I'm not pimping for my own employer here, but they have simply awesome mental health care coverage. I didn't know this until we needed it, but I'm damn grateful (and sold on the value of mental health coverage).
Its possible you are right about yours, but its also possible your HR people have seen this all before, you have several co-workers already in treatment, and you just don't know about it because it isn't the kind of thing people talk about at the water cooler. Your call I guess.
You're completely right about the attitude though. I'm the kind of guy who doesn't like to take painkillers for headaches or after surgery. Its most definitely a cultural thing that Americans, and men in particular, are supposed to "walk it off". But you should consider the possibility that you are being harder on yourself than anyone else.
My advice, for what little its worth: if you have issues with depression, get treatment. If its something mild you can talk out or fix with just CBT or something, a professional should be able to tell. If not, meds are life. I'm serious as a heart attack here.
What it makes me wonder is if the mother did go to a doctor who told her that the symptoms were caused by a "wi-fi allergy" or if she simply deluded herself into thinking it because she didn't want to admit that her daughter had depression. In either case, someone should probably be charged with murder.
Speaking as a parent with 3 kids on anti-depressants now, I'd guess the latter. For our first kid, that "mental illness" thing was a huge hump to get over. Not just for us either. My son just did not want to accept it (he can get like that). He thought it made him "crazy". I finally convinced him to go on meds as a practical matter. Depression has been shown to have a self-feeding effect. Bad episodes can alter your brain to make recurrence more likely. But once we'd gotten over that hump, it wasn't such a big deal with his siblings. So at least his turmoil perhaps helped make the transition easier for them. In my youngest's case, perhaps saved her life.
There's a lot of shame for families involved too, because it tends to run in families. I'm probably only talking about it openly because it appears to be my wife's side of the family with the history of it, rather than mine. You probably won't hear her talking about it this openly.
I went to a funeral of a friend who was suffering and committed suicide this past summer. My group of his friends didn't know about his problems at all, and his friends and family who did were all church people, and were trying to help him "pray it away". What really broke my heart was his note to them apologizing for not being good enough to do so. But they rationalized this was God's Will somehow. (I'm a believer myself, but if God sends you a boat, you don't stay praying, you get on the damn boat. This town is full of doctors who would have helped him in a minute).
So I'm not surprised at all that someone would refuse to admit their kid had depression, and even perhaps in extreme cases transfer all their shame and anger onto some other third party.
What's truly sad is that it doesn't have to be that way at all. So many people die and/or lose loved ones needlessly. Bipolar or Depression is usually just a brain chemical imbalance. Finding the right meds isn't always trivial, but it tends to be effective if you can stay on them. You just have to manage it carefully, kinda like having diabetes.
In fact, it probably has a little too much of them, but they appear to be used correctly.
More than one (you could even argue one) "i.e." is too many. Good writing should have no need for a shorthand construction for "that is to say". If you want to say something, then just say it, damn it.
Actually, yes sometimes there is wisdom in "total nonsense". That's why we loved Yogi Berra. Wisdom, like art, is what you take out of something, and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with what the person put into it.
Case in point are Spam Haikus. Once a lot of people started using Baysean filters on their incoming email, spammers started trying to fool them by just inserting random text that had nothing to do with the ad. Some of these were passages lifted straight from books, but a large amount seem to have been randomly generated phrases using words from nice high-level conversational English. Most of it is dross of course, but there are some really interesting concoctions in there. I took to saving the more interesting ones in a "Spam Haikus" folder.
They typically aren't proper haikus of course, but a lot of them are damn close. I take it the Spam phrase generator was tuned to make its paragraphs fairly close to 17 syllables.
some point FreeBSD ports-team considered doing the right thing for FreeBSD-users, at least, but was afraid, Mozilla will prohibit the use of the name "firefox" as a result — as happened to Debian/Ubuntu [djst.org].
Totally fogetting that... XUL had tons of APIs accessible from javascript, all not accessible from the HTML platform.
