Did you include the cost of a bedroom in the above calculation? Never taken that particular journey, but honestly if Amtrak is including bedrooms, or even roomettes, in that, then their pricing is radically out of whack with what they charge elsewhere.
Which is why I used weasel words to get around the fact that you never mention the NEC directly ("there's a huge perception" rather than "you wrote..."). Weasel words FTW!
Not using that name, but I did refer to the "North East" ("Outside the North East" and "DC to Boston";P
Sure they're heavy, but my point was that no one has shown that the weight is the cause of sucky Amtrak service. Having lighter trains isn't going to solve the problem of Amtrak trains being stuck behind freight trains. Furthermore, as heavy as Amtrak trains are, they are far, far, lighter than the 15,000-ft long freight trains they share the track with so it's not like they're adding all that much to the track wear.
The issue is trying to get fast, cost effective, trains. Yes, I don't doubt that there are other larger impediments right now, such as the amount of track that has to be shared with 15mph mile long freight trains, but that could also be used as an argument against electrifying and removing railroad crossings. In truth, the whole has to be dealt with, not just a few headline issues. Light trains = more fuel efficiency = improving cost effectiveness over other forms of transport, and the ability to deploy them faster because of a lesser need to engage in wholesale signaling and routing upgrades (light trains have easier emergency braking than heavy trains.)
That's the only reason I mentioned weight. I don't know what the Acela does, I kept it out of the equation because that part of Amtrak seems to be the only part that's working moderately well, I do know that outside of the Acela the trains going from Palm Beach are oversized on the outside considering the lack of anything going on in the inside. Hence I'm proposing it as one of the components of a successful, profitable, passenger railway.
There are a number of freight railroad coalitions (mostly short-haul RRs) arguing exactly that, but I would disagree. Rather than cutting off takes on RR property, I think highway taxes (gas taxes in particular) should be increased. Yes, it's a regressive tax but if it allows more money to be put toward transit, that helps out the poor.
Well, I guess you could level the playing field by doing something like this: roads become built and managed by an accountable body (call it "County Department of Roads" or whatever) that's exclusively funded by "highway taxes" (tolls, gasoline taxes, whatever, as long as they're incremental and linked to use, not tags or something like that). The DOR cannot be funded by property taxes or anything other than the highway taxes, and has to pay property taxes equivalent to that paid by railroads for the same land usage.
That'd level the playing field a lot, but it'd also be massively unpopular. It's also questionable that it'd cover the true social costs of car usage.
In the end, I'd rather just eliminate property taxes for all public infrastructure, regardless of whether that public infrastructure is privately or publicly owned, and eliminate subsidies for roads as far as practically possible. There's no logic to property taxes for this kind of thing, what costs are railroads (outside of crossings, which we should be eliminating) imposing on the cities and counties they pass through? Why should a railroad subsidize local schools? Why discourage a railroad from having and using track?
For high speed rail, deceleration is actually more important than acceleration. You don't generally need to accelerate in an emergency, and you generally want to do both minimally during normal conditions otherwise you lose the benefits of passenger comfort that you have over air and road.
However, most signaling and track congestion is predicated on trains being able to slow down within a fixed length of track rather than fixed time. One of the first major hurdles designers of higher speed trains had to deal with was determining how to ensure a train traveling at 150mph could slow down in an emergency in the same length of track as one traveling at 100mph (or in Amtrak's case, 15mph. Ho ho! I kill myself.) If you want to read up on some of the issues, a good place to start are the various websites concerning Britain's APT-E.
The major reasons for lighter cars are better deceleration, and lower costs accelerating and keeping them going at high speeds. Despite comments from some in this thread that the cars have to be heavier because of safety regulations, the reality is that you can avoid more accidents to begin with if you make them lighter, and it's also not as if we're talking about making polystyrene cars that float in the air, "light" is a relative term. The APT did it using aluminium (yeah, I used an I. It was a British train, get over it) aircraft-style carriage design, and by using an articulated system where bogies (which constitute a huge portion of the weight of every train) were shared between adjoining carriages, effectively halving the number of bogies needed.
There's no legitimate reason for requiring carriages be ultra heavy, lighter trains avoid more accidents, and thus I seriously doubt that the regulations in the US require high minimum weights as characterized here.
FWIW, Leicester to Loughborough is indeed the stretch that has special permission to run faster than 25mph. Test trains are allowed to run up to 60mph, and trains for special events up to 45mph.
And yes, the restrictions are a legal issue. So this is a Heritage railway whose trains run faster than many of Amtrak's trains. Scary.
FWIW, I was repeatedly making sure that my words did not cover the north eastern corridor. I can't comment on the Acela's weight issues (though I suspect it's still unnecessarily heavy. One thing I find very odd about my experiences of living in both the UK and US is that the US uses much larger engines and rolling stock, yet the amount of space inside the trains is identical. Just switching to the UK loading gauge should cut 20% off the weight of every train without in anyway reducing the quality of the experience. And this, my friend, is probably the only time you'll hear anyone "praising" the UK loading gauge;-). I believe the Eurostar trains use the UK LG, FWIW.)
My specific comments though were addressed to things like the DC to Florida stretch, which is wrong in every way imaginable. Acela doesn't run there. It's all big-ass diesel-electrics hauling heavy "streamlined" coaches. Forget electrification, I'd imagine just changing over to something like an HST, like Bombardier's UK versions of the Voyager, would make a huge difference to Amtrak's fuel costs.
Right now, I think two major things have to happen to the line south of DC (and West of NY). First, and I'm sure it'd attract widespread support and government funding if asked for properly), the grade needs to be raised or lowered. That'd make a massive difference, just being able to eliminate virtually every railroad crossing. It'd attract government funding and be popular because nobody in their right mind likes crossings. The other is electrification, which I understand your concerns about, but it's something that the both Amtrak and the railroads ought to be looking at anyway. Yes, nobody likes subsidized railroads, but in reality this is one of the ways to eliminate them, as electrification doesn't just give you highspeed rail (which in turn makes the passenger services profitable) but it also gives you significantly lower fuel costs.
Should the government chip in for electrification? I don't think they need to so much as recognize one other core issue: railroads take traffic off of normal roads, reducing costs, yet railroads have to pay property taxes, and normal roads don't. Property taxes for railroad and railway infrastructure needs to go, it needs to be eliminated. It's silly, the logic seems to be "Well, it's private so...", but in the end it's not recognizing the role railroads play. Eliminating property taxes would go a long way towards making the costs associated with railroads lower, which would help free up funds for upgrades, and ultimately help put passenger services on a profitable footing again.
