Who's going to jail the arresting officer? What if the entire city's police department joins him? Are they going to send in the state police and have a war between them? That'd be interesting to see, actually.
Even the "fighting words" / incitement stuff is very limited in scope. Writing something on the internet saying "all [group] should be killed!!" is perfectly OK, you only get in trouble if you directly and immediately incite some person to do something violent, so stirring up your cousins to go murder someone tonight will definitely get you a long prison term. I don't know the legal terminology for this, but there has to be a very direct connection between your incitement speech and the criminal action, not just some vague advocacy.
Also, I think I've heard about the anti-obscenity speech laws being tossed out (or rather, overturned in court cases) in some places because of the 1A. Usually those laws are local, and it's not unusual for localities to enact unconstitutional laws that end up having to be struck down in court when someone gets arrested because of them.
The Russians, because they benefit from the chaos.
Wrong. Russia wants the war to end. They value regional stability, and Syria is their ally and has a strategically-located port that they use.
Assad, because he is winning.
This one is just plain stupid. Assad was losing until the Russians came in to prop him up. Assad wants the war over because if he loses it, he's dead. Assad wants stability and peace in his country (with him in charge of course) just like Russia does.
The rest I'm not sure about, but I really fail to see how the Turks really want to have a war raging next door, terrorist attacks, and millions of refugees to deal with.
How is a war with ISIS a "never ending war"? What allies does ISIS have? Russia hates them as much as we do, and has constantly been proposing working together against them. ISIS has no aircraft, and is basically a rag-tag band of thugs with very little military discipline. The only reason they're still around is because they're embedded in civilian populations and there hasn't been a strong enough effort to eliminate them; the US doesn't want to put any boots on the ground, so it's up to the dysfunctional Iraqi army, the over-committed Syrian army, the Kurds, and various other militias. ISIS took over Palmyra and destroyed ancient archaeological artifacts, and the US did nothing about it. When Russia decided to get involved and put boots on the ground, ISIS was wiped out in Palmyra in days.
Trump's domestic policy looks like it's going to be a disaster, but for foreign policy I see things going two ways: 1) he pulls out altogether, and Russia fully commits to Syria and cleans the place up very quickly, or 2) he puts boots on the ground in Syria and cleans the place up very quickly. What we're doing in Syria right now isn't working, and only a fool would argue that it is; it's only making things worse. I don't see how Trump could make it any worse.
As for "all the previous middle eastern adventures", you can blame Hillary and her good buddies (like Bush and Rumsfeld) for that. She's the one who wants to establish a no-fly zone over Syria the minute she's elected. How do you think that's going to go over with Russia?
What is it with people like you and your advocacy of slap-on-the-wrist punishments? This pathetic little punishment won't fix the problem; the solution is to ban these drivers for life once the company finds out that they're doing this. Uber is a private company and has every right to terminate a business relationship with a driver who is willfully harming its business and reputation this way, and absolutely should.
Yeah, I don't know why they wanted to split Alaska, that's the only part that doesn't make any sense to me. Everything else mostly makes sense, though it might need a little updating for population shifts in the last 40 years since they came up with this, plus other considerations they didn't make.
You should check out the 38 State proposal. Redraw all the state boundaries so they're more sensible and local cultures are kept together better, and no major cities straddle state lines, while making the states more roughly equal in population.
Yeah, you would think so, but I'm just pointing out that you can't be sure that scaling isn't an issue. Maybe it is. No democratic republic country of 310+M people has tried to implement single-payer healthcare before. Australia is indeed, I believe, our most similar peer, but they have 1/10 of our population.
While we're talking about Australia, I'd like to make the comment that the US should copy them in how it handles the capitol city: they carved out a whole new federal state for it (ACT - Australia Capitol Territory), with the same rights and privileges as any other state. We should do the same here with DC, and it should annex all the area around it too (sorry Maryland and Virginia). The way DC is administered now is a total mess. And if someone doesn't like the idea of 51 states (and having to have more Congressional seats, and having to redo all the national flags), that could be easily solved: give Maryland's eastern shore area to Delaware (they really should just have the whole peninsula), give the western little sliver of MD to either WV or PA, and then combine DC and Baltimore and everything else left into a single capitol state.
