As people get older, they tend to need to see a doctor more often...
I think even the older people I know go to the doctor way to often. They almost insist on getting prescriptions for every little ailment even those that are entirely preventable. Why is it that it isn't uncommon for even young people to be on high blood pressure medication? There is a growing cultural problem where people think "health care" really is the solution to their problems, when just a little introspection would prove otherwise.
Healthcare, even for older people, should consist of regular physicals to catch preventable disease, avoiding prescriptions unless absolutely necessary for things like infection, and relying on insurance for what insurance is meant to be for--catastrophic illness. For older people who have nothing (no family, no money, no friends, no church, no community), then they can rely on charities, similar to the Shriner's Hospitals for kids, for example. People that simply can find no refuge in society will waste away on their own no differently than they do when neglected by a nursing home that manipulates Medicare and other systems to suck all the money out of someone before killing them anyway. The federal government can't make nursing homes more dignified; already they have their hands in every Medicare recipient's bank account for full financial molestation (I have even heard of bookkeeping errors, where the government took every penny of a "dead" person leaving them fighting an uphill battle of living broke while fighting the government).
It is nice you can afford insurance now, but that may not be true forever.
If insurance were what it is supposed to be, and the medical industry had sufficient checks and balances between people, their doctors, and the insurance companies, then basic care would be affordable to everyone and insurance would not be several hundred dollars or more a month. For the relatively few people that can't spend a few hundred dollars a year on physical checkups, then, again, private charities can fill the void. Why not leverage religious compassion for all it's worth? Do Catholics still run mission hospitals?
I just think that all the woes we see today can be dealt with very effectively without creating a 1,000,000-person government bureaucracy, whose leadership is made up of politicians rather than businesspeople and physicians. Also, privatization also insulates the government from a gold mine of domestic intelligence gathering (the personal medical histories of every man, woman, and child in the USA).
But what exactly is the general justification for socialised defence/policing of people but not of disease/illness.
One prevents invasion from foreign countries and complete anarchy; the other is a domestic issue that can be dealt with independently of the government.
But what is consistent with RMS's message is that much of the fantastic profit in the pharmaceutical industry can be attributed to the lengthy periods of patent protection they get for their products.
Patents are artificial and not really a part of the pharmaceutical industry. The industry takes advantage of long patent terms, of course, because they would be foolish not to. Dealing with inappropriate patent terms can be done independently of establishing a socialist government program.
The high profits seen in the pharmaceutical industry are propped up by the FDA in addition to the patent terms. Again, nationalized health care isn't required to deal with this problem.
I don't want to pay taxes to support building nuclear weapons. I don't want my taxes to support covert wars. I don't want my taxes to support prosecution of non-violent 'criminals.' I don't want my taxes to help bail out failing corporations. I don't want my taxes to fund clear-cutting our national forests. And if I don't pay the taxes, I'd go to jail too.
Exactly. Why are tax dollars going towards imprisoning pot smokers and overthrowning foreign governments, anyway? Tax shouldn't even be collected for these things because they fall outside the bounds of the federal government's responsibilities.
Society? Never heard of it, don't want to be a part of it.
This isn't a matter of alienating one's self from society, it is a matter of successfully tackling the challenges we face every day without resorting to a centralized, inefficient, and corrupt government regime.
The only people with the cowboy mentality, BTW, are among the people who voted for Bush. Yeeehaw!
You can provide your own water.
If I have a well, I don't have to pay a water bill. If I have a septic tank, I don't have to pay a sewer bill. There are probably hidden subsidies, but at least these systems are fairer than an all-or-nothing government-run health care system.
Actually, if people paid by usage for public roads, we would see a much different population distribution in cities. The hidden gas tax isn't the sole source of money for roads, so it is an insufficient motivator to get people to actually want mass transit.
The minimum wage doesn't prevent sweatshops in the US. The expectation for a standard of living and competition among factories for laborers does (look at companies finding themselves priced out of Mexico, of all places, and moving operations to Asia).
The same standards mandated by OSHA would have happened anyway, but for less cost.
It seems that nationalized government solutions are borne out of pessimism and a lack of patience rather than a real justified need.
So do you seek medical attention when you have problems?
Only for problems I can't treat myself. I am not a person to go to a doctor for every ailment, real or imagined, to beg for magical prescription treatments whose placebo effect is more effective than the medications themselves.
