Above, you argue that marriage tax breaks benefit children, so we shouldn't touch them. Here, you ignore the fact that the maternity and paternity leave granted in Europe are largely intended to help the children.
The tax break helps mom stay home for good. It helps keep the family together.
Maternity leave leads to latch-key kids raising themselves on the streets. Mom has no need for Dad anymore, so she can toss him out of the house and go screw somebody else.
It should be obvious which situation is better for the kids.
I agree: quit the job. Mothers should take care of the kids. (could flip that around, but men don't breastfeed very well)
No daycare worker can provide parental security and love. Kids without stay-at-home moms do worse in life. (education, drugs, violence, those high-school pregnancies, etc.)
producing offspring is much more important (in a long term kind of way). And a society who has foresight would be wise to protect this matter
OK, I agree, but that leads to a different conclusion. The mother should not go back to work. Her child needs her. No day-care worker will love the child like the mother, nor provide the discipline and emotional security that the child needs.
Having a kid is not "abandoning" your job
And neither is going off to Africa for half a year for missionary work? And neither is spending half a year at home playing Everquest? And neither is taking a job with the competition for half a year?
Why does everybody else get hurt
Financial harm to the company hurts all employees. Maybe it's the last straw leading to layoffs or even bankrupcy.
The substitute does not deserve the job. That's why she's a substitute. If she did, she'd HAVE said job.
Look, I've seen this. We all wanted to give the substitute the job because she was way better. Because of the law, we had to let a crummy employee have her job back. Of course, that just means we'll get rid of her in some other way.
European companies are really hesitant to hire people because it's so damn hard to get rid of people.
Places that think they can get away with it will particularly avoid those who seem likely to take advantage of the benefits.
WTF is with people thinking they should get paid for nothing and/or have a right to get back a job they abandoned for half a year? Everybody else at that company gets hurt, especially the substitute worker who'd really like to keep the job.
A woman gets one or two periods, and then she's pregnant.
Roughly 9 months go by with nothing.
A baby is delivered. I suppose you could call that a period, maybe.
Breastfeeding suppresses the menstrual cycle. The woman can almost certainly go 6 months without a period, and stands a decent chance of going 18 months or more.
So there you go. Regular periods are NOT natural. They are a side effect of birth control.
Each kid born, and each kid nursed, reduces the risk of breast cancer. It's a 5% drop and a 7% drop, or the other way around. Assuming every kid is nursed, that should be about 12% to 13% risk reduction per kid. A woman naturally has about a dozen kids. Breast cancer is quite rare in countries where women birth early and often.
BTW, another side effect specific to the pill: reduced sex drive.
No law can be defect-free, but consider the fact that every member of a Gay/Lesbian couple was once a child.
Some mostly-correct assumptions are implicit in the law. Kids are known to do better in intact families. (even kids that grow up to be gay) Kids do better with a stay-at-home parent, traditionally the mom. Hetero couples generally produce kids. Legal issues related to kids (inheritance, etc.) are easier with a married couple.
Even totally single people benefit from marriage-related tax breaks. Oh sure, having benefited as a child it would be mighty nice (totally selfish) to throw away the tax advantages for the generation that follows. Your childhood is comfy, and screw the next generation, hmmm?
It's kind of like social security, moving wealth across generations. The kids are at least a good investment; they cost less and aren't just waiting around to die. Better food or additional at-home parental time would do some good.
Next, it is not natural for a woman to have a monthly period. That's a side effect of birth control. Go all natural, and you probably get a couple periods every couple years. You also get adorable little babies and an enormous reduction in breast cancer risk.
There are only a few providers of core Internet switches. The situation is rapidly getting worse, with Huawei (a Chinese company) taking over the market.
Suppose an enemy knows of an exploit, possibly a back door. Suppose they flash the firmware with something bad, possibly just nonsense to make the routers fail to boot.
Suddenly we lack an internet. Most people can't connect to the next town over. The hardware needs replacement, but from what vendor? With several vendors eliminated, you have no choice capable of handling high-speed backbone traffic.
