I don't know how this kdawson person is, but every single one of their stories of late has been about how evil Republicans are, and how pure and innocent Democrats are. I for one am voting with my preferences page, and turning off all stories posted by this DNC shill.
That's completely false. ExxonMobil and the other Gas/Oil companies are directly in league with the automobile companies. Their chairmen serve on each other boards. Really? Because according to his bio at ExxonMobile's site, Rex W. Tillerson (the Chairman of ExxonMobile) doesn't sit on the boards of any automobile manufacturers. He does sit on a number of non-profit and NGO boards, though.
There are some interesting points in here. There are a few things I want to rehash, though:
This "choice" is due to the inaccessibility by price of private insurance to individuals as opposed to plans bundled with corporate employment.
This is generally true (though not as much as many think, private insurance is sometimes cheaper than that offered by employers, especially mine). However, it doesn't remove the fact that, to many people, being "their own boss" is more important than anything else. If health insurance were more important, they would work for a larger company, or make sacrifices somewhere else in their budget, to get that insurance.
As for children who aren't covered, I should have brought this up before: there already exist programs for children to get free or cheap health insurance, if their parents don't have their own for whatever reason. So any children who are not currently covered are not because their parents have not signed up for these programs, perhaps due to ignorance of their existence. So the solution isn't to create a monstrous bureaucracy, it is to inform people of the choices they have available to them already.
And, no, I'm not referring to Medicaid, I'm referring to programs run by states to provide private health insurance to children.
Now you know how your conservative countrymen have felt for several decades. We tried to warn you before about activist judges creating new laws from thin air, but you wouldn't listen as long as you controlled the courts. Now maybe you'll get what we've been trying to say. Live by the SCOTUS, die by the SCOTUS.
And, as another poster put it sharply, nobody 'chooses' to not have health insurance.
First off, you can't say that "nobody" makes that choice, not in a population of 40 million. I guarantee there's at least one person who has knowingly chosen not to have health insurance.
Second, the self-employed who do not have health insurance do choose not to have it, because, for them, it's better to be self-employed without insurance than to work for someone else and have it. You might not agree with their rationale, but there are millions of people who share it, and it seems to work for them in the main.
Lastly, children suffer the consequences of their parents decisions. That's life, and it convey any responsibility on you or me to change things for them. You can't force adults to conform to your values, not without sacrificing some pretty important values (like liberty) along the way.
That the countervailing evidence manifests as health insurance being inaccessible for a huge swath of the working population
Huge swath? The latest numbers show that 40 million (out of 300 million) people don't have health insurance. The vast majority of these are self employed individuals who choose not to have health insurance. You must have some bizarre definition of "huge".
not a strong enough magnetosphere (which is how Venus holds it atmosphere).
Correction: Venus' gravity is roughly 90% of Earth's, while it has almost no magnetosphere. I'm pretty sure the rest of your statements are accurate, though.
If there's one thing that 70's era Saturday morning children's entertainment taught me, it's that there's nothing that Marshall and Will can't do. That idiot Holly, on the other hand, would just fuck it up.
Mars will never be habitable for us earthlings to live comfortably. Our bone density would suffer too with a year long round trip and 6 month minimum stay, that's 18 months away from Earth's gravity. Not too good for our health but we're smart enough to figure out a solution.
I'm not a biologist or a physicist or anything, but I think it's a remarkable display of hubris to assert that the technology we have today will not be improved upon at some point in the future.
Wow, way to ignore the GP's last sentence, where he stated the exact same thing.
Re:You still have service fees?
on
ATM Turns 40
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· Score: 1
I don't really see any problems with banks charging non-customers a nominal fee to use their ATM (it costs the bank money to service the ATM, normally that gets paid for by other account servicing fees, but if non-customers keep using it then the cost is borne solely by customers, which isn't fair to them). What pisses me off is when a bank charges its own customers a fee for using other banks' ATMs. This was one of the reasons I switched from Bank of America, who would charge me $2.50 for this, to Wachovia, who doesn't charge anything (and who reimburses me up to $6 per month in other bank's ATM fees).
Excellent points, I concede that someone could choose to be a strawberry picker and enjoy the work. You made me realize that when I started working as a sysadmin sometime towards the end of the last millennium, I looked forward to coming to work and making servers do interesting and exciting things. Now I just spend my time on/. and cash the checks my employer gives me every two weeks.
