sorry to quibble, but actually SCOTUS is an initialism, not an acronym. Acronyms spell out something that is a word already, not something that becomes meaningful from the use of the initialism.
my point in the argument with my colleague was that it is this idea that it "works" is actually feeding its failure. His argument was that there were a number of people who had "millionaire" status from this investment policy. I claim both the moral high ground and the economic high ground because your policies are (in my view) feeding the existiing, unhealthy system of boom and bust. I am trying to work outside that system. One thing I do, (which has not been part of the discussion, and is, therefore an unfair addition, so please ignore it in the basic discussion,) is to invest only in thigs I care about or need. For example, I bought a house. The choice and decision on the house were based on the economics of the time (transition neighborhood, short sale property, adequate space and limited repairs needed) In order to buy the house I took the stock that I had invested in a single company (RedHat) and held them until the earning announcement to catch the bounce-- because RedHat almost always bounces on the earnings-- and used the proceeds to pay the downpayment and closing costs. In fact the bounce covered most of the closing. I had planned on selling the stock anyway right after the bounce because it obviously was time. It is not magic, but it is principled, and it is the principle (as in ethical principles) which i see scoffed at today and the entire reason for the failure of the system.
walking around my university the number of students with the little bottles of handsoap hanging from backpack loops has exploded in the last two years. Now they are putting the stuff in extra dispensers around the buildings as well. My guess is that there is some corporate sales thing going on at very high levels. I don't hear the kids asking for it (i mean really, they are happy to give blood, but skip the flu vaccine) I wonder if the little soap bottles are just fashion accessories or fragrance thingies?
It used to be, but that ethos was lost in the drug "revolution" of the 70s, the apathy of the 80s and now the narcissism of the teenies (hey, i like that one). I complain about the miasma of fear that is like a fog in the US (and in much of the world, remember the terrorists won) but it was just the last stroke in the continuing battle of power vs rights. The power mongers have been winning by giving away toys and joys (doesn't anybody remember that the CIA was running a large part of the cocaine into the US for president Reagan???-- or that the queen of England ran the biggest drug cartel in the world in the 1800s to keep the yellow menace in check?). Now they give us toys and TVs. And use them to spy on whether or not it is really working. Anonymous are freedom fighters, maybe asshole freedom fighters by many measures (because they make us all uncomfortable?) but what they do needs more doing and support, not less.
1) correct. The/r//l/ differentiation distinction is problematic for Japanese and Thai speakers especially. The Thais lump the/n/ in as well. Koreans also have the problem in some phonetic contexts. But, I should add that the Chinese/r/ is remarkably different from the western European/r/
2) while almost correct, as in "yes the Chinese today do have a robust middle class while we have a moribund and retrograde middle class" saying that they have "more" mile class people than we do ignores the fact that they have more poor people in China than the entire population of the US. It's a matter of scale. You have to look in terms of proportion to say anything of value.
Interesting I was having a discussion like this with a colleague at work yesterday. What I said was basically that he was drinking the accepted kool-aid that he could invest all his retirement into stocks and just hold on to a highly diversified portfolio for a long time and come out on top at the end. My side: the boom and bust, bubble and crash cycles we have gone through since WWII (at least) have meant that the only people who can make money on this economy over time are those that profit and dump, waiting out the busts with cash on hand.
I explained I was using a "Pynchonesque, Gravity's Rainbow" approach. I bought real estate right after the bust, assuming that real estate wouldn't bust again until it had built up to bubble heights again, when I could sell out. He is, by his own account, well-invested in tech. It is "the future" after all. Good luck friend.
I saw that in China, somebody in the neighborhood had bought a Ferrari and would put a few gallons in it on Saturday and zoom around the neighborhood at high speed for a few minutes before parking it again for the rest of the week.
OK, My first partner and I home schooled our two kids in 1st and 2nd grade. To very mixed results: My son, the elder by 18 months, loved it and quickly mastered math through number theory and application (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) by the end of second grade. Together with social studies and English language studies as well as applied science stuff (my wife was teaching him and she was a lib arts major so science was kid fun stuff). My daughter started a little behind him and also moved quickly forward, though not covering the ground that he did. We recognized at this point that the daughter was a socially skilled person and needed the interactions of a school. We put her in and she blossomed. Our son went in at the same time and crashed head first into the system: he already knew everything in third grade, not to mention 4th and 5th. By the time he had gotten to 6th grade he had already read everything they were going to learn and math was just pissing him off, and science? fuggetaboutit. So, when he got to 10th grade he dropped out, even though he was in a really cool school that he loved, it was just too late for him.