It's not reasonable for the government to do anything more than monitor the internet. To start telling people how to run their nodes
In a competitive world, businesses WILL NOT prepare for disaster unless the executives see that it affects the stock price. Preparing for disaster is expensive, and it seldom pays off. (see also: car industry, banking industry, airlines, BP, failure to protect against natural disasters...)
If we want the internet to keep running, without collapsing during a cyberwar, then we do need to insist on some things. It's like requiring that banks keep some reserve, requiring that oil companies have a means to stop a leak, or requiring that an airline not skimp on maintenance when the competition gets fierce.
Sure the OB will tell you what they charge, and maybe some of the other docs involved. The hospital has no interest in doing so. The best I could do last time my wife and I had a baby (less then 2 years ago) was people with insurance usually pay in this range.
I asked the genuine midwives (non-hospital) and got answers. Last I checked, it was about $2500 to $3500 for the very best. That gets you a midwife with 20 to 25 years of experience, an assistant/substitute midwife with about 7 years of experience, and a helper to fetch things and clean messes. Such a team is capable of handling twins and breach births. Cheaper alternatives are probably available.
That covers everything: prenatal visits (you at their place), practice visit (so they can find your home), false alarms, a birth that could be lengthy, baby registration, and a couple post-birth visits.
Best of all, you're not treated like an item on an assembly line. You get to be informed and you have no trouble being in control. Nobody has a financial incentive to perform extra procedures that could hurt the baby or the mother. Nobody is eager and willing to force the birth (induction/episiotomy/caesarean) in order to get home early. Nobody will use scare tactics to control you. The germs are the ones your body faces everyday at home and would be bringing to a hospital if you went; there won't be any extra-special exotic germs that your immune system hasn't seen before. There aren't any cables or tubes attached to discourage you from moving about while increasing the risk of infection. Things don't go BEEP all night long, unless your home is normally like that. You get the food you like, unlimited visitors, your own comfy bed, and control over the thermostat. You can turn off the lights. You can birth in the best position (usually squatting or crawling) rather than the position that fits standard hospital equipment and doctor expediance.
Did you even bother to read the text you quoted? How about we provide the "unproductive" people with crappy third-rate care?
I don't see how to do that, with or without ignoring the political impossibility.
We license doctors. This means yes/no. It's a boolean value. All doctors within a specialty are considered equal to each other. They are interchangable.
We don't assign ratings. I can't imagine actually having some system where your healthcare plan specifies a maximum doctor rating for you to use. There would be outrage.
Having people choose insurance unrelated to their employer obviously solves that issue, as would paying out of pocket.
Either way though, without or without the stupid employer-provided plans, people are encouraged to work harder. When personal desires like healthcare are provided for free, people give in to their lazyness more.
So, if a person is involved in an accident and needs $100,000 of critical care or they'll die, however with the care they are likely to nearly fully recover and live a high quality life for many decades, we spend the money. It is worth it.
Suppose the person is a criminal. Their mere existance is a loss to society. (they sell cocaine, or they are a mafia enforcer, or they rob people at gunpoint, or they rape little boys...)
Suppose the person is very useful. They are expected to provide millions of dollars of value to society. We could spend much more to ensure they get a better outcome. The bare minimum $100,000 isn't appropriate; we could spend $millions on the valuable person.
That's largely a false dilemma. At this point, for millions of Americans, the choice is between the lower 50% and no doctor at all.
To be blunt and cold, it is not economically beneficial to provide luxury care to unproductive people.
We simply can't provide everybody with the very best, in healthcare or anything else. (think "housing" or "food" if you like) Allowing a lottery to decide who gets the best care is worse than allowing money to decide who gets the best care.
The productive people (those who can afford health insurance) are rightly concerned about losing reliable access to the good doctors.
The care standards of a century ago would be sensible for unproductive people; they'd get no worse than my great grandparents had.
Imagine if we handed out top-quality shelter like government healthcare, by lottery, perhaps with a waiting list. Shelter is a human right, and everybody deserves the best! Just as in healthcare, the country would go broke trying to provide mansions and/or the waiting list would grow as required to ensure that most people die on the waiting list.
Right now, better health care is a mighty big incentive to work harder. People seek jobs that provide insurance and/or jobs that pay enough to make insurance affordable. People are lazy and selfish; they won't work simply for the common good.