But do I want that? Allowing code on websites to muck with my browser's UI toolkit sounds like a really bad idea. Guaranteed first thing some a-hole is gonna do is use it to get around my browser's "no popups" settings.
Oh don't get me wrong. It was damn funny. But it spread the condensed funny of that short "Thicke of the Night" bit out over two whole freaking hours. At most they should have made the shows 1 hour long, but 30 minutes would have been even better. Again, I've seen the idea done both ways (unlike rather a lot of people I guess. Thicke of the Night didn't last more than a year), so I know what can be done. Somewhere in the middle would be great.
So in short, you think Felicia day isn't a camw****
I would never even think of such a term, let alone apply it to another human being (except perhaps it the very most literal definition possible). I will say that I don't personally find her very physically attractive (not my type at all), so I'm fairly confident that what admiration I do have for her work (which is a fair bit) is entirely about her talent, not her looks.
Those are some terrible opinions
You are correct there. That would indeed be a terrible opinion, if I held it. What a terribly shitty thing to think about another human being. Glad I don't.
As someone who uses both at home (where its my choice), I honestly don't see what integration there currently is now.
They are completely separate executables. Perhaps under the scenes they use some common UI code, but if so its not anything I ever interact with. So I really don't see what it benefits me, as a user of either or both, that they are under the same umbrella.
MST3K itself though...well it wasn't *that* great. The only time I can remember watching a whole show was when I was killing time and literally had nothing else to do. That's certainly not a world I'm living in now. Today a show has to be pretty darn good to beat out the other 3 or 4 good shows on Netflix I can never get around to watching.
So yeah, it actually needs to be better.
That should be doable though, with the right format. I can remember they used to do a similar bit on the Thicke of the Night back in the early 80's that was just magical. However, it was only a few minutes long, so it didn't have time to get boring. If you show the whole freaking 2 hour movie, and its a bad movie, yes bits will be boring
FWIW, you can see Felicia Day doing a somewhat similar improv bit on 8-bit co-op games on her youtube show Co-optitude. She's pretty good, but she has her brother to play off of there (and he's probably even better). That should give you an idea of what kind of things to expect from her. For one thing, she can break into song with the perfect inappropriate song.
The ability of Slashdot (and Reddit, etc.) to sort conversations is very much predicated on the existence of threaded discussion.... Jeff's very much in the anti-threading camp
From the person whose question he was answering (who is temporarily sans mod points), this is a very insightful post. Jeff's answer makes perfect sense, if you *assume* the software doesn't strongly support threading. Which Discourse doesn't (mostly).
Now from *my* perspective, as a person who had a choice and has *chosen* to read email/news/forums in threaded mode since the first threaded newsreaders came out in the 80's, it doesn't answer the question at all. There are theoretically loads of other ways to get discussion context independent of how you decide to "promote" upvoted posts. I'd list some, but apparently that was the trap I fell into with Jeff. The point should be that a clever developer ought to be able to come up with some way of doing it, aside from bumping a tiny number next to the post just like its next to every single other discussion post, no matter how great or boring or offensive.
I'm not saying I hate it. It's just "meh". Lots of other online discussion software is already doing that. I expected more.
But again, as I said in the question, perhaps I'm missing something. I was late to the SE bandwagon too, so its not like it would be the first time.
And while we're at it: what sort of stupid standard puts Mars and Jupiter in the same group but in a different group than Pluto and Ceres?
One that looks at this picture of orbits, notices the striking difference, realizes that this clearly puts Pluto and Ceres in a completely different class of objects, with completely different origins etc, and feels like acknowledging that obvious fact?
There was a perfectly reasonable standard under discussion at the IAU conference shortly before they switched what they were voting on: a definition built around hydrostatic equilibrium(sp).
