If Romney is too busy bashing Obama to tell them, how do they know that?
Romney may need to prove he can fix the economy
More than that, he needs to prove that he won't screw it up even worse. In as much as he has any plans at all, he's promising to cut taxes and protect the very predatory businesses who got us into this mess.
Further, the pro-lifers are not going to vote Democratic. The religious right wouldn't touch Obama with a space elevator due to the whole issue with gays and other family issues.
Right, so they don't vote for Obama. They still have three choices: vote for Romney, vote for a 3rd party candidate, stay home. Romney needs to convince them to make the first choice.
Everyone wants health care reform, but no one on the Republican side wants it to be a plan that forces people to pay for other people, especially if they are illegal immigrants.
That's a key part of the Obama Socialist meme, and I think people are beginning to see that it's disconnected with reality. People paying for other people' is what we have now.
Millions of people right now don't have health insurance either because they can't afford it or don't think they need it. So if you're not healthy and don't have insurance, you avoid doctors as long as you can, then you go to an ER, an expensive way to provide basic care, and made more expensive by the fact that you've let your condition deteriorate. Or if you're healthy and are injured, once again you go to the ER, maybe are hospitalized and even need long term care for your injuries.
In both cases, who pays the resulting costs? People who do have insurance and the taxpayers. Unpaid ER and hospital bills get cost shifted to people who can pay. Long term care for people who can't pay for it gets covered by Medicaid.
Obamacare makes everybody get insurance. This is the provision that the anti-Obamacore crowd insists is unconstitutional, but it's also the provision that most impacts the "people pay for other people" problem. Yeah, people who can't afford insurance get subsidized, but lots of people who can afford insurance are forced to buy it. Plus individual buyers of insurance can go to Insurance Exchanges, which create risk pools that lower premium costs; currently that kind of risk pooling is only available to people in (usually employer-provided) group health plans.
Plus you get more rational use of health care (seeing a doctor for preventive care instead of waiting until you're really sick and going to an ER), and that lowers costs. So despite government subsidies, you end up with less "people paying for other people" than you have now.
These facts have been out there for years now, and yet people are still telling each other that Obamacare is about making them pay for other people's pills. I guess they're too involved in their own political echo chambers to pay attention. I like to think that this is changing. If Romney is elected, this will be proof positive that people are clinging to militant ignorance. That possibility scares me a lot more than the idea of a President Romney.
Romney's campaign is on the attack because he's the contender, he has to point at Obama and convince people they made a mistake in 2008.
That's been the Republican strategy since about 5 minutes after Obama won the election. I suppose it could be part of a bigger strategy, but it seems to be the only strategy they have. Every single GOP speech I've heard has had something to say about how Obama is screwing up the country.
Even if there were anything to half their claims, this would be a stupid way to proceed. It's not enough to tell people they have to vote against Obama, they need to offer people something to vote for. And the constant repetition is begging to wear on people. That's why Obama is less than 20 electoral votes from clinching the election.
I don't usually care about getting modded down. But there's something extremely sad about getting multiple Flamebait mods for pointing out that somebody's an ignorant bigot.
Hey, the whole Christian religion is founded on one such issue, Isaiah 7:14 prophesied that an "almah" will give birth to the Messiah. It's pretty clear that in this context the Hebrew word means "young woman", but people in the first century people had forgotten their Hebrew (except for priests, most Jews spoke Greek or Aramaic) and were casting around for miraculous events that would show them the way out of the nasty times they lived in. There were lots of candidates for the Messiah, but the one that got the most following was a guy who supposedly was born of a virgin — just as Isaiah prophesied!
Of course any Christian who believes in the Immaculate Conception will not accept my logic. And that's fine. The fact remains that a major religion is based on a particular translation of a word.
I believe the main prophet is the LDS President. I remember back in the 70s, the LDS was taking a lot of flack for excluding "Africans" from the Aaronic Priesthood, making black male Mormons essentially second-class members of the church. Conveniently enough, the President had a revelation in 1978 lifting the ban.