The productive people (those who can afford health insurance) are rightly concerned about facing this choice. Right now, they get the good doctor.
To be blunt and mighty cold, it is not economicly sensible to waste good doctors on the unproductive people. The care standards of a century ago would be sensible; they'd get no worse than my great grandparents had.
We simply can't provide everybody with the very best, in healthcare or anything else. (think "housing" or "food" if you like) Allowing a lottery to decide who gets the best care is worse than allowing money to decide who gets the best care.
Imagine if we handed out mansions by lottery, perhaps with a waiting list. Shelter is a human right, and everybody deserves the best! Just as in healthcare, the country would go broke trying and/or the waiting list would grow as required to ensure that most people die on the waiting list.
Right now, better health care is a mighty big incentive to work harder. People seek jobs that provide insurance and/or jobs that pay enough to make insurance affordable. People are lazy and selfish; they won't work simply for the common good.
You're right that the money isn't there, but we can still promise the care. We don't have the stomach for death committees or official rationing. We will refuse to accept the problem.
Of course, the waiting lists will grow as required to ration out the supply. Everybody gets healthcare, except the people who die while waiting for treatment.
Maybe you can bribe your way to the front of the list, make friends with a senator, or claim to be part of some disadvantaged group that needs special treatment. The blackmarket possibilities are endless.
You could put that line almost anywhere without being unreasonable. I think we can agree that it's unreasonable to have 99.999% of the applicants on one side of the line or the other, but beyond that? What about taking only the best 10%, or only the best 90%, would one of those be OK with you?
It seems the AMA decided that the lower 50% are unfit. OK. Well, would you want one of those doctors instead of one in the top 50%? The top 50% is dangerous enough.
It's all lovely sounding to toss out some BS objection to standardized testing, especially given that tests are flawed and TEACHERS cheat for their students, but you haven't proposed a workable alternative.
We need a way to rank students, and we need a way to see if students are learning. We need this to cover the largest population possible, ideally the whole world but we'd settle for "English speaking students in Texas" or "French speaking students in Quebec".
Grades are out. Grades assigned by one teacher bear no relation to grades assigned by a different teacher.
Pretending for a moment that it is possible to fire a non-molesting teacher, we also need a way to identify teachers that don't cause students to improve.
It's really quite impossible to get any improvement in education if you refuse all attempts to measure it. You can shout "we're doing GREAT" all you want, and I can shout back "the students haven't learned shit". It's an argument without numbers, and nothing is accomplished.
Schools, and especially teacher unions, hate being held accountable. They hate numbers, because numbers cut through the bullshit excuses and handwaving. This is why teachers attack testing.
A vaccine is merely supplying your immune system with an antigen to provide immunity in the future.
The body doesn't recognize an antigen with some flawless process. A crude and dangerous balancing act goes on. Many non-ancestors died to evolve the mostly-working mess we call our immune system.
By your logic, any immune response, from anyting, might cause autoimmune diseases.
Pretty much, yes. Nearly always you'll be fine. Depending on many things (your genome, your previous immune system exposure, simultaneous illness, bad luck...) you can get very serious problems.
You're playing with fire whenever you fuck with the immune system. Sometimes it's worthwhile. I'm not keen on taking risks where the benefits are mighty slim. I don't visit northern Nigeria, northern Pakistan, etc.
a test gets us closer to a root cause and thus less credibility for the "vaccines cause autism" idiots
So here we have different gut bacteria, probably caused by and/or the cause of some difference in the way the gut lining works. It's already well known that gut lining disturbances can be autoimmune disease, and it's well known that vaccines can cause autoimmune disease.
Thus, credibility is not lessened. On the contrary, this may end up being a proven link.
Not that I'm saying there definitely is a link at all, but one has to be suspicious over the refusal to do the obvious double-blind study. (and before you say that the link-believers should fund a study, I'll point out that it's not in the typical family budget)
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Above, you argue that marriage tax breaks benefit children, so we shouldn't touch them. Here, you ignore the fact that the maternity and paternity leave granted in Europe are largely intended to help the children.
The tax break helps mom stay home for good. It helps keep the family together.
Maternity leave leads to latch-key kids raising themselves on the streets. Mom has no need for Dad anymore, so she can toss him out of the house and go screw somebody else.
