I'm beginning to think you're a troll, and your entire job is to prove ObamaCare is Constitutional, because you really suck at this. You just don't seem to be familiar with any actual facts.
Reconciliation happens with every bill that either House amends. It is the process by which the House approves Senate amendments, or vice versa. Reconciliation is not against the House rules, it is the House rules. It involves having both houses vote on the final, reconciled, proposal that their committee has come up with.
Reconciliation did not happen in this case because the vote on a reconciled bill can be filibustered, and between final passage of ObamaCare in the Senate and the start of the reconciliation process Scott Brown got himself elected. This cut the Democratic majority to 59 in the Senate, so no reconciled bill could pass, so they did an end run around the process.
The end run was they just had the House pass the Senate bill. The final vote was 219-212, and was very much in doubt because a group of pro-life Dems, led by Bart Stupak, wanted much stronger rules preventing tax money from funding abortions. Moreover Kucinich refused to support a bill that did not include a strong public option. Both Stupak and Kucinich ended up voting for the bill.
So the House proposed the mandate, it voted on it;s version of the mandate, and then it voted on the Senate version of the mandate. You ain't gonna convince a Court that ObamaCare is invalid because the House didn't vote on it.
Reread the origination clause. The senate "may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills".
That's exactly what happened. Both houses introduced the legislation at once (ie: they "proposed it" at the same time), both houses extensively amended it, and the house went with the Senate version. In legal terms that counts as the House "originating" the bill and then going along with the Senate Amendments.
Note that pretty much every revenue bill ever passed has gone through this exact process. Most of them don't end with the house agreeing to the entire Senate bill, but over the years the Senate bill has been the primary source of the final bill quite often.
And now you've committed Contempt of Court and you're going to jail. Possibly Obstruction of Justice as well.
And jury's typically assume the dude who destroyed the evidence had a reason to destroy the evidence, so when your nephew fingers you as the source of all the weed he's been selling his High School you gonna be going away for a while.
One of your nephews or cousins that uses your e-mail server decides to purchase a pressure cooker online. He also has some friends in Europe that he e-mails once in a while. What do you do when the NSA asks you for all the e-mails stored on your server?
So you still have an advantage because now you know that there's a warrant targeting you, personally.
There is no actual good solution to this problem. The government has infinite power, if it's actually abusing the law the way Snowden alleges (and it's clear he's simply wrong about several of his allegations), then going abroad only means they file for a foreign warrant before they screw you, or they get all your emails from the numerous people you know who haven't gone abroad.
More importantly if you're going to a place that hates the US Legal system so much they'll ignore a FISA warrant you're either a) going to a place where connectivity will be an issue (Africa is long-ass way from the US), b) going to a place where the local snoops have literally no restrictions (Russia), or c) both (Cuba makes a point of restricting the internet so your connection is bound to suck).
I don't like the Israelis very much, and I'm quite a bit more skeptical of the use of force then a lot of Americans, but methinks your problem is that you ignore anything that doesn't involve the US.
Russia is, at this very minute, supporting major secessionist movements in Abkhazia and Transdneipr. Neither is really big enough to be it's own independent state, both are trying to secede from countries roughly the size of Denmark; but the Russians don't care. They say the West supported an independent (roughly 1 million person) Kosovo, therefore these two tiny statelets with a combined population of 800k deserve troops from Mother Russia. OTOH if the same problem appears in Russia it's an internal Russian matter, and it's nobody's business what the Russian state does to preserve it's territory.
I don't know if anyone is actually dying as part of these conflicts, largely because people like you don't watch News shows that cover Russia bullying Georgia, but there was actually a war between Abkhazia and the Georgians. It was preceded in '93 by a minor incident where a quarter million ethnic Georgians were expelled from Abkhaz territory and 15,000 died. Yeah, technically it's genocide, and technically it's worse then the genocidal crap the Israelis do, but apparently it's only news when the US and it's allies do bad things.
BTW, you may note that I made a point of not mentioning either of the matters Lotana mentioned. When the US does evil we go after one guy, we try not to kill more then a handful of his associates, and everyone criticizes us for it. The Israelis are quite a bit less selective, in favor of a cause I don't have much sympathy for, but they too get raked over the coals for anything they do.
I get very annoyed when internet-savvy westerners rip the US to shreds for being un-Democratic and evil, and then imply the Russians are better because they milk Snowden for propaganda value. They aren't.
You do realize the legal theory pretty much all NSA interception is based on is that one of the people in a conversation is a foreigner? And if your email address is.co.no the NSA can make that assumption, and is legally entitled to all communications from a.com address to you? They don't need a warrant, they don't need a Court Order, they're 51% sure you're a foreigner therefore you have no rights, therefore until they stumble across an email from you that includes the phrase "I am a US Citizen," you have no rights. Even after they stumble across said email, the "good faith" exception means they don't have to delete any of their info on you, and all they have to do is turn your name over to the FBI for a serious investigation.
I sincerely doubt there's a way to avoid NSA snooping without opening yourself up to much worse snooping because all the democracies intelligence services and court systems work together, so if the NSA has enough probable cause for a US warrant the French are probably gonna bend over backwards to provide all the damn data. The non-democracies and shitty democracies are probably doing the same shit the NSA does, except instead of focusing on a tiny little ideology that would be lucky to get 1% support (there ain't many Islamists in the US) they're focused on the Chinese and Russian equivalent of Mitt Romney. Assange, for example, would probably be totally unacceptable to Ecuador if he had any interaction at all with Latin American NGOs because latin American NGOs are associated with the rich, which (to Correa at least) means the US.
Presumably if you're actually planning a terror attack you do all kinds of things that create evidence. You're buying things that go boom, talking to nasty people, etc. They'll have plenty of evidence that is NSA-free. They get your metadata with a FISA warrant, figure out you're talking to a terrorist, then get a non-FISA warrant so google will tell them the text of your emails, then use the text of said emails to find out more, etc. Why bother presenting the metadata in Court?
Investigations are really complex, and involve a lot of steps that may (but may not) depend on each-other. I have no doubt that this NSA stuff was at least present in the files of some recently convicted terrorists, but that it wasn't mentioned in Court because a) it might get thrown out, and b) they didn't need it for a conviction. If Obama ever starts taking this seriously (which would basically require a bunch of Senate Democrats to take this seriously, and/or Boehnor and the House GOP to stop bitching about taxes/spending long enough to talk about shit that matters) I have no doubt all those convictions will be brought out to the public.