Regardless, my point was that with a full-blown tax-supported national healthcare system, my ability to choose private healthcare and not pay taxes towards the national plan will be stripped from me. It's already bad enough to be forced to give money to so many social programs I disagree with, when excersizing a choice to not give money to them literally results in a prison sentence. Only the government can extort money from people without fear of retribution. Does that make you feel all warm and fuzzy?
When Dennis Kucinich claimed that we needed to remove the "profit component" from medicine in Tuesday night's presidential debate, it sure sounded like socialism to me.
I find it intersting that Richard Stallman supports Kucinich. I guess free speach != freedom of choice in medical care. What if I don't want to pay taxes towards medical care I don't want to use? Well fuck me, it doesn't matter, they'll take my money anyway or send me to prison!
...Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA). You never hear about it in the mainstream media because it is a movement to amend the Constitution to say that marriage is between a man and a woman, to hedge any attempts by activist judges to legislate otherwise.
There is no way that this would pass. If it does, then I really need to consider moving to an island somewhere, way out there, to get away from these insane ideas about what the government is for.
Marriage is social in nature and often religious in nature, for the purposes of genetic propogation. If a person finds it their destiny to marry a woman, three men, and a goat, then fine. The government shouldn't stop them, nor would it ever be the government's business to do so.
Also, I'd like to see a sound non-religious argument for forcing all marriages to be heterosexual. What? Such an argument doesn't exist?
"Free trade" advocates these days want free movement of capital and goods, but not workers.
Actually, they should advocate that the recieving countries can choose one, the other, both, or neither. The sending countries either play along or take their business elsewhere. Eventually, countries will figure out what works will do well, and the countries that don't will suffer (and eventually come around).
Right now, I think that being a Christian politician is incompatible with the Constitution of the United States...
It isn't incompatible at all. All a Christain has to do is realize that it isn't the state's job to tell people what to do regarding morality (in most cases). The state has no business in welfare, for example, when people are fully capable of being charitible themselves. The best thing a Christain politician can do is maintain everyone's right to be a Christain by choice and to act as a Christian without fear of persecution. A side effect of this is also allowing everyone the right to be Muslim or agostic or whatever (you just can't allow people to kill each other over these issues). Basically, it is the government's duty to maintain peace, domestically, and to provide for the national defense. This requires less of the government than you might imagine.
I believe the neo-cons have shifted the Republican party away from their libertarian roots and towards facism packaged as patriotism
Do modern Republicans really have libertarian roots? That seems odd, given the blatant disregard for these principles lately. It should be the Republicans, then, fighting the PATRIOT Act and not supporting it. They should be fighting anything that take away Constitutional rights in favor of empowering the state. WTF?!?
This is not a crazed leftist conspiracy either. It is the publically stated goal of the organisation that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al. founded several years before Bush got into power.
So, now that we have an expertly marketed President (the whole bit: jeans, a pickup truck, and an anti-homo slant) how do we convince Joe Blow American to vote for someone else in 2004?
Point 1 I'll leave as an exercise for the reader (it's not like I have all day to puncture liberal theories that have already been punctured quite extensively elsewhere)...
Where? Whether it is money for guns or for food, it is still the US manipulating foreign soveriegn nations. Why can't we be friends while also minding our own business? Why do we feel that shaping the rest of the world is actually doing good for the long term? The American ideology set out in the US Constitution will never die--it is too clearly a good model of government. Why not let other countries discover this for themselves? Why gag them with it with some "I want it yesterday" attitude? Or is all this a matter of "Manipulating Foreign Governments for Fun and Profit"?
Interestingly, a lot of Slashdot readers seem to support extensive government intervention.
Ironically, these people do so while arguing against things like the PATRIOT Act, copyright extensions, the DMCA, etc. Intervention is intervention, but some people don't seen the subtlty of things like nationalized healthcare or drug legislation.
No, it isn't debris. If you look closely, you will see Saturn's rings are made up of billions of white monoliths waiting for orders to attack the black monoliths of Jupiter. The last battle between the original fourth and fifth planets resulted in an astroid belt, but it is likely that Jupiter and Saturn will simply dissipate into a gas belt (not dissimilar to my beer gut...).
Additionally, even a big showing in 2004 without a win can help gain momentum for 2008. Four more years is a short time to wait to save something that is already over 225 years old.
The most important thing is to find ways to speak loudly in the electoral process that there is dissatisfaction with the top two canidates. This will at least get people's attention, start showing up in polls, and become conversation everywhere. That's enough to get the ball rolling.
