This just brought a thought into my head about universal healthcare: can doctors, under such a system, be forced to provide care for patients?
I was just thinking how one possible complaint about universal healthcare is that people who intentionally make themselves sick would still be taken care of, and that others would complain about this costing them (through higher taxes) for those peoples' poor decisions: eating poorly, smoking, etc.
One thing I've heard of from my mother, who used to be a hospital nurse, was that not so infrequently, doctors she knew would actually refuse to treat certain patients because they were smokers. This happened when the patient was being treated for smoking-related illness (usually emphysema), and was elderly, but then would refuse the doctor's orders to quit smoking immediately and would go sneak cigarettes (usually brought in by their stupid families). When the doctor would find out, they'd give them the choice to either really quit, or go home and die. The patients usually chose the latter.
There is no difference! That's the whole point! You still need insurance to deal with stuff like hail, trees falling on your car, etc. That doesn't change whether it's autonomous or not. "internerdj" was responding to someone saying you'd still need personal liability insurance, pointing out that you'd also need insurance to deal with weather (which falls under comprehensive) and other "acts of God".
Well the idea is that a lot of people wouldn't want to bother any more. People prefer to have their own cars now because they don't want to wait for a ride, and because cabs are slow as shit and horrifically expensive in the non-NYC (less dense) cities you speak of. If we have big-corporation-owned-and-operated autonomous "ride sharing" cars where you can just call up a ride on your smartphone, have it arrive in a couple of minutes, and take you (possibly with some ride-alongs to save money) to your workplace, and this comes out cheaper than the current system of a car payment plus insurance plus repairs/maintenance, then I can see a lot of people switching to that.
Also, a lot of people are more occasional car users: retired people don't need to drive every day, for instance, some people work at home and only need a car for grocery runs and pleasure trips, etc. Those people will probably dump their cars first.
You're right that all car ownership is unlikely to disappear quickly. For someone who uses a car a lot, it's likely it'll stay cheaper to own your own car instead of relying on GM/Lyftcab. Plus, people do like to own things, and generally dislike sharing rides with strangers, and a personally-owned car is likely to have a nicer interior too than one used by the masses. Plus rental schemes usually seem to end up being more expensive than they really need to for some reason.
Sorry, but pointing your gun at someone on your back porch at 3AM is really rather stupid, and a good way to go to jail if you shoot them, even in gun-happy states.
It's simple: if someone shady is outside your house, you stay *inside*. Get your gun, but stay inside; otherwise, you're losing the defensive advantage. Only an idiot would go outside to confront a possible intruder/criminal.
Legal gun ownership requires some personal responsibility and common sense - something you libtards
Apparently it's something you lack too, if you advocate going outside to confront possibly-armed people at 3AM. Do you even have any security or combat training at all? If not, you really have no business owning a gun. There's lots of places that offer training for dealing with home intruders; maybe you should sign up for a course.
(I'll grant an exception if you just happened to already be outside on your back porch at 3AM for some odd reason, but that's unlikely in your scenario.)
One-income households aren't realistic and are inherently sexist. They depend entirely on women being second-class citizens and on people being stuck in unhappy marriages.
What's your solution for women (or a few rare men) in one-income households who are unhappy in their marriages? Just stay there and be miserable? The whole reason the divorce rate is so high is because women now have jobs and aren't stuck, and society has changed so that it's not scandalous to get a divorce. In the "old days", people weren't happy in their marriages there either, but the society was structured so that getting a divorce was hard and caused you to be socially outcast, so people just stayed in their miserable marriages and tried to look happy when they weren't behind closed doors.
The whole institution of monogamous marriage is really just a historical artifact, a byproduct of our move to agrarian societies. Hunter-gatherer societies never had these kinds of relationships, and there's no evidence that humans are naturally monogamous at all; at best, we're more like penguins who mate with a single partner long enough to have a kid and raise it a bit, and then we split and find someone new (Emperor penguins mate for 1 year, and have one egg/chick each year; after that, they find a new partner.) Almost no animals mate for life; we only invented that crazy idea because of religion.
So if you toss out going back to the 1950s, one-income households are clearly nonviable.
Um, I think he's talking about situations where you're not at home, and it starts hailing. Your car isn't going to just pull itself into a garage when you're parked at the grocery store. It'll just get hailed on and need body work.
Compare $400/month to how much you'd spend on your own car: the car payment ($200-800/month), insurance (probably at least $200/month), and NYC parking ($$$$).