It's easy to make fun of this sort of thing. But if a religious leader prays and meditates and examines his conscience, and decides that one of his doctrines has to change, I'm not going to sneer, even if I don't believe in the God he's praying to. Having a way to adapt your doctrines to changing times is a good thing, with or without the hocus pocus.
Huh? I never said I was bulked. I'm pretty much the standard Slashdotter who spends too much time on the couch (which is where I am now).
I do seem to be resistant to putting on weight, despite a semi-crappy diet and desultory exercise. But that's a physiological quirk, not a moral achievement.
The interesting thing is that the Word of Wisdom specifies hot drinks, but the LDS reads that as "coffee and tea and nothing else". I assume iced tea is also verboten.
What arrogant crap. All the people I've seen using mobility scooters actually had physical problems that made assistance necessary. OK, a lot of them should have taken better care of themselves when they were younger, but so what? I doubt that anybody on Slashdot is a paragon of healthy eating and frequent exercise.
It's been a long time since I read "Winter Market" but from what I remember it's about uploading consciousness, not cyborg augmentation for the paralyzed. John Varley's "Blue Champagne" seems to be much more relevant.
Huh. Hence all the takedown notices from companies nobody ever heard of. So even the media companies are getting ripped off.
They're pretty stupid that way. I heard an NPR piece once (I forget the details) about an indie record label that was approached by a big media company and offered a bucket of cash to license one of their albums. They took the cash, and refrained from telling the media company that they already owned the songs on the album, which had been licensed from them in the first place.
Then there's the issue of fair use in documentaries. If you do news or documentary film, any content you happen to pick up in the background is fair use, because it's part of the story. I heard one lawyer say that a freshman law student would flunk out if they didn't know that. Of course, any music you dub in as theme or background has to be properly licensed.
Now, if you make a documentary, you probably get financial backing from a big media company, which makes you buy clearance insurance to protect against any claims for unlicensed content. And apparently the insurance companies are really stupid about the difference between fiction and documentary, because they'll insist that you obtain clearance for all the music that appears. The producers of Mad Hot Ballroom spent huge sums licensing the music that plays in the background. In some cases when they thought it didn't affect the story (like a scene where some kids are playing a video game), they dubbed over the music to save money.
People talk about greedy media companies. But really, all the incidents we're talking about here — the Ustream shutdown, the Youtube takedown notices, etc. — are not about greed. They're about stupidity.
That's a different category from what I was talking about, but yeah, that's pretty lame. This is where they buy some company because they think they can integrate the companies products into their own plans. But often their plans are very poorly thought out,
The one that really bugs me is Jotspot. This was a sort of business wiki that they bought and shut down. It reappeared 16 months later as Google Sites. My issue here is not so much that Jotspot went away (I never used it) but that Google Sites is such a gawdawful application. (I briefly worked on a job where I had to use Google Sites to maintain web-based technical documentation It was painful.) So, they spent millions of bucks to buy an advanced wiki platform, spent a long time fiddling with it, and all they have to show for it is a poorly implemented, feature-limited CMS. Lame.
Now that I think of it, this is the same as what I was talking about before. Somebody at Google has a brilliant idea for acquiring and repurposing a company, but (as always) there's no follow-through. Obviously they got bored and moved on to something else. I imagine the same thing is now happening to Meebo.
Slashdot Mirror
They know what Romney means for them already
If Romney is too busy bashing Obama to tell them, how do they know that?
Romney may need to prove he can fix the economy
More than that, he needs to prove that he won't screw it up even worse. In as much as he has any plans at all, he's promising to cut taxes and protect the very predatory businesses who got us into this mess.
Further, the pro-lifers are not going to vote Democratic. The religious right wouldn't touch Obama with a space elevator due to the whole issue with gays and other family issues.
Right, so they don't vote for Obama. They still have three choices: vote for Romney, vote for a 3rd party candidate, stay home. Romney needs to convince them to make the first choice.
