"If it is not obvious by now it should be, people 'enjoy' doing all kinds of shit that is harmful to themselves."
Including voting.
The sad part is, enough people want the government to parent us that these laws end up getting passed. Remember trans-fat? Heard about the ban on >16oz of soda in NYC?
Why does your TPMS go off all winter long? It will go off when the air temperature drops. Adjust the tire pressure and you should be good until spring. I've had this feature since '06 and that's always how it has worked out.
The only thing that bugs me is that even on cars with touch screens, they cheap out and don't tell you which tires are at fault.
I had been a Verizon Wireless customer since the late 90s. I recently dropped them and went with a prepaid provider, switching to the unlocked Google Nexus sold directly from Google. I've had it for a few months now and there hasn't been anything to complain about. The monthly cost is about what I was paying for a lousy voice plan, grandfathered evdo data, and no texting on an ancient Motorola flip phone. These companies are just reselling the bigger company's network so the bargain may not last forever if the big guys lose all their customers, but at least for now there are options.
The only drawback is that you have to pay out of pocket for the phone. But with the increase in monthly charges I would have faced through Verizon to go to a "smartphone", I would have paid for it within not too many months even IF they covered the whole cost of the phone.
The party you register under determines which ballot you get during the primary election. It makes sense since you're voting for the party's nominee. Once that's settled, then it's free for all in the general election. In my state, you can register without specifying a party and choose which ballot you'd like at the primary. That automatically enrolls you, but they also let us switch back to having no party before leaving the polling station.
The state had argued over whether those without a party should be allowed to vote in the primary. At the time, I was thinking yes because independents should be able to vote for the best candidate so their favorite has a chance at being a nominee. The downside is that if you have an incumbent or an obvious win for one party, independents-in-name-only can snipe the other party's ballot. They'll vote for the most-like-my-party's candidate.
Seems to me this would improve the jobs numbers slightly and play to team Obama's "Romney was an outsourcer" campaign rhetoric. So, I'd shorten the back-to-looking-for-work interval to post November of this year, depending on the election outcome. It's similar to how right after the WI recall failed that the President was speaking about hiring more firemen and teachers, both are union strongholds and could push against the right-to-work movement. The timing is incredibly convenient.
i've lived in the USA for over 30 years. came here shortly after Reagan took office. when have these issue things actually influenced an election? it's all charisma and oratory ability
I'm not sure if that trickles down to the other offices as much. While I'm sure a lot of folks still just check one party or the other, I think there's a lot that choose senators and reps and their state and local officials based on issues. Scott Brown is one such case. Martha Coakley was expected to have an easy win since she was the easy choice for that district. She didn't win.
All I'm suggesting is that e-voting would make the popularity contest even worse. Those that feel strongly about voting don't mind the short trip to their local polling station. I'd be worried if we put it online and let those who truly don't care cast a vote.
If they're too lazy to walk a few blocks then they're way too lazy to actually be informed about the issues and where the candidates stand on them. If you make it easy enough that even those folks will vote, then you've turned the elections into popularity contests. We could only guess at what criteria they'd be basing those votes on.
In my state, we have paper sheets where you fill in the bubble. When you're done filling them in, you feed the ballot to the scanner and the paper copy is retained. We have quick results thanks to the scanners, but the actual ballots still exist and can be counted. We don't need anything more than that.
I doubt it could ever be proven, but I think it had far more to do with Government Motors. Those incidents happened around the time that the domestic car manufacturers were begging for federal bailouts to stay in business. That hysteria was exactly what they needed to drive a scared public away from a very popular foreign company back to the domestic brands. Eventually the federal investigations quietly blamed it on operator error, long after the damage was done.
When you start to automate this process, you will need to have a centralized system that handles all patients' drug information as you have now removed the role of various trained medical professionals.
Does the proposal make it illegal for patients to ask their doctor about non-prescription medicine? Will there be barbed wire fences and men with machine guns at the pharmacy preventing access to the pharmacists?