I don't see how buying your own car makes any sense there.
Have you looked into getting an Uber ride to the beach? The other thing you can do is find some friends to go with you and split the Zipcar cost. Then the per-person cost is really quite cheap.
This is precisely why we should be working on developing and building SkyTran. It's much cheaper to build per-mile than regular roads or highways (since it's mostly made in a factory and just assembled on-site), it avoids many problems with cars (snow-covered roads, time-wasting intersections, pedestrians) because it uses suspended rails which can be built in 3D space instead of 2D, it can operate much faster than cars (75-100mph in the city, with no intersections, 150mph in less-dense areas), and does it all with a fraction of the energy usage of cars (maglev rails instead of high-friction rubber tires on asphalt, and small, lightweight pod cars instead of 3-5000lb chunks of steel).
For a while, at least, a lot of people are going to want personal cars still, even if they're self-driving: people in more rural areas aren't going to want to wait around for a GM/Lyft car to come pick them up, for instance. They're going to need insurance, though it's going to be less since the car will be self-driving, but they'll still need to insure the vehicle against accidents caused by human drivers, or acts of God, bad weather, etc.
Also, it's a bit hard to believe that other companies wouldn't want to get in on the "ride sharing" or Johnny-cab business, and wouldn't buy autonomous vehicles from the automakers to use in their fleets. Smaller, city-wide companies like that (probably descendants of existing cab/livery companies) would still need insurance because they're not big enough to self-insure. Of course, I could be completely wrong about this and these companies could all be forced out of business by the automakers jumping directly to making their own Johnny-cabs and operating them directly. However, it seems like a stretch to me, because today automakers specialize in just building cars, they're not even generally in the business of selling them (they leave that to independent con-artists^Hdealerships in most places), much less operating their own cab companies or anything like that. So I have a hard time seeing the automakers trying to do multiple things at once like that. If this actually made sense, then wouldn't we see GM in the car-rental business at airports, rather than contracting with Hertz/Avis/Dollar/Budget to sell them fleets of crappy cars no one wants so they can be rented to travelers?
He's not talking about progressive politics, he's talking about the Progressive insurance company which is somewhat famous for their loud-mouthed "Flo" character on their TV commercials. That's why he mentioned "Flo" and capitalized "Progressive". The company has some kind of program they're pushing where they have a tracking device in their customers' cars which track their driving actions and then adjust their bills accordingly.
I don't have a "hometown". I'm talking about my own personal experience in living in a bunch of places and dating in all of them.
There's also plenty of articles about the relative distribution of singles in different cities around the country. It's no secret that the Bay Area and Seattle have a large surplus of single men, and NYC has a large surplus of single women.
It's probably not that great really. Remember, he's in Russia, and presumably all these women sending him nudie pics are not. So it's not like he can just meet up with them on a moment's notice, even if he was single.
WTF are you talking about? NYC is full of beautiful (and frequently single) women. In fact, every liberal-ish major US city is full of beautiful women, though the west-coast cities don't have so many single ones while the northeast ones do.
For the barf bag, you'll have to go to basically any rural area or conservative city. Women in those places tend not to look so great, probably partly because of poverty and partly because of terrible diet and also bad habits (smoking, etc.). The big-city liberal women have money, eat really well, and seem to all be into yoga for some reason.
They *did* switch to a different layout: the AZERTY one. Why'd they do that if it doesn't work for them? And why are they only now complaining about it? It's not like typewriters are a new thing in France.
I don't see the problem here at all. It's not like someone else picked their keyboard for them: they chose it themselves!!! AFAIK, they're the only ones using AZERTY, so it's obviously something they came up with by themselves, so if it's not serving them well, then it's their own dumb fault. How long did it take them to figure this out? Over a century I'm guessing. If they were just using the keyboards we English-speakers use, they'd be using QWERTY. Since they obviously took the time to make their own layout, they should have done a much better job of it.
Yep, this is frequently why I've found it useful to do "pair working" when a problem comes up sometimes: two people can learn from each other in tackling the problem, brainstorming ideas to root-cause it, etc. But it has to be something that's limited, not something you do for 8 hours every day. And it isn't very useful for banging out code; for that I need solitude. So as an occasional practice when a difficult problem comes up, working in pairs I think definitely has value, but not as a regular way of working.
I actually disagree about the number of female cheaters; personally I think it might be higher for women.
