But what else can you expect when you cater to people's ignorance and baser urges?
Well, unfortunately we can't all be superior, enlightened, educated, highly intelligent moral beings like you! I mean, your charitable work and your dedicated service to humanity speak for themselves!
Seriously - why would you favor the current grossly inaccurate and frankly insulting representation of computer geekdom unless you aspire to be a member of the unhealthy albino sausage-party that is Hollywood's representation? [...] These are just kids we're talking about, mostly extremely image-conscious, and expected to choose a career path based on media portrayal and far too little solid information.
Yes, as a scrawny gay teenage geek, I aspired to be a member of the "unhealthy albino sausage-party", because those were the people who wouldn't beat me up and actually tolerate them. The teenagers with "no solid information" about computers were the ones doing the beating because in their "extremely image conscious" world, there was no room for scrawny gay geeks like me. Unfortunately, self-righteous bigots like you will destroy this niche for people like me just like you have destroyed the gay and minority neighborhoods people like me used to live in.
Phonies, all of them. They want to feel like they're changing the world, but without leaving the comfortable 6-digit salary and fancy coffee shops ecosystem.
These phonies are nothing new either. Read Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic.
The US has the money to provide UK-style healthcare out of the existing Medicare/Medicaid contributions. Obama had eight years to do it, instead he screwed up the private insurance market.
the US is 22 trillion in debt and rising:-)
So? The mandatory contributions to the public medical system in the US already bring in sufficient money to provide UK-style healthcare with no deficit or borrowing.
In the UK you get close to those margins for no extra cash; in rhe US sizeable numbers of people can't afford to get anywhere near.
Yes, and as I was pointing out: that's because the public US healthcare system is so damned inefficient. The crony capitalist crap that the Democrats have been working towards, however, is nothing but a massive handout to donors of the Democratic party. Instead of creating a healthcare system like that of the UK, which spends about $4000/patient/year, Obama and Hillary have been pushing for a healthcare system that forces everybody to cough up $12000/patient/year and delivers worse outcomes than the UK.
If you can afford to pay your way in our profit-driven healthcare system, yes - that system sounds worse.
Let's be crystal clear here: the existing Medicare/Medicaid system could cover every single American at the same level as the British are covered by NHS without increasing Medicare/Medicaid contributions at all. Furthermore, per patient costs in Medicare/Medicaid are higher, and outcomes are worse, than in the US private system, even controlling for demographics.
You're right that the problem in the US is with "profits", but it's not the profits of insurance companies. The profits we're talking about here are the profits of the pharma and medical cartels and Democratic reformers aren't touching those. Quite the contrary: they want to mandate that everybody is forced to pay for those profits by law.
While Democrats love to point to universal healthcare in Europe, they are pulling a bait and switch: single payer healthcare in Europe overwhelmingly uses nationalized providers and strict salary and cost controls, but Democrats aren't proposing that because it would upset their biggest donors who make massive profits off the current system.
you know.. we have choice here too. We can get private policies and btw... I have a BUPA family plan, they are a massively cheaper here than over there.
How nice for you. But you have a system in which the government provides a basic level of healthcare through government-run institutions, controls costs strictly, and permits a thriving national market for supplementary and private insurance.
That's not what the US healthcare debate is about. The US healthcare debate is about providing everybody the same top-notch medical care regardless of income without meaningful cost controls on providers. And then people pretend that such a "universal healthcare system" is anything like the UK system.
The US has the money to provide UK-style healthcare out of the existing Medicare/Medicaid contributions. Obama had eight years to do it, instead he screwed up the private insurance market.
It was more of a general statement on how the founding fathers got the free speech thing right, but our election process still has a few bugs.
Our election process works quite well: unlike European parliamentary systems, it has kept us from sliding into tyranny for more than two centuries.
Insert quip about the shortcomings of our essentially two-party system here
Again, if you look at European history, the two party system is a feature: parties like the NSDAP and dictators like Hitler could only come to power under Europe's multi-party parliamentary systems.