I sincerely doubt any of it would actually means anything, because unless they tell us exactly what they did we can't tell whether this NSA stuff was just kinda there, or whether it blew open the case. And if they tell US exactly what they did they tell Al Qaeda exactly what they did. Which I really don't want. I honestly have no clue whether AQ could find a way top seriously hurt us with that info, because that kind of thing is simply unknowable until you actually try it, but really have a burning desire not to find that out. I wouldn't mind finding out more about the NSA sections of their files, but to actually figure out whether the NSA section is important they have to tell you everything else, and that strikes me as a bad idea.
What would be interesting to know is the number of drone attack victims who have an NSA section in their files. Guys who directly attack us tend to be in the US, talking to Americans, which means the NSA has to do it's best not to accidentally read their mail, and in turn means that if they got anything on the Fort Hood shooter it's like one email they forwarded to the FBI.
Question: When has the Court ever overturned a proposal on the basis of the origination clause?
Hell, why would the Court do that in this case? Several bills passed the House, including this one, all of which included the mandate. IIRC the House bill's mandate-clause was identical to the Senate bills, because the differences between the houses were largely in abortion funding and the various public option plans.
Please name a proposal that has been un-done due to the origination clause.
Senators change taxes all the time, and if the Senate can;t amend a House bill that includes taxes the Senate is useless.
More to the point the US House said it passed the Bill. Part of Separation of Powers is that the Courts don't get deep into the nitty-gritty of legislative details. For example, more then once they've allowed the House to pass a Bill without voting for it on the basis that the House "Deemed it passed."
It would be a pretty big deal for them to ban ObamaCare on the basis of the origination clause.
The US Constitution includes an enumerated list of powers for both the Executive and the Legislative branches. This implies that no other powers are allowed the federal government. The Ninth (and Tenth as well), re-state that the Feds have no powers except those listed. Which means legally speaking the Ninth (and the Tenth) are only relevant if you can prove a given government action is not justified by some other clause of the Constitution. And if you can prove that the 9tth and 10th are unnecessary.
In other words the fact that you're quoting the Ninth at all is pretty clear evidence you have no clue what the Constitution actually means. In this case it's quite clear the government has the ability to retain data it got legally, because if it didn't it would be extremely tricky for them to run at all. For example, take the fact that Barrack Obama is President. That's data. If the feds have no power to retain legally obtained data it's illegal for them to remember that.
The problem for Fourth Amendment maximalists and email is that the Fourth Amendment predates email. This means that the only way the Courts can apply it to email is apply analogies from horse and buggy-level technology to your gmail account, and the Courts have historically not been very aggressive about 4th Amendment enforcement. For example, if a Federal official heard a wagon was smuggling fake banknotes, he had something on the order of a 99.99% chance of getting a warrant. If he "accidentally" searched the wrong wagon and found some other contraband (say some good imported without paying the proper duties) the courts would declare it was Good Faith and the poor wagon-owner would be found guilty.
Hell, today NYC's stop-and-frisk is much worse from a Fourth Amendment point-of-view, and yet it's virtually impossible to get white people to talk about it. Apparently searching black people without a warrant of any kind is perfectly fine, but reading a white guy's email with a warrant is EVIL.
Doesnt mean MY government is empowered legally to look at ANY of my correspondence ANYWHERE in the world, without a warrant. It is explicitly forbidden to do so by the absolute highest law in the land. Until such time as the 4th is repealed, i will continue to demand that it be enforced.
Unfortunately unless you're user-name is your social security number they have no way of knowing which Norwegian-stored emails they're allowed to read, which brings in the "good-faith exception." The "good faith exception" is that if a government agent comes upon something interesting, it's usable in a court of law; as long as the government employee was trying to comply with the Fourth Amendment.
For example, if a cop searches your wagon because he thinks he's got a warrant for an eight-horse-wagon, and finds six Salvadorean 12-year-olds tied up in the back, the courts are not gonna give your Salvadorean pre-teens back to you just because it turns out the actual warrant was for a wagon with six horses.
The disadvantage of depending on a late 18th century document to protect your privacy in the early 21st century is that it doesn't really cover anything vaguely like signals intelligence, so the Courts are forced to rely on ridiculous analogies. Your email was stored in Norway, therefore most of the email on the server was probably Norwegians emailing other Norwegians, therefore the cops can assume on Good Faith that ALL the email on the server is not subject to the fourth amendment, therefore they don't need a US Warrant to search those emails. They may need a Norwegian warrant before the Norwegians will turn over the emails, but they do not need an American one.
Those are the countries that claim a chunk of Antarctica plus Russia. Argentina and Chile are the Latin American territorial claimants. Unfortunately for those fleeing the US the only states on that list who aren't officially US Allies are Russia and Chile, the Russians record towards freedom of anything is extremely mixed, and the current Chilean government is probably more pro-US then most of our official allies.
Many other states have research stations on the continent. Nine of them are NATO (Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Romania, and Spain) and three more are other official (ie: Major Non-NATO) allies (Japan, South Korea, and Pakistan). Ukraine waffles between being Russia's ally and America's, and the Belarussians share their base with the Russians.
But Sweden, China, South Africa, Ecuador, India, Peru, Brazil, Uruguay, and Finland all have bases. It's theoretically possible the Uruguayans and Brazilians aren't tainted by pro-US policies and haven't done something that makes their claim to support the freedom of information a joke in the last decade, but you'd probably be better off setting up your servers in Brazil or Uruguay proper instead of Artigas and Commandante Ferraz.
You certainly don't want to. Fact is that the WW II hasn't ended in so far as there are still serious limitations on sovereignity on Germany from US side (the Russians gave up on them during German reunification). Essentially US authorities can order around German authorities, including in particular the order to not investigate US crimes on German soil.
That's not really a relic of WW2. Any state allied to the US that wants US Troops based in it has to agree that all criminal cases involving said troops run through the US Military. We were supposed to have 10k or troops still in Iraq training their Army, but the Iraqis wouldn't extend their version of this deal. Obviously most of these agreements date to WW2 or it's immediate aftermath (Japan, Korea, etc.), but Afghanistan didn't have one until 2002.
From our point of view this is necessary because civilian courts suck art evaluating whether something was justified militarily. People who do not regularly fly a combat aircraft at 0.9 Mach and 150 ft simply are not capable of telling you who was at fault when one of those flights goes wrong.
Then there's the relative trustworthiness of court systems in various US Allies. Most of Europe is good, but there's a pretty big exception in Italy. The Italian Courts take forever to do anything even when they're working right, and it's not hard to find examples of them not working right. For example they just sentenced a CIA guy for an extraordinary rendition, but they happened to pick the one CIA guy who opposed the entire operation. Which is counter-productive, at best. Spanish Judges actually seem to like being called "Crusaders" in the media, and if I was a Spanish Judge I would be very tempted to play to Latin American Anti-American sentiment by insisting the US Troop who shorted his waitress 15 eurocents be sent to prison for theft.