It should be obvious which situation is better for the kids.
I agree: quit the job. Mothers should take care of the kids. (could flip that around, but men don't breastfeed very well)
No daycare worker can provide parental security and love. Kids without stay-at-home moms do worse in life. (education, drugs, violence, those high-school pregnancies, etc.)
producing offspring is much more important (in a long term kind of way). And a society who has foresight would be wise to protect this matter
OK, I agree, but that leads to a different conclusion. The mother should not go back to work. Her child needs her. No day-care worker will love the child like the mother, nor provide the discipline and emotional security that the child needs.
Having a kid is not "abandoning" your job
And neither is going off to Africa for half a year for missionary work? And neither is spending half a year at home playing Everquest? And neither is taking a job with the competition for half a year?
Why does everybody else get hurt
Financial harm to the company hurts all employees. Maybe it's the last straw leading to layoffs or even bankrupcy.
The substitute does not deserve the job. That's why she's a substitute. If she did, she'd HAVE said job.
Look, I've seen this. We all wanted to give the substitute the job because she was way better. Because of the law, we had to let a crummy employee have her job back. Of course, that just means we'll get rid of her in some other way.
European companies are really hesitant to hire people because it's so damn hard to get rid of people.
Places that think they can get away with it will particularly avoid those who seem likely to take advantage of the benefits.
WTF is with people thinking they should get paid for nothing and/or have a right to get back a job they abandoned for half a year? Everybody else at that company gets hurt, especially the substitute worker who'd really like to keep the job.
A woman gets one or two periods, and then she's pregnant.
Roughly 9 months go by with nothing.
A baby is delivered. I suppose you could call that a period, maybe.
Breastfeeding suppresses the menstrual cycle. The woman can almost certainly go 6 months without a period, and stands a decent chance of going 18 months or more.
So there you go. Regular periods are NOT natural. They are a side effect of birth control.
Each kid born, and each kid nursed, reduces the risk of breast cancer. It's a 5% drop and a 7% drop, or the other way around. Assuming every kid is nursed, that should be about 12% to 13% risk reduction per kid. A woman naturally has about a dozen kids. Breast cancer is quite rare in countries where women birth early and often.
BTW, another side effect specific to the pill: reduced sex drive.
No law can be defect-free, but consider the fact that every member of a Gay/Lesbian couple was once a child.
Some mostly-correct assumptions are implicit in the law. Kids are known to do better in intact families. (even kids that grow up to be gay) Kids do better with a stay-at-home parent, traditionally the mom. Hetero couples generally produce kids. Legal issues related to kids (inheritance, etc.) are easier with a married couple.
Even totally single people benefit from marriage-related tax breaks. Oh sure, having benefited as a child it would be mighty nice (totally selfish) to throw away the tax advantages for the generation that follows. Your childhood is comfy, and screw the next generation, hmmm?
It's kind of like social security, moving wealth across generations. The kids are at least a good investment; they cost less and aren't just waiting around to die. Better food or additional at-home parental time would do some good.
Think of the children, Gay ones included.
Sure, why not? We tax alcohol and tobacco too. Are you suggesting that this is a sin tax error?
First of all, consider kids and old people.
Next, it is not natural for a woman to have a monthly period. That's a side effect of birth control. Go all natural, and you probably get a couple periods every couple years. You also get adorable little babies and an enormous reduction in breast cancer risk.
Got a friend? Want more money?
If need be, you can use half the money to rent a friend.
There are only a few providers of core Internet switches. The situation is rapidly getting worse, with Huawei (a Chinese company) taking over the market.
Suppose an enemy knows of an exploit, possibly a back door. Suppose they flash the firmware with something bad, possibly just nonsense to make the routers fail to boot.
Suddenly we lack an internet. Most people can't connect to the next town over. The hardware needs replacement, but from what vendor? With several vendors eliminated, you have no choice capable of handling high-speed backbone traffic.
It's not reasonable for the government to do anything more than monitor the internet. To start telling people how to run their nodes
In a competitive world, businesses WILL NOT prepare for disaster unless the executives see that it affects the stock price. Preparing for disaster is expensive, and it seldom pays off. (see also: car industry, banking industry, airlines, BP, failure to protect against natural disasters...)