If you can afford to pay your way in our profit-driven healthcare system, yes - that system sounds worse. However, if you can't afford a plan with realistic co-pay costs and deductibles (and are unlucky enough to live in a state which rejected the ACA subsidies), you may as well have no insurance at all.
The problem with our health care system for the past half century has been that it hasn't been "profit driven", or more precisely, that it hasn't been a free market health care system. It has instead been driven by government-granted monopolies and socialization of costs.
Being uninsured means either paying completely out of pocket for all your medical expenses, and/or going to the E.R. and defaulting on the bill.
I have news for you: being insured these days also means paying completely out of pocket for all of your medical expenses, given the high deductibles most affordable plans have.
Except for waiting times, everything I said applies throughout the UK/US. As for waiting times, Scotland still has waiting time targets (!) of 6 weeks for diagnostic tests and 18 weeks for referral to treatment. That would be completely unacceptable even as targets in the US. Of course, by US standards, Scotland is dirt poor, about 30% below Mississippi.
And if you're going to make arguments of "but in this part of the UK", I'd point out that if you go by states and regions, you can find always find parts of the US as well that do spectacularly well compared to the rest.
Could be worse: it could be Hillary, and with her new wars, new taxes, and new free speech restrictions.
and our horribly awful healthcare system
If you like the UK healthcare system, it means cutting per-patient Medicare/Medicaid spending in half, making most doctors government employees, cutting the average doctor salaries in half, introducing waiting times of many months, and limiting services to the elderly. If you think that results in a better healthcare system, you're a fool.
Which goes to show that indoctrination by the corporatist UK government works extremely well: independent thought has been pretty much stamped out across the country.
I'm thinking false because they certainly don't have a monopoly in search
I didn't say they had a "monopoly" in search, I said "dominance". Nor did I allege that they are doing anything illegal.
It's like saying Seagate are abusing their monopoly in storage because they told someone their data integrity will suffer if they don't buy drives for backups.
It's more like Microsoft's tying, bundling, and exclusive contracts.
Again, I think Google should be legally fine to try to prop up their awful social network with their popular search engine. But it's also legitimate for journalists to criticize them over it.
I would think that the more useful application for this enzyme is to convert abundant plant derived fatty acids into suitable high weight molecular precursors for plastic synthesis in a post peak-oil economy, as the costs of crude oil derived hydrocarbons becomes more and more onerous.
Peak oil is a myth. We're going to largely switch to renewables within a few decades, and after that, we're going to have a massive oversupply of oil, and that's not even counting the massive reserves in the rest of the solar system. Long chain alkanes need to be cracked before turning them into plastics, and plastics are moving increasingly towards renewables as well.
The original economic model was worker ownership, direct or indirect, of the means of production. The modern meaning of Socialism is that the government takes care of the citizen.
Correct. That new model is roughly fascism: private ownership of the means of production, government intervention in the economy for the benefit of all, large government spending, and "government takes care of the citizens". That's why the new left/right distinction that was briefly marginally useful mid-century isn't useful anymore: socialists and fascists have pretty much merged again. I mean, even your language of "taking care of citizens" means literally that you are advocating "national socialism", i.e., socialism for citizens.
The different treatment by race you complain of is a reaction to racial and sexual inequalities that already exist.
Yes, pretty much the same argument that progressives and Democrats used to justify segregation, eugenics, and racial discrimination a century ago. The Democratic and progressive policies on race have changed because scientific results have changed, but the political ideology is still the same: treat people differently based on race and sexuality using scientific results as justification.
We generally dislike laws about drugs or forbidding medical procedures. Fascists, in general, want all of this regulated.
Under the government-run universal healthcare system you advocate, the drugs and medical procedures anybody can get are completely determined by the government. If you're talking about abortions, Nazi Germany greatly liberalized abortion law compared to the Christian conservative laws that preceded them, for the same reason that progressives like Sanger promoted abortions in the US: to reduce births among populations considered undesirable. Planned Parenthood still targets minorities. Of course, socialists and fascists are not consistently pro-abortion: when they need cannon fodder or worker bees, they like to force women to have children "for the good of society",
In some respects, left-wing attitudes are closer to libertarian. We'd like to avoid laws complicating who can use what rest room, and just let trans people be. We like that same-sex couples can marry.