And we don't just have European allies. How hard do you think it would be for the Taliban to find an innocent guy killed in the crossfire of a firefight, and get a couple Marines hanged for his murder? Hell, how hard do you think it would be for them to kill some innocent dude, and then bribe a couple local officials into convicting Americans of his murder. Heck if they were smart they'd use two judges. The one whose reluctant to kill innocent foreigners gets to be the dead dude.
It's a lot easier to get Afghanistan, the Spanish, the Italians, etc. to agree that US Military Courts will have sole jurisdiction in US Military cases if everybody else had to agree to that too.
You also may want to look up the story of the guy who invited a few friends on fecesbook to take a walk to some spy facility to watch the endangered species of NSA agents from a distance (or some such). He had the modern equivalent of the Gestapo at his doorsteps a few days later and had to officially register this walk as a demonstration..
So the US is evil because some guy wanted to demonstrate against us, and the German Government made him fill out paperwork calling it a demonstration?
I'm not familiar enough with German law to make any conclusive statements on it, but I do have to say that in most countries 10 demonstrators are enough to require a permit, and this guy ended up with 80. They weren't walking quietly, keeping to themselves, they were making a show of it. They used birdcalls to try to coax the "endangered species" out of it's underground facility, and they brought signs. That's a demonstration, and in every democracy in the entire fucking world 80 guys demonstrating at a government facility requires a permit. If you try to a start such a demonstration without a permit, the police make the assumption you have a reason to do so (for example, perhaps you intend to break into the facility in your search for NSA Agent when the birdcalls fail to work), therefore they have to talk to you to figure out the reason.
Hell, complaints of this kind are a major reason I trust the NSA. You can start a demonstration a
And since Apple doesn't specifically design low-end phones, your cheap iPhone has all the polish of an expensive iPhone. There's none-of-this, "It's a low-end phone, of course it sucks," BS.
OTOH, he picked the Stratosphere specifically for it's keyboard. It would be nice if Apple had a model with a keyboard, but the Steve has chose to bless us with such a product, which means there's no way in hell Tim will spend money on it. Apparently you can buy external keyboards, but I have no clue how to tell which ones suck.
Most conservative/libertarian intellectuals will admit in theory that the market does not work perfectly at all times. But getting them to admit anything currently done by the market could be better down without the market, or with regulations the current businesses in the market dislike, is like pulling teeth. This is especially true with the ones who are actually elected to powerful positions in the conservative dominated US House.
Pretty much the only government program these Tea Party-aligned Conservatives like is the Military. Social Security, law enforcement, and Medicare come in for honorable mentions. These preferences have not been arrived at after a lengthy journey, involving much research and weighing of costs vs. benefits to the nation, but the rest of us have to pretend they did or we get called assholes. It's kinda a pain.
I've used Apple products for decades. I've never had this problem.
If was a true hacker, trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of my machine by any means necessary, I'd probably have run into it. But I'm not. I'm a power-user who just wants all his products to play nice without going to the command to fiddle with settings for three hours. I just want things to work out of the box, and they do. When something goes wrong I walk to an Apple Store and they fix it. Sometimes they charge unreasonable rates (ie: $80 for an AC Adapter), other times they do a ridiculous amount of work for virtually no cost (ie: the time they replaced the board on my laptop that connects to my AC Adapter for $20).
Right now my phone is Android, and I have to say I'm not impressed. It's a cheap Samsung, so I didn't expect much, but a lot of the problems are so simple. For example, unlock is pretty much identical to butt-dial the police. Which means more then once the reason I know I have accidentally unlocked my cell phone is 911 calling me back to verify that was a butt-dial. The other thing that happens when it gets accidentally unlocked is it launches it's web-browser. You can really tell somebody at Samsung didn't bother to think this feature through.
How would you make the cell phone market freer? Networks are incredibly expensive to set up, especially national networks. Apparently you're in the country a lot, so any network of cell towers that covered enough of the nation to actually matter to you would cost ten$ of billion$. That's why there aren't a lot of companies to choose from.
Pretty much the only solutions I can see involve the Feds a) building several networks with public money and then auctioning them off, with clear instructions to the FTC that any attempt to merge or co-ordinate said networks deserves anti-trust action, or b) ordering certain companies with massive cash stock-piles (ie: apple) to do so.
That wouldn't work too well. Very few parlaimentarians, in any country, read and understand every bill they vote on. When your job involves making decisions on issues as diverse as what fighter jet to buy, the appropriate response to Syria, copyright, etc. there simply is not enough time in the year to read and understand every bill. In fact if you think their job is to read every bill you have failed to understand the main point of a legislature: it has a lot of people in it, so there're a couple people who know agricultural policy cold, another couple who know healthcare. The healthcare MP makes friends with an ag guy, and they explain the bills to each-other. They have another guy who knows the intricacies of the two-engive vs. one-engine fighter jet debate. If the healthcare guy spends three months learning the pros and cons of DDT regulation, another three figuring out whether the Soviet strategy of lots of cheap single-engine Mig-21s was superior to the US strategy of incredibly expensive F-4s (and how that ties in to the debate over which fighter jet the country should buy), etc. he's gonna get rusty on health policy and the quality of legislation will collapse.
This is even more important in the US, because our decentralized political institutions are incredibly complex. In healthcare, for example, we have a clone of the British NHS in the VA, a clone of Canada's system in Medicare, our employer-based system is somewhat unique but somewhat similiar to the German system, now with Obamacare we have a clone of the Dutch system in the individual market, Medicaid is 50 state systems that all operate subtly differently, etc. To understand how health policy actually works a US Pol needs to do three or four times the work that his foreign counterparts do. We have a system where Presidents and Congressman are pressured to add programs (it looks good on TV to be the guy with a new program) without replacing them (current beneficiaries freak out at miniscule changes to existing programs, and there are lots of veto points where they can derail the process, to bring up Obamacare again, the GOP is still convinced it can derail it despite not having the Senate, not having the Presidency, the Supreme Court's declaration it's constitutional, because it has enough Senators to filibuster).
No, "corrupt" means doing unethical things for personal gain. Businessman frequently get off on the technicality that they are allowed to define the word "ethical" as it relates to their own jobs, therefore anything that be a terrible fireable, never-work-in-the-sector again sin for the government is just how it's done in private industry.