There was another study somewhere about college kids and their sexual habits, and it found that, in a nutshell, 20% of the male students were getting 80% of the sex. Basically, a minority of the men are really good at seducing women, and have a bunch of female partners (frequently one-night-stands), while many of the rest of the men struggle to get a date.
Women who cheat are likely hooking up with men like those 20%. And many of those guys might not even be married; why would they, when they can easily bed women?
I used to live in NJ too, however I only saw the really stupid stuff if I ventured up to Bergen county. I did notice that liquor stores weren't allowed to be open on Sunday mornings (seemingly state-wide), so that did irk me; I never saw anything like that in red-state, home of Joe Arpaio Arizona where I used to live.
It's a little more complicated than that, though. Those "conservatives" frequently want change too; there's a bunch of conservatives who want marijuana legalized, for instance. You don't see it in the east-coast "liberal" states much (except DC), but Arizona is pretty "red" and has medical marijuana that's really easy to get a card for, unlike blue New Jersey where it's nearly impossible to get legal medical MJ.
Also, look at gun laws: you'd think that blue states would universally be anti-gun, but Bernie's home state of Vermont is about as lax on guns as you can get.
So IMO it really depends on the issue, and the stances on various issues w.r.t. liberal vs. conservative vary a lot by region.
Another example: in New York, you'll see armed combat troops (NG) being used as police in NYC. You'd never see that on the west coast.
Women I think probably cheat at least as much as men. They just don't need websites to do it, because it's much easier for them to find partners to cheat with.
There have been genetic studies which have found that something like 15% of the population in western countries (I think Britain was where one study was done) does not have the father they thought they did, meaning that their mother cheated, while ovulating. Other studies have found that women are much more likely to stray when they are ovulating.
Funny, Ive never cheated, but I managed to outgrow the "holier than thou" attitude when I disavowed Christianity and returned to being an atheist.
Hear, hear.
It's attitudes like yours that make it so easy to blackmail people.
It's attitude like his which are causing the Millenials to abandon Christianity. And for good reason. How ironic is it that the religion centered on the guy who said "do not judge lest thee be judged" is full of the most judgmental, self-righteous assholes on this side of the planet?
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This just brought a thought into my head about universal healthcare: can doctors, under such a system, be forced to provide care for patients?
I was just thinking how one possible complaint about universal healthcare is that people who intentionally make themselves sick would still be taken care of, and that others would complain about this costing them (through higher taxes) for those peoples' poor decisions: eating poorly, smoking, etc.
One thing I've heard of from my mother, who used to be a hospital nurse, was that not so infrequently, doctors she knew would actually refuse to treat certain patients because they were smokers. This happened when the patient was being treated for smoking-related illness (usually emphysema), and was elderly, but then would refuse the doctor's orders to quit smoking immediately and would go sneak cigarettes (usually brought in by their stupid families). When the doctor would find out, they'd give them the choice to either really quit, or go home and die. The patients usually chose the latter.
There is no difference! That's the whole point! You still need insurance to deal with stuff like hail, trees falling on your car, etc. That doesn't change whether it's autonomous or not. "internerdj" was responding to someone saying you'd still need personal liability insurance, pointing out that you'd also need insurance to deal with weather (which falls under comprehensive) and other "acts of God".
Well the idea is that a lot of people wouldn't want to bother any more. People prefer to have their own cars now because they don't want to wait for a ride, and because cabs are slow as shit and horrifically expensive in the non-NYC (less dense) cities you speak of. If we have big-corporation-owned-and-operated autonomous "ride sharing" cars where you can just call up a ride on your smartphone, have it arrive in a couple of minutes, and take you (possibly with some ride-alongs to save money) to your workplace, and this comes out cheaper than the current system of a car payment plus insurance plus repairs/maintenance, then I can see a lot of people switching to that.
Also, a lot of people are more occasional car users: retired people don't need to drive every day, for instance, some people work at home and only need a car for grocery runs and pleasure trips, etc. Those people will probably dump their cars first.
You're right that all car ownership is unlikely to disappear quickly. For someone who uses a car a lot, it's likely it'll stay cheaper to own your own car instead of relying on GM/Lyftcab. Plus, people do like to own things, and generally dislike sharing rides with strangers, and a personally-owned car is likely to have a nicer interior too than one used by the masses. Plus rental schemes usually seem to end up being more expensive than they really need to for some reason.
Sorry, but pointing your gun at someone on your back porch at 3AM is really rather stupid, and a good way to go to jail if you shoot them, even in gun-happy states.