Italy is infamous for its corruption. You can't even send something their through their postal service without it going missing. It's so bad in Italy that the Italian voters voted to ban nuclear power plants in Italy and instead buy nuclear power from France, because they don't trust themselves to run such plants safely because of corruption.
Free software is awesome because of the choice and liberty at your disposal.
The problem is that people don't want choice and liberty, then want to spend $$$ on stuff from one of two giant, dominating corporations, and then bitch and complain when it's broken and doesn't work to their liking.
I just recently tried the beta for 3.22 though and honestly it's not so bad. The default configuration sucks though, you need to install a bunch of extensions and gnome-tweak-tool for it to be usable.
Exactly!
Similarly, after years of being a hater of Chevrolets, I just bought a new Cruze, and honestly it's not so bad. The default configuration sucks though, so I had to drop in a different engine, put in some new seats (which required some welding), transplant infotainment (nav/radio) system from another car, and to make that work I had to replace the whole dashboard. I also swapped out the ugly-ass wheels and put some new brakes on it while I was at it, and repainted it too because Chevy's available paint schemes were all horrible. But other than those minor modifications, it's not too bad a car!
OR even null-and-voiding the patents for an entire field like the US Gov't did for Airplanes after WWI until mid...70s
WTF are you talking about? According to Wikipedia the government pressured the Wright and Curtiss companies and others to form a patent pool and pay fees to use each others' patents. There was no null-and-voiding, and the whole issue was over by 1918 as Wilbur had died and Orville had retired and sold out of the business. Moreover, they didn't refuse to license their patents, they did license them, but Curtiss and the Wrights got into a legal war over them.
Further proof of the incompetence of most IT organizations.
Not necessarily. If they've been tasked with using Outlook/Exchange, there's nothing they can do about it.
You're probably assuming that the IT organization is incompetent if it can't choose the best tool for the job. That's not true: from what I've seen of IT, they frequently have zero say about what tools they get to use, and instead it's the non-technical higher-ups that make those decisions, usually based on how much they're wined and dined by sales reps.
You can't call someone incompetent if they do a poor job using tools they didn't pick. That's like complaining that a plumber is incompetent because he wasn't able to fix your leak with the table saw you required him to use.
It's not just the foreign-born population, it's the native populations. We have three big ethnic groups: whites, blacks, and hispanics, who have very different cultures and two different languages too. On top of that, there's a huge and growing divide between urban and rural populations (where do you think Trump's support is coming from?), with again very different cultures arising there, and growing more and more polarized.
Finally, the other thing the US adds to this is size: its population is over 10 times that of Australia's, even more that that of NZ, and more than double that of the UK IIRC. You seem to assume that in governance, everything can scale perfectly; maybe that's not the case. Also, at least for AUS and UK, the vast majority of those countries' populations are urban, so they don't have the huge urban/rural divide that we do. That's why it was so easy to ban guns in those countries: they didn't have half the population strongly voting against it, because urban dwellers generally don't care so much for gun ownership and proliferation the way rural dwellers do.
Remember the old saying, "divide and conquer". That's a whole lot easier when your population is already divided and fragmented in many ways.
Oh please, the guy's been an independent (though caucusing with Dems) for ages, and he does have a record of getting useful things done, which is why he's called "the amendment king". Sure, he's been a politician for a long time (and a career one at that), but that's not a bad thing by itself unless you assume that everyone gets corrupt, which I think is false. Sanders didn't win because the DNC didn't like him: he's not a "real Democrat", because he hasn't played the party game all this time like Hillary and DWS have, he wasn't even *in* the party until just before the race. You can't be "part of the machine" if you're not in one of the two main parties. All indications are he's in it to try to make things better; if not, after all this time he'd be a multi-millionaire like so many other Congresspeople, not just comfortably upper-middle-class (which he got just by being in Congress all that time and collecting their normal paychecks). Sanders is just very unusual, and he's been a politician this long because he comes from a very unusual little state (Vermont) where apparently the puny number of voters there (state pop. is a little over a half-million) like him.