If we want the internet to keep running, without collapsing during a cyberwar, then we do need to insist on some things. It's like requiring that banks keep some reserve, requiring that oil companies have a means to stop a leak, or requiring that an airline not skimp on maintenance when the competition gets fierce.
Sure the OB will tell you what they charge, and maybe some of the other docs involved. The hospital has no interest in doing so. The best I could do last time my wife and I had a baby (less then 2 years ago) was people with insurance usually pay in this range.
I asked the genuine midwives (non-hospital) and got answers. Last I checked, it was about $2500 to $3500 for the very best. That gets you a midwife with 20 to 25 years of experience, an assistant/substitute midwife with about 7 years of experience, and a helper to fetch things and clean messes. Such a team is capable of handling twins and breach births. Cheaper alternatives are probably available.
That covers everything: prenatal visits (you at their place), practice visit (so they can find your home), false alarms, a birth that could be lengthy, baby registration, and a couple post-birth visits.
Best of all, you're not treated like an item on an assembly line. You get to be informed and you have no trouble being in control. Nobody has a financial incentive to perform extra procedures that could hurt the baby or the mother. Nobody is eager and willing to force the birth (induction/episiotomy/caesarean) in order to get home early. Nobody will use scare tactics to control you. The germs are the ones your body faces everyday at home and would be bringing to a hospital if you went; there won't be any extra-special exotic germs that your immune system hasn't seen before. There aren't any cables or tubes attached to discourage you from moving about while increasing the risk of infection. Things don't go BEEP all night long, unless your home is normally like that. You get the food you like, unlimited visitors, your own comfy bed, and control over the thermostat. You can turn off the lights. You can birth in the best position (usually squatting or crawling) rather than the position that fits standard hospital equipment and doctor expediance.
Did you even bother to read the text you quoted? How about we provide the "unproductive" people with crappy third-rate care?
I don't see how to do that, with or without ignoring the political impossibility.
We license doctors. This means yes/no. It's a boolean value. All doctors within a specialty are considered equal to each other. They are interchangable.
We don't assign ratings. I can't imagine actually having some system where your healthcare plan specifies a maximum doctor rating for you to use. There would be outrage.
Having people choose insurance unrelated to their employer obviously solves that issue, as would paying out of pocket.
Either way though, without or without the stupid employer-provided plans, people are encouraged to work harder. When personal desires like healthcare are provided for free, people give in to their lazyness more.
You'd be subjecting productive people to the standard of care that we can afford to give everybody, but the productive people deserve better.
Productive: that guy running SpaceX
Unproductive: car thief
Women don't need them unless they fuck guys with warts.
Suggestion: don't fuck guys with warts
So, if a person is involved in an accident and needs $100,000 of critical care or they'll die, however with the care they are likely to nearly fully recover and live a high quality life for many decades, we spend the money. It is worth it.
Suppose the person is a criminal. Their mere existance is a loss to society. (they sell cocaine, or they are a mafia enforcer, or they rob people at gunpoint, or they rape little boys...)
Suppose the person is very useful. They are expected to provide millions of dollars of value to society. We could spend much more to ensure they get a better outcome. The bare minimum $100,000 isn't appropriate; we could spend $millions on the valuable person.
That's largely a false dilemma. At this point, for millions of Americans, the choice is between the lower 50% and no doctor at all.
To be blunt and cold, it is not economically beneficial to provide luxury care to unproductive people.
We simply can't provide everybody with the very best, in healthcare or anything else. (think "housing" or "food" if you like) Allowing a lottery to decide who gets the best care is worse than allowing money to decide who gets the best care.
The productive people (those who can afford health insurance) are rightly concerned about losing reliable access to the good doctors.
The care standards of a century ago would be sensible for unproductive people; they'd get no worse than my great grandparents had.
Imagine if we handed out top-quality shelter like government healthcare, by lottery, perhaps with a waiting list. Shelter is a human right, and everybody deserves the best! Just as in healthcare, the country would go broke trying to provide mansions and/or the waiting list would grow as required to ensure that most people die on the waiting list.
