Considering the alternative involves a whole lot of death and/or overly-intrusive governmental control of one's life (e.g. China's "one child" policy)... well, good luck with that.
Feeding people (or not) usually has to do more with local politics and who controls the land.
Sometimes, but...
Sometimes it's a matter of transport. Iowa has no shortage of pork at all, but the cost of shipping it to China before it loses its freshness may sometimes be more than the Chinese feel like paying.
Sometimes it's a matter of not-so-local politics. See also farm bills, agricultural subsidies and price controls coming out of Washington DC - all done in order to keep crop prices artificially high.
Sometimes it's a question of being held back/destroyed on suspicion of disease. Happens a lot, especially with fresh meat and produce.
Depends - sometimes Type II diabetes comes along for the ride when other conditions arise or get worse, and will diminish as the underlying disease relents (my missus has a fairly rare disease where this happens - it also does fun stuff like dump a ton of magnesium into her muscles, causing partial paralytic episodes. Even though her A1Cs are just on the good side of diagnosis, she's stuck with taking insulin anyway because the blood sugar count would go nuts otherwise.)
Sometimes it comes about after dousing yourself with way the hell too much sugar or alcohol your entire life. Sometimes it comes about after your BMI skyrockets past 30%. Sometimes, it's a nsty side effect from anything that happens to your pancreas (e.g. injury.) Sometimes it shows up for no damned reason at all...
They do prescribe some electronic devices and programming (e.g. CPAP machines) to individuals, but in all honesty, this is one step too effing far.
Mind you, my missus is diabetic, but she can control her blood sugar levels just fine w/o being forced to buy/use a smartphone app to do it. Instead she uses a combination of common sense and a meter. So far, it's stayed happily between 98-130, and that's in spite of juggling two different types of insulin to keep it under control (Novolog and Lantus).
Last bloody thing I need is for some doc getting a kickback to push an app onto her phone that the insurance company gets billed $12,000 for:(
Sorta... sometimes they'd toss in Chinese phrases, have ideograms on some of the crates and boxes, and suchlike, but just enough to add a hint of backstory - that is, that the Chinese and indeterminate-but-we-think-Americans worked together to evacuate their populations off the original dying Earth. Only problem is, the utter deficit of Chinese/Asian folks on the show led one to believe that somehow the language made it there, but the Chinese didn't.
Well, with one small twist: China has (at least for millennia) been quite content to consider themselves the center-point between Heaven and Earth (culturally, that's how they'd considered themselves all this time.) With I think like one or two exceptions (one of which involved a Mongol leader wanting a piece of Japan), they've never really done much in the way of projecting power out beyond their own rather well-defined region.
It'll be damned hard to break that kind of ingrained culture - not saying it'll never happen, just that it'll take a lot to overcome the cultural inertia.
Now Space may whet their appetites a bit for it, but I think it'll be just to move out in that direction, which honestly I'm completely okay with - so long as they don't keep anyone else from migrating skyward...
to the point that most program installers offer to put a shortcut on your desktop, which is an obvious sign that everyone acknowledges the start menu is a pit of doom
It means nothing of the sort. The installers offer to put a shortcut on your desktop and in the quick launch menu because they want to be important. But every program wants that, so that's useless. If you always accept the defaults then you'll need to use your desktop cleanup tool regularly because there will be more contents than you can display.
Agreed - it's not a "pit of doom", but because nobody wants their product to sit unused in C:\Program Files* and not get used - that's natural. Interestingly enough, everyone seems to have forgotten that you can "pin" commonly-needed and desired apps to the top of the Start Menu.
Based on the number of people I see with an entire desktop full of shortcuts and files, I refuse to believe that most people feel the start menu works well..
Depends on the person and use case... which varies even with one person. I'll explain:
My 'doze desktop at work has the desktop often packed full of files (no icons, tho') because it's a nice temporary place to stash stuff that I'm working on at the moment - not because I have some enmity towards the start menu (which I use quite often, save for the most common applications I reach for, which in turn reside on the start menu bar). The Start Menu is okay, but I only use it when I'm looking to run something that I haven't used in a long while.