Check-in for Chinese trains is also still simple: buy a ticket (preferably using cash), walk through a metal detector while your bag is scanned in an x-ray device, and walk on to your train. Very efficient. And that way easily competitive with airliners.
One of the things I rather miss in the UK is the whole train travel experience. Here's how it works:
1. The US.
Unless you're insane, purchase an airline ticket two weeks in advance. Compare from a variety of deals that generally include a direct plane that's expensive, a direct plane that's just about affordable but is at an awkward time of day, and three indirect flights with a {too long} layover in Atlanta or Newark.
Print off the itinerary. You're going to have to catch those flights.
On the day of travel, make sure everything's packed, and then rush to the airport so you can be there at least an hour, and preferably two, before you get there. Don't even think about taking public transport there unless you happen to live very, very, close by. Make sure you remembered your ID, you're going to have to show that a zillion times.
Check in
Go through security. Don't look guilty.
Sit at gate for an hour. Try to be comfortable on cheap plastic seats that seem to stab your back near to the most sensitive parts. Try to read, but...
Now wait to be "boarded". First wait for first class passengers
Now wait for "Premium Select Superclub Saver" passengers
Now rows 600-590...
Rows 230-228...
Finally get on the sodding plane. Wait in line because special row-by-row seating thing only partially works. Finally sit down in seat only slightly more comfortable than airport plastic waiting lounge seat.
Sit bored. Flight takes off. Sit. Sit. Sit. (Possibly: Complain about jackass in front of you crushing legs with chair. Get told "Sorry sir but the seats are designed to do that" WTF? No, seriously, it happened to me.) Keep belt tightly fastened except to go into cramped tiny toilet. Gah.
Get off plane at first stop over. Repeat from "Sit at gate for an hour" onwards appropriate number of times
Finally get off plane, follow signs to baggage reclaim. Wait for suitcases to finally make it onto belt. Wait for your suitcase to finally turn up
Finally leave the airport. Car hire or other transport is beyond the scope of this discussion
Now, the Chinese experience sounds better. But here's what I had to do on British Rail. Now, British Rail was an awful, nationalized, mess full of everything bad you associate with nationalized industries. It had been ripped apart in the 1960s by the road lobby, and from then until privatization was heavily underfunded and everything was constantly under the threat of closure or reduction. So, this is Crap by the standards it could have been. Also, this was during a time when Britain was suffering real terrorism from people who couldn't be screened out via passport checks.
Pack your luggage
Take public transport to station. If you need to be at the destination quickly, then get there before 9am, else wait until after 9am because that's when the tickets are cheaper. Do a little research so you can make sure you're not going to have to wait longer than 15 minutes for the first train.
Stand in line for five minutes, then purchase a "Return" ticket to destination. Ticket clerk may offer you a cheaper ticket in return for not traveling "Via London". Clerk will advise you on good trains to take. The ticket you buy does not have anyone's name on it, you do not have to show ID and didn't when you bought the ticket.
Go directly to platform. Do not pass security. There is no security. Well, the trash cans were removed around 1990, if that counts, 'cos some IRA jackass planted a bomb in one.
Wait for train clerk advised you to take, or peruse printed timetables on platforms and come up with your own sane route if you thi
Not when you're pointing out that Amtrak's speeds outside of a small number of corridors are exceptionally slow compared to the rest of the world. If you'd read the entire paragraph, you would have noted that I was pointing out that Amtrak's speeds on, for example, the Palm Beach to DC line, comparable to a British heritage railway. That's how bad it is.
Also, I don't think there's any law limiting the speed, but most are so short that it's not even worth worrying about...
The Light Railways Act, which was the act I was referring to, imposed 25mph on straight lines, 8mph on curves. Some railways covered by the act did receive special permission to run faster trains (one of the Great Central heritage railways has special permission, largely because of the high quality of the Great Central's original line and the length of track they're maintaining), but 25mph was indeed the legal maximum for the majority of heritage railways in the UK, and while the Act has recently been superseded, I suspect it's still the case.
If it takes 10 hours and it's travelling 600 miles, then it certainly isn't traveling at an average of 100mph or more. It's traveling at an average of 60mph, which is only slightly faster than Amtrak. So your comparison doesn't really cut it. I don't know what the Austrian and German railway companies are doing wrong, but it doesn't look good, it's certainly not an example of what can happen with proper high speed (or medium speed even) infrastructure.
On better maintained systems, averages of 100mph is not unusual. Even British high speed trains generally travel at averages close to that for "long distance" trips. The British considered their rolling stock in the 1980s and 1990s to be somewhat behind the rest of the world because our top, mainstream, high speed train had a maximum speed of 125mph, and generally averaged around 100mph for most of the long distance trips it was put on, going at 125mph frequently in order to make those averages.
Take Eurostar as a high profile example. Back when it was lumbered with Britain's awful pre-HS1 track between the Chunnel and Waterloo Station in London averaged over 106mph for the journey from Paris to London as a whole. London to Cannes is nearly 900 miles, and can take as little as seven and a half hours. London to Paris costs from $100-150 for a round trip ticket and takes a little over two hours.
So yes, low cost, medium speed travel is possible by rail. You have to put in place the infrastructure, schedule useful trains, (and while I'm on the subject do something about the backwards "property tax" rules that require railroad companies pay taxes intended for building roads and airports. WTF? so that the costs of travel actually resemble the real costs and benefits resulting from people taking a train from the nearest station.)
Al Qaeda is not, as I understand it, a real entity. There's no board of directors, no "Department of Bringing Down Aeroplanes", no CTO. No organizational structure whatsoever. The term itself is supposed to have originated at the CIA.
The way to look at it instead is a term analogous to "Silicon Valley". The is a common thread ("A united Arab superstate/Making money through the advancement of computer technology"), there are the sources of funds (Osama Bin Laden/numerous Venture Capitalists), and then there are the numerous operations themselves. For every 9/11, there's a hundred shoe bombers. For every Apple Computer, there's a hundred Pets.coms.
Pants On Fire Guy was an idiot who wanted to bring down a plane in the cause of striking at the infidels and thus helping bring about an Arab Superstate. That's all the label means. That's all PoFG meant by invoking it. PoFG is no more an employee of Al Qaeda than Greg McLemore (who?) was an employee of Silicon Valley.