What you like is power, and us faggots, immigrants, and minorities are just politically convenient playthings for your totalitarian aspirations. It's certainly a step forward that you don't have us castrated or locked up anymore, but you are still just totalitarian pricks, your totalitarianism is simply less violent than it used to be.
As for who is closer to libertarianism, all totalitarians have areas where they want to force society to comply and other areas they don't consider important right now. That's why anybody from neo-Nazis to Christian conservatives and communists at times pretends to be in favor of some libertarian ideas.
Yes indeed, and so we have established that you were lying when you claimed that today's left/right distinction was centuries old.
It's ironic that you would accuse the left of massive deficit spending, when at least since 1980 the right wing has been the party of deficits.
Your reasoning: "There is 'the left' and everybody else is an amorphous mass we leftists call 'the right', and they are all Republicans, or all neo-Nazis, or all corporatists, depending on what kind of propaganda message our tribe wants to get across."
It's stupid to take Mussolini at his word.
Well, yes: he was a progressive, a socialist, and a fascist. Of course it's stupid to "take him at his word".
Look at this from the perspective of a search engine trying to uprank the best content.
Well, that concept has legs. Let's try some more of this.
"Look at this from the perspective of a search engine trying to uprank the best content: if you don't spend half an hour giving them detailed feedback on the pages you visit, they can't uprank the best content; it is therefore perfectly legitimate to give you the choice of either complying or doxxing you and releasing your porn browsing habits."
These are not the same things. The first is true, the second is a twisting of the truth by a journalist to create a false perception.
I don't see what's "false" about the perception. It's reasonable for Google to claim that adding G+ buttons will improve search results, while at the same time viewing it as an abuse of Google's search predominance to push an otherwise bad product.
The EE degree isn't the problem. It's taking out student loans to get a MBA and not being able to find a job to pay off the student loans. I have several friends who graduated with EE in the 1990's, decided to get their MBA after getting laid off during the Great Recession, and now do IT support because they can't find a higher paying job.
Well, it was their decision and now they have to live with the consequences.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, unfortunately we can't all be superior, enlightened, educated, highly intelligent moral beings like you! I mean, your charitable work and your dedicated service to humanity speak for themselves!
Is there any profession that Hollywood portrays even remotely accurately?
Yes, as a scrawny gay teenage geek, I aspired to be a member of the "unhealthy albino sausage-party", because those were the people who wouldn't beat me up and actually tolerate them. The teenagers with "no solid information" about computers were the ones doing the beating because in their "extremely image conscious" world, there was no room for scrawny gay geeks like me. Unfortunately, self-righteous bigots like you will destroy this niche for people like me just like you have destroyed the gay and minority neighborhoods people like me used to live in.
Same reason feminists love to talk about how more other women should be coders but don't want to be coders themselves.
These phonies are nothing new either. Read Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic.
And by "fixing" you mean replacing an inaccurate stereotype with social-justice propaganda that is even more removed from reality?
So much anger and vitriol towards the US... that's not somebody talking who is happy with his circumstances.
You know, I have plenty of reasons to be angry at Europe, having grown up there. But I'm just glad that I'm out of there.
So? The mandatory contributions to the public medical system in the US already bring in sufficient money to provide UK-style healthcare with no deficit or borrowing.
Yes, have you? Maybe you can clearly express what you think that data shows.
Yes, and as I was pointing out: that's because the public US healthcare system is so damned inefficient. The crony capitalist crap that the Democrats have been working towards, however, is nothing but a massive handout to donors of the Democratic party. Instead of creating a healthcare system like that of the UK, which spends about $4000/patient/year, Obama and Hillary have been pushing for a healthcare system that forces everybody to cough up $12000/patient/year and delivers worse outcomes than the UK.