Any manager who manages to figure out a way to fire the pregnant chick before she starts costing the company money due to a) maternity leave, b) expensive health costs of pregnancy, and c) upgrading her health plan from individual to family is gonna get a bonus. And, since businessmen define their own ethics, it's only unethical if some government employee made a point of pushing through a law specifically banning such shenanigans, and the manager can't rationalize the firing enough to get around the law. For example, in quite a few jurisdictions it would be perfectly ethical to wait until the day the woman was about to file for maternity leave, reorganize your business unit so her job doesn't exist, then wait until about the time she would be coming back and re-re-organize her old job back into existence.
Hell, take a look at the corruption that happens in the government. The classic case is some colonel making $120k arranging it so his buddy gets the contract for the new plane, retiring (and getting an $80k pension) and getting a $250k job from his buddy. In the government that is corruption, but spend a month in the actual private sector and you'll meet dozens of people who arranged for their company to buy products from a buddy, and then as soon as that buddy had a job opening jumped ship. It's not corrupt when the businesses do it because they can point out "of course the guy buying our products knows exactly what our customers want, and is therefore a really good hire." Couldn't you say the same about our Air Force Colonel?
Not really, because USAF Colonels don't get to write their own ethical standards.
Which means that if Congressional candidates spend $0.50 or $1.50 trying to communicate with every individual in the district they're gonna have a $500k budget.
And if a congressional candidate does not have enough money to communicate with ever single individual? What happens then? Armaggedon? What if many of us promise to cry for hours over the injustice of this? Would that make it better? It is not necessary for a campaign to acceept large donations in order to get funded. To use your example of 750,000 voters, if even half of them donate the maximum amount allowed of say $100, then you would have 37.5 million dollars for your campaign. And you couldn't be accused of having been bought by whatever company or companies actually did purchase you. A win-win for everyone.
And what makes all those voters decide to donate to the same guy? How do they even know he's running if he has no money to ask them for donations?
I agree that if you did this through the government you could make things look a lot less like corruption. The Canadians, for example, have strict dollar limits on expenditures, freedom of speech does not include the freedom to buy as much advertising as you can afford, they match many donations, they give political parties a subsidy based on the votes received, there's a huge tax credit, the party gets some it's election expenses reimbursed, etc.
But since our system in the US is a lot less generous top small donors, and Congress is incapable of passing anything, it's not likely we'll get some scheme where every vote gets $100 to donate to local candidates and spends an hour on a website of registered candidates picking who gets the money.
So you've basically got it backwards. They got $41k because they were going after the tough-on-terror voters who actually like the NSA program (support goes up from 30%ish to 40%ish if you mention it's supposed to be looking for terrorists). The others got $18k because they were going after the kind of voter who hates the NSA program.
I don't think you currently have any solid evidence that the tough-on-terror, pro-surveillance voters currently represent the majority. In fact it is currently hard to predict what the most popular stance is toward PRISM etc. Which makes it pretty easy to accept bribes from the defense industry. Whether those bribes are a direct payment for this particular vote or to encourage the congressman to vote for their issues in the future is irrelevant. It is still corruption. It is still bribery. These corporations are still getting an unfair advantage in the political process.
Pro-NSA voters don't need to be an actual majority. The GOP actually lost the popular vote by 1.4 million and they took the House due to the way districts are drawn.
They just have to be a plurality in 218 districts. I doubt they actually are at this moment (Snowden is a lot better at not pissing Americans off then Assange), but apparently the Congresscritters who represent those districts calculated that a) their districts were more anti-NSA then anti-Snowden, b) opposition to the NSA is a mile-wide and an inch deep, so voting on their side won't help in Nov 2014, but actual NSA employees will remember, or c) various things the Congresscritter can extort from the leadership will make up for the hit they take from this vote. It's likely some of them were actually voting on principle. I hated the Neo-Cons, and thought their Crusade to turn Iraq into a Jeffersonian Democracy was almost as insane as their pro-torture position; but that doesn't mean they don't actually believe that the US Government needs insane surveillance powers to protect freedom.
You do realize that residents get paid? And they get paid MORE then most bunny lawyers, all vets, or humanities PhDs? And that very few PhDs make it through in three years?
So your Doctor has the same amount of schooling our vet or humanities PhD does, then he makes $40-60k for four years, during which time our vet and humanities PhD is making $40-50k. So he's probably made $20k more during his residency then our vets and humanities PhDs. Law-school is three years, but many bunny lawyers do not get legal jobs. Most of them are making $45k, which is again $20k less then the resident. Then this continues for our various PhDs/Vets/ and Lawyers but our Doctor gets a six-figure raise.
Now our Doctor has a 30-year career, making $100k more then any of the others. That's a $3 Million salary premium. If you offered me $3 Million on the condition I pay off a $250k loan I'd take that deal.
The thing you have to keep in mind about Doctors is they live in the world of Mitt Romney. They don't meet public defenders, non-tenure track professors, or vets. They show up at a party with their equals, and it's a bunch of two-year MBAs who make more then them, a smattering of lawyers who made partner at a big firm (and make more then them), and maybe a prof with tenure (who makes less, but not much less). They are incredibly out-of-touch. They personify the upper-crusty-arrogant attitude that $40k is not enough to raise a family.
The way private sector insurance companies determine prices is even more fucked up, because they always end up paying more then Medicare.
Granted frequently that's because hospitals flat-out refuse any proposal to pay less then Medicare offers, but you'd think if the private sector was actually good at setting health prices they'd have found a way to do so that was better-sounding then "pay whatever the government will pay, plus 20%, because that asshole plays hardball."
Lawyers study as long as Doctors, get as many loans, and make less. Most Law School grads make under $50k. Vets are worse. It's harder to get into vet school then MedSchool, the coursework is harder (you have to know medical care for multiple organisms), the loans just as bad, and $50k is a really good salary for a Vet. Hell do you think ANY humanities PhD is ever gonna pay off his student loans?
I would have a lot more sympathy for American Doctors if their foreign counterparts didn't make do with a much less pay. Luxembourg is an incredibly expensive country to live in, yet their Doctors make 30% less then our doctors. Yeah we overpay our MBAs, and MPHs, but it's very hard for me to sympathize with a guy who does the exact same job as a Doctor from Winnipeg for $40,000 more and complains he isn't paid enough.
Strictly speaking he doesn't have to. If something is inherently unfixable EVERYONE is too fucking stupid to fix it. It's kinda dickish to put it that way, but hey. It's slashdot.
If dickishness were banned my posts wouldn;t get a +1 from karma bonus.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm beginning to think you're a troll, and your entire job is to prove ObamaCare is Constitutional, because you really suck at this. You just don't seem to be familiar with any actual facts.