What do we do when they become the Big One? I don't see any fundamental differences between Democrats and Republicans, right now. There are minor differences (Patriot Act vs. National Healthcare whoopdedoo), but no differences big enought to make a Democratic president better for personal liberty than a Republican one.
What would be a really good thing would be for the biggest third parties to put aside their differences and band together to get someone else--anyone else-- into office. If they could find a canidate to run under a unified platform, at least temporarily, that will do a lot of good to shake up the status quo.
Thanks to media and government hysteria, terrorists have become the "boogie man" that everyone seems to fear.
I don't live in fear. My attitude is more or less "fuck the terrorists; more people died today in car accidents and from crack overdoses."
No matter what our administration says, Al Queda is like a mosquito bite in light of other issues. I'd much rather they let the Palistinians and Israelis blow the shit out of each other once and for all, so we don't have to watch their petty bickering any longer and let civilized people continue with their lives (religious zealotry aside, their pot shots and name calling really do appear petty).
result in a monopoly in anti-terrorist provisions.
I don't think so, at least for most products. Duct tape is duct tape is duct tape. For other products, like gas masks, I would think the market for them is already pretty mature (1.5 million masks for the Army, 150,000 to paranoid citizens). The "anti-terrorism" market would just be a basic extension of the already entrenched military and security markets.
Wouldn't you be supporting terrorism if you didn't use products the government approved?
Actually, yes, because choosing uncertified products allows you to sue their makers! Certified products allow the status quo to continue and fester indefinitely.
So, seeking accountability == terrorism. I think this is a wonderful idea!!!
It's also a lot easier to flip-flop and change your mind when the enemy is "everywhere"
You mean like the government saying "we can say now that we've effectively disabled Al Queda and it is a diminished threat" (sometime earlier this year or last year) and then saying "we suspect that Al Queda is behind the bombings in Iraq." (last week)?
Any certification program worth anything would look beyond this fact and only certify paying customers that actually meet the criteria. A certification program can still keep the money and say "too bad, come back and try again later."
Slashdot Mirror
As people get older, they tend to need to see a doctor more often...
I think even the older people I know go to the doctor way to often. They almost insist on getting prescriptions for every little ailment even those that are entirely preventable. Why is it that it isn't uncommon for even young people to be on high blood pressure medication? There is a growing cultural problem where people think "health care" really is the solution to their problems, when just a little introspection would prove otherwise.
Healthcare, even for older people, should consist of regular physicals to catch preventable disease, avoiding prescriptions unless absolutely necessary for things like infection, and relying on insurance for what insurance is meant to be for--catastrophic illness. For older people who have nothing (no family, no money, no friends, no church, no community), then they can rely on charities, similar to the Shriner's Hospitals for kids, for example. People that simply can find no refuge in society will waste away on their own no differently than they do when neglected by a nursing home that manipulates Medicare and other systems to suck all the money out of someone before killing them anyway. The federal government can't make nursing homes more dignified; already they have their hands in every Medicare recipient's bank account for full financial molestation (I have even heard of bookkeeping errors, where the government took every penny of a "dead" person leaving them fighting an uphill battle of living broke while fighting the government).
It is nice you can afford insurance now, but that may not be true forever.
If insurance were what it is supposed to be, and the medical industry had sufficient checks and balances between people, their doctors, and the insurance companies, then basic care would be affordable to everyone and insurance would not be several hundred dollars or more a month. For the relatively few people that can't spend a few hundred dollars a year on physical checkups, then, again, private charities can fill the void. Why not leverage religious compassion for all it's worth? Do Catholics still run mission hospitals?
I just think that all the woes we see today can be dealt with very effectively without creating a 1,000,000-person government bureaucracy, whose leadership is made up of politicians rather than businesspeople and physicians. Also, privatization also insulates the government from a gold mine of domestic intelligence gathering (the personal medical histories of every man, woman, and child in the USA).
But what exactly is the general justification for socialised defence/policing of people but not of disease/illness.
One prevents invasion from foreign countries and complete anarchy; the other is a domestic issue that can be dealt with independently of the government.
But what is consistent with RMS's message is that much of the fantastic profit in the pharmaceutical industry can be attributed to the lengthy periods of patent protection they get for their products.
Patents are artificial and not really a part of the pharmaceutical industry. The industry takes advantage of long patent terms, of course, because they would be foolish not to. Dealing with inappropriate patent terms can be done independently of establishing a socialist government program.
The high profits seen in the pharmaceutical industry are propped up by the FDA in addition to the patent terms. Again, nationalized health care isn't required to deal with this problem.
What makes you so special?
Nothing. This wasn't my point.