I could care less whether conservatives believe they are ethically wayward when their policies lead to people starving and or dying w/out medical care. It does not change the actual ethical valence of the situation.
It sounds like you're basically saying "the ends justify the means". Think of it this way: in a redistribution of wealth scheme, you have to use force, or at least the threat of force, to take wealth from person A to give to person B. In doing so, you assure that person B won't go to bed hungry, and person's A total wealth is only mildly impacted (let's say he went from having $1M to $999k, and the thousand dollar difference kept person B well fed for several months). That end result might be good, but you can't justify using force against one person just because it materially benefits another. Not unless you're Tony Soprano, and look what happened to him.
war against a nation without a declaration of war and thus the express permission of Congress and the American people (such as the war powers dictate)
Yeah, because no American President has ever invaded or attacked another country without a declaration of war before.
Wilson -> Mexico, Russia Truman -> Korea Johnson -> Vietnam Nixon -> Cambodia Carter -> Iran Reagan -> Grenada, Libya Bush Sr. -> Iraq, Panama Clinton -> Bosnia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq
It's exactly that kind of overstatement that is the problem. You don't have to like Bush's policies, but please don't pretend that he's doing something unique and original. In many ways, he's simple standing on the shoulders of giants, so to speak.
This is why I really really hope that Rodham-Clinton or Obama win in 2008: maybe then the left in this country will realize that ALL politicians are lying scum out to ruin our rights. But then they ignored Clinton's excesses for eight years, so they can probably ignore someone else's for four or eight more.
And it is only through a re-imagined and re-energised public sector will our species have any hope of surviving the coming crises in Energy, Environment, and Population reduction.
Wtf? It sounds like you want a government policy to start killing people off. Please tell me I'm mistaken.
1. Why should we care? Seriously? This wasn't a good argument against cars (think of the horse whip manufacturers!), and it's not a good argument against robots doing the job of migrant workers (who may or may not be illegal aliens).
2. I can't speak for the GP, but I'm a sysadmin: my whole job function is to automate myself out of a job with effective shell scripts. So far, I've been unsuccessful, but only because new problems come up all the time. But if I was still spending two hours a day rotating log files manually instead of using a cron job to do it, I wouldn't have time to work on the important things, like creating an effective DR policy for the enterprise. So to directly answer your question, my job won't be made obsolete as long as there is a need for intelligent and creative solutions to problems in an ever changing world.
what makes you think picking strawberries is any different from any other career that one can enjoy?
If you think that picking strawberries is a career someone can enjoy, you have very low standards for "enjoyment".
And every time in the past when technological improvements threatened an existing industry, people managed to adapt. This was just as true 8000 years ago when bronze workers displaced stone chippers as it is today.
Grandparent sounds like someone who's never been outside of his hometown of Buttfuck, Texas.
I'm not going to bother responding to your other statements, because they're not worth the time it would take (your post is riddled with both factual and logical errors). But I will say that I've been to 40 countries, have circumnavigated the globe, and lived in the Middle East for most of a year. In every nation I've visited, I've at least carried a guide book with me to be able to communicate with the natives. I was visiting their country, not the other way around, and it would have been rude of me to expect them to speak English. In the year I was in Turkey, I managed to learn basic conversational Turkish (most of which I've know forgotten due to lack of use).
The only people who move/visit a country without either having or gaining some command of that nation's language are rude, intolerant, racists, who should not be coddled by the society they insist on insulting by forcing the natives of that society to conform to their alien language and mores. And this goes as much for so-called "ugly Americans" who think people can understand English when it's shouted in their faces as it does for anyone else.
As for morality crimes... do you want hookers turning tricks in your front yard? I suspect not. Do you want to live next to a dope house? If you're an addict, it's convenient...
Wow, and I thought I saw the world in black and white! You do realize that if prostitution and drugs were legal, they could be regulated and sold in licensed locations, just like liquor is today, right?
Everyone loves seatbelt enforcement; they save lives, right?
Seriously, what color is the sky in your world??