You just seem to have a religious belief that no one can stay in politics for long without turning corrupt. I say the reverse is problematic: it's all too easy for some corrupt person, affiliated with some moneyed interest (like the payday loan industry, in the case of DWS), to get elected and then work to pass legislation helpful to that interest. It's better to have highly experienced politicians stay in their jobs for a long time, and not be allied to any moneyed interests, which is why the pay for these people (in the federal government at least) was set to be reasonably high, but it's up to the voters to do a decent job choosing these people. Apparently most voters fail miserably.
As for your question, the reason it's "so hard" to have politicians for a few years is because people have to have careers. You can't just take a 5-year hiatus from a career to do something else for a while and expect to come back to it and be competitive. Anyone working in tech should know this all too well: how do you think YOU would do if you took 5 years off and then asked for your old job back? The only time it seems to work out well is when there's some pretty obvious corruption, like with Eric Cantor when he lost his seat and then got some corporate job paying millions, because he had connections. There's plenty of decently-run (well, better than the US at any rate), highly developed nations in western Europe that don't have any such notion about politicians serving only a few years. That's a quaint old concept from 200+ years ago when the founders/politicians were all farmers and landowners, and it really was possible to let someone else run the farm for a while and then come back to it. That doesn't work in modern society.
I partly agree with your assessment about Trump, and completely about Hillary. But where on Earth do you get the idea that Sanders will "ruin the US"? By making it more like his idol country, Denmark? What's to dislike about that? Great standard of living, education, strong economy, healthcare, what's not to like unless you think you're a "temporarily embarrassed millionaire"? Now maybe it's not that realistic to try to be like that (we are very different nations after all), but if we move a little bit in that direction (Presidents have limited power, they have more power to veto and to start wars than to do great legislative things), I don't see how that's a bad thing, in fact it's much better than what all the other candidates want to do. Very likely, a Bernie Presidency would probably be known for two things: 1) not getting into any stupid wars, and 2) maybe, just maybe accomplishing some nice social services goal, such as single-payer healthcare (that might be too optimistic) or moving to a better hybrid regulated healthcare system like what Germany has. And if you're a gun-loving conservative, he's already proven he's pretty neutral on that issue, unlike Hillary, who seems to want to revive the ineffective AWB of the 90s because it sounds good.
As for what Trump will accomplish, I have no doubt that he loves his name and wants to go down in history for doing great things. However, he's also allied himself with a bunch of ultra-conservatives, and picked Pence as his running mate, and that guy is a firm member of the establishment. I can only hope that if he does get elected, he'll tell the religious loonies and neo-cons to sit down and shut up and maybe try to do something good. He did say a few things about making sure everyone's taken care of healthcare-wise, so I'll give him credit for that, unlike most on the right who think it should be everyone for themselves
As far as needing to use the restroom, I've always had that problem; maybe it gets worse with age for some people, but judging by all the people rushing to the bathroom as soon as a theater movie ends, I don't think anyone's immune. 2-4 hours is a long time to go without a bathroom break, especially if you're drinking something during that time.
Personally, I try to never go to theaters any more; I just don't enjoy it that much, and would rather save my money. The only time I do go (maybe once a year at this rate) is when someone drags me into it.
I'm not trying to stick up for Hillary here, but while we don't have much of a political record of Trump's to go on since he wasn't a politician until recently, we do have one for his running mate Pence, who's an ultra-conservative neo-con who says he idolizes Dick Cheney, meaning he intends to run the show from behind the scenes with Trump as a mere figurehead.
I'm a old projectionist from three decades ago... Now in my day, screens where much bigger and a house sat 400 or more, which is twice the size I'm seeing today in places
I'll bet that back in your day, even with those more-populated theaters, theater-going was a far more pleasurable experience, without people talking throughout the movie, using their cellphones, wearing big hats, bringing noisy little kids to age-inappropriate movies, etc. Or am I looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses?