Later, with my second partner, we moved to China and took a Dutch home school series for them. It was expensive, awesomely good and designed for Dutch kids overseas to keep up with the national curriculum. (my first partner and I were both Americans, my second partner is Dutch.) It was fantastic in terms of content and perfect for them. Worked great for a year, then the girls went to Chinese school.
Later (like 8 years later) the elder sister came to the US for university and the younger was beginning high school, again in China. We were on a remote island off the coast of ZHejiang province and decided to try home schooling again. Failure. Not a bad curriculum text books or any of that, she just wanted to be in a school. So we moved off the island into the big city where she could go to school.
Home school can work and can be good education. The difference is what the kids want and how they approach it. Parental involvement can help, but the real deciding factor is the kids themselves. School education puts more of the responsibility on the teacher and less on the students. Maybe that is what we should be thinking about.
it certainly is a mmistake to lump private schols in this mix, they are as varied a landscape (or ecosystem) as the entirety of the other education options. From military, tp religious, to wacky, to racist, to elite, to just kind of bland, private schools have something for everyone. I went to what was then an aspiring elite that gave me a full scholarship for 4 years and gave me an education that stood me up well enough to run a few of my own businesses, as well as work successfully for others and then, in my 40s toss it up and finally go to university. Yeah, I honor my teachers and that school.
In the university program I work in, the first year I was there (2011) they decided to implement a grammar exam for our students (international students trying to work up to the minimum level required by the university to be a matriculating student). I said, based on the tests that I had seen used so far, that they had no one capable of writing a high-stakes exam that would meet international standards, and that they should not even try. (now, don't get me wrong: I believe that tests are the biggest waste of time and effort in the education world and refuse to give them in every case where I can) I explained then, and a number of time since to unhappy ears and scalding looks, that I had worked with people who were not just highly skilled but degreed in test creation. They can and do make exams and tests that are everything a test should be. (I still hate the damn things and don't think students get anything from doing them, but also like to see things done right). The thing I am doing now, and what I suggest for parents and educators in the future, is to run the research and prove whether or not students are improving because of the tests. If they are not then we, the educators and the parents and administrators have to stop this foolishness. First there must be proof, then action.
IMO we should defund the TSA and tell the airlines to run a minimal seccheck for wackos obviously carrying guns and bombs and leave the rest up to the passengers. You want to fly, you take care of anyone who tries to cause trouble. It worked for 60+ years, why did we need to change it after 9/11?
" It's nearly impossible to train yourself to avoid the reflex-like response of interacting. " Calling BS, its a personal deciision, the person who says this is a person who wakes to gheck email because they leave their phone by the bed and hear it buz/noise all night long. That is a decision, the decision to wear or not and the decision to interact or not, all made in time.
(not sent from an iPhone, android, or other mobile device, the one I've got runs symbian.)
OK, I am an American and don't understand NHS or cricket, so help me out. One of my British friends who had lived most of her life outside of England came to me a few years ago asking about sending her two kids to america for university. She said that because she hadn't been living in England she hadn't been paying into the NHS. Because of that her kids couldn't get subsidized university education, or any education without paying the same as foreign students. Apparently even Indian and other commonwealth country students paid less than she would have to. Be that as it may, I was surprised that the university was paid by NHS, or subsidized or something. If this is true, then it might explain part of the funding problem since I work with foreign students in the US and they have told me that England is too expensive for them. Could someone from the blighted isle respond to that?
I understand the problems inherent in the system and the demands of P or P because I teach in a research university. But, back in the 90s I had an experience that really shook me up. I was studying Chinese language while finishing a linguistics degree. I had a request from the TESOL department for someone like me (and there was only one person "like" me at the time)to help a Chinese PhD candidate on his dissert. He was a great guy, very humble, extremely knowledgable about his specialty which was a heart defect that involved a hole in one of the chambers. He was, when I met him, working on and trying to document his initial work to create a new mouse that had the heart defect. That would give him and others in his field do the next step work. There were, as I recall, 4 other groups around the world also trying to create these mice. Long story short, he did it. The shit was, he was the only one who could do it. He did it two or three times while I was there, but even lab assistants who stood next to him through the whole process could not do it. But he had the mice, obviously it did work, even if it couldn't be replicated. My friend, in his humility, said that he didn't understand why it didn't work for anyone else, he didn't think he was special, he just thought he was lucky, because that mouse got him his PhD.