Reconciliation happens with every bill that either House amends. It is the process by which the House approves Senate amendments, or vice versa. Reconciliation is not against the House rules, it is the House rules. It involves having both houses vote on the final, reconciled, proposal that their committee has come up with.
Reconciliation did not happen in this case because the vote on a reconciled bill can be filibustered, and between final passage of ObamaCare in the Senate and the start of the reconciliation process Scott Brown got himself elected. This cut the Democratic majority to 59 in the Senate, so no reconciled bill could pass, so they did an end run around the process.
The end run was they just had the House pass the Senate bill. The final vote was 219-212, and was very much in doubt because a group of pro-life Dems, led by Bart Stupak, wanted much stronger rules preventing tax money from funding abortions. Moreover Kucinich refused to support a bill that did not include a strong public option. Both Stupak and Kucinich ended up voting for the bill.
So the House proposed the mandate, it voted on it;s version of the mandate, and then it voted on the Senate version of the mandate. You ain't gonna convince a Court that ObamaCare is invalid because the House didn't vote on it.
Reread the origination clause. The senate "may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills".
That's exactly what happened. Both houses introduced the legislation at once (ie: they "proposed it" at the same time), both houses extensively amended it, and the house went with the Senate version. In legal terms that counts as the House "originating" the bill and then going along with the Senate Amendments.
Note that pretty much every revenue bill ever passed has gone through this exact process. Most of them don't end with the house agreeing to the entire Senate bill, but over the years the Senate bill has been the primary source of the final bill quite often.
And now you've committed Contempt of Court and you're going to jail. Possibly Obstruction of Justice as well.
And jury's typically assume the dude who destroyed the evidence had a reason to destroy the evidence, so when your nephew fingers you as the source of all the weed he's been selling his High School you gonna be going away for a while.
Let's get hypothetical...
One of your nephews or cousins that uses your e-mail server decides to purchase a pressure cooker online. He also has some friends in Europe that he e-mails once in a while. What do you do when the NSA asks you for all the e-mails stored on your server?
So you still have an advantage because now you know that there's a warrant targeting you, personally.
There is no actual good solution to this problem. The government has infinite power, if it's actually abusing the law the way Snowden alleges (and it's clear he's simply wrong about several of his allegations), then going abroad only means they file for a foreign warrant before they screw you, or they get all your emails from the numerous people you know who haven't gone abroad.
More importantly if you're going to a place that hates the US Legal system so much they'll ignore a FISA warrant you're either a) going to a place where connectivity will be an issue (Africa is long-ass way from the US), b) going to a place where the local snoops have literally no restrictions (Russia), or c) both (Cuba makes a point of restricting the internet so your connection is bound to suck).
I don't like the Israelis very much, and I'm quite a bit more skeptical of the use of force then a lot of Americans, but methinks your problem is that you ignore anything that doesn't involve the US.
Russia is, at this very minute, supporting major secessionist movements in Abkhazia and Transdneipr. Neither is really big enough to be it's own independent state, both are trying to secede from countries roughly the size of Denmark; but the Russians don't care. They say the West supported an independent (roughly 1 million person) Kosovo, therefore these two tiny statelets with a combined population of 800k deserve troops from Mother Russia. OTOH if the same problem appears in Russia it's an internal Russian matter, and it's nobody's business what the Russian state does to preserve it's territory.
I don't know if anyone is actually dying as part of these conflicts, largely because people like you don't watch News shows that cover Russia bullying Georgia, but there was actually a war between Abkhazia and the Georgians. It was preceded in '93 by a minor incident where a quarter million ethnic Georgians were expelled from Abkhaz territory and 15,000 died. Yeah, technically it's genocide, and technically it's worse then the genocidal crap the Israelis do, but apparently it's only news when the US and it's allies do bad things.
BTW, you may note that I made a point of not mentioning either of the matters Lotana mentioned. When the US does evil we go after one guy, we try not to kill more then a handful of his associates, and everyone criticizes us for it. The Israelis are quite a bit less selective, in favor of a cause I don't have much sympathy for, but they too get raked over the coals for anything they do.
I get very annoyed when internet-savvy westerners rip the US to shreds for being un-Democratic and evil, and then imply the Russians are better because they milk Snowden for propaganda value. They aren't.
Nope. Because Russia is too shitty at technology to build drones.
The Russians use Polonium.
You do realize the legal theory pretty much all NSA interception is based on is that one of the people in a conversation is a foreigner? And if your email address is .co.no the NSA can make that assumption, and is legally entitled to all communications from a .com address to you? They don't need a warrant, they don't need a Court Order, they're 51% sure you're a foreigner therefore you have no rights, therefore until they stumble across an email from you that includes the phrase "I am a US Citizen," you have no rights. Even after they stumble across said email, the "good faith" exception means they don't have to delete any of their info on you, and all they have to do is turn your name over to the FBI for a serious investigation.
I sincerely doubt there's a way to avoid NSA snooping without opening yourself up to much worse snooping because all the democracies intelligence services and court systems work together, so if the NSA has enough probable cause for a US warrant the French are probably gonna bend over backwards to provide all the damn data. The non-democracies and shitty democracies are probably doing the same shit the NSA does, except instead of focusing on a tiny little ideology that would be lucky to get 1% support (there ain't many Islamists in the US) they're focused on the Chinese and Russian equivalent of Mitt Romney. Assange, for example, would probably be totally unacceptable to Ecuador if he had any interaction at all with Latin American NGOs because latin American NGOs are associated with the rich, which (to Correa at least) means the US.
Why would they do that?
Presumably if you're actually planning a terror attack you do all kinds of things that create evidence. You're buying things that go boom, talking to nasty people, etc. They'll have plenty of evidence that is NSA-free. They get your metadata with a FISA warrant, figure out you're talking to a terrorist, then get a non-FISA warrant so google will tell them the text of your emails, then use the text of said emails to find out more, etc. Why bother presenting the metadata in Court?
Investigations are really complex, and involve a lot of steps that may (but may not) depend on each-other. I have no doubt that this NSA stuff was at least present in the files of some recently convicted terrorists, but that it wasn't mentioned in Court because a) it might get thrown out, and b) they didn't need it for a conviction. If Obama ever starts taking this seriously (which would basically require a bunch of Senate Democrats to take this seriously, and/or Boehnor and the House GOP to stop bitching about taxes/spending long enough to talk about shit that matters) I have no doubt all those convictions will be brought out to the public.