Lots of people hate seatbelt laws, they're pointless and stupid. They serve only as a means to generate revenue for the state by "taxing" idiots who don't wear seatbelts. It's an unjust intrusion on the individual right to fuck up your own life. And as for the argument that "society has to pay your medical bills, so we get to force you to wear seatbelts", I have a simple solution (that Michael Moore will hate): don't pay the medical bills of anyone injured in an accident due to not wearing a seatbelt! There, problem solved.
1. The officers were very rude and were completely intolerant of the individual's lack of English skills. I realize I live in a state where people find KQRS' resident racist Tom Bernard "entertaining", but the cops should at least be a little more understanding.
Don't ever visit France, you'd hate it (unless you speak French).
2. They were obviously mocking the individuals that they pulled over because they spoke very little English. Waving (princess style) and "shooing" with their hands while saying "bye bye" and "adios" was ignorant as can be.
Yeah, you kind of covered this behavior in pt. 1. Though I wonder if you consider it equally ignorant to move to a country and not even attempt to learn the language? (Strictly speaking, the cops were not "ignorant" in their behavior, though the non-English speaker was ignorant of English. Though I realize that "ignorant" has certain connotations in some parts of the US apart from its literal meaning.)
3. When they told the driver that "if you put your tongue in front of the mouthpiece one more time we will take you to jail without question", I wasn't surprised when the drunken driver was more than a little confused when they spun him around and cuffed him.
What would you have done differently, if presented with a drunk driver who had zero command of the common language of your country? How do you expect the cops to behave in a situation like this? Really, I'm curious.
Conservatives have a tendency toward ethical blindness when it comes to the pracitcal human consequences of certain ideological fixed-points
Replace "conservatives" with "people", and then most of your second paragraph becomes redundant. Besides, only a fool would argue that free markets are perfect in the real world, since their "perfection" requires perfect information sharing between parties. That won't even happen. Instead, what most people who believe in free markets say is that they afford the most liberty to and between individuals, and tend to be the most efficient at solving problems. Kind of like Sir Winston's famous quote about democracy, free markets are the worst form of economics ever invented by man; except for all those others that have been tried from time to time.
Not a liberal here. Just honestly curious why anyone believes in an ideology whose corporeal manifestations try very hard to deny you are worth the time of day, never mind any more substantial consideration.
You're not a liberal, you just bash conservatives as evil incarnate.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know how this kdawson person is, but every single one of their stories of late has been about how evil Republicans are, and how pure and innocent Democrats are. I for one am voting with my preferences page, and turning off all stories posted by this DNC shill.
Details:http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/About
Looks like you're wrong about that one, at least.
There are some interesting points in here. There are a few things I want to rehash, though:
This "choice" is due to the inaccessibility by price of private insurance to individuals as opposed to plans bundled with corporate employment.
This is generally true (though not as much as many think, private insurance is sometimes cheaper than that offered by employers, especially mine). However, it doesn't remove the fact that, to many people, being "their own boss" is more important than anything else. If health insurance were more important, they would work for a larger company, or make sacrifices somewhere else in their budget, to get that insurance.
As for children who aren't covered, I should have brought this up before: there already exist programs for children to get free or cheap health insurance, if their parents don't have their own for whatever reason. So any children who are not currently covered are not because their parents have not signed up for these programs, perhaps due to ignorance of their existence. So the solution isn't to create a monstrous bureaucracy, it is to inform people of the choices they have available to them already.
And, no, I'm not referring to Medicaid, I'm referring to programs run by states to provide private health insurance to children.
Yes, I'm sure a random Slashdot reader has a much better grasp of the legalities of this rather than five experienced jurists.
Now you know how your conservative countrymen have felt for several decades. We tried to warn you before about activist judges creating new laws from thin air, but you wouldn't listen as long as you controlled the courts. Now maybe you'll get what we've been trying to say. Live by the SCOTUS, die by the SCOTUS.
And, as another poster put it sharply, nobody 'chooses' to not have health insurance.
First off, you can't say that "nobody" makes that choice, not in a population of 40 million. I guarantee there's at least one person who has knowingly chosen not to have health insurance.
Second, the self-employed who do not have health insurance do choose not to have it, because, for them, it's better to be self-employed without insurance than to work for someone else and have it. You might not agree with their rationale, but there are millions of people who share it, and it seems to work for them in the main.
