What about his story made you think he needed to be hit?
- well now, that's a dumb-ass comment! He didn't need to be drugged, let's start from that. My question was: now, that he is looking back, he is telling us that he was a zombie because of the drugs that the doctors and his parents gave him. Kids didn't use to be drugged up, if parents felt the need to increase motivation, they could do it in other ways. Were I in his shoes, I would have preferred my parents spanked me rather than drugged me.
Do you see now, Mr2001, how dumb your comment was? Did he need being hit? Probably not, but did he need being drugged? Much less so.
and being a drug zombie for years thanks to the misdiagnosis of having ADHD
- a society that drugs kids up but shuns 'capital punishment' (spanking) and expects to continue as normal, it's a doomed place.
Don't you wish you were spanked a few times rather than being drugged for years? What a fucked up situation, when spanking is deemed worse than drugging.
So MJ dies, some speculate that it's due to him taking too many pain killers and now this silly idea comes out? Ok, so that maybe a coincidence...
However, what is this nonsense? Pretty much any medication is poison in the wrong dose, doesn't anyone see that this is totally misguided? Poisons are all around us, use too much bleach while cleaning up and end up breathing in poison that was used in wars to kill people. I mean cigarettes are legal and nicotine is poisonous. Advil will ruin your stomach lining in wrong doses (or even in normal doses if you have an ulcer.) Antibiotics are great, but will kill your flora and you may end up sick because of that. Too many vitamins can kill you.
This is stupid and retarded, I just had a root canal done a couple of months ago, without Tylenol with Codein I wouldn't be able to do anything without bashing my head out for a week at least (I was on antibiotics for a week before the doc could even freeze the tooth, the first time he couldn't even freeze it.)
Government spending may provide temporary relief to the jobless rates, but it does nothing for economy and the way government counts the GDP is useless.
I'm glad to see the Herbert Hoover theory of handling a depression is alive and well.
- this is why I believe everything I say will sadly come true, people still don't know their history and are not even interested to find out. What, you believe that Hoover did not intervene in economy because a talking TV head told you so?
Hoover did meddle in economy and that recession became depression and lasted for 10 years instead of fizzling away in maybe 2-3 as a recession. Buying farm surpluses to control prices, loaning money to farms to establish cooperatives, establishing the Mexican Repatriation program, raising tariffs on imports, spending almost a billion of 1930th money on useless public works thus leading to the revenue act of 32 (so far the greatest single US tax increase) - income tax, estate tax, corporate tax, all of those were raised by double digit percents. Some sort of a check tax too, and you are saying he didn't meddle? You are severely uninformed.
I am with the Austrian school of economics on this - expansion of money supply, overspending and stupid credit policy lead to inflation. The US Federal reserve was one of the major causes for that depression and it didn't change from that time to now.
Oh, you have plenty of liquidity, but since it is the USD that are the currency, in which you are liquid, it doesn't matter that you have it, it's quickly becoming worthless. In fact you are so liquid, that your government is printing t-bills like never before to buy off the dollar. Only this will does nothing more than inflating the dollar further and the foreigners are catching on quickly, that's why they want off of USD as reserve currency because it can no longer serve as such.
When I say that you have a spending problem, it is exactly that - you are spending money borrowed from foreigners and you can give them nothing back in return. Worse, you are spending on your 'service economy' (as if such a thing is real) instead of investing into new manufacturing and production capabilities. You are consuming, which is basically the most irrelevant part of the economy. Anyone can consume. Production, this is where the real economy is and US is no longer there. Financial institutions account for over 41% of your total economy. I don't know how much of your economy is 'intellectual property', but I bet it's also a huge chunk. Guess what, if all you are holding is 'rights' but not manufacturing capacity then you have nothing. So the only thing that you still do have is your military and since US has shown its colors once and again many times before, I can safely predict that printing money, reducing personal freedoms and using military to maintain some position for the USD is going to be the modus-operandi.
US economy is in the hands of large government, never mind the political associations, the important point is that government doesn't produce anything, it can only print money and spend. Government never reduces its own power without some violence directed against it, so I suppose the thing that can turn the tide quicker would be an organized armed revolt of the citizens, but I am not sure that they are onto what is really going on there, so I wouldn't count on it.