I sincerely doubt any of it would actually means anything, because unless they tell us exactly what they did we can't tell whether this NSA stuff was just kinda there, or whether it blew open the case. And if they tell US exactly what they did they tell Al Qaeda exactly what they did. Which I really don't want. I honestly have no clue whether AQ could find a way top seriously hurt us with that info, because that kind of thing is simply unknowable until you actually try it, but really have a burning desire not to find that out. I wouldn't mind finding out more about the NSA sections of their files, but to actually figure out whether the NSA section is important they have to tell you everything else, and that strikes me as a bad idea.
What would be interesting to know is the number of drone attack victims who have an NSA section in their files. Guys who directly attack us tend to be in the US, talking to Americans, which means the NSA has to do it's best not to accidentally read their mail, and in turn means that if they got anything on the Fort Hood shooter it's like one email they forwarded to the FBI.
Question:
When has the Court ever overturned a proposal on the basis of the origination clause?
Hell, why would the Court do that in this case? Several bills passed the House, including this one, all of which included the mandate. IIRC the House bill's mandate-clause was identical to the Senate bills, because the differences between the houses were largely in abortion funding and the various public option plans.
Please name a proposal that has been un-done due to the origination clause.
Senators change taxes all the time, and if the Senate can;t amend a House bill that includes taxes the Senate is useless.
More to the point the US House said it passed the Bill. Part of Separation of Powers is that the Courts don't get deep into the nitty-gritty of legislative details. For example, more then once they've allowed the House to pass a Bill without voting for it on the basis that the House "Deemed it passed."
It would be a pretty big deal for them to ban ObamaCare on the basis of the origination clause.
The US Constitution includes an enumerated list of powers for both the Executive and the Legislative branches. This implies that no other powers are allowed the federal government. The Ninth (and Tenth as well), re-state that the Feds have no powers except those listed. Which means legally speaking the Ninth (and the Tenth) are only relevant if you can prove a given government action is not justified by some other clause of the Constitution. And if you can prove that the 9tth and 10th are unnecessary.
In other words the fact that you're quoting the Ninth at all is pretty clear evidence you have no clue what the Constitution actually means. In this case it's quite clear the government has the ability to retain data it got legally, because if it didn't it would be extremely tricky for them to run at all. For example, take the fact that Barrack Obama is President. That's data. If the feds have no power to retain legally obtained data it's illegal for them to remember that.
The problem for Fourth Amendment maximalists and email is that the Fourth Amendment predates email. This means that the only way the Courts can apply it to email is apply analogies from horse and buggy-level technology to your gmail account, and the Courts have historically not been very aggressive about 4th Amendment enforcement. For example, if a Federal official heard a wagon was smuggling fake banknotes, he had something on the order of a 99.99% chance of getting a warrant. If he "accidentally" searched the wrong wagon and found some other contraband (say some good imported without paying the proper duties) the courts would declare it was Good Faith and the poor wagon-owner would be found guilty.
Hell, today NYC's stop-and-frisk is much worse from a Fourth Amendment point-of-view, and yet it's virtually impossible to get white people to talk about it. Apparently searching black people without a warrant of any kind is perfectly fine, but reading a white guy's email with a warrant is EVIL.
Doesnt mean MY government is empowered legally to look at ANY of my correspondence ANYWHERE in the world, without a warrant. It is explicitly forbidden to do so by the absolute highest law in the land. Until such time as the 4th is repealed, i will continue to demand that it be enforced.
Unfortunately unless you're user-name is your social security number they have no way of knowing which Norwegian-stored emails they're allowed to read, which brings in the "good-faith exception." The "good faith exception" is that if a government agent comes upon something interesting, it's usable in a court of law; as long as the government employee was trying to comply with the Fourth Amendment.
For example, if a cop searches your wagon because he thinks he's got a warrant for an eight-horse-wagon, and finds six Salvadorean 12-year-olds tied up in the back, the courts are not gonna give your Salvadorean pre-teens back to you just because it turns out the actual warrant was for a wagon with six horses.
The disadvantage of depending on a late 18th century document to protect your privacy in the early 21st century is that it doesn't really cover anything vaguely like signals intelligence, so the Courts are forced to rely on ridiculous analogies. Your email was stored in Norway, therefore most of the email on the server was probably Norwegians emailing other Norwegians, therefore the cops can assume on Good Faith that ALL the email on the server is not subject to the fourth amendment, therefore they don't need a US Warrant to search those emails. They may need a Norwegian warrant before the Norwegians will turn over the emails, but they do not need an American one.
Those are the countries that claim a chunk of Antarctica plus Russia. Argentina and Chile are the Latin American territorial claimants. Unfortunately for those fleeing the US the only states on that list who aren't officially US Allies are Russia and Chile, the Russians record towards freedom of anything is extremely mixed, and the current Chilean government is probably more pro-US then most of our official allies.
Many other states have research stations on the continent. Nine of them are NATO (Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Romania, and Spain) and three more are other official (ie: Major Non-NATO) allies (Japan, South Korea, and Pakistan). Ukraine waffles between being Russia's ally and America's, and the Belarussians share their base with the Russians.
But Sweden, China, South Africa, Ecuador, India, Peru, Brazil, Uruguay, and Finland all have bases. It's theoretically possible the Uruguayans and Brazilians aren't tainted by pro-US policies and haven't done something that makes their claim to support the freedom of information a joke in the last decade, but you'd probably be better off setting up your servers in Brazil or Uruguay proper instead of Artigas and Commandante Ferraz.
You certainly don't want to. Fact is that the WW II hasn't ended in so far as there are still serious limitations on sovereignity on Germany from US side (the Russians gave up on them during German reunification). Essentially US authorities can order around German authorities, including in particular the order to not investigate US crimes on German soil.
That's not really a relic of WW2. Any state allied to the US that wants US Troops based in it has to agree that all criminal cases involving said troops run through the US Military. We were supposed to have 10k or troops still in Iraq training their Army, but the Iraqis wouldn't extend their version of this deal. Obviously most of these agreements date to WW2 or it's immediate aftermath (Japan, Korea, etc.), but Afghanistan didn't have one until 2002.
From our point of view this is necessary because civilian courts suck art evaluating whether something was justified militarily. People who do not regularly fly a combat aircraft at 0.9 Mach and 150 ft simply are not capable of telling you who was at fault when one of those flights goes wrong.
Then there's the relative trustworthiness of court systems in various US Allies. Most of Europe is good, but there's a pretty big exception in Italy. The Italian Courts take forever to do anything even when they're working right, and it's not hard to find examples of them not working right. For example they just sentenced a CIA guy for an extraordinary rendition, but they happened to pick the one CIA guy who opposed the entire operation. Which is counter-productive, at best. Spanish Judges actually seem to like being called "Crusaders" in the media, and if I was a Spanish Judge I would be very tempted to play to Latin American Anti-American sentiment by insisting the US Troop who shorted his waitress 15 eurocents be sent to prison for theft.