Actually they probably do. Mandarin, or Putonghua, is the standard language taught in school> Most people also speak their "local language" which is usually completely incomprehensible to anyone from that area. People who have moved from one linguistic area to another learn the new language in order to communicate with ordinary people at the market. Now, and don't give me any lip about this, what they share is the written language. This means you will often see people "writing" on their palm or a wall to show the word they are saying if you don't speak their language. When I moved back in 2007 I made sure to buy a phone that let me write characters so I could communicate with everybody no matter what. I still use that phone BTW. I said don't give me any lip because many people confuse language and writing, and being an old school trained linguist that is anathema. Language is, in the old school, only the spoken language, the rest is semiotics.
Yeah "unsupervised has many meanings. My 10 year old has "uncontrolled access to the internet: no filters, no blocks. But his computer is right next to mine, I see what he is seeing and hear what he is hearing all the time he in on line. Maybe when he has found the nasty corners and we have talked them out i'll let him move his computer.
My British friends (and I had quite a few when I was living in Asia) all insisted that REAL British food was really wonderful and that what they had in the tourist centers of Europe and Asia that was sold as British cuisine (HAHAHAHAHAHA) was crap. OKay, so then they invited me to dinner. They served Indian food, French food, Italian food, Spanish food (depending on where they liked to vacation) rather than British food. The closest I have come to "homecooking" was a verbal description of how to cook a "Sunday roast" which was bland and boring until I took the recipe and kicked it up a notch or two with, like, some flavour stuff (misspelling intentional).
My sister in law is an Anglophile and claims to have some real British holiday recipes that she brings to holidays for us. They are commonly called: hockey pucks, nasty pudding and (the only one people will eat) fruitcake cocktail (fruitcake soaked in rum for years so that one piece is the equal of a rum and coke).
OK, true, but it doesn't address the issue that the article addresses. Simply put: Apple and Blackberry and (so far because of lack of adoption) Win8 have a more homogenous GUI that allows apps to be more fully tested and vetted for all possible use cases. Android, simply because of its huge manufacturer base does not have the homogeneity that makes that possible. It achieved the large manufacturer base by being open and available to all. Now people are claiming that Andoid is a "slut" and therefore looks trashy. Of course we can "pimp her up" (Galaxy 4 or Nexus say, although others might argue that they are "plain Jane GUIs" and are going for the fringe kink market).
Lets do a real world analogy to a pop-star who becomes popular, puts her face out in the "scene" often and has her love-life spread all over the tabloids. Does that make it more clear what is going on? People like the author of this article are like the writers for People magazine, looking for headlines and pumps for the magazine bottom line.
I remember a few years ago when the iToy craze was at its height and everyone who wanted to push page views did it by putting Apple in the title of their article. Not exactly the same, but close enough to what is going on here.
It is, perhaps to you, a disgustiing proposition (suicide that is) but your American view of how the world works is laughable. In China, entire villages are covered with lead dust from battery factories and people die of inhaling the dust. Do you have any clue at all how bad things can be in these places? No, no you don't. I do, I've been there and I know what good looks like there, and you would refuse to step foot in it.
What you say about cost shifting is somewhat mistaken. What I see is that the "part-timers" who were working 40-60 hours a week under a "part-time contract" are now going to be held to a 30 hour max week so they will have to have 2 jobs to pay the bills instead of the one. While that is hard on them, the political cost to the employers (being treated like dirt because they are screwing their employees who will cheat them big-time because of it: so that everyone loses from this is what is stupid. And the large orgs and edus that are doing this are just making themselves look shabby.
I ran my health insurance like that for almost fifteen years: while I lived in Asia and could get good (but not great) health care for pennies (yes, literally pennies). We had a baby, operations, High-tech scanning (CT, sono, MRI) and nothing even pushed the card over $1000. Now, what would happen here in the US if we tried to get by on a $5000 credit card to cover a family of 5? HAHAHAHAHA! we'd be screwed.
you are exactly right. The last time a third party was able to affect the vote the other two parties changed the rules for presidential debates and made it impossible for a third party to have a seat in the debate. Fixed that, (walks off smiling and wiping hands on a rag.....)
Slashdot Mirror
sorry to quibble, but actually SCOTUS is an initialism, not an acronym. Acronyms spell out something that is a word already, not something that becomes meaningful from the use of the initialism.
my point in the argument with my colleague was that it is this idea that it "works" is actually feeding its failure. His argument was that there were a number of people who had "millionaire" status from this investment policy. I claim both the moral high ground and the economic high ground because your policies are (in my view) feeding the existiing, unhealthy system of boom and bust. I am trying to work outside that system.