My personal MacBook Pro has all of its desktops 100% devoid of any icon, file, symbol, whatever. Anything applications that I use often have an icon in the Dock. I do this because I prefer a nice, clean desktop when it comes to my personal crap, and because it is (at least for me) far easier and more logical to organize my stuff on the Mac (yes I know that W7+ have "Libraries" that are similar, but for some reason it just seems clumsier to me in there since File Explorer (and many apps) treats them a bit differently, there's no multi-gesture like on the MBP touchpad, etc.)
My work MacBook Air has semi-cluttered desktops, but again, usually as a temporary holding pen of stuff I'm working on at the moment - I'll pack them off somewhere when I'm done with them.
My Linux boxen (at both work and home) have all my personal/work stuff organized in ~/ the same way I organize stuff on the Mac, with links and scripts chucked into ~/bin/* where needed (that is, if not already sitting in $PATH). The Desktops are devoid of pretty much everything since most of what I do is either on a box at runlevel 3, or I log into the already-running GUI just long enough to pop over to tty0 or open a terminal application, depending on how long I intend to be in there.
I'd mention my cheap-o Android phone, which is organized in a different manner entirely, but, well...
Even without acting as a bridge to external people, simply having an educate but non-technical resource on hand is useful.
If you can't explain your project to your manager in terms they can understand, you have no hope of explaining it to the end-users, upper management, budget committees, etc.
This is 10x as true if you're doing UI design/implementation (which is why I still get a laugh out of whoever let Windows 8.x through...)
Like any other business, you, the consumer, eventually do pay for them - in higher (and newer, more devious) fees, lower savings/CD interest rates, and higher loan interest rates.
Don't fool yourself into thinking that you;re getting a free ride.
Employers are required to provide coverage under the ACA. It is a requirement not an option so they don't get to choose what they provide, end of story. In the future they will be required to provide coverage for abortions. Tough noogies.
The Fugitive Slave Act was once law as well - so are you sure you want to continue using the silly 'it's the law so suck it up' argument?
Here's the trick: the ACA is likely going to cost its promulgators control of the Senate this year. Many of its backers are already backing away from it, knowing full well that they will pay for their vote come November. It will also continue to anger a lot more people as it unfolds... the odds of it remaining a law will get longer and longer as its effects deepen... and even Obama's term has an expiration date (and no, I do not see Ms. Clinton taking the baton from there.)
Even now, the ACA's enforcement is rather fluid, with the President changing conditions, exemptions, and applications of it - sometimes every other day, as this or that political group squeals over it hurting their bottom line in some fashion. I figure it'll eventually be neutered to ineffectiveness; all it will take is for a full opposition congress to force the Executive into a corner.
FYI: Religious organizations invented the hospital (as far back as ancient Greece/Egypt), and the Catholic Church runs more of them today than any other organization on Earth. "Private Business" came into the biz way, way late in the game, boyo.
also religious institutions have no problem giving out viagra to men. it is just female drugs that present problems.
Nive strawman - where'd you get it?
Viagra isn't a contraceptive. It is not an abortifacient. Women don't wear condoms - men do.
There are also a plethora of "female drugs" that are perfectly legit by any reading of Canon Law, e.g. estrogen treatments for menopause, HPV vaccinations, Rh-factor incompatibility mitigation drugs given during pregnancy, and etc. The number of other strictly "female" medicines that dwarfs the few you're thinking of - enough to make you completely, utterly, astoundingly wrong.
The catholic church wants to be able to deny coverage to their "secular" employees on the religious grounds.
Wrong - specific coverages are denied, and for obvious reasons. Employers can pick and choose what they will and will not provide to their employees, as is their right. Nobody as a "right" to free contraception.
The catholic church can not dictate how an employee can spend their pay check and they shouldn't be able to dictate what health care options the employee uses.
No one is stopping those employees from purchasing their own health insurance, or from refusing to join in their employer's insurance plan. No one is stopping those employees from buying their own damned pills or rubbers - considering that both are cheap enough, I fail to see what you're so agitated about.
"The newly amended bill eventually passed the House of Representatives at 11:19 PM EST on Saturday, November 7, 2009, by a vote of 220-215. The bill passed with support of the majority of Democrats, together with one Republican who voted only after the necessary 218 votes had already been cast. Thirty-nine Democrats voted against the bill. All members of the House voted, and none voted "present".[27]"
Gotta agree with sibling... most school districts are far more enamored with stomping out all hallmarks of what most of us refer to as the real world.