Hydrostatic equilibrium is in fact used by the IAU to designate the difference between "dwarf planets" and "small Solar System bodies". If that were made the baseline for proper planets, we'd have to add somewhere between 53 and 200 new planets. You are talking about changing our list of planets by 2500%, rather than by 13%. Not only would that not be "reasonable", that is in fact the opposite of "reasonable".
Now you could make an argument that this definition doesn't get at what truly separates the TNO's like Pluto from planets (which for me probably has to do with being made from the same primordial rotating disk of leftover Sun stuff). So yeah, it should probably be tweaked, and will have to be at some point. But until we have a better handle on how planet formation in other solar systems works, this definition is probably good enough to be getting on with.
ISIS is essentially an Al-Queda in Iraq splinter that set up shop on its own. The last "I" stands for Iraq. They wouldn't exist today without that mess having happened.
There aren't any good guys. The Syrians who want Western democracy? Laughable
This is wrong at best, and bordering on malicious. You only have to hop on Twitter and follow a few Syrian accounts to see the truth, in all its complexity.
Even saying there are three sides is a vast oversimplification. The simplest way to explain it is that most of Syria has decided that Assad is no longer an acceptable ruler. Other than that, everything is a dizzying array of faction. The two biggest factions are those who disagree and want Assad to stay on, and ISIS. That still leaves out most of Syria though, and that vast swath of people is not united on anything other than that Assad doesn't rule them.
Are some of those people Islamists? You betcha. Some are also supporters of democracy. Some are ethnic separatists. The ones fighting ISIS most effectively right now are Kurds. Some are Turkish clients, and fight Kurds more than ISIS. Some are just psychpaths who like having guns and shooting people. And lots and lots of people just want to live their lives free of fear, and don't really give much of a crap about politics outside of that (just like here in the US).
A lot of the problem is that things look different in Syria depending on who you are.
For most Westerners, we see a three-sided civil war between Assad, ISIS, and "Rebels". We'd probably like to see the "Rebels" win, but not enough to actually do much about it. So mostly we just bomb ISIS territory a tad and leave the other two alone.
For Assad (and his Iranian, Russian, and Hezbolla allies) and ISIS itself, there's the same dynamic, but to them the assorted Rebel groups are the real threat. While ISIS exists, Assad can talk about terrorists, and while Assad exists ISIS can portray themselves as saviors. So Assad and ISIS don't attack each other much, and are effectively allies. They both spend most of their effort attacking the same rebel areas.
For Russians, Assad has been a friend, and everyone against him is a "terrorist", backed by the west. If Assad goes, so does their influence. So they are bombing Assad's biggest threat, the non-ISIS "terrorists".
For Turks, there's Assad, ISIS, Kurdish "terrorists", and everyone else. As far as they are concerned, the Kurd "terrorists" (some of who also operate within Turkey) are the real problem, so that's who they are attacking. Nevermind that Kurdish forces are the ones that have been most effective against ISIS. ISIS isn't Turkey's main problem, Kurds with guns are. Turks also have some armed groups in Syria they are supporting. Since Russia has been bombing that area, Turkey can't be particularly happy with Russia right now, and would be only too happy to shoot down any Russian that dips so much as a toe into Turkish territory.
So basically, if you live in a "Rebel" area, everyone except "the West" is attacking you, and the West isn't doing a whole lot of attacking. Which is why there are now millions of refugees looking to go to the West.
That actually is a deceptively good question. Probably the best answer that can be given is that you have to use your head. Trying to make an absolute rule that can be followed brainlessly on one side or the other (eg: "We stay out no matter what" or "We go hard with troops to preempt any possible future problem") is only going to lead to utter disasters (Syria and Iraq respectively).
Probably the best recent model is Libya. There when it became clear the people would no longer accept their leader, and he was prepared to commit military troops against civilians to enforce his rule anyway, we did what needed to be done. Khadaffi had tanks on the move to a civilian city when we intervened. Yes, Libya is not a peaceful democratic paradise now, but at least its problems are now mostly its problems and not ours. (and if you're looking for guns that cause sunshine and rainbows to erupt, I'd argue you need to start much earlier and use much more subtle methods).