LACK of government caused this problem. The company that makes epipens has been given free reign
It's not lack of government that caused the problem: it's government regulation that prevents competitors from selling in the US. They have competitors to the EpiPen outside the US, you know. They don't exist here because of government regulation.
The government has no profit motive.
This is just plain dumb. What do you call "campaign finance contributions"? Or "lobbying"? The government as a singular entity may not have such a motive, but the individuals running the government and making decisions absolutely do.
If you need to see the effects of having governments setting prices for medical care I refer you to pretty much every other industrialized country in the world. They manage to keep cost much lower AND have better outcomes in many cases.
What makes you think those nations are comparable? You're comparing to the wrong countries; you should be comparing to countries like India, Brazil, Russia, etc.
You sure about that? Maybe we really are so different, politically, so dysfunctional, that those solutions won't work here.
Just look at our current Presidential race. We're the laughing stock of the world.
Perhaps it really isn't possible to have a country this large with a government that isn't as broken as ours. You're comparing the US to a bunch of countries that are much smaller and more homogeneous. There really are no countries on the planet that are comparable to the US; the closest are China and India. China's government doesn't resemble ours in the least, and India is plagued with corruption problems.
It's worse than that. Most of the quacks actually think they're right and that they're helping people. It's hard to do trials that really prove efficacy (or prove that something is ineffective), and people who are sick are desperate so they'll believe just about anything, and on top of all that the Placebo Effect is a real thing, so we end up with stuff like Homeopathy and Chiropractic. The vast majority of these "practitioners" IMO are not sacrificing your life to make a few extra bucks, they do it because they genuinely believe in their snake oil.
Slashdot Mirror
Who's going to jail the arresting officer? What if the entire city's police department joins him? Are they going to send in the state police and have a war between them? That'd be interesting to see, actually.
Even the "fighting words" / incitement stuff is very limited in scope. Writing something on the internet saying "all [group] should be killed!!" is perfectly OK, you only get in trouble if you directly and immediately incite some person to do something violent, so stirring up your cousins to go murder someone tonight will definitely get you a long prison term. I don't know the legal terminology for this, but there has to be a very direct connection between your incitement speech and the criminal action, not just some vague advocacy.
Also, I think I've heard about the anti-obscenity speech laws being tossed out (or rather, overturned in court cases) in some places because of the 1A. Usually those laws are local, and it's not unusual for localities to enact unconstitutional laws that end up having to be struck down in court when someone gets arrested because of them.
Citation needed. Who is going to declare war on a country for refusing to take in refugees?
This is bullshit.
The Russians, because they benefit from the chaos.
Wrong. Russia wants the war to end. They value regional stability, and Syria is their ally and has a strategically-located port that they use.
Assad, because he is winning.
This one is just plain stupid. Assad was losing until the Russians came in to prop him up. Assad wants the war over because if he loses it, he's dead. Assad wants stability and peace in his country (with him in charge of course) just like Russia does.
The rest I'm not sure about, but I really fail to see how the Turks really want to have a war raging next door, terrorist attacks, and millions of refugees to deal with.
How is a war with ISIS a "never ending war"? What allies does ISIS have? Russia hates them as much as we do, and has constantly been proposing working together against them. ISIS has no aircraft, and is basically a rag-tag band of thugs with very little military discipline. The only reason they're still around is because they're embedded in civilian populations and there hasn't been a strong enough effort to eliminate them; the US doesn't want to put any boots on the ground, so it's up to the dysfunctional Iraqi army, the over-committed Syrian army, the Kurds, and various other militias. ISIS took over Palmyra and destroyed ancient archaeological artifacts, and the US did nothing about it. When Russia decided to get involved and put boots on the ground, ISIS was wiped out in Palmyra in days.