It's simple: if someone shady is outside your house, you stay *inside*. Get your gun, but stay inside; otherwise, you're losing the defensive advantage. Only an idiot would go outside to confront a possible intruder/criminal.
Legal gun ownership requires some personal responsibility and common sense - something you libtards
Apparently it's something you lack too, if you advocate going outside to confront possibly-armed people at 3AM. Do you even have any security or combat training at all? If not, you really have no business owning a gun. There's lots of places that offer training for dealing with home intruders; maybe you should sign up for a course.
(I'll grant an exception if you just happened to already be outside on your back porch at 3AM for some odd reason, but that's unlikely in your scenario.)
I'm hoping for a zombie apocalypse. It's better than the brutal police state, at any rate.
One-income households aren't realistic and are inherently sexist. They depend entirely on women being second-class citizens and on people being stuck in unhappy marriages.
What's your solution for women (or a few rare men) in one-income households who are unhappy in their marriages? Just stay there and be miserable? The whole reason the divorce rate is so high is because women now have jobs and aren't stuck, and society has changed so that it's not scandalous to get a divorce. In the "old days", people weren't happy in their marriages there either, but the society was structured so that getting a divorce was hard and caused you to be socially outcast, so people just stayed in their miserable marriages and tried to look happy when they weren't behind closed doors.
The whole institution of monogamous marriage is really just a historical artifact, a byproduct of our move to agrarian societies. Hunter-gatherer societies never had these kinds of relationships, and there's no evidence that humans are naturally monogamous at all; at best, we're more like penguins who mate with a single partner long enough to have a kid and raise it a bit, and then we split and find someone new (Emperor penguins mate for 1 year, and have one egg/chick each year; after that, they find a new partner.) Almost no animals mate for life; we only invented that crazy idea because of religion.
So if you toss out going back to the 1950s, one-income households are clearly nonviable.
Wow, really? What's the logic there?
Um, I think he's talking about situations where you're not at home, and it starts hailing. Your car isn't going to just pull itself into a garage when you're parked at the grocery store. It'll just get hailed on and need body work.
Compare $400/month to how much you'd spend on your own car: the car payment ($200-800/month), insurance (probably at least $200/month), and NYC parking ($$$$).
I don't see how buying your own car makes any sense there.
Have you looked into getting an Uber ride to the beach? The other thing you can do is find some friends to go with you and split the Zipcar cost. Then the per-person cost is really quite cheap.
This is precisely why we should be working on developing and building SkyTran. It's much cheaper to build per-mile than regular roads or highways (since it's mostly made in a factory and just assembled on-site), it avoids many problems with cars (snow-covered roads, time-wasting intersections, pedestrians) because it uses suspended rails which can be built in 3D space instead of 2D, it can operate much faster than cars (75-100mph in the city, with no intersections, 150mph in less-dense areas), and does it all with a fraction of the energy usage of cars (maglev rails instead of high-friction rubber tires on asphalt, and small, lightweight pod cars instead of 3-5000lb chunks of steel).
For a while, at least, a lot of people are going to want personal cars still, even if they're self-driving: people in more rural areas aren't going to want to wait around for a GM/Lyft car to come pick them up, for instance. They're going to need insurance, though it's going to be less since the car will be self-driving, but they'll still need to insure the vehicle against accidents caused by human drivers, or acts of God, bad weather, etc.
Also, it's a bit hard to believe that other companies wouldn't want to get in on the "ride sharing" or Johnny-cab business, and wouldn't buy autonomous vehicles from the automakers to use in their fleets. Smaller, city-wide companies like that (probably descendants of existing cab/livery companies) would still need insurance because they're not big enough to self-insure. Of course, I could be completely wrong about this and these companies could all be forced out of business by the automakers jumping directly to making their own Johnny-cabs and operating them directly. However, it seems like a stretch to me, because today automakers specialize in just building cars, they're not even generally in the business of selling them (they leave that to independent con-artists^Hdealerships in most places), much less operating their own cab companies or anything like that. So I have a hard time seeing the automakers trying to do multiple things at once like that. If this actually made sense, then wouldn't we see GM in the car-rental business at airports, rather than contracting with Hertz/Avis/Dollar/Budget to sell them fleets of crappy cars no one wants so they can be rented to travelers?
-1 Ignorant about insurance companies
He's not talking about progressive politics, he's talking about the Progressive insurance company which is somewhat famous for their loud-mouthed "Flo" character on their TV commercials. That's why he mentioned "Flo" and capitalized "Progressive". The company has some kind of program they're pushing where they have a tracking device in their customers' cars which track their driving actions and then adjust their bills accordingly.