Can't have harsh terminology, can't have depicted violence... hell, they can't even stand to have some wayward little boy kissing a girl, or pointing a finger at a classmate while saying "bang".
With all the zero tolerance BS going around? I can almost assure you that the censorship isn't coming from some drooling caricature of the "Right Wing" (cue ominous music), but more a result of overly-anxious officials scouring the libraries to expunge anything that could remotely intrude on what they assert is the "best" way to teach a child.
Well, not quite. It wasn't until industrialization and assembly-line manufacturing that we saw user-serviceability. Until then, most of the homemade stuff required that you made an exact replica of the busted part yourself, else it wouldn't work quite right. Doing that took a bucketload of skill.
Actually, it's kinda funny that they're surprised the Mac Pro was repairable.
I've done wild-arsed modifications on the original Mac Cube before - while a bit tricky, even that was doable....maybe PC repair tech really has gone downhill over the past decade or so?
Civil disobedience en masse, to the point where you cannot possibly enforce it. This is happening now with marijuana usage, and will likely end up happening with movies and music, if BitTorrent traffic is an indicator.
You could write the congresscritters (one of my senators --Sen. Wyden-- gets it, but the other 534 congresscritters in DC don't, and some (Hatch in Utah) actively try and make things worse. Too bad the rest either don't care or have been bought off enough to ignore it.)
I'm afraid there aren't many other viable options, outside of a very lucky Supreme Court case.
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Considering the alternative involves a whole lot of death and/or overly-intrusive governmental control of one's life (e.g. China's "one child" policy)... well, good luck with that.
Feeding people (or not) usually has to do more with local politics and who controls the land.
Sometimes, but...
Sometimes it's a matter of transport. Iowa has no shortage of pork at all, but the cost of shipping it to China before it loses its freshness may sometimes be more than the Chinese feel like paying.
Sometimes it's a matter of not-so-local politics. See also farm bills, agricultural subsidies and price controls coming out of Washington DC - all done in order to keep crop prices artificially high.
Sometimes it's a question of being held back/destroyed on suspicion of disease. Happens a lot, especially with fresh meat and produce.
Depends - sometimes Type II diabetes comes along for the ride when other conditions arise or get worse, and will diminish as the underlying disease relents (my missus has a fairly rare disease where this happens - it also does fun stuff like dump a ton of magnesium into her muscles, causing partial paralytic episodes. Even though her A1Cs are just on the good side of diagnosis, she's stuck with taking insulin anyway because the blood sugar count would go nuts otherwise.)
Sometimes it comes about after dousing yourself with way the hell too much sugar or alcohol your entire life. Sometimes it comes about after your BMI skyrockets past 30%. Sometimes, it's a nsty side effect from anything that happens to your pancreas (e.g. injury.) Sometimes it shows up for no damned reason at all...
Agreed.
Damn I'm getting old. I remember when companies would strive to get customers to do the purchasing. :/
They do prescribe some electronic devices and programming (e.g. CPAP machines) to individuals, but in all honesty, this is one step too effing far.
Mind you, my missus is diabetic, but she can control her blood sugar levels just fine w/o being forced to buy/use a smartphone app to do it. Instead she uses a combination of common sense and a meter. So far, it's stayed happily between 98-130, and that's in spite of juggling two different types of insulin to keep it under control (Novolog and Lantus).
Last bloody thing I need is for some doc getting a kickback to push an app onto her phone that the insurance company gets billed $12,000 for :(
Nope the USA let capitalism get in the way..
Sorta... sometimes they'd toss in Chinese phrases, have ideograms on some of the crates and boxes, and suchlike, but just enough to add a hint of backstory - that is, that the Chinese and indeterminate-but-we-think-Americans worked together to evacuate their populations off the original dying Earth. Only problem is, the utter deficit of Chinese/Asian folks on the show led one to believe that somehow the language made it there, but the Chinese didn't.
Well, with one small twist: China has (at least for millennia) been quite content to consider themselves the center-point between Heaven and Earth (culturally, that's how they'd considered themselves all this time.) With I think like one or two exceptions (one of which involved a Mongol leader wanting a piece of Japan), they've never really done much in the way of projecting power out beyond their own rather well-defined region.