Trump's domestic policy looks like it's going to be a disaster, but for foreign policy I see things going two ways: 1) he pulls out altogether, and Russia fully commits to Syria and cleans the place up very quickly, or 2) he puts boots on the ground in Syria and cleans the place up very quickly. What we're doing in Syria right now isn't working, and only a fool would argue that it is; it's only making things worse. I don't see how Trump could make it any worse.
As for "all the previous middle eastern adventures", you can blame Hillary and her good buddies (like Bush and Rumsfeld) for that. She's the one who wants to establish a no-fly zone over Syria the minute she's elected. How do you think that's going to go over with Russia?
What is it with people like you and your advocacy of slap-on-the-wrist punishments? This pathetic little punishment won't fix the problem; the solution is to ban these drivers for life once the company finds out that they're doing this. Uber is a private company and has every right to terminate a business relationship with a driver who is willfully harming its business and reputation this way, and absolutely should.
Yeah, I don't know why they wanted to split Alaska, that's the only part that doesn't make any sense to me. Everything else mostly makes sense, though it might need a little updating for population shifts in the last 40 years since they came up with this, plus other considerations they didn't make.
You should check out the 38 State proposal. Redraw all the state boundaries so they're more sensible and local cultures are kept together better, and no major cities straddle state lines, while making the states more roughly equal in population.
Yeah, you would think so, but I'm just pointing out that you can't be sure that scaling isn't an issue. Maybe it is. No democratic republic country of 310+M people has tried to implement single-payer healthcare before. Australia is indeed, I believe, our most similar peer, but they have 1/10 of our population.
While we're talking about Australia, I'd like to make the comment that the US should copy them in how it handles the capitol city: they carved out a whole new federal state for it (ACT - Australia Capitol Territory), with the same rights and privileges as any other state. We should do the same here with DC, and it should annex all the area around it too (sorry Maryland and Virginia). The way DC is administered now is a total mess. And if someone doesn't like the idea of 51 states (and having to have more Congressional seats, and having to redo all the national flags), that could be easily solved: give Maryland's eastern shore area to Delaware (they really should just have the whole peninsula), give the western little sliver of MD to either WV or PA, and then combine DC and Baltimore and everything else left into a single capitol state.
Italy is infamous for its corruption. You can't even send something their through their postal service without it going missing. It's so bad in Italy that the Italian voters voted to ban nuclear power plants in Italy and instead buy nuclear power from France, because they don't trust themselves to run such plants safely because of corruption.
If that's the league we're in, we're in trouble.
Free software is awesome because of the choice and liberty at your disposal.
The problem is that people don't want choice and liberty, then want to spend $$$ on stuff from one of two giant, dominating corporations, and then bitch and complain when it's broken and doesn't work to their liking.
I just recently tried the beta for 3.22 though and honestly it's not so bad. The default configuration sucks though, you need to install a bunch of extensions and gnome-tweak-tool for it to be usable.
Exactly!
Similarly, after years of being a hater of Chevrolets, I just bought a new Cruze, and honestly it's not so bad. The default configuration sucks though, so I had to drop in a different engine, put in some new seats (which required some welding), transplant infotainment (nav/radio) system from another car, and to make that work I had to replace the whole dashboard. I also swapped out the ugly-ass wheels and put some new brakes on it while I was at it, and repainted it too because Chevy's available paint schemes were all horrible. But other than those minor modifications, it's not too bad a car!
dubbed Karlsruhe after the German host city of the annual GUADEC (GNOME Users And Developers European Conference) event
Instead of Karlsruhe, they should name it "Pyongyang", as the GNOME team's mentality towards their users is far more similar to that country.
OR even null-and-voiding the patents for an entire field like the US Gov't did for Airplanes after WWI until mid ...70s
WTF are you talking about? According to Wikipedia the government pressured the Wright and Curtiss companies and others to form a patent pool and pay fees to use each others' patents. There was no null-and-voiding, and the whole issue was over by 1918 as Wilbur had died and Orville had retired and sold out of the business. Moreover, they didn't refuse to license their patents, they did license them, but Curtiss and the Wrights got into a legal war over them.