I don't have a "hometown". I'm talking about my own personal experience in living in a bunch of places and dating in all of them.
There's also plenty of articles about the relative distribution of singles in different cities around the country. It's no secret that the Bay Area and Seattle have a large surplus of single men, and NYC has a large surplus of single women.
Yes, there is: the hood and the Force lightning are missing. Other than that, perfect.
Someone needs to do a photoshop pic with Hillary dressed as the Emperor and grinning evilly while doing Force lightning.
It's probably not that great really. Remember, he's in Russia, and presumably all these women sending him nudie pics are not. So it's not like he can just meet up with them on a moment's notice, even if he was single.
WTF are you talking about? NYC is full of beautiful (and frequently single) women. In fact, every liberal-ish major US city is full of beautiful women, though the west-coast cities don't have so many single ones while the northeast ones do.
For the barf bag, you'll have to go to basically any rural area or conservative city. Women in those places tend not to look so great, probably partly because of poverty and partly because of terrible diet and also bad habits (smoking, etc.). The big-city liberal women have money, eat really well, and seem to all be into yoga for some reason.
They *did* switch to a different layout: the AZERTY one. Why'd they do that if it doesn't work for them? And why are they only now complaining about it? It's not like typewriters are a new thing in France.
I don't see the problem here at all. It's not like someone else picked their keyboard for them: they chose it themselves!!! AFAIK, they're the only ones using AZERTY, so it's obviously something they came up with by themselves, so if it's not serving them well, then it's their own dumb fault. How long did it take them to figure this out? Over a century I'm guessing. If they were just using the keyboards we English-speakers use, they'd be using QWERTY. Since they obviously took the time to make their own layout, they should have done a much better job of it.
Yep, this is frequently why I've found it useful to do "pair working" when a problem comes up sometimes: two people can learn from each other in tackling the problem, brainstorming ideas to root-cause it, etc. But it has to be something that's limited, not something you do for 8 hours every day. And it isn't very useful for banging out code; for that I need solitude. So as an occasional practice when a difficult problem comes up, working in pairs I think definitely has value, but not as a regular way of working.
I actually disagree about the number of female cheaters; personally I think it might be higher for women.
There was another study somewhere about college kids and their sexual habits, and it found that, in a nutshell, 20% of the male students were getting 80% of the sex. Basically, a minority of the men are really good at seducing women, and have a bunch of female partners (frequently one-night-stands), while many of the rest of the men struggle to get a date.
Women who cheat are likely hooking up with men like those 20%. And many of those guys might not even be married; why would they, when they can easily bed women?
I used to live in NJ too, however I only saw the really stupid stuff if I ventured up to Bergen county. I did notice that liquor stores weren't allowed to be open on Sunday mornings (seemingly state-wide), so that did irk me; I never saw anything like that in red-state, home of Joe Arpaio Arizona where I used to live.
It's a little more complicated than that, though. Those "conservatives" frequently want change too; there's a bunch of conservatives who want marijuana legalized, for instance. You don't see it in the east-coast "liberal" states much (except DC), but Arizona is pretty "red" and has medical marijuana that's really easy to get a card for, unlike blue New Jersey where it's nearly impossible to get legal medical MJ.
Also, look at gun laws: you'd think that blue states would universally be anti-gun, but Bernie's home state of Vermont is about as lax on guns as you can get.
So IMO it really depends on the issue, and the stances on various issues w.r.t. liberal vs. conservative vary a lot by region.
Another example: in New York, you'll see armed combat troops (NG) being used as police in NYC. You'd never see that on the west coast.
Women I think probably cheat at least as much as men. They just don't need websites to do it, because it's much easier for them to find partners to cheat with.
There have been genetic studies which have found that something like 15% of the population in western countries (I think Britain was where one study was done) does not have the father they thought they did, meaning that their mother cheated, while ovulating. Other studies have found that women are much more likely to stray when they are ovulating.
Funny, Ive never cheated, but I managed to outgrow the "holier than thou" attitude when I disavowed Christianity and returned to being an atheist.
Hear, hear.
It's attitudes like yours that make it so easy to blackmail people.
It's attitude like his which are causing the Millenials to abandon Christianity. And for good reason. How ironic is it that the religion centered on the guy who said "do not judge lest thee be judged" is full of the most judgmental, self-righteous assholes on this side of the planet?