Terrorism is a matter of motive. If you're trying to seriously terrorize a people for political, ideological, or religious reasons, and you're not doing so on behalf of a government, then you're engaging in terrorism, however stupid your methods or the degree to which you're a personal failure.
If you're just trying to terrorize people because you're a sociopath, or else you're not putting anyone under any serious direct threat (ie "If you're gay, you'll burn in hell", "The south will rise again"), then you're not a terrorist, just a run-of-the-mill jackass.
This guy (a) made it clear that his motives were ideological (by invoking Al Qaeda, even if there's a question of whether such a group exists in any real form, as opposed to being a western umbrella term for terrorist groups helped by Osama Bin Laden and Dick Cheney), and (b) actually tried to kill a bunch of people. Therefore, Burning Leg Man is a terrorist, a stupid one no doubt, but as much of one as the Shoe Bomber.
I've done the same thing a few times and there are a number of problems.
The first is it's one thing to spend over night or most of a day traveling by train instead of most of a day "flying" (flying, say, from NYC to Palm Beach consists of approximately 3-4 hours of flying, but a little over two hours of "getting there, checking in, going through security, making sure you're way early due to paranoia, etc", umpteen hours of layovers, and at least thirty minutes of baggage claims, plus another thirty to sixty minutes of getting out of the air port and getting to your destination), but generally with Amtrak it's a little of both, multiplied.
I've taken the train from Palm Beach to NYC, it's around 26-30 hours, depending on the precise train you take and how much it's delayed. In practice, that's most of two days, plus a night.
Then there's the cost. A bedroom (which is what you describe, roomettes don't include showers - and the "toilet" in them isn't something you'd want to use given it's not enclosed) generally costs around $500-1,000 per night on top of the regular fares. Roomettes are a little cheaper, $300-500 per night, generally, but are even less comfortable and, like I said, you wouldn't want to use the toilet and you have to share a shower. Again though, you add fares to that. You can forgo both and sit in the standard seats, which are certainly more comfortable than airline seats, for something more competitive with airlines, but for a minimum of 26 hours?
Rail travel could be cheaper and could actually compete with the airlines. If Amtrak and CSX et al improved the track, including engaging in a program of electrification (which they should do anyway), and started using lighter, lower cost, rolling stock, they could run faster trains at lower cost, which in turn would increase passenger numbers exponentially and mean they could use the same rolling stock for more trips. Palm Beach to NYC is only 1,200 miles. At an average of 100mph, which is hardly rocket speed outside of the US, that trip could be done in 12-15 hours (depending on number of stops.) I think a huge contingent of people would be more than willing to go by train if you could get in a train in the morning and get off at your destination before the end of the day. Travel for ten hours in confusion and discomfort, or travel for fifteen in comfort. Not the world's hardest choice.
Alas, outside of the North East, I seriously think Amtrak sees itself as a state subsidized version of a Heritage Railway. In England, there Heritage Railways are limited to 25mph because they originally operated under a nineteenth century law making it easy to create independent railways that was never updated. In the US, Amtrak runs most of its East Coast trains at 25-30mph outside of the DC to Boston portion because the sodding track doesn't support faster speeds.
And then people turn around and complain that trains are obsolete and we shouldn't fund (and fix) Amtrak because railways are inherently slow and inflexible, while the French, Japanese, and even the post-Beeching British, scratch their heads and wonder what the hell happened to a country that was built by the railroads.
Geez, someone never went on an anal retentive Computer Science Degree course.
All source files should be no more than 20 lines, so they can fit, together with the editor's status bar, on the screen of a VT-100. If you're doing more than 20 lines per source file, then you're doing it wrong.
Also lines shouldn't be more than 80 characters in length. And the first 19 lines of your file should be comments.
I have to disagree with you. If all of the below are true:
The offer is "opt in", that is, the buyer explicitly agrees to this particular trial (as opposed to the standard Cable TV scam of "That's odd, HBO just appeared on my line-up. Oh, I see, the bill says I'm automatically enrolled in a free HBO trial)
Clear to the buyer before he or she opts in to the offer that the deal is "First one is free, you pay for the rest, and you're enrolled unless you say otherwise"
The fees are reasonable, including for the first "trial" product
There are no impediments to cancellation - if you ordered via a website, the website allows you to cancel. If you ordered by phone, you should be able to cancel with a phone call. If you ordered by mail, a post card allowing you to cancel should be shipped with the product. There should be no ambiguities about what to do, it shouldn't be difficult in any way.
...then this is a reasonable way of doing a free trial. What the business is doing, essentially, is saying "We know you probably want it, but you might be concerned that it's the wrong product for you. Well, here's a way to try this while knowing that if it really is a mistake, you don't have to be on the hook for the whole thing."
These systems tend to have a bad name because at least one of the above requirements are broken by many bad-faith operators. In Video Professor's case, VP are selling unaccredited video learning courses apparently primarily aimed at the elderly for absurd amounts of money. In addition, apparently many customers were unaware of the fact they were signing up to an automatically rebilling system. So in my list of rules above, both (2) and (3) were violated. Book clubs in the UK were infamous for breaking rules (2) and (4), though in fairness their prices were reasonable enough that they had many satisfied customers. Cable and Satellite TV companies the world over are infamous for (1), often combined with (4).
The fact that so many scams use the model doesn't make the model a scam. There are plenty of scams that use the "You pay $X for something in the expectation it'll be sent to you" model too, but fail because a list of rules ($X has to be reasonable, the actual something you ordered needs to be delivered to you and be as described, the actual something that's sent to you can't be stolen property, etc) are broken.
As always, with any commerce system, the key questions are based upon good and bad faith, and the reasonable requirements and expectations of buyers. "First one free, others not free and sent automatically unless you cancel" is not inherently a scam. It is, after all, an improvement on "Pay for all of them, sent automatically unless you cancel."
Sorry but none of this flies, as far as I can see.
First of all, OSHA is a Federal agency and thus this has nothing to do with voters in California. OSHA is what Apple is being accused of blaming for a refusal to work on products exposed to cigarette smoke.
Secondly, there's absolutely nothing wrong whatsoever with strong labeling laws, as long as the mandated labels contain accurate and non-misleading information. There's nothing in California's laws that requires anything inaccurate be presented, and it's reasonable to propose that many people would find these useful in making an informed decision about what to buy without it having a negative impact on people who do not need to make the same kinds of suggestions.