In Syria with Assad's years of barrel-bombing civilians, you see a nice alternative-universe Libya where we never intervened hard enough to force the ruler out.
Didn't we elect someone to get us the hell out of some sandy region where everyone hates everyone else
...and ironicly, staying out of it is exactly what got us into this position. That's the problem with being the USA. We have treaty commitments (eg: Turkey is a NATO member we are pledged to defend, as is France), and letting situations fester until they start to spill over onto our allies only means things will be 100x worse when we are finally forced to get involved.
On paper it might sound nice, but ignoring the nasty political swamps of the world is simply not an option for the US.
I'm talking about competition in real medicine,...Yes, we need exactly the ability to call around and get a better price.
I don't see how that could possibly work. As someone with a family of 5, almost all of my encounters with the US medical system are along the lines of "OMG, we have to go to the hospital NOW." or "your {relative} had an accident, and was taken to {hospital X}" (which is almost always the nearest one physically capable of performing the required service). Nowhere in there is a good opportunity (and sometimes any opportunity at all) to shop around for a better ambulance service or emergency health provider.
This is what economists call a "captive market". In such a market, there can be no real competition. Everything is a "take it or leave it" proposition. Against life-or-death choices, that's no choice at all. So this pretend "free market" ends up just being a system to allow providers to make however much they think their unfortunate users can afford.
Yes, for non-emergency things its different, but its the emergency services that are costing all the money.
In general you physically can't have a free market in health care. Basic economics says its not an option.
Slashdot Mirror
That's so sad.
I'm not pimping for my own employer here, but they have simply awesome mental health care coverage. I didn't know this until we needed it, but I'm damn grateful (and sold on the value of mental health coverage).
Its possible you are right about yours, but its also possible your HR people have seen this all before, you have several co-workers already in treatment, and you just don't know about it because it isn't the kind of thing people talk about at the water cooler. Your call I guess.
You're completely right about the attitude though. I'm the kind of guy who doesn't like to take painkillers for headaches or after surgery. Its most definitely a cultural thing that Americans, and men in particular, are supposed to "walk it off". But you should consider the possibility that you are being harder on yourself than anyone else.
My advice, for what little its worth: if you have issues with depression, get treatment. If its something mild you can talk out or fix with just CBT or something, a professional should be able to tell. If not, meds are life. I'm serious as a heart attack here.
What it makes me wonder is if the mother did go to a doctor who told her that the symptoms were caused by a "wi-fi allergy" or if she simply deluded herself into thinking it because she didn't want to admit that her daughter had depression. In either case, someone should probably be charged with murder.
Speaking as a parent with 3 kids on anti-depressants now, I'd guess the latter. For our first kid, that "mental illness" thing was a huge hump to get over. Not just for us either. My son just did not want to accept it (he can get like that). He thought it made him "crazy". I finally convinced him to go on meds as a practical matter. Depression has been shown to have a self-feeding effect. Bad episodes can alter your brain to make recurrence more likely. But once we'd gotten over that hump, it wasn't such a big deal with his siblings. So at least his turmoil perhaps helped make the transition easier for them. In my youngest's case, perhaps saved her life.
There's a lot of shame for families involved too, because it tends to run in families. I'm probably only talking about it openly because it appears to be my wife's side of the family with the history of it, rather than mine. You probably won't hear her talking about it this openly.
I went to a funeral of a friend who was suffering and committed suicide this past summer. My group of his friends didn't know about his problems at all, and his friends and family who did were all church people, and were trying to help him "pray it away". What really broke my heart was his note to them apologizing for not being good enough to do so. But they rationalized this was God's Will somehow. (I'm a believer myself, but if God sends you a boat, you don't stay praying, you get on the damn boat. This town is full of doctors who would have helped him in a minute).