Further proof of the incompetence of most IT organizations.
Not necessarily. If they've been tasked with using Outlook/Exchange, there's nothing they can do about it.
You're probably assuming that the IT organization is incompetent if it can't choose the best tool for the job. That's not true: from what I've seen of IT, they frequently have zero say about what tools they get to use, and instead it's the non-technical higher-ups that make those decisions, usually based on how much they're wined and dined by sales reps.
You can't call someone incompetent if they do a poor job using tools they didn't pick. That's like complaining that a plumber is incompetent because he wasn't able to fix your leak with the table saw you required him to use.
We're getting the government we deserve.
It's not just the foreign-born population, it's the native populations. We have three big ethnic groups: whites, blacks, and hispanics, who have very different cultures and two different languages too. On top of that, there's a huge and growing divide between urban and rural populations (where do you think Trump's support is coming from?), with again very different cultures arising there, and growing more and more polarized.
Finally, the other thing the US adds to this is size: its population is over 10 times that of Australia's, even more that that of NZ, and more than double that of the UK IIRC. You seem to assume that in governance, everything can scale perfectly; maybe that's not the case. Also, at least for AUS and UK, the vast majority of those countries' populations are urban, so they don't have the huge urban/rural divide that we do. That's why it was so easy to ban guns in those countries: they didn't have half the population strongly voting against it, because urban dwellers generally don't care so much for gun ownership and proliferation the way rural dwellers do.
Remember the old saying, "divide and conquer". That's a whole lot easier when your population is already divided and fragmented in many ways.
Oh please, the guy's been an independent (though caucusing with Dems) for ages, and he does have a record of getting useful things done, which is why he's called "the amendment king". Sure, he's been a politician for a long time (and a career one at that), but that's not a bad thing by itself unless you assume that everyone gets corrupt, which I think is false. Sanders didn't win because the DNC didn't like him: he's not a "real Democrat", because he hasn't played the party game all this time like Hillary and DWS have, he wasn't even *in* the party until just before the race. You can't be "part of the machine" if you're not in one of the two main parties. All indications are he's in it to try to make things better; if not, after all this time he'd be a multi-millionaire like so many other Congresspeople, not just comfortably upper-middle-class (which he got just by being in Congress all that time and collecting their normal paychecks). Sanders is just very unusual, and he's been a politician this long because he comes from a very unusual little state (Vermont) where apparently the puny number of voters there (state pop. is a little over a half-million) like him.
You just seem to have a religious belief that no one can stay in politics for long without turning corrupt. I say the reverse is problematic: it's all too easy for some corrupt person, affiliated with some moneyed interest (like the payday loan industry, in the case of DWS), to get elected and then work to pass legislation helpful to that interest. It's better to have highly experienced politicians stay in their jobs for a long time, and not be allied to any moneyed interests, which is why the pay for these people (in the federal government at least) was set to be reasonably high, but it's up to the voters to do a decent job choosing these people. Apparently most voters fail miserably.
As for your question, the reason it's "so hard" to have politicians for a few years is because people have to have careers. You can't just take a 5-year hiatus from a career to do something else for a while and expect to come back to it and be competitive. Anyone working in tech should know this all too well: how do you think YOU would do if you took 5 years off and then asked for your old job back? The only time it seems to work out well is when there's some pretty obvious corruption, like with Eric Cantor when he lost his seat and then got some corporate job paying millions, because he had connections. There's plenty of decently-run (well, better than the US at any rate), highly developed nations in western Europe that don't have any such notion about politicians serving only a few years. That's a quaint old concept from 200+ years ago when the founders/politicians were all farmers and landowners, and it really was possible to let someone else run the farm for a while and then come back to it. That doesn't work in modern society.