I don't want to pay taxes to support building nuclear weapons. I don't want my taxes to support covert wars. I don't want my taxes to support prosecution of non-violent 'criminals.'
I don't want my taxes to help bail out failing corporations. I don't want my taxes to fund clear-cutting our national forests. And if I don't pay the taxes, I'd go to jail too.
Exactly. Why are tax dollars going towards imprisoning pot smokers and overthrowning foreign governments, anyway? Tax shouldn't even be collected for these things because they fall outside the bounds of the federal government's responsibilities.
Society? Never heard of it, don't want to be a part of it.
This isn't a matter of alienating one's self from society, it is a matter of successfully tackling the challenges we face every day without resorting to a centralized, inefficient, and corrupt government regime.
The only people with the cowboy mentality, BTW, are among the people who voted for Bush. Yeeehaw!
You can provide your own water.
If I have a well, I don't have to pay a water bill. If I have a septic tank, I don't have to pay a sewer bill. There are probably hidden subsidies, but at least these systems are fairer than an all-or-nothing government-run health care system.
Actually, if people paid by usage for public roads, we would see a much different population distribution in cities. The hidden gas tax isn't the sole source of money for roads, so it is an insufficient motivator to get people to actually want mass transit.
The minimum wage doesn't prevent sweatshops in the US. The expectation for a standard of living and competition among factories for laborers does (look at companies finding themselves priced out of Mexico, of all places, and moving operations to Asia).
The same standards mandated by OSHA would have happened anyway, but for less cost.
It seems that nationalized government solutions are borne out of pessimism and a lack of patience rather than a real justified need.
So do you seek medical attention when you have problems?
Only for problems I can't treat myself. I am not a person to go to a doctor for every ailment, real or imagined, to beg for magical prescription treatments whose placebo effect is more effective than the medications themselves.
Regardless, my point was that with a full-blown tax-supported national healthcare system, my ability to choose private healthcare and not pay taxes towards the national plan will be stripped from me. It's already bad enough to be forced to give money to so many social programs I disagree with, when excersizing a choice to not give money to them literally results in a prison sentence. Only the government can extort money from people without fear of retribution. Does that make you feel all warm and fuzzy?
Typically impermissible grounds for making hiring decisions include:
-sex
-race
-religion
-age
What about those who are often unconscious due to too much sex with minority elderly hookers and drunkenness from ceremonial wine?
When Dennis Kucinich claimed that we needed to remove the "profit component" from medicine in Tuesday night's presidential debate, it sure sounded like socialism to me.
I find it intersting that Richard Stallman supports Kucinich. I guess free speach != freedom of choice in medical care. What if I don't want to pay taxes towards medical care I don't want to use? Well fuck me, it doesn't matter, they'll take my money anyway or send me to prison!
...Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA). You never hear about it in the mainstream media because it is a movement to amend the Constitution to say that marriage is between a man and a woman, to hedge any attempts by activist judges to legislate otherwise.
There is no way that this would pass. If it does, then I really need to consider moving to an island somewhere, way out there, to get away from these insane ideas about what the government is for.
Marriage is social in nature and often religious in nature, for the purposes of genetic propogation. If a person finds it their destiny to marry a woman, three men, and a goat, then fine. The government shouldn't stop them, nor would it ever be the government's business to do so.
Also, I'd like to see a sound non-religious argument for forcing all marriages to be heterosexual. What? Such an argument doesn't exist?
"Free trade" advocates these days want free movement of capital and goods, but not workers.
Actually, they should advocate that the recieving countries can choose one, the other, both, or neither. The sending countries either play along or take their business elsewhere. Eventually, countries will figure out what works will do well, and the countries that don't will suffer (and eventually come around).
Right now, I think that being a Christian politician is incompatible with the Constitution of the United States...
It isn't incompatible at all. All a Christain has to do is realize that it isn't the state's job to tell people what to do regarding morality (in most cases). The state has no business in welfare, for example, when people are fully capable of being charitible themselves. The best thing a Christain politician can do is maintain everyone's right to be a Christain by choice and to act as a Christian without fear of persecution. A side effect of this is also allowing everyone the right to be Muslim or agostic or whatever (you just can't allow people to kill each other over these issues). Basically, it is the government's duty to maintain peace, domestically, and to provide for the national defense. This requires less of the government than you might imagine.