So I'm not surprised at all that someone would refuse to admit their kid had depression, and even perhaps in extreme cases transfer all their shame and anger onto some other third party.
What's truly sad is that it doesn't have to be that way at all. So many people die and/or lose loved ones needlessly. Bipolar or Depression is usually just a brain chemical imbalance. Finding the right meds isn't always trivial, but it tends to be effective if you can stay on them. You just have to manage it carefully, kinda like having diabetes.
In fact, it probably has a little too much of them, but they appear to be used correctly.
More than one (you could even argue one) "i.e." is too many. Good writing should have no need for a shorthand construction for "that is to say". If you want to say something, then just say it, damn it.
Actually, yes sometimes there is wisdom in "total nonsense". That's why we loved Yogi Berra. Wisdom, like art, is what you take out of something, and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with what the person put into it.
Case in point are Spam Haikus. Once a lot of people started using Baysean filters on their incoming email, spammers started trying to fool them by just inserting random text that had nothing to do with the ad. Some of these were passages lifted straight from books, but a large amount seem to have been randomly generated phrases using words from nice high-level conversational English. Most of it is dross of course, but there are some really interesting concoctions in there. I took to saving the more interesting ones in a "Spam Haikus" folder.
They typically aren't proper haikus of course, but a lot of them are damn close. I take it the Spam phrase generator was tuned to make its paragraphs fairly close to 17 syllables.
some point FreeBSD ports-team considered doing the right thing for FreeBSD-users, at least, but was afraid, Mozilla will prohibit the use of the name "firefox" as a result — as happened to Debian/Ubuntu [djst.org].
Ahhh. IceWeasel rules.
Totally fogetting that ... XUL had tons of APIs accessible from javascript, all not accessible from the HTML platform.
But do I want that? Allowing code on websites to muck with my browser's UI toolkit sounds like a really bad idea. Guaranteed first thing some a-hole is gonna do is use it to get around my browser's "no popups" settings.
Oh don't get me wrong. It was damn funny. But it spread the condensed funny of that short "Thicke of the Night" bit out over two whole freaking hours. At most they should have made the shows 1 hour long, but 30 minutes would have been even better. Again, I've seen the idea done both ways (unlike rather a lot of people I guess. Thicke of the Night didn't last more than a year), so I know what can be done. Somewhere in the middle would be great.
So in short, you think Felicia day isn't a camw****
I would never even think of such a term, let alone apply it to another human being (except perhaps it the very most literal definition possible). I will say that I don't personally find her very physically attractive (not my type at all), so I'm fairly confident that what admiration I do have for her work (which is a fair bit) is entirely about her talent, not her looks.
Those are some terrible opinions
You are correct there. That would indeed be a terrible opinion, if I held it. What a terribly shitty thing to think about another human being. Glad I don't.
As someone who uses both at home (where its my choice), I honestly don't see what integration there currently is now.
They are completely separate executables. Perhaps under the scenes they use some common UI code, but if so its not anything I ever interact with. So I really don't see what it benefits me, as a user of either or both, that they are under the same umbrella.
MST3K itself though...well it wasn't *that* great. The only time I can remember watching a whole show was when I was killing time and literally had nothing else to do. That's certainly not a world I'm living in now. Today a show has to be pretty darn good to beat out the other 3 or 4 good shows on Netflix I can never get around to watching.
So yeah, it actually needs to be better.
That should be doable though, with the right format. I can remember they used to do a similar bit on the Thicke of the Night back in the early 80's that was just magical. However, it was only a few minutes long, so it didn't have time to get boring. If you show the whole freaking 2 hour movie, and its a bad movie, yes bits will be boring
FWIW, you can see Felicia Day doing a somewhat similar improv bit on 8-bit co-op games on her youtube show Co-optitude. She's pretty good, but she has her brother to play off of there (and he's probably even better). That should give you an idea of what kind of things to expect from her. For one thing, she can break into song with the perfect inappropriate song.
But Discourse is, and that's what we are talking about here.