One thing I do, (which has not been part of the discussion, and is, therefore an unfair addition, so please ignore it in the basic discussion,) is to invest only in thigs I care about or need. For example, I bought a house. The choice and decision on the house were based on the economics of the time (transition neighborhood, short sale property, adequate space and limited repairs needed) In order to buy the house I took the stock that I had invested in a single company (RedHat) and held them until the earning announcement to catch the bounce-- because RedHat almost always bounces on the earnings-- and used the proceeds to pay the downpayment and closing costs. In fact the bounce covered most of the closing.
I had planned on selling the stock anyway right after the bounce because it obviously was time. It is not magic, but it is principled, and it is the principle (as in ethical principles) which i see scoffed at today and the entire reason for the failure of the system.
walking around my university the number of students with the little bottles of handsoap hanging from backpack loops has exploded in the last two years. Now they are putting the stuff in extra dispensers around the buildings as well. My guess is that there is some corporate sales thing going on at very high levels. I don't hear the kids asking for it (i mean really, they are happy to give blood, but skip the flu vaccine) I wonder if the little soap bottles are just fashion accessories or fragrance thingies?
It used to be, but that ethos was lost in the drug "revolution" of the 70s, the apathy of the 80s and now the narcissism of the teenies (hey, i like that one). I complain about the miasma of fear that is like a fog in the US (and in much of the world, remember the terrorists won) but it was just the last stroke in the continuing battle of power vs rights.
The power mongers have been winning by giving away toys and joys (doesn't anybody remember that the CIA was running a large part of the cocaine into the US for president Reagan???-- or that the queen of England ran the biggest drug cartel in the world in the 1800s to keep the yellow menace in check?). Now they give us toys and TVs. And use them to spy on whether or not it is really working.
Anonymous are freedom fighters, maybe asshole freedom fighters by many measures (because they make us all uncomfortable?) but what they do needs more doing and support, not less.
1) correct. The /r/ /l/ differentiation distinction is problematic for Japanese and Thai speakers especially. The Thais lump the /n/ in as well. Koreans also have the problem in some phonetic contexts. /r/ is remarkably different from the western European /r/
But, I should add that the Chinese
2) while almost correct, as in "yes the Chinese today do have a robust middle class while we have a moribund and retrograde middle class"
saying that they have "more" mile class people than we do ignores the fact that they have more poor people in China than the entire population of the US. It's a matter of scale. You have to look in terms of proportion to say anything of value.
Interesting
I was having a discussion like this with a colleague at work yesterday. What I said was basically that he was drinking the accepted kool-aid that he could invest all his retirement into stocks and just hold on to a highly diversified portfolio for a long time and come out on top at the end.
My side: the boom and bust, bubble and crash cycles we have gone through since WWII (at least) have meant that the only people who can make money on this economy over time are those that profit and dump, waiting out the busts with cash on hand.
I explained I was using a "Pynchonesque, Gravity's Rainbow" approach. I bought real estate right after the bust, assuming that real estate wouldn't bust again until it had built up to bubble heights again, when I could sell out. He is, by his own account, well-invested in tech. It is "the future" after all. Good luck friend.
I saw that in China, somebody in the neighborhood had bought a Ferrari and would put a few gallons in it on Saturday and zoom around the neighborhood at high speed for a few minutes before parking it again for the rest of the week.
Fear, fear and more fear. Even the fear mongers live in fear of those they are supposed to inspire fear into.
OK, My first partner and I home schooled our two kids in 1st and 2nd grade. To very mixed results:
My son, the elder by 18 months, loved it and quickly mastered math through number theory and application (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) by the end of second grade. Together with social studies and English language studies as well as applied science stuff (my wife was teaching him and she was a lib arts major so science was kid fun stuff).
My daughter started a little behind him and also moved quickly forward, though not covering the ground that he did.
We recognized at this point that the daughter was a socially skilled person and needed the interactions of a school. We put her in and she blossomed. Our son went in at the same time and crashed head first into the system: he already knew everything in third grade, not to mention 4th and 5th. By the time he had gotten to 6th grade he had already read everything they were going to learn and math was just pissing him off, and science? fuggetaboutit.
So, when he got to 10th grade he dropped out, even though he was in a really cool school that he loved, it was just too late for him.