Lastly, children suffer the consequences of their parents decisions. That's life, and it convey any responsibility on you or me to change things for them. You can't force adults to conform to your values, not without sacrificing some pretty important values (like liberty) along the way.
That the countervailing evidence manifests as health insurance being inaccessible for a huge swath of the working population
Huge swath? The latest numbers show that 40 million (out of 300 million) people don't have health insurance. The vast majority of these are self employed individuals who choose not to have health insurance. You must have some bizarre definition of "huge".
Why spoon-feed them EVERYTHING?
In truly great sci-fi, there is no spoon.
not a strong enough magnetosphere (which is how Venus holds it atmosphere).
Correction: Venus' gravity is roughly 90% of Earth's, while it has almost no magnetosphere. I'm pretty sure the rest of your statements are accurate, though.
If there's one thing that 70's era Saturday morning children's entertainment taught me, it's that there's nothing that Marshall and Will can't do. That idiot Holly, on the other hand, would just fuck it up.
Wow, way to ignore the GP's last sentence, where he stated the exact same thing.
I don't really see any problems with banks charging non-customers a nominal fee to use their ATM (it costs the bank money to service the ATM, normally that gets paid for by other account servicing fees, but if non-customers keep using it then the cost is borne solely by customers, which isn't fair to them). What pisses me off is when a bank charges its own customers a fee for using other banks' ATMs. This was one of the reasons I switched from Bank of America, who would charge me $2.50 for this, to Wachovia, who doesn't charge anything (and who reimburses me up to $6 per month in other bank's ATM fees).
Excellent points, I concede that someone could choose to be a strawberry picker and enjoy the work. You made me realize that when I started working as a sysadmin sometime towards the end of the last millennium, I looked forward to coming to work and making servers do interesting and exciting things. Now I just spend my time on /. and cash the checks my employer gives me every two weeks.
I could care less whether conservatives believe they are ethically wayward when their policies lead to people starving and or dying w/out medical care. It does not change the actual ethical valence of the situation.
It sounds like you're basically saying "the ends justify the means". Think of it this way: in a redistribution of wealth scheme, you have to use force, or at least the threat of force, to take wealth from person A to give to person B. In doing so, you assure that person B won't go to bed hungry, and person's A total wealth is only mildly impacted (let's say he went from having $1M to $999k, and the thousand dollar difference kept person B well fed for several months). That end result might be good, but you can't justify using force against one person just because it materially benefits another. Not unless you're Tony Soprano, and look what happened to him.
war against a nation without a declaration of war and thus the express permission of Congress and the American people (such as the war powers dictate)
Yeah, because no American President has ever invaded or attacked another country without a declaration of war before.
Wilson -> Mexico, Russia
Truman -> Korea
Johnson -> Vietnam
Nixon -> Cambodia
Carter -> Iran
Reagan -> Grenada, Libya
Bush Sr. -> Iraq, Panama
Clinton -> Bosnia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq
It's exactly that kind of overstatement that is the problem. You don't have to like Bush's policies, but please don't pretend that he's doing something unique and original. In many ways, he's simple standing on the shoulders of giants, so to speak.
This is why I really really hope that Rodham-Clinton or Obama win in 2008: maybe then the left in this country will realize that ALL politicians are lying scum out to ruin our rights. But then they ignored Clinton's excesses for eight years, so they can probably ignore someone else's for four or eight more.
And it is only through a re-imagined and re-energised public sector will our species have any hope of surviving the coming crises in Energy, Environment, and Population reduction.
Wtf? It sounds like you want a government policy to start killing people off. Please tell me I'm mistaken.
1. Why should we care? Seriously? This wasn't a good argument against cars (think of the horse whip manufacturers!), and it's not a good argument against robots doing the job of migrant workers (who may or may not be illegal aliens).
2. I can't speak for the GP, but I'm a sysadmin: my whole job function is to automate myself out of a job with effective shell scripts. So far, I've been unsuccessful, but only because new problems come up all the time. But if I was still spending two hours a day rotating log files manually instead of using a cron job to do it, I wouldn't have time to work on the important things, like creating an effective DR policy for the enterprise. So to directly answer your question, my job won't be made obsolete as long as there is a need for intelligent and creative solutions to problems in an ever changing world.
what makes you think picking strawberries is any different from any other career that one can enjoy?