The ability of Slashdot (and Reddit, etc.) to sort conversations is very much predicated on the existence of threaded discussion. ... Jeff's very much in the anti-threading camp
From the person whose question he was answering (who is temporarily sans mod points), this is a very insightful post. Jeff's answer makes perfect sense, if you *assume* the software doesn't strongly support threading. Which Discourse doesn't (mostly).
Now from *my* perspective, as a person who had a choice and has *chosen* to read email/news/forums in threaded mode since the first threaded newsreaders came out in the 80's, it doesn't answer the question at all. There are theoretically loads of other ways to get discussion context independent of how you decide to "promote" upvoted posts. I'd list some, but apparently that was the trap I fell into with Jeff. The point should be that a clever developer ought to be able to come up with some way of doing it, aside from bumping a tiny number next to the post just like its next to every single other discussion post, no matter how great or boring or offensive.
I'm not saying I hate it. It's just "meh". Lots of other online discussion software is already doing that. I expected more.
But again, as I said in the question, perhaps I'm missing something. I was late to the SE bandwagon too, so its not like it would be the first time.
And while we're at it: what sort of stupid standard puts Mars and Jupiter in the same group but in a different group than Pluto and Ceres?
One that looks at this picture of orbits, notices the striking difference, realizes that this clearly puts Pluto and Ceres in a completely different class of objects, with completely different origins etc, and feels like acknowledging that obvious fact?
There was a perfectly reasonable standard under discussion at the IAU conference shortly before they switched what they were voting on: a definition built around hydrostatic equilibrium(sp).
Hydrostatic equilibrium is in fact used by the IAU to designate the difference between "dwarf planets" and "small Solar System bodies". If that were made the baseline for proper planets, we'd have to add somewhere between 53 and 200 new planets. You are talking about changing our list of planets by 2500%, rather than by 13%. Not only would that not be "reasonable", that is in fact the opposite of "reasonable".
Now you could make an argument that this definition doesn't get at what truly separates the TNO's like Pluto from planets (which for me probably has to do with being made from the same primordial rotating disk of leftover Sun stuff). So yeah, it should probably be tweaked, and will have to be at some point. But until we have a better handle on how planet formation in other solar systems works, this definition is probably good enough to be getting on with.
ISIS is essentially an Al-Queda in Iraq splinter that set up shop on its own. The last "I" stands for Iraq. They wouldn't exist today without that mess having happened.
There aren't any good guys. The Syrians who want Western democracy? Laughable
This is wrong at best, and bordering on malicious. You only have to hop on Twitter and follow a few Syrian accounts to see the truth, in all its complexity.
Even saying there are three sides is a vast oversimplification. The simplest way to explain it is that most of Syria has decided that Assad is no longer an acceptable ruler. Other than that, everything is a dizzying array of faction. The two biggest factions are those who disagree and want Assad to stay on, and ISIS. That still leaves out most of Syria though, and that vast swath of people is not united on anything other than that Assad doesn't rule them.
Are some of those people Islamists? You betcha. Some are also supporters of democracy. Some are ethnic separatists. The ones fighting ISIS most effectively right now are Kurds. Some are Turkish clients, and fight Kurds more than ISIS. Some are just psychpaths who like having guns and shooting people. And lots and lots of people just want to live their lives free of fear, and don't really give much of a crap about politics outside of that (just like here in the US).
A lot of the problem is that things look different in Syria depending on who you are.
For most Westerners, we see a three-sided civil war between Assad, ISIS, and "Rebels". We'd probably like to see the "Rebels" win, but not enough to actually do much about it. So mostly we just bomb ISIS territory a tad and leave the other two alone.
For Assad (and his Iranian, Russian, and Hezbolla allies) and ISIS itself, there's the same dynamic, but to them the assorted Rebel groups are the real threat. While ISIS exists, Assad can talk about terrorists, and while Assad exists ISIS can portray themselves as saviors. So Assad and ISIS don't attack each other much, and are effectively allies. They both spend most of their effort attacking the same rebel areas.