You think I am wrong, but you are not paying attention to history and your words are the proof, you believe you found a way around the lessons that history has taught at least some people? I don't believe so.
Keynes is absolutely wrong for what is happening right now - destruction of currency based on overspending, borrowing without having any collateral, losing the manufacturing capacity and generally becoming uncompetitive in the global market.
What is happening right now not a normal situation, so your normal theories are not valid.
The US is in economic meltdown and the only thing that it can do to save itself is to stop spending. Well, that and it must stop printing short term and long term money so that dollar inflation will stop. Then, if it cannot pay its debt, it must default, which will inevitably happen anyway. It will either be done honestly (unlikely) or dishonestly (most likely) - by printing money and inflating the dollar so that the bonds and dollars held by the debt owners will become worthless.
One way or another the only thing that can turn the economy for the US around is to stop spending, default, start saving and start producing and trading in the global market. When US starts producing something more than just the useless US dollar, the foreigners may see it as fit to start trading with again.
This is what must happen to restart the economy.
What will actually happen: US will never admit that it cannot pay its debt, so instead it will inflate dollar by holding the interest rates artificially low and printing dollars, bonds, treasury bills. The dollar will die, the foreigners will stop trading with US.
Here there are a number of possible scenarios, some of them include starting wars, even nuclear (not surprising that North Korea is being used now as the next probable stage for a war - Asian Pacific, the strategic place to bring in the US fleet so that maybe Japan will 'forgive' about the US debt and China will not switch off of the USD just yet).
However internally the US will go through a metamorphosis turning itself into something the USSR used to be - people will not be allowed to exchange in actual money (gold), probably exchange in anything but USD will become illegal, so no gold, it probably will be confiscated again (yes, again, it has happened in the States before.) The inflation will force the prices to rise sharply and the gov't will implement price controls thus instantly causing shortages of basic goods (even food). So government will force the farmers to only deal with the government, people probably be issued rationed food stamps to be used together with money.
The Constitutional rights will be all but forgotten, the switch to a dictatorship will be organic, not based on ideology but on 'necessity'. The people will be regulated very personally on the government level, they will no longer be allowed to move around freely, the US gov't will probably close the borders with some sort of an 'iron curtain', will not allow the population to escape and move the remaining capital out of the country. The government will become completely dictatorial under the guise of saving the country etc.
Suggestion - get out while you can, move money out of USD to other currencies outside of the country even, if you don't have that kind of capital at least invest into hard items like nonperishable food items, alcohol, equipment for producing your own food/clothing/energy. All of this will be more difficult to come by later on, once hyper-inflation forces companies to drastically cut inventory and raise prices and then price controls and shortages will finish this off completely.
The elephant in the room is of-course this: in the time of the largest US economic meltdown, in the time when the government must do one thing - cut spending and shrink to cut costs and stop printing money, in this time how is this reform going to be paid for? One most likely possibility is of-course the printing press.
Except that Japan and China have even more to lose from calling in the United States' debts than the United States itself. Did you bother to see what happened to the world economy when the financial crisis hit the United States? China and Japan both have export-driven manufacturing bases, with their biggest and most profitable market being the US. It makes no economic sense for them to turn off the faucet by which the United States buys up their goods (and, employs a large chunk of their citizens). Also, as long as they hold the debt, they maintain leverage over the United States that would disappear if they called their debts in.
- yeah, yeah, US exports the green and China and Japan export their goods because what, China and Japan cannot consume their own goods that they produce? They are lead to believe this, but they are waking up and realizing that this is not the case.
US has 4% of total population and China has 20%. China is an emerging market and US is a saturated one. China sees job growth while US sees record jobless rates. China is manufacturing things that people buy and US is manufacturing paper that people want to get rid of at this point. Sure, delude yourself thinking that China cannot switch from exporting all of their stuff to consuming it, but watch this happen. Iraq already has shown that US will absolutely start a war when its dollar is threatened, now Asia will show it once more.