In reality, 99% of the "I blame the government" claims actually have to do with companies looking for excuses to not live up to their obligations to be honest and offer the product they actually sold. That's why we're seeing crap like the "SOX means we can't provide free upgrades to our existing customers" even though SOX has nothing whatsoever to do with goodwill accounting (SOX is an honesty and accountability in accounting law only) (and it's why banks are running away from fixed rate cards: they don't like them anyway, and they especially don't want something they sell as a fixed rate card to actually be a fixed rate card)
This is something the usual gaggle of right wing pseudo-libertarians who reflexly jump onto any excuse to blame anything negative in the market on government regulations (see the moderation on my comment above), but it's reality.
Read my comment again. The banks are no longer offering fixed rate cards and claim that it's because the government has banned them from varying the interest rate on a fixed rate credit card more than once a year.
I'm glad you found a financial institution that still offers one, but don't be surprised if it, too, decides to join the rest of the mob. Our Citibank and Chase cards were both turned into variable rate (and variable rates that are always going to be higher than the original fixed rates, just to add insult to injury) over the last few months.
In the mean time, try a few banking websites, and try to find a major bank that offers a fixed rate card. Just to save you some time: Chase, Bank of America, Discover, American Express, Capital One, Citibank, Riverside National (OK, that's not major, but it's my home bank, so I checked them) all don't offer them any more (and those are just the ones I remember checking.) Also Google for "fixed rate" "Credit cards" and you'll find quite a few hogwash pseudo-libertarian useful idiots claiming that the recent law change somehow makes it just impossible for banks to offer a card... that's what it claims to be.
...is something I'm getting increasingly tired of hearing.
Sometimes laws have unintentional negative consequences, but most of the "Oh, we can't do this any more, because the government has a rule that says {X}" is generally BS. Case in point, no banks offer fixed rate credit cards.
Wanna know why? Want to know why banks don't offer fixed rate credit cards, that is, credit cards whose interest rate doesn't change? Want to know why they've all withdrawn them, the credit cards they had with fixed rates? Want to know?
Are you sitting down?
...it's because, claim the credit card companies, the government has banned them from varying the rates of a fixed rate credit card more than once a year.
You heard that right: the credit card companies, and their obedient apologists in the right wing media, claim that the reason they can't offer fixed rate credit cards is because they can't vary the rate of a fixed rate credit card... very often.
Yeah, the government's to blame for that one. Right.
Sarbanes Oxley? What businesses except Apple don't offer free "good will" gifts from time to time to their existing customer base, that previously did so? And what's the clause in SO anyway that bans businesses from traditional goodwill accounting? What's that? It doesn't exist? Damn right it doesn't exist!
And now OSHA is banning Apple from working on laptops contaminated with tobacco smoke? Quite honestly, even for Apple, it seems like a stretch to me. I'm inclined to assume it's probably false, but it's not going to completely surprise me, given the above, if Apple reveals it's true.
ASCII is 7 bits. You'd have to reduce ANSI for it to be "reduced" when 7 bits. (I was going to say Unicode, but I believe there is actually a UTF-7 that nobody ever uses.)
That said, if you're good with upper case only encoding, you can always use the 6 bit alphabets that were popular until the mid-seventies for lots of 36 bit computers like the PDP-10. Then you only need 30 bits.
FWIW, I was very surprised coming here how corrupt US politics are, to the point most people don't even notice. People like Joe Lieberman get called "the honest man of politics" because they put their contributors ahead of their party, as if being in line with the views of your party (and thus the shorthand many people used to judge your views and values when they elected you) is somehow wrong, but doing what your campaign contributors demand is somehow honest.
In Britain, when people like Jonathan Aitken and the Hamiltons were found to be "for sale" in much the same way as US politicians are, they were shunned. I'm amazed the birthplace of modern democracy doesn't take corruption more seriously.
That's generally the first mistake, to assume it's just a matter of eating less calories and concentrating on that. The problem is that eating less doesn't, by itself, mean weight loss. Do it incorrectly and (a) you're going to be starving all day and find it's hard work keeping on the diet and (b) you're going to slow down your metabolism as your body goes into "starvation mode", which ironically might even mean you end up gaining weight when you're eating less. Oh sure, if you start eating 1,000 calories a day, you'll lose weight anyway (but you'll also be unable to fully function as a human being), but a woman eating 1,500 calories, or a man eating 2,000, who picks the wrong foods and doesn't exercise* will almost certainly either lose a small amount and plateau, or actually gain weight.
The key here is to understand that no sane weight loss regime excludes either diet or exercise. You need both. Exercise forces your body to burn the calories. Diets have to be picked carefully, generally focusing on higher protein content and somewhat lower fat and carbs, as focusing on cutting calories only will just leave you hungry and unable to function.
I lost about 30lbs over about three months by doing about 30 minutes of Wii Fit per day while changing my diet to four peanut bars a day (not "diet" peanut bars, those "Sweet and Salty" ones made by Nature Valley), a fairly large bowl of spicy chili (the way I like it!) at lunch time, and a fried (slathered in oil!) vegetable dish with spaghetti or sausage or something like that every evening. I didn't concentrate on removing fat, or removing carbs, I just picked foods that were high in protein, that tasted good, and did a rough finger-in-the-air thing to make sure I was consuming much less than 2,500 calories per day. I lost weight so fast that Wii Fit actually criticized me for it. I didn't feel particularly hungry during the day, and the peanut bars were always there if I needed something to keep me going. And, well, I got more work done too.
The weight loss stopped when I stopped the regime (many people stop their "diets" when the weight loss stops, I was losing weight when I stopped), I was at my goal, so I stopped, I was getting concerned at that point that I'd lose too much weight.
* Exercise, of course, can be something people do in the normal course of their lives. I've noticed a huge, pun intended, difference between people living around where I live, a sprawling car-dependent city in which there are few stairs and nobody walks more than a few hundred yards a day at most, and, say, New York City, where people generally walk several miles a day and have been known to have to run up or down some stairs once in a while. You don't have to go to a gym.
Aha! This explains your claims about illegal aliens and the absurd lies you've been telling about Britain's National Health Service.
Next time though you might want to, y'know, actually talk to men on streets, rather than post your comments in a forum where people who know what they're talking about can call you out on the crap you've written.
You can't do that with the UK Government's monopoly.
Yes, you can. Plenty of Doctors operate outside of the NHS. Indeed, when I lived there, there was an infamous incident in which the vast majority of Dentists withdrew en-mass from the NHS. So far as I'm aware, it's still difficult to get NHS covered dental care, most people opt to pay for dental work privately. The NHS "monopoly" is on a plan that everyone is required to subscribe to, not on medical personnel or institutions to accept it.