I partly agree with your assessment about Trump, and completely about Hillary. But where on Earth do you get the idea that Sanders will "ruin the US"? By making it more like his idol country, Denmark? What's to dislike about that? Great standard of living, education, strong economy, healthcare, what's not to like unless you think you're a "temporarily embarrassed millionaire"? Now maybe it's not that realistic to try to be like that (we are very different nations after all), but if we move a little bit in that direction (Presidents have limited power, they have more power to veto and to start wars than to do great legislative things), I don't see how that's a bad thing, in fact it's much better than what all the other candidates want to do. Very likely, a Bernie Presidency would probably be known for two things: 1) not getting into any stupid wars, and 2) maybe, just maybe accomplishing some nice social services goal, such as single-payer healthcare (that might be too optimistic) or moving to a better hybrid regulated healthcare system like what Germany has. And if you're a gun-loving conservative, he's already proven he's pretty neutral on that issue, unlike Hillary, who seems to want to revive the ineffective AWB of the 90s because it sounds good.
As for what Trump will accomplish, I have no doubt that he loves his name and wants to go down in history for doing great things. However, he's also allied himself with a bunch of ultra-conservatives, and picked Pence as his running mate, and that guy is a firm member of the establishment. I can only hope that if he does get elected, he'll tell the religious loonies and neo-cons to sit down and shut up and maybe try to do something good. He did say a few things about making sure everyone's taken care of healthcare-wise, so I'll give him credit for that, unlike most on the right who think it should be everyone for themselves
Interesting, thanks for the reply.
As far as needing to use the restroom, I've always had that problem; maybe it gets worse with age for some people, but judging by all the people rushing to the bathroom as soon as a theater movie ends, I don't think anyone's immune. 2-4 hours is a long time to go without a bathroom break, especially if you're drinking something during that time.
Personally, I try to never go to theaters any more; I just don't enjoy it that much, and would rather save my money. The only time I do go (maybe once a year at this rate) is when someone drags me into it.
I'm not trying to stick up for Hillary here, but while we don't have much of a political record of Trump's to go on since he wasn't a politician until recently, we do have one for his running mate Pence, who's an ultra-conservative neo-con who says he idolizes Dick Cheney, meaning he intends to run the show from behind the scenes with Trump as a mere figurehead.
We have two really lousy choices this year.
I'm a old projectionist from three decades ago... Now in my day, screens where much bigger and a house sat 400 or more, which is twice the size I'm seeing today in places
I'll bet that back in your day, even with those more-populated theaters, theater-going was a far more pleasurable experience, without people talking throughout the movie, using their cellphones, wearing big hats, bringing noisy little kids to age-inappropriate movies, etc. Or am I looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses?
LACK of government caused this problem. The company that makes epipens has been given free reign
It's not lack of government that caused the problem: it's government regulation that prevents competitors from selling in the US. They have competitors to the EpiPen outside the US, you know. They don't exist here because of government regulation.
The government has no profit motive.
This is just plain dumb. What do you call "campaign finance contributions"? Or "lobbying"? The government as a singular entity may not have such a motive, but the individuals running the government and making decisions absolutely do.
If you need to see the effects of having governments setting prices for medical care I refer you to pretty much every other industrialized country in the world. They manage to keep cost much lower AND have better outcomes in many cases.
What makes you think those nations are comparable? You're comparing to the wrong countries; you should be comparing to countries like India, Brazil, Russia, etc.
You sure about that? Maybe we really are so different, politically, so dysfunctional, that those solutions won't work here.
Just look at our current Presidential race. We're the laughing stock of the world.
Perhaps it really isn't possible to have a country this large with a government that isn't as broken as ours. You're comparing the US to a bunch of countries that are much smaller and more homogeneous. There really are no countries on the planet that are comparable to the US; the closest are China and India. China's government doesn't resemble ours in the least, and India is plagued with corruption problems.
It's worse than that. Most of the quacks actually think they're right and that they're helping people. It's hard to do trials that really prove efficacy (or prove that something is ineffective), and people who are sick are desperate so they'll believe just about anything, and on top of all that the Placebo Effect is a real thing, so we end up with stuff like Homeopathy and Chiropractic. The vast majority of these "practitioners" IMO are not sacrificing your life to make a few extra bucks, they do it because they genuinely believe in their snake oil.