And we don't just have European allies. How hard do you think it would be for the Taliban to find an innocent guy killed in the crossfire of a firefight, and get a couple Marines hanged for his murder? Hell, how hard do you think it would be for them to kill some innocent dude, and then bribe a couple local officials into convicting Americans of his murder. Heck if they were smart they'd use two judges. The one whose reluctant to kill innocent foreigners gets to be the dead dude.
It's a lot easier to get Afghanistan, the Spanish, the Italians, etc. to agree that US Military Courts will have sole jurisdiction in US Military cases if everybody else had to agree to that too.
You also may want to look up the story of the guy who invited a few friends on fecesbook to take a walk to some spy facility to watch the endangered species of NSA agents from a distance (or some such). He had the modern equivalent of the Gestapo at his doorsteps a few days later and had to officially register this walk as a demonstration..
So the US is evil because some guy wanted to demonstrate against us, and the German Government made him fill out paperwork calling it a demonstration?
I'm not familiar enough with German law to make any conclusive statements on it, but I do have to say that in most countries 10 demonstrators are enough to require a permit, and this guy ended up with 80. They weren't walking quietly, keeping to themselves, they were making a show of it. They used birdcalls to try to coax the "endangered species" out of it's underground facility, and they brought signs. That's a demonstration, and in every democracy in the entire fucking world 80 guys demonstrating at a government facility requires a permit. If you try to a start such a demonstration without a permit, the police make the assumption you have a reason to do so (for example, perhaps you intend to break into the facility in your search for NSA Agent when the birdcalls fail to work), therefore they have to talk to you to figure out the reason.
Hell, complaints of this kind are a major reason I trust the NSA. You can start a demonstration a
And since Apple doesn't specifically design low-end phones, your cheap iPhone has all the polish of an expensive iPhone. There's none-of-this, "It's a low-end phone, of course it sucks," BS.
OTOH, he picked the Stratosphere specifically for it's keyboard. It would be nice if Apple had a model with a keyboard, but the Steve has chose to bless us with such a product, which means there's no way in hell Tim will spend money on it. Apparently you can buy external keyboards, but I have no clue how to tell which ones suck.
Depends on who you're talking about.
Most conservative/libertarian intellectuals will admit in theory that the market does not work perfectly at all times. But getting them to admit anything currently done by the market could be better down without the market, or with regulations the current businesses in the market dislike, is like pulling teeth. This is especially true with the ones who are actually elected to powerful positions in the conservative dominated US House.
Pretty much the only government program these Tea Party-aligned Conservatives like is the Military. Social Security, law enforcement, and Medicare come in for honorable mentions. These preferences have not been arrived at after a lengthy journey, involving much research and weighing of costs vs. benefits to the nation, but the rest of us have to pretend they did or we get called assholes. It's kinda a pain.
I've used Apple products for decades. I've never had this problem.
If was a true hacker, trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of my machine by any means necessary, I'd probably have run into it. But I'm not. I'm a power-user who just wants all his products to play nice without going to the command to fiddle with settings for three hours. I just want things to work out of the box, and they do. When something goes wrong I walk to an Apple Store and they fix it. Sometimes they charge unreasonable rates (ie: $80 for an AC Adapter), other times they do a ridiculous amount of work for virtually no cost (ie: the time they replaced the board on my laptop that connects to my AC Adapter for $20).
Right now my phone is Android, and I have to say I'm not impressed. It's a cheap Samsung, so I didn't expect much, but a lot of the problems are so simple. For example, unlock is pretty much identical to butt-dial the police. Which means more then once the reason I know I have accidentally unlocked my cell phone is 911 calling me back to verify that was a butt-dial. The other thing that happens when it gets accidentally unlocked is it launches it's web-browser. You can really tell somebody at Samsung didn't bother to think this feature through.
How would you make the cell phone market freer? Networks are incredibly expensive to set up, especially national networks. Apparently you're in the country a lot, so any network of cell towers that covered enough of the nation to actually matter to you would cost ten$ of billion$. That's why there aren't a lot of companies to choose from.
Pretty much the only solutions I can see involve the Feds a) building several networks with public money and then auctioning them off, with clear instructions to the FTC that any attempt to merge or co-ordinate said networks deserves anti-trust action, or b) ordering certain companies with massive cash stock-piles (ie: apple) to do so.
That wouldn't work too well. Very few parlaimentarians, in any country, read and understand every bill they vote on. When your job involves making decisions on issues as diverse as what fighter jet to buy, the appropriate response to Syria, copyright, etc. there simply is not enough time in the year to read and understand every bill. In fact if you think their job is to read every bill you have failed to understand the main point of a legislature: it has a lot of people in it, so there're a couple people who know agricultural policy cold, another couple who know healthcare. The healthcare MP makes friends with an ag guy, and they explain the bills to each-other. They have another guy who knows the intricacies of the two-engive vs. one-engine fighter jet debate. If the healthcare guy spends three months learning the pros and cons of DDT regulation, another three figuring out whether the Soviet strategy of lots of cheap single-engine Mig-21s was superior to the US strategy of incredibly expensive F-4s (and how that ties in to the debate over which fighter jet the country should buy), etc. he's gonna get rusty on health policy and the quality of legislation will collapse.
This is even more important in the US, because our decentralized political institutions are incredibly complex. In healthcare, for example, we have a clone of the British NHS in the VA, a clone of Canada's system in Medicare, our employer-based system is somewhat unique but somewhat similiar to the German system, now with Obamacare we have a clone of the Dutch system in the individual market, Medicaid is 50 state systems that all operate subtly differently, etc. To understand how health policy actually works a US Pol needs to do three or four times the work that his foreign counterparts do. We have a system where Presidents and Congressman are pressured to add programs (it looks good on TV to be the guy with a new program) without replacing them (current beneficiaries freak out at miniscule changes to existing programs, and there are lots of veto points where they can derail the process, to bring up Obamacare again, the GOP is still convinced it can derail it despite not having the Senate, not having the Presidency, the Supreme Court's declaration it's constitutional, because it has enough Senators to filibuster).
No, "corrupt" means doing unethical things for personal gain. Businessman frequently get off on the technicality that they are allowed to define the word "ethical" as it relates to their own jobs, therefore anything that be a terrible fireable, never-work-in-the-sector again sin for the government is just how it's done in private industry.