Everyone wants health care reform, but no one on the Republican side wants it to be a plan that forces people to pay for other people, especially if they are illegal immigrants.
That's a key part of the Obama Socialist meme, and I think people are beginning to see that it's disconnected with reality. People paying for other people' is what we have now.
Millions of people right now don't have health insurance either because they can't afford it or don't think they need it. So if you're not healthy and don't have insurance, you avoid doctors as long as you can, then you go to an ER, an expensive way to provide basic care, and made more expensive by the fact that you've let your condition deteriorate. Or if you're healthy and are injured, once again you go to the ER, maybe are hospitalized and even need long term care for your injuries.
In both cases, who pays the resulting costs? People who do have insurance and the taxpayers. Unpaid ER and hospital bills get cost shifted to people who can pay. Long term care for people who can't pay for it gets covered by Medicaid.
Obamacare makes everybody get insurance. This is the provision that the anti-Obamacore crowd insists is unconstitutional, but it's also the provision that most impacts the "people pay for other people" problem. Yeah, people who can't afford insurance get subsidized, but lots of people who can afford insurance are forced to buy it. Plus individual buyers of insurance can go to Insurance Exchanges, which create risk pools that lower premium costs; currently that kind of risk pooling is only available to people in (usually employer-provided) group health plans.
Plus you get more rational use of health care (seeing a doctor for preventive care instead of waiting until you're really sick and going to an ER), and that lowers costs. So despite government subsidies, you end up with less "people paying for other people" than you have now.
These facts have been out there for years now, and yet people are still telling each other that Obamacare is about making them pay for other people's pills. I guess they're too involved in their own political echo chambers to pay attention. I like to think that this is changing. If Romney is elected, this will be proof positive that people are clinging to militant ignorance. That possibility scares me a lot more than the idea of a President Romney.
Just because you are at a PUB doesnt mean you are forced to get drunk. And a good thing too, since most psychiatric meds don't mix well with alcohol.
Romney's campaign is on the attack because he's the contender, he has to point at Obama and convince people they made a mistake in 2008.
That's been the Republican strategy since about 5 minutes after Obama won the election. I suppose it could be part of a bigger strategy, but it seems to be the only strategy they have. Every single GOP speech I've heard has had something to say about how Obama is screwing up the country.
Even if there were anything to half their claims, this would be a stupid way to proceed. It's not enough to tell people they have to vote against Obama, they need to offer people something to vote for. And the constant repetition is begging to wear on people. That's why Obama is less than 20 electoral votes from clinching the election.
And exactly how many people have you seen who were riding scooters, but obviously didn't need them?
OK, who wasted a mod point on this post, when the could have modded up the post I was talking about?
I simply do not get stationary bikes. Has to be the most boring exercise possible.
I don't usually care about getting modded down. But there's something extremely sad about getting multiple Flamebait mods for pointing out that somebody's an ignorant bigot.
Hey, the whole Christian religion is founded on one such issue, Isaiah 7:14 prophesied that an "almah" will give birth to the Messiah. It's pretty clear that in this context the Hebrew word means "young woman", but people in the first century people had forgotten their Hebrew (except for priests, most Jews spoke Greek or Aramaic) and were casting around for miraculous events that would show them the way out of the nasty times they lived in. There were lots of candidates for the Messiah, but the one that got the most following was a guy who supposedly was born of a virgin — just as Isaiah prophesied!
Of course any Christian who believes in the Immaculate Conception will not accept my logic. And that's fine. The fact remains that a major religion is based on a particular translation of a word.
My mistake (grunt).
I believe the main prophet is the LDS President. I remember back in the 70s, the LDS was taking a lot of flack for excluding "Africans" from the Aaronic Priesthood, making black male Mormons essentially second-class members of the church. Conveniently enough, the President had a revelation in 1978 lifting the ban.