Right now, better health care is a mighty big incentive to work harder. People seek jobs that provide insurance and/or jobs that pay enough to make insurance affordable. People are lazy and selfish; they won't work simply for the common good.
The productive people (those who can afford health insurance) are rightly concerned about facing this choice. Right now, they get the good doctor.
To be blunt and mighty cold, it is not economicly sensible to waste good doctors on the unproductive people. The care standards of a century ago would be sensible; they'd get no worse than my great grandparents had.
We simply can't provide everybody with the very best, in healthcare or anything else. (think "housing" or "food" if you like) Allowing a lottery to decide who gets the best care is worse than allowing money to decide who gets the best care.
Imagine if we handed out mansions by lottery, perhaps with a waiting list. Shelter is a human right, and everybody deserves the best! Just as in healthcare, the country would go broke trying and/or the waiting list would grow as required to ensure that most people die on the waiting list.
Right now, better health care is a mighty big incentive to work harder. People seek jobs that provide insurance and/or jobs that pay enough to make insurance affordable. People are lazy and selfish; they won't work simply for the common good.
You're right that the money isn't there, but we can still promise the care. We don't have the stomach for death committees or official rationing. We will refuse to accept the problem.
Of course, the waiting lists will grow as required to ration out the supply. Everybody gets healthcare, except the people who die while waiting for treatment.
Maybe you can bribe your way to the front of the list, make friends with a senator, or claim to be part of some disadvantaged group that needs special treatment. The blackmarket possibilities are endless.
Who is to say where the cut-off line should be?
You could put that line almost anywhere without being unreasonable. I think we can agree that it's unreasonable to have 99.999% of the applicants on one side of the line or the other, but beyond that? What about taking only the best 10%, or only the best 90%, would one of those be OK with you?
It seems the AMA decided that the lower 50% are unfit. OK. Well, would you want one of those doctors instead of one in the top 50%? The top 50% is dangerous enough.
It wasn't computer skills that got me into a university.
That degree is mighty important for even getting a job interview.
Most people get by with awful computer skills. Arguably, this includes the IT guys and far too many programmers!
It's all lovely sounding to toss out some BS objection to standardized testing, especially given that tests are flawed and TEACHERS cheat for their students, but you haven't proposed a workable alternative.
We need a way to rank students, and we need a way to see if students are learning. We need this to cover the largest population possible, ideally the whole world but we'd settle for "English speaking students in Texas" or "French speaking students in Quebec".
Grades are out. Grades assigned by one teacher bear no relation to grades assigned by a different teacher.
Pretending for a moment that it is possible to fire a non-molesting teacher, we also need a way to identify teachers that don't cause students to improve.
It's really quite impossible to get any improvement in education if you refuse all attempts to measure it. You can shout "we're doing GREAT" all you want, and I can shout back "the students haven't learned shit". It's an argument without numbers, and nothing is accomplished.
Schools, and especially teacher unions, hate being held accountable. They hate numbers, because numbers cut through the bullshit excuses and handwaving. This is why teachers attack testing.
A vaccine is merely supplying your immune system with an antigen to provide immunity in the future.
The body doesn't recognize an antigen with some flawless process. A crude and dangerous balancing act goes on. Many non-ancestors died to evolve the mostly-working mess we call our immune system.
By your logic, any immune response, from anyting, might cause autoimmune diseases.
Pretty much, yes. Nearly always you'll be fine. Depending on many things (your genome, your previous immune system exposure, simultaneous illness, bad luck...) you can get very serious problems.
You're playing with fire whenever you fuck with the immune system. Sometimes it's worthwhile. I'm not keen on taking risks where the benefits are mighty slim. I don't visit northern Nigeria, northern Pakistan, etc.
a test gets us closer to a root cause and thus less credibility for the "vaccines cause autism" idiots
So here we have different gut bacteria, probably caused by and/or the cause of some difference in the way the gut lining works. It's already well known that gut lining disturbances can be autoimmune disease, and it's well known that vaccines can cause autoimmune disease.
Thus, credibility is not lessened. On the contrary, this may end up being a proven link.
Not that I'm saying there definitely is a link at all, but one has to be suspicious over the refusal to do the obvious double-blind study. (and before you say that the link-believers should fund a study, I'll point out that it's not in the typical family budget)