Later, with my second partner, we moved to China and took a Dutch home school series for them. It was expensive, awesomely good and designed for Dutch kids overseas to keep up with the national curriculum. (my first partner and I were both Americans, my second partner is Dutch.) It was fantastic in terms of content and perfect for them. Worked great for a year, then the girls went to Chinese school.
Later (like 8 years later) the elder sister came to the US for university and the younger was beginning high school, again in China. We were on a remote island off the coast of ZHejiang province and decided to try home schooling again. Failure. Not a bad curriculum text books or any of that, she just wanted to be in a school. So we moved off the island into the big city where she could go to school.
Home school can work and can be good education. The difference is what the kids want and how they approach it. Parental involvement can help, but the real deciding factor is the kids themselves. School education puts more of the responsibility on the teacher and less on the students. Maybe that is what we should be thinking about.
it certainly is a mmistake to lump private schols in this mix, they are as varied a landscape (or ecosystem) as the entirety of the other education options. From military, tp religious, to wacky, to racist, to elite, to just kind of bland, private schools have something for everyone. I went to what was then an aspiring elite that gave me a full scholarship for 4 years and gave me an education that stood me up well enough to run a few of my own businesses, as well as work successfully for others and then, in my 40s toss it up and finally go to university.
Yeah, I honor my teachers and that school.
In the university program I work in, the first year I was there (2011) they decided to implement a grammar exam for our students (international students trying to work up to the minimum level required by the university to be a matriculating student). I said, based on the tests that I had seen used so far, that they had no one capable of writing a high-stakes exam that would meet international standards, and that they should not even try. (now, don't get me wrong: I believe that tests are the biggest waste of time and effort in the education world and refuse to give them in every case where I can)
I explained then, and a number of time since to unhappy ears and scalding looks, that I had worked with people who were not just highly skilled but degreed in test creation. They can and do make exams and tests that are everything a test should be. (I still hate the damn things and don't think students get anything from doing them, but also like to see things done right).
The thing I am doing now, and what I suggest for parents and educators in the future, is to run the research and prove whether or not students are improving because of the tests. If they are not then we, the educators and the parents and administrators have to stop this foolishness. First there must be proof, then action.
IMO we should defund the TSA and tell the airlines to run a minimal seccheck for wackos obviously carrying guns and bombs and leave the rest up to the passengers. You want to fly, you take care of anyone who tries to cause trouble. It worked for 60+ years, why did we need to change it after 9/11?
" It's nearly impossible to train yourself to avoid the reflex-like response of interacting. "
Calling BS, its a personal deciision, the person who says this is a person who wakes to gheck email because they leave their phone by the bed and hear it buz/noise all night long. That is a decision, the decision to wear or not and the decision to interact or not, all made in time.
(not sent from an iPhone, android, or other mobile device, the one I've got runs symbian.)
I can't wait for the ads for this: "for your comfort and convenience, this flight is equipped with the newest and most modern seating available."
Its like the sign at my grocery store: "for your convenience, the carts are provided with new stop-theft wheel-locks."
Wait, my convenience?
OK, I am an American and don't understand NHS or cricket, so help me out. One of my British friends who had lived most of her life outside of England came to me a few years ago asking about sending her two kids to america for university. She said that because she hadn't been living in England she hadn't been paying into the NHS. Because of that her kids couldn't get subsidized university education, or any education without paying the same as foreign students. Apparently even Indian and other commonwealth country students paid less than she would have to.
Be that as it may, I was surprised that the university was paid by NHS, or subsidized or something. If this is true, then it might explain part of the funding problem since I work with foreign students in the US and they have told me that England is too expensive for them. Could someone from the blighted isle respond to that?
I understand the problems inherent in the system and the demands of P or P because I teach in a research university. But, back in the 90s I had an experience that really shook me up. I was studying Chinese language while finishing a linguistics degree. I had a request from the TESOL department for someone like me (and there was only one person "like" me at the time)to help a Chinese PhD candidate on his dissert. He was a great guy, very humble, extremely knowledgable about his specialty which was a heart defect that involved a hole in one of the chambers.
He was, when I met him, working on and trying to document his initial work to create a new mouse that had the heart defect. That would give him and others in his field do the next step work. There were, as I recall, 4 other groups around the world also trying to create these mice. Long story short, he did it. The shit was, he was the only one who could do it. He did it two or three times while I was there, but even lab assistants who stood next to him through the whole process could not do it.