For Russians, Assad has been a friend, and everyone against him is a "terrorist", backed by the west. If Assad goes, so does their influence. So they are bombing Assad's biggest threat, the non-ISIS "terrorists".
For Turks, there's Assad, ISIS, Kurdish "terrorists", and everyone else. As far as they are concerned, the Kurd "terrorists" (some of who also operate within Turkey) are the real problem, so that's who they are attacking. Nevermind that Kurdish forces are the ones that have been most effective against ISIS. ISIS isn't Turkey's main problem, Kurds with guns are. Turks also have some armed groups in Syria they are supporting. Since Russia has been bombing that area, Turkey can't be particularly happy with Russia right now, and would be only too happy to shoot down any Russian that dips so much as a toe into Turkish territory.
So basically, if you live in a "Rebel" area, everyone except "the West" is attacking you, and the West isn't doing a whole lot of attacking. Which is why there are now millions of refugees looking to go to the West.
What's the line then?
That actually is a deceptively good question. Probably the best answer that can be given is that you have to use your head. Trying to make an absolute rule that can be followed brainlessly on one side or the other (eg: "We stay out no matter what" or "We go hard with troops to preempt any possible future problem") is only going to lead to utter disasters (Syria and Iraq respectively).
Probably the best recent model is Libya. There when it became clear the people would no longer accept their leader, and he was prepared to commit military troops against civilians to enforce his rule anyway, we did what needed to be done. Khadaffi had tanks on the move to a civilian city when we intervened. Yes, Libya is not a peaceful democratic paradise now, but at least its problems are now mostly its problems and not ours. (and if you're looking for guns that cause sunshine and rainbows to erupt, I'd argue you need to start much earlier and use much more subtle methods).
In Syria with Assad's years of barrel-bombing civilians, you see a nice alternative-universe Libya where we never intervened hard enough to force the ruler out.
Didn't we elect someone to get us the hell out of some sandy region where everyone hates everyone else
...and ironicly, staying out of it is exactly what got us into this position. That's the problem with being the USA. We have treaty commitments (eg: Turkey is a NATO member we are pledged to defend, as is France), and letting situations fester until they start to spill over onto our allies only means things will be 100x worse when we are finally forced to get involved.
On paper it might sound nice, but ignoring the nasty political swamps of the world is simply not an option for the US.
Nah, they never say that. Instead, they paste the entire text for the homework problem in the text box verbatim, then hit "post".
Whatever we do, we must not let ISIS find out that Ann Coulter has the secret to achieving a working Red Mercury weapon.
Nobody watches CNN at home. Their entire viewership consists of people stuck waiting in airport terminals and Doctors' offices.
Yup. The All Drug Olympics
In the latter case, I don't see bombing helping at all, and in the former I suppose it might help, but would essentially be a crime against humanity.
I'm talking about competition in real medicine,...Yes, we need exactly the ability to call around and get a better price.
I don't see how that could possibly work. As someone with a family of 5, almost all of my encounters with the US medical system are along the lines of "OMG, we have to go to the hospital NOW." or "your {relative} had an accident, and was taken to {hospital X}" (which is almost always the nearest one physically capable of performing the required service). Nowhere in there is a good opportunity (and sometimes any opportunity at all) to shop around for a better ambulance service or emergency health provider.
This is what economists call a "captive market". In such a market, there can be no real competition. Everything is a "take it or leave it" proposition. Against life-or-death choices, that's no choice at all. So this pretend "free market" ends up just being a system to allow providers to make however much they think their unfortunate users can afford.
Yes, for non-emergency things its different, but its the emergency services that are costing all the money.
In general you physically can't have a free market in health care. Basic economics says its not an option.
We know you don't read TFA anyway. So really, why bother linking to it at all?
(For those of you who "are new here" and actually want to read it, the article is available here on OpenSource.com