I've been using the same prescription drug for a skin condition for decades. Every year I'd have to see a dermatologist for five seconds so he'd sign off on the prescription once again. It was a waste of my time, his time, the insurance company's time, and my employer's time since the appointments were always during working hours. If I wanted to know the doctor's opinion about new drugs on the market or I thought it was losing its effectiveness or whatever and it was no longer prescription, I can still make an appointment or a simple phone call to ask.
Now, the copay to see a specialist is five times what the drug costs. What the insurance pays is even worse. Fortunately, many primary care doctors have turned into walking prescription pads. You can basically rattle off whatever you'd like (at least for the mundane, no street-value drugs) and they'll sign for it. That's the next best thing to being able to bypass them completely if you're comfortable doing so.
Ahh yes, heat generating lights. The city I live in burnt some stimulus money on replacing traffic signal lights with LEDs. Then winter came and we all realized that they don't generate heat, meaning if they're windblown with snow and ice.. you can't tell which one is lit up. But hey, at least we're green. Or red, or yellow.. shit, lookout!
The LEDs do go to full brightness even if the ambient room temperature is low. Probably not a huge issue for most people, but I don't crank the heat in the winter and even the latest and greatest CFLs still take a while to get to full brightness. They switch on and off so fast it's trippy.
If you truly think we "all generally agree" about energy, read some of the related topics that have come up on/. recently. The "generally agreeable" crowd expresses one point of view and everyone else posts as AC to avoid the onslaught of flame-bait and troll down mods that are the generally agreeable crowd's version of "I respectfully disagree". The assumption that any non-mainstream opinion is based in fear just adds a layer of arrogance on top of it all.
Ask anyone who works hard and is taxed hard how agreeable they are with our ever increasing entitlement burden. Ask the half of America paying for groceries about the other half being subsidized by EBT. Ask the retired senior about how they make a living and what they think of the younger folks still paying in to a system that may not be there for them. Generally agreeable? Maybe if the question is "do you agree that everyone does or doesn't do something to make a living?" Sure. But the question is pointless.
Two people will never agree entirely on right and wrong, that's the human factor. That's why there competing parties, competing ideas. That's also the basis for democracy. There would be no need for elections if everyone believed in the same sets of right and wrong. The mere fact that we have self-consciousness makes pure altruism unattainable. We vote for whoever has a belief system that's closest to our own. Then we hope they'll stay true to their campaign rhetoric, we end up disappointed once again when they fail, and then it's campaign season again.
They can't begin to concieve of a gov't that's not beholden to some sort of special interests.
Humans always favor some over others. Unless we're to be ruled by circuitry, government will always exhibit the same behavior. The brand name doesn't matter.
It no doubt varies by region. If you live in an area with a high rate of claims or is deemed higher risk for whatever reason, you'll get burned. Some states have also over regulated auto insurance to the point where it penalizes everyone for the poor driving of a few (under the codeword "fairness"), or it has the effect of driving out competition. My neighbors in MA had that problem until they started to drift away from heavy regulation. Most of the big insurers didn't even bother offering policies there.
The black box data, which gathers information on the 20 seconds before the crash, indicates he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and that he was traveling at speeds ranging from 75 miles per hour to 108 miles per hour, the peak speed recorded less than a half-second before the crash. After hitting the ledge, the vehicle spun and rolled over while travelling another 232 feet before coming to a stop. The data indicate Murray did not brake prior to impact.
He originally blamed his spectacular crash on icy roads. The article includes a nice graph of some of the data. There's also a PDF floating around that has a more in depth analysis, but I can't find it at the moment.
As if insurance companies are going to lower your premiums. What they'll do with this data is, increase premiums on those they now know are 'unsafe'. As in, you actually drive your car instead of keeping it safely in the garage.
My insurance gives a decent discount for however many years I keep from having an at-fault accident or ticket. My premium has gone way down over the years, even as my choice of vehicles gets more expensive. They must, as others have pointed out. It's a highly competitive business. Besides which, I live in a state which doesn't require insurance. We're only required to have sufficient "financial means". If the policies got too high, they'd lose all their customers.. except for the ones forced to buy insurance by the bank holding the title until the loan is paid off.