Any manager who manages to figure out a way to fire the pregnant chick before she starts costing the company money due to a) maternity leave, b) expensive health costs of pregnancy, and c) upgrading her health plan from individual to family is gonna get a bonus. And, since businessmen define their own ethics, it's only unethical if some government employee made a point of pushing through a law specifically banning such shenanigans, and the manager can't rationalize the firing enough to get around the law. For example, in quite a few jurisdictions it would be perfectly ethical to wait until the day the woman was about to file for maternity leave, reorganize your business unit so her job doesn't exist, then wait until about the time she would be coming back and re-re-organize her old job back into existence.
Hell, take a look at the corruption that happens in the government. The classic case is some colonel making $120k arranging it so his buddy gets the contract for the new plane, retiring (and getting an $80k pension) and getting a $250k job from his buddy. In the government that is corruption, but spend a month in the actual private sector and you'll meet dozens of people who arranged for their company to buy products from a buddy, and then as soon as that buddy had a job opening jumped ship. It's not corrupt when the businesses do it because they can point out "of course the guy buying our products knows exactly what our customers want, and is therefore a really good hire." Couldn't you say the same about our Air Force Colonel?
Not really, because USAF Colonels don't get to write their own ethical standards.
Which means that if Congressional candidates spend $0.50 or $1.50 trying to communicate with every individual in the district they're gonna have a $500k budget.
And if a congressional candidate does not have enough money to communicate with ever single individual? What happens then? Armaggedon? What if many of us promise to cry for hours over the injustice of this? Would that make it better? It is not necessary for a campaign to acceept large donations in order to get funded. To use your example of 750,000 voters, if even half of them donate the maximum amount allowed of say $100, then you would have 37.5 million dollars for your campaign. And you couldn't be accused of having been bought by whatever company or companies actually did purchase you. A win-win for everyone.
And what makes all those voters decide to donate to the same guy? How do they even know he's running if he has no money to ask them for donations?
I agree that if you did this through the government you could make things look a lot less like corruption. The Canadians, for example, have strict dollar limits on expenditures, freedom of speech does not include the freedom to buy as much advertising as you can afford, they match many donations, they give political parties a subsidy based on the votes received, there's a huge tax credit, the party gets some it's election expenses reimbursed, etc.
But since our system in the US is a lot less generous top small donors, and Congress is incapable of passing anything, it's not likely we'll get some scheme where every vote gets $100 to donate to local candidates and spends an hour on a website of registered candidates picking who gets the money.
So you've basically got it backwards. They got $41k because they were going after the tough-on-terror voters who actually like the NSA program (support goes up from 30%ish to 40%ish if you mention it's supposed to be looking for terrorists). The others got $18k because they were going after the kind of voter who hates the NSA program.
I don't think you currently have any solid evidence that the tough-on-terror, pro-surveillance voters currently represent the majority. In fact it is currently hard to predict what the most popular stance is toward PRISM etc. Which makes it pretty easy to accept bribes from the defense industry. Whether those bribes are a direct payment for this particular vote or to encourage the congressman to vote for their issues in the future is irrelevant. It is still corruption. It is still bribery. These corporations are still getting an unfair advantage in the political process.
Pro-NSA voters don't need to be an actual majority. The GOP actually lost the popular vote by 1.4 million and they took the House due to the way districts are drawn.
They just have to be a plurality in 218 districts. I doubt they actually are at this moment (Snowden is a lot better at not pissing Americans off then Assange), but apparently the Congresscritters who represent those districts calculated that a) their districts were more anti-NSA then anti-Snowden, b) opposition to the NSA is a mile-wide and an inch deep, so voting on their side won't help in Nov 2014, but actual NSA employees will remember, or c) various things the Congresscritter can extort from the leadership will make up for the hit they take from this vote. It's likely some of them were actually voting on principle. I hated the Neo-Cons, and thought their Crusade to turn Iraq into a Jeffersonian Democracy was almost as insane as their pro-torture position; but that doesn't mean they don't actually believe that the US Government needs insane surveillance powers to protect freedom.
You do realize that residents get paid? And they get paid MORE then most bunny lawyers, all vets, or humanities PhDs? And that very few PhDs make it through in three years?
So your Doctor has the same amount of schooling our vet or humanities PhD does, then he makes $40-60k for four years, during which time our vet and humanities PhD is making $40-50k. So he's probably made $20k more during his residency then our vets and humanities PhDs. Law-school is three years, but many bunny lawyers do not get legal jobs. Most of them are making $45k, which is again $20k less then the resident. Then this continues for our various PhDs/Vets/ and Lawyers but our Doctor gets a six-figure raise.
Now our Doctor has a 30-year career, making $100k more then any of the others. That's a $3 Million salary premium. If you offered me $3 Million on the condition I pay off a $250k loan I'd take that deal.
The thing you have to keep in mind about Doctors is they live in the world of Mitt Romney. They don't meet public defenders, non-tenure track professors, or vets. They show up at a party with their equals, and it's a bunch of two-year MBAs who make more then them, a smattering of lawyers who made partner at a big firm (and make more then them), and maybe a prof with tenure (who makes less, but not much less). They are incredibly out-of-touch. They personify the upper-crusty-arrogant attitude that $40k is not enough to raise a family.
The way private sector insurance companies determine prices is even more fucked up, because they always end up paying more then Medicare.
Granted frequently that's because hospitals flat-out refuse any proposal to pay less then Medicare offers, but you'd think if the private sector was actually good at setting health prices they'd have found a way to do so that was better-sounding then "pay whatever the government will pay, plus 20%, because that asshole plays hardball."
Lawyers study as long as Doctors, get as many loans, and make less. Most Law School grads make under $50k. Vets are worse. It's harder to get into vet school then MedSchool, the coursework is harder (you have to know medical care for multiple organisms), the loans just as bad, and $50k is a really good salary for a Vet. Hell do you think ANY humanities PhD is ever gonna pay off his student loans?
I would have a lot more sympathy for American Doctors if their foreign counterparts didn't make do with a much less pay. Luxembourg is an incredibly expensive country to live in, yet their Doctors make 30% less then our doctors. Yeah we overpay our MBAs, and MPHs, but it's very hard for me to sympathize with a guy who does the exact same job as a Doctor from Winnipeg for $40,000 more and complains he isn't paid enough.
Strictly speaking he doesn't have to. If something is inherently unfixable EVERYONE is too fucking stupid to fix it. It's kinda dickish to put it that way, but hey. It's slashdot.
If dickishness were banned my posts wouldn;t get a +1 from karma bonus.