Your knowledge of military systems is sadly lacking. There are no missiles mounted on a United States destroyer that has anywhere near the range to reach Hawaii from North Korea.
- yes, and you know that it is so in this particular case and you know exactly what is happening on any destroyer.
In any case it is not necessary for a missile to reach Hawaii, it is not necessary for a missile to originate from NK. All that needs to happen is for the news stations to start passing this as news, and who the hell in the US cares about what Russkies or anyone else says exactly? Wars start when people who stand to profit from them decide it is time to start wars, not because of anything else. You can mock my intelligence all you wish, but when US government wanted to start a war in Vietnam they did not wait for someone to bomb their military ship, they just said that their ship was bombed.
I left comments on various sites, including this one and some of my comments have been disappearing.
Isn't it an awfully big coincidence that the destruction of US dollar and these fears of NK nuclear bombs and missiles are happening at exactly the same time? I wouldn't put it past the US government to do with NK what they did with Iraq: create a lie and push it to start a war so that US could have its fleet in Asia. There they could 'protect the world from crazy NK' in return for the largest debt owner of US (Japan) forgiving most of it and creating enough threat for China not to try and call US on its debt (not switching from US dollar to some other currency, say gold.) I absolutely believe that US government, the real government - banks, insurance companies, credit companies, military contractors are totally capable of starting a war even a nuclear war to protect their currency and wealth.
A US destroyer was sent to NK shores, isn't that convenient, a single destroyer. They have cruiser missiles on destroyers now, don't they? The 'news' that NK was going to launch a missile at Hawaii came from Japan, and at about the same time Japanese Finance Minister Kaoru Yosano delivered a speech saying that Japan's confidence in US Treasuries and the US dollar "is absolutely unshakable", he also said "I have faith in the U.S. dollar's status as a reserve currency." So Japan props up the USD and at the same time supplies 'intel' that NK is preparing a strike on US territory? You make me LOL so hard.
Anyone remembers how Vietnam started? US fabricated bombing of its ship on the 4th of August 1964. In 2005 data came out from the US gov't that there was no bombing, but the Vietnam war started anyway. How did Iraq start? Saddam decided to switch from USD to Euro as main currency of payment for Oil. US has the largest military for a reason - to protect its interests, and right now its interests are protecting its currency. NK 'going nuclear' is a ruse, the real news are: US dollar is dying.
wake up as a species and think seriously about the collective and what is best for all. We could build starships in 20-30 years
- who is that 'all' you speak about? Starships for all? You surely jest, don't you?
Seriously, I don't believe that 'all' more important than any given separate person and what may be good for this abstract amorphous 'all', is not necessarily any good for someone specific, thus they will not care.
There is government that society can bear to afford during good economic times and there is government that society cannot afford anymore. In either case the government never shrinks by itself even during bad times (like now), when it must shrink to decrease cost on the society. So the only way to shrink this government would be through violence, not through government benevolence. There is never 'good' government, there is just government that you still can afford to rob you and government you can no longer afford.
Wrong. This is pretty much the same as saying that when the goverment wouldn't subsidise car manufacturers, everyone could afford a Porsche.
- wow. How is it 'pretty much the same'? Not everyone can afford a Porsche, but plenty of people can afford Honda or Ford. Porsche is better, but Honda still gets you from A to B, so this argument is just dumb and definitely does not provide a useful comparison to any of my previous points.
A private education system, same as a private healthcare system, will charge for the services whatever the market can bear.
- correct. Only if the government kept its nose out of it, there would have been more competition and the market would drive the prices down.
That means for healthcare that the doctors will charge real shitloads of money.
- sure, if there were 10 doctors only, they would charge a cubic shitload of money. If there were 100 doctors only, each would charge a quadratic shitload of money. With 1,000,000 doctors, the shitload of money would be still quite large, but if the government staid out of manipulating the prices for education by providing loans and artificially driving the costs up, then there could be 30,000,000 doctors maybe, all of a sudden there would have been real choice and nobody would be charging money by the shitload. So just like 100 years ago, a person would be able to pay for a visit to a doctor and get what he needs with only a minimal expense. Of-course the legal system would have to be cleaned as well, so that all types of unreasonable lawsuits wouldn't force overly expensive insurance costs (and surprise, liability insurance is also mandated by the government.)