There is no such tax credit. Worse, the Obama administration wants to make the insurance benefit that many of us receive from our employers taxable. That means we'll be paying more in taxes, not less. The mandate has a penalty for non-compliance, which the administration's lawyer frequently called a tax when this was argued in front of SCOTUS. Several of the justices questioned why he kept using different terms when arguing different points. This was all an attempt to dance around the fact that it's a fine which makes it a mandate. We're in a holding pattern now until the justices release their verdict.
Mayor Mumbles should put this in his pocket and raise it again the next time the city has to negotiate with the Boston patrolmen's union. The overall cost is higher. $170k is just the settlement. This whole debacle will have cost Boston taxpayers more than that from start to finish.
Why does everything need to be taxed? Don't we have enough forms of taxation already? Would you ever be satisfied so long as there was still a glimmer of capitalism left untaxed? In New Hampshire, we pay mostly via our property taxes. We don't have or need a state sales or income tax. Taxing us two or three different ways doesn't magically create money that couldn't have been collected the first way. All it does is create more bureaucracy, thus necessitating more taxation to fund the bureaucracy.
Online purchases are beyond the state's jurisdiction unless everything takes place within the state. They can demand that their residents pay up, but they can't make demands of companies that don't exist within the state.
Often these politicians don't get re-elected, either.
Although sometimes they get elected US senator. With any luck, we'll pass an amendment to the state constitution to make those taxes even more unlikely.
Our state politicians are like car salesmen (yes, a car analogy!). "Well, by enacting a small sales tax, we won't have to raise property taxes nearly as much." In the end, we pay more anyway. All a granite stater has to do is look at our southern neighbor.
What do you mean by "disagree with regulation"? NH isn't a state full of anarchists. Our folks are generally against pointless and/or nanny-stating regulations. We don't need a law to tell us to buckle up. We either will, or we won't. Same thing with helmet laws for two wheeled vehicles. You want to take stupid risks? Go for it! You can even drive here without auto insurance. The law only requires that you be "financially responsible". Add "pointless" before regulation, and I think you'd be right on the money.
I do agree that this legislation is somewhat odd. If there were no laws barring the government from considering open source, why demand officials to consider it? If a tech company here in NH wanted to provide a solution to the state for $1 that was desirable in every way, this law would force the state to waste money considering options it wouldn't take. That probably wouldn't happen often, but it is a valid point. I can understand a law like this in neighboring Massachusetts where every state purchase is followed by a trail of corruption, but not here in the Granite State.
As a long-time New Hampshire resident, I think you raise an interesting question. The state public utilities commission really screwed us when Verizon decided to pull out of northern New England. They handed over the keys to the telecom kingdom to Fairpoint, a tiny utility that many said couldn't handle the job. Turns out they couldn't handle the job. Those of us in the more populated parts of NH saw Verizon rolling out fiber only to see those trucks cut and run. A portion of that is kept running by Fairpoint, but to the poorest possible level. The last ice storm showed us that their system had a single point of failure where it ties into the world.
The state is too interested in providing DSL service to the sparsest areas of the state while completely ignoring the areas where most of its residents live. What choices would you have as a NH resident? The same you'd get pretty much anywhere there isn't fiber: painfully slow DSL or overpriced you-must-buy-a-bundle cable. It's a sad state of affairs considering how many high tech workers there are here. Heck, you can't even register your vehicles online in many places because the towns don't want to pay anything extra to the state to provide the service to its residents. I don't disagree with those towns, but I do believe the state restricts them from running their own system.
All that aside, there's nowhere else I'd rather live. New Hampshire, by far, gets more things right than it gets wrong.
Why isn't the company they worked for ALSO shut down?
I remember sitting in class in elementary school when the teacher would hold the whole class responsible for something that one individual did. That sucked then, and it would still suck now.
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Reminds me of a Reagan quote, "the more the plans fail, the more the planners plan".