It'll be damned hard to break that kind of ingrained culture - not saying it'll never happen, just that it'll take a lot to overcome the cultural inertia.
Now Space may whet their appetites a bit for it, but I think it'll be just to move out in that direction, which honestly I'm completely okay with - so long as they don't keep anyone else from migrating skyward...
to the point that most program installers offer to put a shortcut on your desktop, which is an obvious sign that everyone acknowledges the start menu is a pit of doom
It means nothing of the sort. The installers offer to put a shortcut on your desktop and in the quick launch menu because they want to be important. But every program wants that, so that's useless. If you always accept the defaults then you'll need to use your desktop cleanup tool regularly because there will be more contents than you can display.
Agreed - it's not a "pit of doom", but because nobody wants their product to sit unused in C:\Program Files* and not get used - that's natural. Interestingly enough, everyone seems to have forgotten that you can "pin" commonly-needed and desired apps to the top of the Start Menu.
Based on the number of people I see with an entire desktop full of shortcuts and files, I refuse to believe that most people feel the start menu works well..
Depends on the person and use case... which varies even with one person. I'll explain:
My 'doze desktop at work has the desktop often packed full of files (no icons, tho') because it's a nice temporary place to stash stuff that I'm working on at the moment - not because I have some enmity towards the start menu (which I use quite often, save for the most common applications I reach for, which in turn reside on the start menu bar). The Start Menu is okay, but I only use it when I'm looking to run something that I haven't used in a long while.
My personal MacBook Pro has all of its desktops 100% devoid of any icon, file, symbol, whatever. Anything applications that I use often have an icon in the Dock. I do this because I prefer a nice, clean desktop when it comes to my personal crap, and because it is (at least for me) far easier and more logical to organize my stuff on the Mac (yes I know that W7+ have "Libraries" that are similar, but for some reason it just seems clumsier to me in there since File Explorer (and many apps) treats them a bit differently, there's no multi-gesture like on the MBP touchpad, etc.)
My work MacBook Air has semi-cluttered desktops, but again, usually as a temporary holding pen of stuff I'm working on at the moment - I'll pack them off somewhere when I'm done with them.
My Linux boxen (at both work and home) have all my personal/work stuff organized in ~/ the same way I organize stuff on the Mac, with links and scripts chucked into ~/bin/* where needed (that is, if not already sitting in $PATH). The Desktops are devoid of pretty much everything since most of what I do is either on a box at runlevel 3, or I log into the already-running GUI just long enough to pop over to tty0 or open a terminal application, depending on how long I intend to be in there.
I'd mention my cheap-o Android phone, which is organized in a different manner entirely, but, well...
Even without acting as a bridge to external people, simply having an educate but non-technical resource on hand is useful.
If you can't explain your project to your manager in terms they can understand, you have no hope of explaining it to the end-users, upper management, budget committees, etc.
This is 10x as true if you're doing UI design/implementation (which is why I still get a laugh out of whoever let Windows 8.x through...)
Banks pay for credit card breaches, not consumers
Like any other business, you, the consumer, eventually do pay for them - in higher (and newer, more devious) fees, lower savings/CD interest rates, and higher loan interest rates.
Don't fool yourself into thinking that you;re getting a free ride.
Shhh, you are showing your ignorance since as an employee I earned that benefit.
You only "earn" the benefits offered by the employer in exchange for your labor. If you don't like that, then you can start your own business.
Anything else is the result of an overly-developed sense of entitlement.
Employers are required to provide coverage under the ACA. It is a requirement not an option so they don't get to choose what they provide, end of story. In the future they will be required to provide coverage for abortions. Tough noogies.
The Fugitive Slave Act was once law as well - so are you sure you want to continue using the silly 'it's the law so suck it up' argument?
Here's the trick: the ACA is likely going to cost its promulgators control of the Senate this year. Many of its backers are already backing away from it, knowing full well that they will pay for their vote come November. It will also continue to anger a lot more people as it unfolds... the odds of it remaining a law will get longer and longer as its effects deepen... and even Obama's term has an expiration date (and no, I do not see Ms. Clinton taking the baton from there.)