I believe the neo-cons have shifted the Republican party away from their libertarian roots and towards facism packaged as patriotism
Do modern Republicans really have libertarian roots? That seems odd, given the blatant disregard for these principles lately. It should be the Republicans, then, fighting the PATRIOT Act and not supporting it. They should be fighting anything that take away Constitutional rights in favor of empowering the state. WTF?!?
This is not a crazed leftist conspiracy either. It is the publically stated goal of the organisation that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al. founded several years before Bush got into power.
So, now that we have an expertly marketed President (the whole bit: jeans, a pickup truck, and an anti-homo slant) how do we convince Joe Blow American to vote for someone else in 2004?
1. It isn't true.
Point 1 I'll leave as an exercise for the reader (it's not like I have all day to puncture liberal theories that have already been punctured quite extensively elsewhere)...
Where? Whether it is money for guns or for food, it is still the US manipulating foreign soveriegn nations. Why can't we be friends while also minding our own business? Why do we feel that shaping the rest of the world is actually doing good for the long term? The American ideology set out in the US Constitution will never die--it is too clearly a good model of government. Why not let other countries discover this for themselves? Why gag them with it with some "I want it yesterday" attitude? Or is all this a matter of "Manipulating Foreign Governments for Fun and Profit"?
Interestingly, a lot of Slashdot readers seem to support extensive government intervention.
Ironically, these people do so while arguing against things like the PATRIOT Act, copyright extensions, the DMCA, etc. Intervention is intervention, but some people don't seen the subtlty of things like nationalized healthcare or drug legislation.
...debris field?
No, it isn't debris. If you look closely, you will see Saturn's rings are made up of billions of white monoliths waiting for orders to attack the black monoliths of Jupiter. The last battle between the original fourth and fifth planets resulted in an astroid belt, but it is likely that Jupiter and Saturn will simply dissipate into a gas belt (not dissimilar to my beer gut...).
Additionally, even a big showing in 2004 without a win can help gain momentum for 2008. Four more years is a short time to wait to save something that is already over 225 years old.
The most important thing is to find ways to speak loudly in the electoral process that there is dissatisfaction with the top two canidates. This will at least get people's attention, start showing up in polls, and become conversation everywhere. That's enough to get the ball rolling.
Big Two
What do we do when they become the Big One? I don't see any fundamental differences between Democrats and Republicans, right now. There are minor differences (Patriot Act vs. National Healthcare whoopdedoo), but no differences big enought to make a Democratic president better for personal liberty than a Republican one.
What would be a really good thing would be for the biggest third parties to put aside their differences and band together to get someone else--anyone else-- into office. If they could find a canidate to run under a unified platform, at least temporarily, that will do a lot of good to shake up the status quo.
The McCarthy era is back, in full force.
Thankfully, we don't have to endure it past December 2004.
Thanks to media and government hysteria, terrorists have become the "boogie man" that everyone seems to fear.
I don't live in fear. My attitude is more or less "fuck the terrorists; more people died today in car accidents and from crack overdoses."
No matter what our administration says, Al Queda is like a mosquito bite in light of other issues. I'd much rather they let the Palistinians and Israelis blow the shit out of each other once and for all, so we don't have to watch their petty bickering any longer and let civilized people continue with their lives (religious zealotry aside, their pot shots and name calling really do appear petty).
result in a monopoly in anti-terrorist provisions.
I don't think so, at least for most products. Duct tape is duct tape is duct tape. For other products, like gas masks, I would think the market for them is already pretty mature (1.5 million masks for the Army, 150,000 to paranoid citizens). The "anti-terrorism" market would just be a basic extension of the already entrenched military and security markets.
Wouldn't you be supporting terrorism if you didn't use products the government approved?
Actually, yes, because choosing uncertified products allows you to sue their makers! Certified products allow the status quo to continue and fester indefinitely.
So, seeking accountability == terrorism. I think this is a wonderful idea!!!
It's also a lot easier to flip-flop and change your mind when the enemy is "everywhere"
You mean like the government saying "we can say now that we've effectively disabled Al Queda and it is a diminished threat" (sometime earlier this year or last year) and then saying "we suspect that Al Queda is behind the bombings in Iraq." (last week)?
How about the the WMD fiasco?
Did the check clear? :-)
.NET benchmark, you know.
Any certification program worth anything would look beyond this fact and only certify paying customers that actually meet the criteria. A certification program can still keep the money and say "too bad, come back and try again later."
This isn't a Microsoft
"raquetball"
This is the correct spelling, even in the USA. I have never seen "racketball" before.
Also, both "cheque" and "check" are acceptible in the USA. It's just that "check" is the more popular usage.