My state doesn't even have a sales tax. Can we opt out of your plan?
"If it is not obvious by now it should be, people 'enjoy' doing all kinds of shit that is harmful to themselves."
Including voting.
The sad part is, enough people want the government to parent us that these laws end up getting passed. Remember trans-fat? Heard about the ban on >16oz of soda in NYC?
Why does your TPMS go off all winter long? It will go off when the air temperature drops. Adjust the tire pressure and you should be good until spring. I've had this feature since '06 and that's always how it has worked out.
The only thing that bugs me is that even on cars with touch screens, they cheap out and don't tell you which tires are at fault.
I had been a Verizon Wireless customer since the late 90s. I recently dropped them and went with a prepaid provider, switching to the unlocked Google Nexus sold directly from Google. I've had it for a few months now and there hasn't been anything to complain about. The monthly cost is about what I was paying for a lousy voice plan, grandfathered evdo data, and no texting on an ancient Motorola flip phone. These companies are just reselling the bigger company's network so the bargain may not last forever if the big guys lose all their customers, but at least for now there are options.
The only drawback is that you have to pay out of pocket for the phone. But with the increase in monthly charges I would have faced through Verizon to go to a "smartphone", I would have paid for it within not too many months even IF they covered the whole cost of the phone.
The party you register under determines which ballot you get during the primary election. It makes sense since you're voting for the party's nominee. Once that's settled, then it's free for all in the general election. In my state, you can register without specifying a party and choose which ballot you'd like at the primary. That automatically enrolls you, but they also let us switch back to having no party before leaving the polling station.
The state had argued over whether those without a party should be allowed to vote in the primary. At the time, I was thinking yes because independents should be able to vote for the best candidate so their favorite has a chance at being a nominee. The downside is that if you have an incumbent or an obvious win for one party, independents-in-name-only can snipe the other party's ballot. They'll vote for the most-like-my-party's candidate.
Seems to me this would improve the jobs numbers slightly and play to team Obama's "Romney was an outsourcer" campaign rhetoric. So, I'd shorten the back-to-looking-for-work interval to post November of this year, depending on the election outcome. It's similar to how right after the WI recall failed that the President was speaking about hiring more firemen and teachers, both are union strongholds and could push against the right-to-work movement. The timing is incredibly convenient.
i've lived in the USA for over 30 years. came here shortly after Reagan took office. when have these issue things actually influenced an election? it's all charisma and oratory ability
I'm not sure if that trickles down to the other offices as much. While I'm sure a lot of folks still just check one party or the other, I think there's a lot that choose senators and reps and their state and local officials based on issues. Scott Brown is one such case. Martha Coakley was expected to have an easy win since she was the easy choice for that district. She didn't win.
All I'm suggesting is that e-voting would make the popularity contest even worse. Those that feel strongly about voting don't mind the short trip to their local polling station. I'd be worried if we put it online and let those who truly don't care cast a vote.
If they're too lazy to walk a few blocks then they're way too lazy to actually be informed about the issues and where the candidates stand on them. If you make it easy enough that even those folks will vote, then you've turned the elections into popularity contests. We could only guess at what criteria they'd be basing those votes on.
In my state, we have paper sheets where you fill in the bubble. When you're done filling them in, you feed the ballot to the scanner and the paper copy is retained. We have quick results thanks to the scanners, but the actual ballots still exist and can be counted. We don't need anything more than that.
I doubt it could ever be proven, but I think it had far more to do with Government Motors. Those incidents happened around the time that the domestic car manufacturers were begging for federal bailouts to stay in business. That hysteria was exactly what they needed to drive a scared public away from a very popular foreign company back to the domestic brands. Eventually the federal investigations quietly blamed it on operator error, long after the damage was done.
When you start to automate this process, you will need to have a centralized system that handles all patients' drug information as you have now removed the role of various trained medical professionals.
Does the proposal make it illegal for patients to ask their doctor about non-prescription medicine? Will there be barbed wire fences and men with machine guns at the pharmacy preventing access to the pharmacists?