Does government ever do anything to drive the prices down? I don't remember many cases of that happening.
Just because they can - if people are seriously ill, they'll pay any cost to get healthy again.
- stupid argument and illogical when compared to my points. This is not about what 'people would pay', it's about how much competition there is for the same medical service, and again, people used to be able to manage somehow just a century ago.
Those, who cannot afford to pay that huge sums of money would receive no healthcare - thre is no reason doctors would waste their time for the poor when they can use the time to treat wealthy patients.
- if you have no money at all, the government would still probably take care of you, though I don't particularly see that as a necessary expense. You can't pay for yourself? Find someone who gives two damns - in this society the means of exchange are clear, why should anyone bother wasting time on something that does not help them in life, unless they are volunteering outside of work?
Same would happen to education.
- what education do you speak of anyway? The extremely expensive high level education that is specifically that expensive because the government dug their claws into it?
... to see that some people believe that they have a 'right' to require that society provides them with something, with anything really. This is amazing, actually.
Living in Canada (where are you located), I disagree. The system does not provide best care and there should be a legal way to get extra care above what they normally provide if you pay the money.
Think about this: if a public hospital allows a person to stay only for a few days after a surgery, why shouldn't a person with means be able to leave that place and go to a private hospital that does not depend on the public resources and stay there for any amount of time that it takes this person to recover fully or until he even simply feels like it as long as he pays? In Ontario this is generally illegal, however what would be the difference between that and simply hiring a bunch of nurses/doctors to take care of you personally in your house even (except that doing it would be so expensive that only the richest people, someone exactly like Jobs could afford it?)
How is it even legal to prevent a professional to provide his/her services for the best payment if he wants that extra money? I am a software developer working on contracts, generally speaking I always search for the best deal I can get. Why should a doctor be denied opportunity to get the most money his abilities would allow him?
So the only argument against a fully private system would be this: if the government subsidizes education of some doctors, then it could demand that those, who were subsidized give back at least some of their time to the public system (say 30% minimum of their time would go to public system) Of-course there is a larger problem with government subsidizing any education system - it drives the education costs up, because universities know that government is there to provide loans, so whatever the costs of education are, anyone can just get this 'mortgage' to pay for it, so there is no incentive to make education any cheaper.
If the government stayed away from subsidizing education, the prices for it would go down and more people would be able to afford it in the first place. More doctors would graduate and that would drive their prices down so even a private health system could be affordable.
You can probably guess I one of those evil socialist types
- and I am not, as you can probably guess, I believe on economy my position is logical and yours is not. You would have a system that would be regulated, taxed and subsidized and would eventually collapse under its own bureaucratic cost.
This is obviously unreasonable, I don't understand how a dozen juries find that it is not absolutely insane to order the defendant to pay that amount.
However from point of view of RIAA it is obviously necessary to make the fines so obscene, that from now on every single person charged just settles for the few grand (what is it, 5K nowadays?)
In any case, at this point it could be a bajjjillion dollars (with a pinky near near the corner of a mouth), there is no way that the defendant can ever pay this out, so why not add another 20 zeros at the end of the fine? Shit, they could argue that taxes from this fine alone will fix the US economy for the next 50 years!
How the hell is the parent 'Insightful'? In this case he is completely factually ignorant, that's the truth.
407 - this is built from concrete except for a few patches here or there. It's the best road around here (Toronto, Canada.)
From the wikipedia: It was the first highway in almost thirty years since Highway 427 to be surfaced with concrete instead of asphalt, which despite involving a costlier initial investment, lasts significantly longer and has better reflective capabilities (although motorists have a noisier ride).
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What about his story made you think he needed to be hit?
- well now, that's a dumb-ass comment! He didn't need to be drugged, let's start from that. My question was: now, that he is looking back, he is telling us that he was a zombie because of the drugs that the doctors and his parents gave him. Kids didn't use to be drugged up, if parents felt the need to increase motivation, they could do it in other ways. Were I in his shoes, I would have preferred my parents spanked me rather than drugged me.