But he had the mice, obviously it did work, even if it couldn't be replicated.
My friend, in his humility, said that he didn't understand why it didn't work for anyone else, he didn't think he was special, he just thought he was lucky, because that mouse got him his PhD.
Actually they probably do. Mandarin, or Putonghua, is the standard language taught in school> Most people also speak their "local language" which is usually completely incomprehensible to anyone from that area. People who have moved from one linguistic area to another learn the new language in order to communicate with ordinary people at the market.
Now, and don't give me any lip about this, what they share is the written language. This means you will often see people "writing" on their palm or a wall to show the word they are saying if you don't speak their language. When I moved back in 2007 I made sure to buy a phone that let me write characters so I could communicate with everybody no matter what. I still use that phone BTW.
I said don't give me any lip because many people confuse language and writing, and being an old school trained linguist that is anathema. Language is, in the old school, only the spoken language, the rest is semiotics.
My mom was driving to school at 13. The rule was: If you see a car pull off the raod and stop until they are gone.
Different times man
Yeah "unsupervised has many meanings. My 10 year old has "uncontrolled access to the internet: no filters, no blocks. But his computer is right next to mine, I see what he is seeing and hear what he is hearing all the time he in on line. Maybe when he has found the nasty corners and we have talked them out i'll let him move his computer.
My British friends (and I had quite a few when I was living in Asia) all insisted that REAL British food was really wonderful and that what they had in the tourist centers of Europe and Asia that was sold as British cuisine (HAHAHAHAHAHA) was crap. OKay, so then they invited me to dinner. They served Indian food, French food, Italian food, Spanish food (depending on where they liked to vacation) rather than British food. The closest I have come to "homecooking" was a verbal description of how to cook a "Sunday roast" which was bland and boring until I took the recipe and kicked it up a notch or two with, like, some flavour stuff (misspelling intentional).
My sister in law is an Anglophile and claims to have some real British holiday recipes that she brings to holidays for us. They are commonly called: hockey pucks, nasty pudding and (the only one people will eat) fruitcake cocktail (fruitcake soaked in rum for years so that one piece is the equal of a rum and coke).
OK, true, but it doesn't address the issue that the article addresses. Simply put: Apple and Blackberry and (so far because of lack of adoption) Win8 have a more homogenous GUI that allows apps to be more fully tested and vetted for all possible use cases.
Android, simply because of its huge manufacturer base does not have the homogeneity that makes that possible. It achieved the large manufacturer base by being open and available to all.
Now people are claiming that Andoid is a "slut" and therefore looks trashy. Of course we can "pimp her up" (Galaxy 4 or Nexus say, although others might argue that they are "plain Jane GUIs" and are going for the fringe kink market).
Lets do a real world analogy to a pop-star who becomes popular, puts her face out in the "scene" often and has her love-life spread all over the tabloids. Does that make it more clear what is going on? People like the author of this article are like the writers for People magazine, looking for headlines and pumps for the magazine bottom line.
I remember a few years ago when the iToy craze was at its height and everyone who wanted to push page views did it by putting Apple in the title of their article. Not exactly the same, but close enough to what is going on here.
It is, perhaps to you, a disgustiing proposition (suicide that is) but your American view of how the world works is laughable. In China, entire villages are covered with lead dust from battery factories and people die of inhaling the dust. Do you have any clue at all how bad things can be in these places? No, no you don't. I do, I've been there and I know what good looks like there, and you would refuse to step foot in it.
What you say about cost shifting is somewhat mistaken. What I see is that the "part-timers" who were working 40-60 hours a week under a "part-time contract" are now going to be held to a 30 hour max week so they will have to have 2 jobs to pay the bills instead of the one. While that is hard on them, the political cost to the employers (being treated like dirt because they are screwing their employees who will cheat them big-time because of it: so that everyone loses from this is what is stupid. And the large orgs and edus that are doing this are just making themselves look shabby.
I ran my health insurance like that for almost fifteen years: while I lived in Asia and could get good (but not great) health care for pennies (yes, literally pennies). We had a baby, operations, High-tech scanning (CT, sono, MRI) and nothing even pushed the card over $1000. Now, what would happen here in the US if we tried to get by on a $5000 credit card to cover a family of 5?
HAHAHAHAHA! we'd be screwed.
you are exactly right. The last time a third party was able to affect the vote the other two parties changed the rules for presidential debates and made it impossible for a third party to have a seat in the debate. Fixed that, (walks off smiling and wiping hands on a rag.....)