May I make a suggestion that before you go ahead and criticize the UK system, you actually make an attempt to find out what you're criticizing?
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* Re:What's in it? (Score:3) by commodore64_love (1445365) Friend of a Friend on 2009-11-08 12:13 (#30023074)
>>>>>Are you honestly saying that a US insurance provider would have provided her insurance?
No but in the US, you can simply walk in, hand-over some cash, and get the PAP smear done. You can't do that with the UK Government's monopoly. They won't accept cash payments, so when the college-aged woman was told "no", that was the end. She had no other choices. It's anti-liberty.
>>>>>A government monopoly is no better than one run by Microsoft, Comcast, or Exxon. It still takes-away choice. >> >>If you don't understand the difference, then there's no helping you.
I'm willing to listen if you're willing to explain. I can name at least one difference: When Microsoft or Comcast comes to me and demands money, I tell them to "fuck off". If I tried that with the government monopoly, I'd probably end-up in jail for failure to pay. (Or in the case of this just-passed bill, get fined ~$2500.)
Governments have a monopoly over your wallet and can vacuum it at will. That's something private corporations, even monopolies, do not have.
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* Re:What's in it? (Score:?) by squiggleslash (241428) on 2009-11-08 13:32 Homepage Journal
You can't do that with the UK Government's monopoly.
Yes, you can. Plenty of Doctors operate outside of the NHS. Indeed, when I lived there, there was an infamous incident in which the vast majority of Dentists withdrew en-mass from the NHS. So far as I'm aware, it's still difficult to get NHS covered dental care, most people opt to pay for dental work privately. The NHS "monopoly" is on a plan that everyone is required to subscribe to, not on medical personnel or institutions to accept it.
May I make a suggestion that before you go ahead and criticize the UK system, you actually make an attempt to find out what you're criticizing? -- My moved journal [livejournal.com]
That's an almost-exact quote from Congressman Barney Frank's mouth
By "an almost exact" you mean "not", pretty much by definition.
Here's the bad news for all those who think as you do: if the Democrats wanted single payer healthcare, they could do it in a heartbeat. It would actually be easier than the travesty of a half-assed "reform" they're doing at the moment. All they have to do is extend Medicare to cover everyone.
Think that's hard? Think again: the votes would be there in Congress, and they wouldn't need Lieberman's vote in the Senate, as the proposal is easily shoved through via reconciliation, something that'll be harder with the Public Option.
The problem is the Democrats are too big a bunch of wusses to actually do what needs to be done with the country's healthcare system. They're scared of not being seen to appeal to the whole country, they're scared of the big bad "Socialism" word.
Trust me, if the Public Option were a "first step" towards something the Democrats really want, the Democrats wouldn't need to bother. They don't want what you want.
BTW, why do you wingnuts have a problem with forcing illegal immigrants to pay for their healthcare? Right now, anyone who's here illegally just needs to go to the emergency room and can get out of the country (indeed, have the INS pay for the airfare!) without the hospitals being able to claw a penny back. Now a law change is proposed where, like everyone else, they have to pay for health insurance, and you're up in arms about that? WTF?
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Did you include the cost of a bedroom in the above calculation? Never taken that particular journey, but honestly if Amtrak is including bedrooms, or even roomettes, in that, then their pricing is radically out of whack with what they charge elsewhere.
Not using that name, but I did refer to the "North East" ("Outside the North East" and "DC to Boston" ;P
The issue is trying to get fast, cost effective, trains. Yes, I don't doubt that there are other larger impediments right now, such as the amount of track that has to be shared with 15mph mile long freight trains, but that could also be used as an argument against electrifying and removing railroad crossings. In truth, the whole has to be dealt with, not just a few headline issues. Light trains = more fuel efficiency = improving cost effectiveness over other forms of transport, and the ability to deploy them faster because of a lesser need to engage in wholesale signaling and routing upgrades (light trains have easier emergency braking than heavy trains.)
That's the only reason I mentioned weight. I don't know what the Acela does, I kept it out of the equation because that part of Amtrak seems to be the only part that's working moderately well, I do know that outside of the Acela the trains going from Palm Beach are oversized on the outside considering the lack of anything going on in the inside. Hence I'm proposing it as one of the components of a successful, profitable, passenger railway.
Well, I guess you could level the playing field by doing something like this: roads become built and managed by an accountable body (call it "County Department of Roads" or whatever) that's exclusively funded by "highway taxes" (tolls, gasoline taxes, whatever, as long as they're incremental and linked to use, not tags or something like that). The DOR cannot be funded by property taxes or anything other than the highway taxes, and has to pay property taxes equivalent to that paid by railroads for the same land usage.
That'd level the playing field a lot, but it'd also be massively unpopular. It's also questionable that it'd cover the true social costs of car usage.
In the end, I'd rather just eliminate property taxes for all public infrastructure, regardless of whether that public infrastructure is privately or publicly owned, and eliminate subsidies for roads as far as practically possible. There's no logic to property taxes for this kind of thing, what costs are railroads (outside of crossings, which we should be eliminating) imposing on the cities and counties they pass through? Why should a railroad subsidize local schools? Why discourage a railroad from having and using track?
For high speed rail, deceleration is actually more important than acceleration. You don't generally need to accelerate in an emergency, and you generally want to do both minimally during normal conditions otherwise you lose the benefits of passenger comfort that you have over air and road.
However, most signaling and track congestion is predicated on trains being able to slow down within a fixed length of track rather than fixed time. One of the first major hurdles designers of higher speed trains had to deal with was determining how to ensure a train traveling at 150mph could slow down in an emergency in the same length of track as one traveling at 100mph (or in Amtrak's case, 15mph. Ho ho! I kill myself.) If you want to read up on some of the issues, a good place to start are the various websites concerning Britain's APT-E.
The major reasons for lighter cars are better deceleration, and lower costs accelerating and keeping them going at high speeds. Despite comments from some in this thread that the cars have to be heavier because of safety regulations, the reality is that you can avoid more accidents to begin with if you make them lighter, and it's also not as if we're talking about making polystyrene cars that float in the air, "light" is a relative term. The APT did it using aluminium (yeah, I used an I. It was a British train, get over it) aircraft-style carriage design, and by using an articulated system where bogies (which constitute a huge portion of the weight of every train) were shared between adjoining carriages, effectively halving the number of bogies needed.
There's no legitimate reason for requiring carriages be ultra heavy, lighter trains avoid more accidents, and thus I seriously doubt that the regulations in the US require high minimum weights as characterized here.