If you think that picking strawberries is a career someone can enjoy, you have very low standards for "enjoyment".
And every time in the past when technological improvements threatened an existing industry, people managed to adapt. This was just as true 8000 years ago when bronze workers displaced stone chippers as it is today.
Machines don't get tired. They don't die. They don't need medical care or costly medical plans.
And they will not stop until you are DEAD!
(Cue thumping theme music.)
Grandparent sounds like someone who's never been outside of his hometown of Buttfuck, Texas.
I'm not going to bother responding to your other statements, because they're not worth the time it would take (your post is riddled with both factual and logical errors). But I will say that I've been to 40 countries, have circumnavigated the globe, and lived in the Middle East for most of a year. In every nation I've visited, I've at least carried a guide book with me to be able to communicate with the natives. I was visiting their country, not the other way around, and it would have been rude of me to expect them to speak English. In the year I was in Turkey, I managed to learn basic conversational Turkish (most of which I've know forgotten due to lack of use).
The only people who move/visit a country without either having or gaining some command of that nation's language are rude, intolerant, racists, who should not be coddled by the society they insist on insulting by forcing the natives of that society to conform to their alien language and mores. And this goes as much for so-called "ugly Americans" who think people can understand English when it's shouted in their faces as it does for anyone else.
these kinds of posts don't cause violence.
Fuck you! I'll kill you!
Nobody hates the cops, everyone loves the cops
What world do you live in?
As for morality crimes... do you want hookers turning tricks in your front yard? I suspect not. Do you want to live next to a dope house? If you're an addict, it's convenient...
Wow, and I thought I saw the world in black and white! You do realize that if prostitution and drugs were legal, they could be regulated and sold in licensed locations, just like liquor is today, right?
Everyone loves seatbelt enforcement; they save lives, right?
Seriously, what color is the sky in your world??
Lots of people hate seatbelt laws, they're pointless and stupid. They serve only as a means to generate revenue for the state by "taxing" idiots who don't wear seatbelts. It's an unjust intrusion on the individual right to fuck up your own life. And as for the argument that "society has to pay your medical bills, so we get to force you to wear seatbelts", I have a simple solution (that Michael Moore will hate): don't pay the medical bills of anyone injured in an accident due to not wearing a seatbelt! There, problem solved.
1. The officers were very rude and were completely intolerant of the individual's lack of English skills. I realize I live in a state where people find KQRS' resident racist Tom Bernard "entertaining", but the cops should at least be a little more understanding.
Don't ever visit France, you'd hate it (unless you speak French).
2. They were obviously mocking the individuals that they pulled over because they spoke very little English. Waving (princess style) and "shooing" with their hands while saying "bye bye" and "adios" was ignorant as can be.
Yeah, you kind of covered this behavior in pt. 1. Though I wonder if you consider it equally ignorant to move to a country and not even attempt to learn the language? (Strictly speaking, the cops were not "ignorant" in their behavior, though the non-English speaker was ignorant of English. Though I realize that "ignorant" has certain connotations in some parts of the US apart from its literal meaning.)
3. When they told the driver that "if you put your tongue in front of the mouthpiece one more time we will take you to jail without question", I wasn't surprised when the drunken driver was more than a little confused when they spun him around and cuffed him.
What would you have done differently, if presented with a drunk driver who had zero command of the common language of your country? How do you expect the cops to behave in a situation like this? Really, I'm curious.
Conservatives have a tendency toward ethical blindness when it comes to the pracitcal human consequences of certain ideological fixed-points
Replace "conservatives" with "people", and then most of your second paragraph becomes redundant. Besides, only a fool would argue that free markets are perfect in the real world, since their "perfection" requires perfect information sharing between parties. That won't even happen. Instead, what most people who believe in free markets say is that they afford the most liberty to and between individuals, and tend to be the most efficient at solving problems. Kind of like Sir Winston's famous quote about democracy, free markets are the worst form of economics ever invented by man; except for all those others that have been tried from time to time.
Not a liberal here. Just honestly curious why anyone believes in an ideology whose corporeal manifestations try very hard to deny you are worth the time of day, never mind any more substantial consideration.
You're not a liberal, you just bash conservatives as evil incarnate.