Do you see now, Mr2001, how dumb your comment was? Did he need being hit? Probably not, but did he need being drugged? Much less so.
and being a drug zombie for years thanks to the misdiagnosis of having ADHD
- a society that drugs kids up but shuns 'capital punishment' (spanking) and expects to continue as normal, it's a doomed place.
Don't you wish you were spanked a few times rather than being drugged for years? What a fucked up situation, when spanking is deemed worse than drugging.
So MJ dies, some speculate that it's due to him taking too many pain killers and now this silly idea comes out? Ok, so that maybe a coincidence...
However, what is this nonsense? Pretty much any medication is poison in the wrong dose, doesn't anyone see that this is totally misguided? Poisons are all around us, use too much bleach while cleaning up and end up breathing in poison that was used in wars to kill people. I mean cigarettes are legal and nicotine is poisonous. Advil will ruin your stomach lining in wrong doses (or even in normal doses if you have an ulcer.) Antibiotics are great, but will kill your flora and you may end up sick because of that. Too many vitamins can kill you.
This is stupid and retarded, I just had a root canal done a couple of months ago, without Tylenol with Codein I wouldn't be able to do anything without bashing my head out for a week at least (I was on antibiotics for a week before the doc could even freeze the tooth, the first time he couldn't even freeze it.)
Terrible, good thing I have a huge stash.
Government spending may provide temporary relief to the jobless rates, but it does nothing for economy and the way government counts the GDP is useless.
I'm glad to see the Herbert Hoover theory of handling a depression is alive and well.
- this is why I believe everything I say will sadly come true, people still don't know their history and are not even interested to find out. What, you believe that Hoover did not intervene in economy because a talking TV head told you so?
Hoover did meddle in economy and that recession became depression and lasted for 10 years instead of fizzling away in maybe 2-3 as a recession. Buying farm surpluses to control prices, loaning money to farms to establish cooperatives, establishing the Mexican Repatriation program, raising tariffs on imports, spending almost a billion of 1930th money on useless public works thus leading to the revenue act of 32 (so far the greatest single US tax increase) - income tax, estate tax, corporate tax, all of those were raised by double digit percents. Some sort of a check tax too, and you are saying he didn't meddle? You are severely uninformed.
I am with the Austrian school of economics on this - expansion of money supply, overspending and stupid credit policy lead to inflation. The US Federal reserve was one of the major causes for that depression and it didn't change from that time to now.
Oh, you have plenty of liquidity, but since it is the USD that are the currency, in which you are liquid, it doesn't matter that you have it, it's quickly becoming worthless. In fact you are so liquid, that your government is printing t-bills like never before to buy off the dollar. Only this will does nothing more than inflating the dollar further and the foreigners are catching on quickly, that's why they want off of USD as reserve currency because it can no longer serve as such.
When I say that you have a spending problem, it is exactly that - you are spending money borrowed from foreigners and you can give them nothing back in return. Worse, you are spending on your 'service economy' (as if such a thing is real) instead of investing into new manufacturing and production capabilities. You are consuming, which is basically the most irrelevant part of the economy. Anyone can consume. Production, this is where the real economy is and US is no longer there. Financial institutions account for over 41% of your total economy. I don't know how much of your economy is 'intellectual property', but I bet it's also a huge chunk. Guess what, if all you are holding is 'rights' but not manufacturing capacity then you have nothing. So the only thing that you still do have is your military and since US has shown its colors once and again many times before, I can safely predict that printing money, reducing personal freedoms and using military to maintain some position for the USD is going to be the modus-operandi.
US economy is in the hands of large government, never mind the political associations, the important point is that government doesn't produce anything, it can only print money and spend. Government never reduces its own power without some violence directed against it, so I suppose the thing that can turn the tide quicker would be an organized armed revolt of the citizens, but I am not sure that they are onto what is really going on there, so I wouldn't count on it.
You think I am wrong, but you are not paying attention to history and your words are the proof, you believe you found a way around the lessons that history has taught at least some people? I don't believe so.
Keynes is absolutely wrong for what is happening right now - destruction of currency based on overspending, borrowing without having any collateral, losing the manufacturing capacity and generally becoming uncompetitive in the global market.