FWIW, Leicester to Loughborough is indeed the stretch that has special permission to run faster than 25mph. Test trains are allowed to run up to 60mph, and trains for special events up to 45mph.
And yes, the restrictions are a legal issue. So this is a Heritage railway whose trains run faster than many of Amtrak's trains. Scary.
FWIW, I was repeatedly making sure that my words did not cover the north eastern corridor. I can't comment on the Acela's weight issues (though I suspect it's still unnecessarily heavy. One thing I find very odd about my experiences of living in both the UK and US is that the US uses much larger engines and rolling stock, yet the amount of space inside the trains is identical. Just switching to the UK loading gauge should cut 20% off the weight of every train without in anyway reducing the quality of the experience. And this, my friend, is probably the only time you'll hear anyone "praising" the UK loading gauge ;-). I believe the Eurostar trains use the UK LG, FWIW.)
My specific comments though were addressed to things like the DC to Florida stretch, which is wrong in every way imaginable. Acela doesn't run there. It's all big-ass diesel-electrics hauling heavy "streamlined" coaches. Forget electrification, I'd imagine just changing over to something like an HST, like Bombardier's UK versions of the Voyager, would make a huge difference to Amtrak's fuel costs.
Right now, I think two major things have to happen to the line south of DC (and West of NY). First, and I'm sure it'd attract widespread support and government funding if asked for properly), the grade needs to be raised or lowered. That'd make a massive difference, just being able to eliminate virtually every railroad crossing. It'd attract government funding and be popular because nobody in their right mind likes crossings. The other is electrification, which I understand your concerns about, but it's something that the both Amtrak and the railroads ought to be looking at anyway. Yes, nobody likes subsidized railroads, but in reality this is one of the ways to eliminate them, as electrification doesn't just give you highspeed rail (which in turn makes the passenger services profitable) but it also gives you significantly lower fuel costs.
Should the government chip in for electrification? I don't think they need to so much as recognize one other core issue: railroads take traffic off of normal roads, reducing costs, yet railroads have to pay property taxes, and normal roads don't. Property taxes for railroad and railway infrastructure needs to go, it needs to be eliminated. It's silly, the logic seems to be "Well, it's private so...", but in the end it's not recognizing the role railroads play. Eliminating property taxes would go a long way towards making the costs associated with railroads lower, which would help free up funds for upgrades, and ultimately help put passenger services on a profitable footing again.
One of the things I rather miss in the UK is the whole train travel experience. Here's how it works:
1. The US.
Now, the Chinese experience sounds better. But here's what I had to do on British Rail. Now, British Rail was an awful, nationalized, mess full of everything bad you associate with nationalized industries. It had been ripped apart in the 1960s by the road lobby, and from then until privatization was heavily underfunded and everything was constantly under the threat of closure or reduction. So, this is Crap by the standards it could have been. Also, this was during a time when Britain was suffering real terrorism from people who couldn't be screened out via passport checks.
Not when you're pointing out that Amtrak's speeds outside of a small number of corridors are exceptionally slow compared to the rest of the world. If you'd read the entire paragraph, you would have noted that I was pointing out that Amtrak's speeds on, for example, the Palm Beach to DC line, comparable to a British heritage railway. That's how bad it is.
The Light Railways Act, which was the act I was referring to, imposed 25mph on straight lines, 8mph on curves. Some railways covered by the act did receive special permission to run faster trains (one of the Great Central heritage railways has special permission, largely because of the high quality of the Great Central's original line and the length of track they're maintaining), but 25mph was indeed the legal maximum for the majority of heritage railways in the UK, and while the Act has recently been superseded, I suspect it's still the case.
If it takes 10 hours and it's travelling 600 miles, then it certainly isn't traveling at an average of 100mph or more. It's traveling at an average of 60mph, which is only slightly faster than Amtrak. So your comparison doesn't really cut it. I don't know what the Austrian and German railway companies are doing wrong, but it doesn't look good, it's certainly not an example of what can happen with proper high speed (or medium speed even) infrastructure.
On better maintained systems, averages of 100mph is not unusual. Even British high speed trains generally travel at averages close to that for "long distance" trips. The British considered their rolling stock in the 1980s and 1990s to be somewhat behind the rest of the world because our top, mainstream, high speed train had a maximum speed of 125mph, and generally averaged around 100mph for most of the long distance trips it was put on, going at 125mph frequently in order to make those averages.
Take Eurostar as a high profile example. Back when it was lumbered with Britain's awful pre-HS1 track between the Chunnel and Waterloo Station in London averaged over 106mph for the journey from Paris to London as a whole. London to Cannes is nearly 900 miles, and can take as little as seven and a half hours. London to Paris costs from $100-150 for a round trip ticket and takes a little over two hours.
So yes, low cost, medium speed travel is possible by rail. You have to put in place the infrastructure, schedule useful trains, (and while I'm on the subject do something about the backwards "property tax" rules that require railroad companies pay taxes intended for building roads and airports. WTF? so that the costs of travel actually resemble the real costs and benefits resulting from people taking a train from the nearest station.)
I don't think "Trivially Preventable" means the same thing to you compared to the majority of Windows users.
Al Qaeda is not, as I understand it, a real entity. There's no board of directors, no "Department of Bringing Down Aeroplanes", no CTO. No organizational structure whatsoever. The term itself is supposed to have originated at the CIA.
The way to look at it instead is a term analogous to "Silicon Valley". The is a common thread ("A united Arab superstate/Making money through the advancement of computer technology"), there are the sources of funds (Osama Bin Laden/numerous Venture Capitalists), and then there are the numerous operations themselves. For every 9/11, there's a hundred shoe bombers. For every Apple Computer, there's a hundred Pets.coms.
Pants On Fire Guy was an idiot who wanted to bring down a plane in the cause of striking at the infidels and thus helping bring about an Arab Superstate. That's all the label means. That's all PoFG meant by invoking it. PoFG is no more an employee of Al Qaeda than Greg McLemore (who?) was an employee of Silicon Valley.
Terrorism is a matter of motive. If you're trying to seriously terrorize a people for political, ideological, or religious reasons, and you're not doing so on behalf of a government, then you're engaging in terrorism, however stupid your methods or the degree to which you're a personal failure.
If you're just trying to terrorize people because you're a sociopath, or else you're not putting anyone under any serious direct threat (ie "If you're gay, you'll burn in hell", "The south will rise again"), then you're not a terrorist, just a run-of-the-mill jackass.