It's easy to make fun of this sort of thing. But if a religious leader prays and meditates and examines his conscience, and decides that one of his doctrines has to change, I'm not going to sneer, even if I don't believe in the God he's praying to. Having a way to adapt your doctrines to changing times is a good thing, with or without the hocus pocus.
Huh? I never said I was bulked. I'm pretty much the standard Slashdotter who spends too much time on the couch (which is where I am now).
I do seem to be resistant to putting on weight, despite a semi-crappy diet and desultory exercise. But that's a physiological quirk, not a moral achievement.
Oh yeah? Well, your mother wears Army boots!
The interesting thing is that the Word of Wisdom specifies hot drinks, but the LDS reads that as "coffee and tea and nothing else". I assume iced tea is also verboten.
What arrogant crap. All the people I've seen using mobility scooters actually had physical problems that made assistance necessary. OK, a lot of them should have taken better care of themselves when they were younger, but so what? I doubt that anybody on Slashdot is a paragon of healthy eating and frequent exercise.
It's been a long time since I read "Winter Market" but from what I remember it's about uploading consciousness, not cyborg augmentation for the paralyzed. John Varley's "Blue Champagne" seems to be much more relevant.
It works for them. Frustrating for users if they depend on a Google product and it goes away or never matures.
Ah, conspiracy theories, the last refuge of the stupid.
Huh. So they could fold iGoogle into Google+ i they wanted to. But iGoogle is just so 90s.
Agreed. I'm trashing Dr. Who, not defending the writer they ripped off.
Crap code offends me. Sorry, it's a personality flaw.
I did some googling. Lots of reports of long delays before stuff gets restored. I suppose it varies depending on the kind of content.
his is so fucking obvious, I am amazed I have to explain it.
Yeah, you're so sure you're right, it really irks you that you have to mess around with boring things like logic and evidence.
Huh. Hence all the takedown notices from companies nobody ever heard of. So even the media companies are getting ripped off.
They're pretty stupid that way. I heard an NPR piece once (I forget the details) about an indie record label that was approached by a big media company and offered a bucket of cash to license one of their albums. They took the cash, and refrained from telling the media company that they already owned the songs on the album, which had been licensed from them in the first place.
Then there's the issue of fair use in documentaries. If you do news or documentary film, any content you happen to pick up in the background is fair use, because it's part of the story. I heard one lawyer say that a freshman law student would flunk out if they didn't know that. Of course, any music you dub in as theme or background has to be properly licensed.
Now, if you make a documentary, you probably get financial backing from a big media company, which makes you buy clearance insurance to protect against any claims for unlicensed content. And apparently the insurance companies are really stupid about the difference between fiction and documentary, because they'll insist that you obtain clearance for all the music that appears. The producers of Mad Hot Ballroom spent huge sums licensing the music that plays in the background. In some cases when they thought it didn't affect the story (like a scene where some kids are playing a video game), they dubbed over the music to save money.
People talk about greedy media companies. But really, all the incidents we're talking about here — the Ustream shutdown, the Youtube takedown notices, etc. — are not about greed. They're about stupidity.
That's a different category from what I was talking about, but yeah, that's pretty lame. This is where they buy some company because they think they can integrate the companies products into their own plans. But often their plans are very poorly thought out,
The one that really bugs me is Jotspot. This was a sort of business wiki that they bought and shut down. It reappeared 16 months later as Google Sites. My issue here is not so much that Jotspot went away (I never used it) but that Google Sites is such a gawdawful application. (I briefly worked on a job where I had to use Google Sites to maintain web-based technical documentation It was painful.) So, they spent millions of bucks to buy an advanced wiki platform, spent a long time fiddling with it, and all they have to show for it is a poorly implemented, feature-limited CMS. Lame.
Now that I think of it, this is the same as what I was talking about before. Somebody at Google has a brilliant idea for acquiring and repurposing a company, but (as always) there's no follow-through. Obviously they got bored and moved on to something else. I imagine the same thing is now happening to Meebo.
What, because a bad TV show ripped it off, it's a great book? Yeah, that's logical.