of getting their disability status granted. Most required lawyers and appeals. This is despite the condition coming with acceptance criteria that's very simple to measure, verify, and document with a lab report.
I've heard may 1st hand complaints.
> while many of these individuals are truly disabled.. social security disability fraud is not what you'd call a rare thing. i hope they aren't using that as the criteria.
Utter nonsense. It is exceedingly difficult to get approved for SS disability even if your case has merits. Quite often it requires multiple appeals and the intervention of a lawyer that's a specialist in this particular are.
It is NOT an easy system to abuse.
You're just demonstrating the common, charity-hostile attitude in the US that makes any social welfare here problematic.