This guy (a) made it clear that his motives were ideological (by invoking Al Qaeda, even if there's a question of whether such a group exists in any real form, as opposed to being a western umbrella term for terrorist groups helped by Osama Bin Laden and Dick Cheney), and (b) actually tried to kill a bunch of people. Therefore, Burning Leg Man is a terrorist, a stupid one no doubt, but as much of one as the Shoe Bomber.
I've done the same thing a few times and there are a number of problems.
The first is it's one thing to spend over night or most of a day traveling by train instead of most of a day "flying" (flying, say, from NYC to Palm Beach consists of approximately 3-4 hours of flying, but a little over two hours of "getting there, checking in, going through security, making sure you're way early due to paranoia, etc", umpteen hours of layovers, and at least thirty minutes of baggage claims, plus another thirty to sixty minutes of getting out of the air port and getting to your destination), but generally with Amtrak it's a little of both, multiplied.
I've taken the train from Palm Beach to NYC, it's around 26-30 hours, depending on the precise train you take and how much it's delayed. In practice, that's most of two days, plus a night.
Then there's the cost. A bedroom (which is what you describe, roomettes don't include showers - and the "toilet" in them isn't something you'd want to use given it's not enclosed) generally costs around $500-1,000 per night on top of the regular fares. Roomettes are a little cheaper, $300-500 per night, generally, but are even less comfortable and, like I said, you wouldn't want to use the toilet and you have to share a shower. Again though, you add fares to that. You can forgo both and sit in the standard seats, which are certainly more comfortable than airline seats, for something more competitive with airlines, but for a minimum of 26 hours?
Rail travel could be cheaper and could actually compete with the airlines. If Amtrak and CSX et al improved the track, including engaging in a program of electrification (which they should do anyway), and started using lighter, lower cost, rolling stock, they could run faster trains at lower cost, which in turn would increase passenger numbers exponentially and mean they could use the same rolling stock for more trips. Palm Beach to NYC is only 1,200 miles. At an average of 100mph, which is hardly rocket speed outside of the US, that trip could be done in 12-15 hours (depending on number of stops.) I think a huge contingent of people would be more than willing to go by train if you could get in a train in the morning and get off at your destination before the end of the day. Travel for ten hours in confusion and discomfort, or travel for fifteen in comfort. Not the world's hardest choice.
Alas, outside of the North East, I seriously think Amtrak sees itself as a state subsidized version of a Heritage Railway. In England, there Heritage Railways are limited to 25mph because they originally operated under a nineteenth century law making it easy to create independent railways that was never updated. In the US, Amtrak runs most of its East Coast trains at 25-30mph outside of the DC to Boston portion because the sodding track doesn't support faster speeds.
And then people turn around and complain that trains are obsolete and we shouldn't fund (and fix) Amtrak because railways are inherently slow and inflexible, while the French, Japanese, and even the post-Beeching British, scratch their heads and wonder what the hell happened to a country that was built by the railroads.
Geez, someone never went on an anal retentive Computer Science Degree course.
All source files should be no more than 20 lines, so they can fit, together with the editor's status bar, on the screen of a VT-100. If you're doing more than 20 lines per source file, then you're doing it wrong.
Also lines shouldn't be more than 80 characters in length. And the first 19 lines of your file should be comments.
I have to disagree with you. If all of the below are true:
These systems tend to have a bad name because at least one of the above requirements are broken by many bad-faith operators. In Video Professor's case, VP are selling unaccredited video learning courses apparently primarily aimed at the elderly for absurd amounts of money. In addition, apparently many customers were unaware of the fact they were signing up to an automatically rebilling system. So in my list of rules above, both (2) and (3) were violated. Book clubs in the UK were infamous for breaking rules (2) and (4), though in fairness their prices were reasonable enough that they had many satisfied customers. Cable and Satellite TV companies the world over are infamous for (1), often combined with (4).
The fact that so many scams use the model doesn't make the model a scam. There are plenty of scams that use the "You pay $X for something in the expectation it'll be sent to you" model too, but fail because a list of rules ($X has to be reasonable, the actual something you ordered needs to be delivered to you and be as described, the actual something that's sent to you can't be stolen property, etc) are broken.
As always, with any commerce system, the key questions are based upon good and bad faith, and the reasonable requirements and expectations of buyers. "First one free, others not free and sent automatically unless you cancel" is not inherently a scam. It is, after all, an improvement on "Pay for all of them, sent automatically unless you cancel."
Sorry but none of this flies, as far as I can see.
First of all, OSHA is a Federal agency and thus this has nothing to do with voters in California. OSHA is what Apple is being accused of blaming for a refusal to work on products exposed to cigarette smoke.
Secondly, there's absolutely nothing wrong whatsoever with strong labeling laws, as long as the mandated labels contain accurate and non-misleading information. There's nothing in California's laws that requires anything inaccurate be presented, and it's reasonable to propose that many people would find these useful in making an informed decision about what to buy without it having a negative impact on people who do not need to make the same kinds of suggestions.
In reality, 99% of the "I blame the government" claims actually have to do with companies looking for excuses to not live up to their obligations to be honest and offer the product they actually sold. That's why we're seeing crap like the "SOX means we can't provide free upgrades to our existing customers" even though SOX has nothing whatsoever to do with goodwill accounting (SOX is an honesty and accountability in accounting law only) (and it's why banks are running away from fixed rate cards: they don't like them anyway, and they especially don't want something they sell as a fixed rate card to actually be a fixed rate card)
This is something the usual gaggle of right wing pseudo-libertarians who reflexly jump onto any excuse to blame anything negative in the market on government regulations (see the moderation on my comment above), but it's reality.
Read my comment again. The banks are no longer offering fixed rate cards and claim that it's because the government has banned them from varying the interest rate on a fixed rate credit card more than once a year.
I'm glad you found a financial institution that still offers one, but don't be surprised if it, too, decides to join the rest of the mob. Our Citibank and Chase cards were both turned into variable rate (and variable rates that are always going to be higher than the original fixed rates, just to add insult to injury) over the last few months.
In the mean time, try a few banking websites, and try to find a major bank that offers a fixed rate card. Just to save you some time: Chase, Bank of America, Discover, American Express, Capital One, Citibank, Riverside National (OK, that's not major, but it's my home bank, so I checked them) all don't offer them any more (and those are just the ones I remember checking.) Also Google for "fixed rate" "Credit cards" and you'll find quite a few hogwash pseudo-libertarian useful idiots claiming that the recent law change somehow makes it just impossible for banks to offer a card... that's what it claims to be.