I've been using the same prescription drug for a skin condition for decades. Every year I'd have to see a dermatologist for five seconds so he'd sign off on the prescription once again. It was a waste of my time, his time, the insurance company's time, and my employer's time since the appointments were always during working hours. If I wanted to know the doctor's opinion about new drugs on the market or I thought it was losing its effectiveness or whatever and it was no longer prescription, I can still make an appointment or a simple phone call to ask.
Now, the copay to see a specialist is five times what the drug costs. What the insurance pays is even worse. Fortunately, many primary care doctors have turned into walking prescription pads. You can basically rattle off whatever you'd like (at least for the mundane, no street-value drugs) and they'll sign for it. That's the next best thing to being able to bypass them completely if you're comfortable doing so.
Ahh yes, heat generating lights. The city I live in burnt some stimulus money on replacing traffic signal lights with LEDs. Then winter came and we all realized that they don't generate heat, meaning if they're windblown with snow and ice.. you can't tell which one is lit up. But hey, at least we're green. Or red, or yellow.. shit, lookout!
The LEDs do go to full brightness even if the ambient room temperature is low. Probably not a huge issue for most people, but I don't crank the heat in the winter and even the latest and greatest CFLs still take a while to get to full brightness. They switch on and off so fast it's trippy.
If you truly think we "all generally agree" about energy, read some of the related topics that have come up on /. recently. The "generally agreeable" crowd expresses one point of view and everyone else posts as AC to avoid the onslaught of flame-bait and troll down mods that are the generally agreeable crowd's version of "I respectfully disagree". The assumption that any non-mainstream opinion is based in fear just adds a layer of arrogance on top of it all.
Ask anyone who works hard and is taxed hard how agreeable they are with our ever increasing entitlement burden. Ask the half of America paying for groceries about the other half being subsidized by EBT. Ask the retired senior about how they make a living and what they think of the younger folks still paying in to a system that may not be there for them. Generally agreeable? Maybe if the question is "do you agree that everyone does or doesn't do something to make a living?" Sure. But the question is pointless.
Two people will never agree entirely on right and wrong, that's the human factor. That's why there competing parties, competing ideas. That's also the basis for democracy. There would be no need for elections if everyone believed in the same sets of right and wrong. The mere fact that we have self-consciousness makes pure altruism unattainable. We vote for whoever has a belief system that's closest to our own. Then we hope they'll stay true to their campaign rhetoric, we end up disappointed once again when they fail, and then it's campaign season again.
They can't begin to concieve of a gov't that's not beholden to some sort of special interests.
Humans always favor some over others. Unless we're to be ruled by circuitry, government will always exhibit the same behavior. The brand name doesn't matter.
It no doubt varies by region. If you live in an area with a high rate of claims or is deemed higher risk for whatever reason, you'll get burned. Some states have also over regulated auto insurance to the point where it penalizes everyone for the poor driving of a few (under the codeword "fairness"), or it has the effect of driving out competition. My neighbors in MA had that problem until they started to drift away from heavy regulation. Most of the big insurers didn't even bother offering policies there.
Yep. Just ask the Lt Governor of Massachusetts:
The black box data, which gathers information on the 20 seconds before the crash, indicates he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and that he was traveling at speeds ranging from 75 miles per hour to 108 miles per hour, the peak speed recorded less than a half-second before the crash. After hitting the ledge, the vehicle spun and rolled over while travelling another 232 feet before coming to a stop. The data indicate Murray did not brake prior to impact.
http://www.commonwealthmagazine.org/News-and-Features/Online-exclusives/2012/Winter/002-Lt-Gov-Murray-was-going-108.aspx
He originally blamed his spectacular crash on icy roads. The article includes a nice graph of some of the data. There's also a PDF floating around that has a more in depth analysis, but I can't find it at the moment.
My insurance gives a decent discount for however many years I keep from having an at-fault accident or ticket. My premium has gone way down over the years, even as my choice of vehicles gets more expensive. They must, as others have pointed out. It's a highly competitive business. Besides which, I live in a state which doesn't require insurance. We're only required to have sufficient "financial means". If the policies got too high, they'd lose all their customers.. except for the ones forced to buy insurance by the bank holding the title until the loan is paid off.