What is happening right now not a normal situation, so your normal theories are not valid.
The US is in economic meltdown and the only thing that it can do to save itself is to stop spending. Well, that and it must stop printing short term and long term money so that dollar inflation will stop. Then, if it cannot pay its debt, it must default, which will inevitably happen anyway. It will either be done honestly (unlikely) or dishonestly (most likely) - by printing money and inflating the dollar so that the bonds and dollars held by the debt owners will become worthless.
One way or another the only thing that can turn the economy for the US around is to stop spending, default, start saving and start producing and trading in the global market. When US starts producing something more than just the useless US dollar, the foreigners may see it as fit to start trading with again.
This is what must happen to restart the economy.
What will actually happen: US will never admit that it cannot pay its debt, so instead it will inflate dollar by holding the interest rates artificially low and printing dollars, bonds, treasury bills. The dollar will die, the foreigners will stop trading with US.
Here there are a number of possible scenarios, some of them include starting wars, even nuclear (not surprising that North Korea is being used now as the next probable stage for a war - Asian Pacific, the strategic place to bring in the US fleet so that maybe Japan will 'forgive' about the US debt and China will not switch off of the USD just yet).
However internally the US will go through a metamorphosis turning itself into something the USSR used to be - people will not be allowed to exchange in actual money (gold), probably exchange in anything but USD will become illegal, so no gold, it probably will be confiscated again (yes, again, it has happened in the States before.) The inflation will force the prices to rise sharply and the gov't will implement price controls thus instantly causing shortages of basic goods (even food). So government will force the farmers to only deal with the government, people probably be issued rationed food stamps to be used together with money.
The Constitutional rights will be all but forgotten, the switch to a dictatorship will be organic, not based on ideology but on 'necessity'. The people will be regulated very personally on the government level, they will no longer be allowed to move around freely, the US gov't will probably close the borders with some sort of an 'iron curtain', will not allow the population to escape and move the remaining capital out of the country. The government will become completely dictatorial under the guise of saving the country etc.
Suggestion - get out while you can, move money out of USD to other currencies outside of the country even, if you don't have that kind of capital at least invest into hard items like nonperishable food items, alcohol, equipment for producing your own food/clothing/energy. All of this will be more difficult to come by later on, once hyper-inflation forces companies to drastically cut inventory and raise prices and then price controls and shortages will finish this off completely.
-----
The elephant in the room is of-course this: in the time of the largest US economic meltdown, in the time when the government must do one thing - cut spending and shrink to cut costs and stop printing money, in this time how is this reform going to be paid for? One most likely possibility is of-course the printing press.
wait, so who got hurt?
Nobody expects the Redundant moderation to be this redundant... oh, and the Spanish Inquisition.
Except that Japan and China have even more to lose from calling in the United States' debts than the United States itself. Did you bother to see what happened to the world economy when the financial crisis hit the United States? China and Japan both have export-driven manufacturing bases, with their biggest and most profitable market being the US. It makes no economic sense for them to turn off the faucet by which the United States buys up their goods (and, employs a large chunk of their citizens). Also, as long as they hold the debt, they maintain leverage over the United States that would disappear if they called their debts in.
- yeah, yeah, US exports the green and China and Japan export their goods because what, China and Japan cannot consume their own goods that they produce? They are lead to believe this, but they are waking up and realizing that this is not the case.
US has 4% of total population and China has 20%. China is an emerging market and US is a saturated one. China sees job growth while US sees record jobless rates. China is manufacturing things that people buy and US is manufacturing paper that people want to get rid of at this point. Sure, delude yourself thinking that China cannot switch from exporting all of their stuff to consuming it, but watch this happen. Iraq already has shown that US will absolutely start a war when its dollar is threatened, now Asia will show it once more.
Your knowledge of military systems is sadly lacking. There are no missiles mounted on a United States destroyer that has anywhere near the range to reach Hawaii from North Korea.
- yes, and you know that it is so in this particular case and you know exactly what is happening on any destroyer.