Sometimes laws have unintentional negative consequences, but most of the "Oh, we can't do this any more, because the government has a rule that says {X}" is generally BS. Case in point, no banks offer fixed rate credit cards.
Wanna know why? Want to know why banks don't offer fixed rate credit cards, that is, credit cards whose interest rate doesn't change? Want to know why they've all withdrawn them, the credit cards they had with fixed rates? Want to know?
Are you sitting down?
You heard that right: the credit card companies, and their obedient apologists in the right wing media, claim that the reason they can't offer fixed rate credit cards is because they can't vary the rate of a fixed rate credit card... very often.
Yeah, the government's to blame for that one. Right.
Sarbanes Oxley? What businesses except Apple don't offer free "good will" gifts from time to time to their existing customer base, that previously did so? And what's the clause in SO anyway that bans businesses from traditional goodwill accounting? What's that? It doesn't exist? Damn right it doesn't exist!
And now OSHA is banning Apple from working on laptops contaminated with tobacco smoke? Quite honestly, even for Apple, it seems like a stretch to me. I'm inclined to assume it's probably false, but it's not going to completely surprise me, given the above, if Apple reveals it's true.
This viral nature of the BSD license is why I avoid it and only use GPL'd software.
Well, the trick with the PDP-10, IIRC, was to pad out your strings with spaces... ;)
ASCII is 7 bits. You'd have to reduce ANSI for it to be "reduced" when 7 bits. (I was going to say Unicode, but I believe there is actually a UTF-7 that nobody ever uses.)
That said, if you're good with upper case only encoding, you can always use the 6 bit alphabets that were popular until the mid-seventies for lots of 36 bit computers like the PDP-10. Then you only need 30 bits.
I believe the comparison was with the EU.
FWIW, I was very surprised coming here how corrupt US politics are, to the point most people don't even notice. People like Joe Lieberman get called "the honest man of politics" because they put their contributors ahead of their party, as if being in line with the views of your party (and thus the shorthand many people used to judge your views and values when they elected you) is somehow wrong, but doing what your campaign contributors demand is somehow honest.
In Britain, when people like Jonathan Aitken and the Hamiltons were found to be "for sale" in much the same way as US politicians are, they were shunned. I'm amazed the birthplace of modern democracy doesn't take corruption more seriously.
That's generally the first mistake, to assume it's just a matter of eating less calories and concentrating on that. The problem is that eating less doesn't, by itself, mean weight loss. Do it incorrectly and (a) you're going to be starving all day and find it's hard work keeping on the diet and (b) you're going to slow down your metabolism as your body goes into "starvation mode", which ironically might even mean you end up gaining weight when you're eating less. Oh sure, if you start eating 1,000 calories a day, you'll lose weight anyway (but you'll also be unable to fully function as a human being), but a woman eating 1,500 calories, or a man eating 2,000, who picks the wrong foods and doesn't exercise* will almost certainly either lose a small amount and plateau, or actually gain weight.
The key here is to understand that no sane weight loss regime excludes either diet or exercise. You need both. Exercise forces your body to burn the calories. Diets have to be picked carefully, generally focusing on higher protein content and somewhat lower fat and carbs, as focusing on cutting calories only will just leave you hungry and unable to function.
I lost about 30lbs over about three months by doing about 30 minutes of Wii Fit per day while changing my diet to four peanut bars a day (not "diet" peanut bars, those "Sweet and Salty" ones made by Nature Valley), a fairly large bowl of spicy chili (the way I like it!) at lunch time, and a fried (slathered in oil!) vegetable dish with spaghetti or sausage or something like that every evening. I didn't concentrate on removing fat, or removing carbs, I just picked foods that were high in protein, that tasted good, and did a rough finger-in-the-air thing to make sure I was consuming much less than 2,500 calories per day. I lost weight so fast that Wii Fit actually criticized me for it. I didn't feel particularly hungry during the day, and the peanut bars were always there if I needed something to keep me going. And, well, I got more work done too.
The weight loss stopped when I stopped the regime (many people stop their "diets" when the weight loss stops, I was losing weight when I stopped), I was at my goal, so I stopped, I was getting concerned at that point that I'd lose too much weight.
* Exercise, of course, can be something people do in the normal course of their lives. I've noticed a huge, pun intended, difference between people living around where I live, a sprawling car-dependent city in which there are few stairs and nobody walks more than a few hundred yards a day at most, and, say, New York City, where people generally walk several miles a day and have been known to have to run up or down some stairs once in a while. You don't have to go to a gym.
Aha! This explains your claims about illegal aliens and the absurd lies you've been telling about Britain's National Health Service.
Next time though you might want to, y'know, actually talk to men on streets, rather than post your comments in a forum where people who know what they're talking about can call you out on the crap you've written.
Yes, you can. Plenty of Doctors operate outside of the NHS. Indeed, when I lived there, there was an infamous incident in which the vast majority of Dentists withdrew en-mass from the NHS. So far as I'm aware, it's still difficult to get NHS covered dental care, most people opt to pay for dental work privately. The NHS "monopoly" is on a plan that everyone is required to subscribe to, not on medical personnel or institutions to accept it.
May I make a suggestion that before you go ahead and criticize the UK system, you actually make an attempt to find out what you're criticizing?
By "an almost exact" you mean "not", pretty much by definition.
Here's the bad news for all those who think as you do: if the Democrats wanted single payer healthcare, they could do it in a heartbeat. It would actually be easier than the travesty of a half-assed "reform" they're doing at the moment. All they have to do is extend Medicare to cover everyone.
Think that's hard? Think again: the votes would be there in Congress, and they wouldn't need Lieberman's vote in the Senate, as the proposal is easily shoved through via reconciliation, something that'll be harder with the Public Option.
The problem is the Democrats are too big a bunch of wusses to actually do what needs to be done with the country's healthcare system. They're scared of not being seen to appeal to the whole country, they're scared of the big bad "Socialism" word.
Trust me, if the Public Option were a "first step" towards something the Democrats really want, the Democrats wouldn't need to bother. They don't want what you want.
BTW, why do you wingnuts have a problem with forcing illegal immigrants to pay for their healthcare? Right now, anyone who's here illegally just needs to go to the emergency room and can get out of the country (indeed, have the INS pay for the airfare!) without the hospitals being able to claw a penny back. Now a law change is proposed where, like everyone else, they have to pay for health insurance, and you're up in arms about that? WTF?