Even now, the ACA's enforcement is rather fluid, with the President changing conditions, exemptions, and applications of it - sometimes every other day, as this or that political group squeals over it hurting their bottom line in some fashion. I figure it'll eventually be neutered to ineffectiveness; all it will take is for a full opposition congress to force the Executive into a corner.
Religious organizations invented many ways of parting gullible rubes from their cash.
Nice try, but most were free to their patients and supported by donation.
And that was because of the introduction of science and the scientific method.
Oh, you mean the scientific method we use today, which was first invented by gents who were either devout Muslims or Catholic clergy, right?
Protip: step out of your ideology once in awhile and look around. You'll find it refreshing and not so restrictive. ;)
FYI: Religious organizations invented the hospital (as far back as ancient Greece/Egypt), and the Catholic Church runs more of them today than any other organization on Earth. "Private Business" came into the biz way, way late in the game, boyo.
also religious institutions have no problem giving out viagra to men. it is just female drugs that present problems.
Nive strawman - where'd you get it?
Viagra isn't a contraceptive. It is not an abortifacient. Women don't wear condoms - men do.
There are also a plethora of "female drugs" that are perfectly legit by any reading of Canon Law, e.g. estrogen treatments for menopause, HPV vaccinations, Rh-factor incompatibility mitigation drugs given during pregnancy, and etc. The number of other strictly "female" medicines that dwarfs the few you're thinking of - enough to make you completely, utterly, astoundingly wrong.
Well, unless you have an autistic kid and are trying to immigrate to said country, which will mean that you're fucked.
The catholic church wants to be able to deny coverage to their "secular" employees on the religious grounds.
Wrong - specific coverages are denied, and for obvious reasons. Employers can pick and choose what they will and will not provide to their employees, as is their right. Nobody as a "right" to free contraception.
The catholic church can not dictate how an employee can spend their pay check and they shouldn't be able to dictate what health care options the employee uses.
No one is stopping those employees from purchasing their own health insurance, or from refusing to join in their employer's insurance plan. No one is stopping those employees from buying their own damned pills or rubbers - considering that both are cheap enough, I fail to see what you're so agitated about.
That's a monumental pile of bullshit:
"The newly amended bill eventually passed the House of Representatives at 11:19 PM EST on Saturday, November 7, 2009, by a vote of 220-215. The bill passed with support of the majority of Democrats, together with one Republican who voted only after the necessary 218 votes had already been cast. Thirty-nine Democrats voted against the bill. All members of the House voted, and none voted "present".[27]"
(emphasis mine)
ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_Health_Care_for_America_Act
Let's call a spade a spade. Only the Christians support this. Even they'd admit. Hell, they're proud of it.
...really? I was reading a large number of books as a kid in Catholic School that would qualify as censorship material today.
(...as a near-universal example, start with The Bible - specifically, Song of Solomon.)
Gotta agree with sibling... most school districts are far more enamored with stomping out all hallmarks of what most of us refer to as the real world.
Can't have harsh terminology, can't have depicted violence... hell, they can't even stand to have some wayward little boy kissing a girl, or pointing a finger at a classmate while saying "bang".
With all the zero tolerance BS going around? I can almost assure you that the censorship isn't coming from some drooling caricature of the "Right Wing" (cue ominous music), but more a result of overly-anxious officials scouring the libraries to expunge anything that could remotely intrude on what they assert is the "best" way to teach a child.
Well, not quite. It wasn't until industrialization and assembly-line manufacturing that we saw user-serviceability. Until then, most of the homemade stuff required that you made an exact replica of the busted part yourself, else it wouldn't work quite right. Doing that took a bucketload of skill.
Actually, it's kinda funny that they're surprised the Mac Pro was repairable.
I've done wild-arsed modifications on the original Mac Cube before - while a bit tricky, even that was doable. ...maybe PC repair tech really has gone downhill over the past decade or so?
The question is, what can we do about it?
Civil disobedience en masse, to the point where you cannot possibly enforce it. This is happening now with marijuana usage, and will likely end up happening with movies and music, if BitTorrent traffic is an indicator.
You could write the congresscritters (one of my senators --Sen. Wyden-- gets it, but the other 534 congresscritters in DC don't, and some (Hatch in Utah) actively try and make things worse. Too bad the rest either don't care or have been bought off enough to ignore it.)
I'm afraid there aren't many other viable options, outside of a very lucky Supreme Court case.