In any case it is not necessary for a missile to reach Hawaii, it is not necessary for a missile to originate from NK. All that needs to happen is for the news stations to start passing this as news, and who the hell in the US cares about what Russkies or anyone else says exactly? Wars start when people who stand to profit from them decide it is time to start wars, not because of anything else. You can mock my intelligence all you wish, but when US government wanted to start a war in Vietnam they did not wait for someone to bomb their military ship, they just said that their ship was bombed.
The person most directly responsible for ruining a number of countries about 90 years ago also said this:
The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.
- though he was a rare SOB (his dead corps is still on display even now), he was right about this, definitely right.
I left comments on various sites, including this one and some of my comments have been disappearing.
Isn't it an awfully big coincidence that the destruction of US dollar and these fears of NK nuclear bombs and missiles are happening at exactly the same time? I wouldn't put it past the US government to do with NK what they did with Iraq: create a lie and push it to start a war so that US could have its fleet in Asia. There they could 'protect the world from crazy NK' in return for the largest debt owner of US (Japan) forgiving most of it and creating enough threat for China not to try and call US on its debt (not switching from US dollar to some other currency, say gold.) I absolutely believe that US government, the real government - banks, insurance companies, credit companies, military contractors are totally capable of starting a war even a nuclear war to protect their currency and wealth.
A US destroyer was sent to NK shores, isn't that convenient, a single destroyer. They have cruiser missiles on destroyers now, don't they? The 'news' that NK was going to launch a missile at Hawaii came from Japan, and at about the same time Japanese Finance Minister Kaoru Yosano delivered a speech saying that Japan's confidence in US Treasuries and the US dollar "is absolutely unshakable", he also said "I have faith in the U.S. dollar's status as a reserve currency." So Japan props up the USD and at the same time supplies 'intel' that NK is preparing a strike on US territory? You make me LOL so hard.
Anyone remembers how Vietnam started? US fabricated bombing of its ship on the 4th of August 1964. In 2005 data came out from the US gov't that there was no bombing, but the Vietnam war started anyway. How did Iraq start? Saddam decided to switch from USD to Euro as main currency of payment for Oil. US has the largest military for a reason - to protect its interests, and right now its interests are protecting its currency. NK 'going nuclear' is a ruse, the real news are: US dollar is dying.
Right, either meet a woman or die trying.
wake up as a species and think seriously about the collective and what is best for all. We could build starships in 20-30 years
- who is that 'all' you speak about? Starships for all? You surely jest, don't you?
Seriously, I don't believe that 'all' more important than any given separate person and what may be good for this abstract amorphous 'all', is not necessarily any good for someone specific, thus they will not care.
Spare me your homosexual fantasies and learn to express yourself in a more clear manner. Your comment is confused and undreadable.
there is no good government.
There is government that society can bear to afford during good economic times and there is government that society cannot afford anymore. In either case the government never shrinks by itself even during bad times (like now), when it must shrink to decrease cost on the society. So the only way to shrink this government would be through violence, not through government benevolence. There is never 'good' government, there is just government that you still can afford to rob you and government you can no longer afford.
Wrong. This is pretty much the same as saying that when the goverment wouldn't subsidise car manufacturers, everyone could afford a Porsche.
- wow. How is it 'pretty much the same'? Not everyone can afford a Porsche, but plenty of people can afford Honda or Ford. Porsche is better, but Honda still gets you from A to B, so this argument is just dumb and definitely does not provide a useful comparison to any of my previous points.
A private education system, same as a private healthcare system, will charge for the services whatever the market can bear.
- correct. Only if the government kept its nose out of it, there would have been more competition and the market would drive the prices down.
That means for healthcare that the doctors will charge real shitloads of money.
- sure, if there were 10 doctors only, they would charge a cubic shitload of money. If there were 100 doctors only, each would charge a quadratic shitload of money. With 1,000,000 doctors, the shitload of money would be still quite large, but if the government staid out of manipulating the prices for education by providing loans and artificially driving the costs up, then there could be 30,000,000 doctors maybe, all of a sudden there would have been real choice and nobody would be charging money by the shitload. So just like 100 years ago, a person would be able to pay for a visit to a doctor and get what he needs with only a minimal expense. Of-course the legal system would have to be cleaned as well, so that all types of unreasonable lawsuits wouldn't force overly expensive insurance costs (and surprise, liability insurance is also mandated by the government.)