There is no such tax credit. Worse, the Obama administration wants to make the insurance benefit that many of us receive from our employers taxable. That means we'll be paying more in taxes, not less. The mandate has a penalty for non-compliance, which the administration's lawyer frequently called a tax when this was argued in front of SCOTUS. Several of the justices questioned why he kept using different terms when arguing different points. This was all an attempt to dance around the fact that it's a fine which makes it a mandate. We're in a holding pattern now until the justices release their verdict.
Mayor Mumbles should put this in his pocket and raise it again the next time the city has to negotiate with the Boston patrolmen's union. The overall cost is higher. $170k is just the settlement. This whole debacle will have cost Boston taxpayers more than that from start to finish.
Why shouldn't online purchases be taxable?
Why does everything need to be taxed? Don't we have enough forms of taxation already? Would you ever be satisfied so long as there was still a glimmer of capitalism left untaxed? In New Hampshire, we pay mostly via our property taxes. We don't have or need a state sales or income tax. Taxing us two or three different ways doesn't magically create money that couldn't have been collected the first way. All it does is create more bureaucracy, thus necessitating more taxation to fund the bureaucracy.
Online purchases are beyond the state's jurisdiction unless everything takes place within the state. They can demand that their residents pay up, but they can't make demands of companies that don't exist within the state.
Often these politicians don't get re-elected, either.
Although sometimes they get elected US senator. With any luck, we'll pass an amendment to the state constitution to make those taxes even more unlikely.
Our state politicians are like car salesmen (yes, a car analogy!). "Well, by enacting a small sales tax, we won't have to raise property taxes nearly as much." In the end, we pay more anyway. All a granite stater has to do is look at our southern neighbor.
What do you mean by "disagree with regulation"? NH isn't a state full of anarchists. Our folks are generally against pointless and/or nanny-stating regulations. We don't need a law to tell us to buckle up. We either will, or we won't. Same thing with helmet laws for two wheeled vehicles. You want to take stupid risks? Go for it! You can even drive here without auto insurance. The law only requires that you be "financially responsible". Add "pointless" before regulation, and I think you'd be right on the money.
I do agree that this legislation is somewhat odd. If there were no laws barring the government from considering open source, why demand officials to consider it? If a tech company here in NH wanted to provide a solution to the state for $1 that was desirable in every way, this law would force the state to waste money considering options it wouldn't take. That probably wouldn't happen often, but it is a valid point. I can understand a law like this in neighboring Massachusetts where every state purchase is followed by a trail of corruption, but not here in the Granite State.
As a long-time New Hampshire resident, I think you raise an interesting question. The state public utilities commission really screwed us when Verizon decided to pull out of northern New England. They handed over the keys to the telecom kingdom to Fairpoint, a tiny utility that many said couldn't handle the job. Turns out they couldn't handle the job. Those of us in the more populated parts of NH saw Verizon rolling out fiber only to see those trucks cut and run. A portion of that is kept running by Fairpoint, but to the poorest possible level. The last ice storm showed us that their system had a single point of failure where it ties into the world.
The state is too interested in providing DSL service to the sparsest areas of the state while completely ignoring the areas where most of its residents live. What choices would you have as a NH resident? The same you'd get pretty much anywhere there isn't fiber: painfully slow DSL or overpriced you-must-buy-a-bundle cable. It's a sad state of affairs considering how many high tech workers there are here. Heck, you can't even register your vehicles online in many places because the towns don't want to pay anything extra to the state to provide the service to its residents. I don't disagree with those towns, but I do believe the state restricts them from running their own system.
All that aside, there's nowhere else I'd rather live. New Hampshire, by far, gets more things right than it gets wrong.
Why isn't the company they worked for ALSO shut down?
I remember sitting in class in elementary school when the teacher would hold the whole class responsible for something that one individual did. That sucked then, and it would still suck now.