Does government ever do anything to drive the prices down? I don't remember many cases of that happening.
Just because they can - if people are seriously ill, they'll pay any cost to get healthy again.
- stupid argument and illogical when compared to my points. This is not about what 'people would pay', it's about how much competition there is for the same medical service, and again, people used to be able to manage somehow just a century ago.
Those, who cannot afford to pay that huge sums of money would receive no healthcare - thre is no reason doctors would waste their time for the poor when they can use the time to treat wealthy patients.
- if you have no money at all, the government would still probably take care of you, though I don't particularly see that as a necessary expense. You can't pay for yourself? Find someone who gives two damns - in this society the means of exchange are clear, why should anyone bother wasting time on something that does not help them in life, unless they are volunteering outside of work?
Same would happen to education.
- what education do you speak of anyway? The extremely expensive high level education that is specifically that expensive because the government dug their claws into it?
... to see that some people believe that they have a 'right' to require that society provides them with something, with anything really. This is amazing, actually.
Living in Canada (where are you located), I disagree. The system does not provide best care and there should be a legal way to get extra care above what they normally provide if you pay the money.
Think about this: if a public hospital allows a person to stay only for a few days after a surgery, why shouldn't a person with means be able to leave that place and go to a private hospital that does not depend on the public resources and stay there for any amount of time that it takes this person to recover fully or until he even simply feels like it as long as he pays? In Ontario this is generally illegal, however what would be the difference between that and simply hiring a bunch of nurses/doctors to take care of you personally in your house even (except that doing it would be so expensive that only the richest people, someone exactly like Jobs could afford it?)
How is it even legal to prevent a professional to provide his/her services for the best payment if he wants that extra money? I am a software developer working on contracts, generally speaking I always search for the best deal I can get. Why should a doctor be denied opportunity to get the most money his abilities would allow him?
So the only argument against a fully private system would be this: if the government subsidizes education of some doctors, then it could demand that those, who were subsidized give back at least some of their time to the public system (say 30% minimum of their time would go to public system) Of-course there is a larger problem with government subsidizing any education system - it drives the education costs up, because universities know that government is there to provide loans, so whatever the costs of education are, anyone can just get this 'mortgage' to pay for it, so there is no incentive to make education any cheaper.
If the government stayed away from subsidizing education, the prices for it would go down and more people would be able to afford it in the first place. More doctors would graduate and that would drive their prices down so even a private health system could be affordable.
You can probably guess I one of those evil socialist types
- and I am not, as you can probably guess, I believe on economy my position is logical and yours is not. You would have a system that would be regulated, taxed and subsidized and would eventually collapse under its own bureaucratic cost.
This is why I never bought CDs in the first place.
- admit the truth, you never bought the CDs in the first place because you are cheap.
I, on the other hand, don't listen to music, so no CDs or downloads for that matter.
This is obviously unreasonable, I don't understand how a dozen juries find that it is not absolutely insane to order the defendant to pay that amount.
However from point of view of RIAA it is obviously necessary to make the fines so obscene, that from now on every single person charged just settles for the few grand (what is it, 5K nowadays?)
In any case, at this point it could be a bajjjillion dollars (with a pinky near near the corner of a mouth), there is no way that the defendant can ever pay this out, so why not add another 20 zeros at the end of the fine? Shit, they could argue that taxes from this fine alone will fix the US economy for the next 50 years!
How the hell is the parent 'Insightful'? In this case he is completely factually ignorant, that's the truth.
407 - this is built from concrete except for a few patches here or there. It's the best road around here (Toronto, Canada.)
From the wikipedia: It was the first highway in almost thirty years since Highway 427 to be surfaced with concrete instead of asphalt, which despite involving a costlier initial investment, lasts significantly longer and has better reflective capabilities (although motorists have a noisier ride).
I think they have just provided the final step for the time-cube solution to start the chain reaction that will end the earth. Ignore Cubic Math at your own peril, and of humanity.