Let's be crystal clear here: the existing Medicare/Medicaid system could cover every single American at the same level as the British are covered by NHS without increasing Medicare/Medicaid contributions at all. Furthermore, per patient costs in Medicare/Medicaid are higher, and outcomes are worse, than in the US private system, even controlling for demographics.
You're right that the problem in the US is with "profits", but it's not the profits of insurance companies. The profits we're talking about here are the profits of the pharma and medical cartels and Democratic reformers aren't touching those. Quite the contrary: they want to mandate that everybody is forced to pay for those profits by law.
While Democrats love to point to universal healthcare in Europe, they are pulling a bait and switch: single payer healthcare in Europe overwhelmingly uses nationalized providers and strict salary and cost controls, but Democrats aren't proposing that because it would upset their biggest donors who make massive profits off the current system.
How nice for you. But you have a system in which the government provides a basic level of healthcare through government-run institutions, controls costs strictly, and permits a thriving national market for supplementary and private insurance.
That's not what the US healthcare debate is about. The US healthcare debate is about providing everybody the same top-notch medical care regardless of income without meaningful cost controls on providers. And then people pretend that such a "universal healthcare system" is anything like the UK system.
The US has the money to provide UK-style healthcare out of the existing Medicare/Medicaid contributions. Obama had eight years to do it, instead he screwed up the private insurance market.
Our election process works quite well: unlike European parliamentary systems, it has kept us from sliding into tyranny for more than two centuries.
Again, if you look at European history, the two party system is a feature: parties like the NSDAP and dictators like Hitler could only come to power under Europe's multi-party parliamentary systems.
The problem with our health care system for the past half century has been that it hasn't been "profit driven", or more precisely, that it hasn't been a free market health care system. It has instead been driven by government-granted monopolies and socialization of costs.
I have news for you: being insured these days also means paying completely out of pocket for all of your medical expenses, given the high deductibles most affordable plans have.
Except for waiting times, everything I said applies throughout the UK/US. As for waiting times, Scotland still has waiting time targets (!) of 6 weeks for diagnostic tests and 18 weeks for referral to treatment. That would be completely unacceptable even as targets in the US. Of course, by US standards, Scotland is dirt poor, about 30% below Mississippi.
And if you're going to make arguments of "but in this part of the UK", I'd point out that if you go by states and regions, you can find always find parts of the US as well that do spectacularly well compared to the rest.
Could be worse: it could be Hillary, and with her new wars, new taxes, and new free speech restrictions.
If you like the UK healthcare system, it means cutting per-patient Medicare/Medicaid spending in half, making most doctors government employees, cutting the average doctor salaries in half, introducing waiting times of many months, and limiting services to the elderly. If you think that results in a better healthcare system, you're a fool.
Which goes to show that indoctrination by the corporatist UK government works extremely well: independent thought has been pretty much stamped out across the country.
I didn't say they had a "monopoly" in search, I said "dominance". Nor did I allege that they are doing anything illegal.
It's more like Microsoft's tying, bundling, and exclusive contracts.
Again, I think Google should be legally fine to try to prop up their awful social network with their popular search engine. But it's also legitimate for journalists to criticize them over it.
Peak oil is a myth. We're going to largely switch to renewables within a few decades, and after that, we're going to have a massive oversupply of oil, and that's not even counting the massive reserves in the rest of the solar system. Long chain alkanes need to be cracked before turning them into plastics, and plastics are moving increasingly towards renewables as well.
And if you're lucky, you may yet grow up to be more mature than your 16 year old daughter.
See the quotes? Do you understand the concept of "sarcasm"?
What's your IQ? 85?
Correct. That new model is roughly fascism: private ownership of the means of production, government intervention in the economy for the benefit of all, large government spending, and "government takes care of the citizens". That's why the new left/right distinction that was briefly marginally useful mid-century isn't useful anymore: socialists and fascists have pretty much merged again. I mean, even your language of "taking care of citizens" means literally that you are advocating "national socialism", i.e., socialism for citizens.
Yes, pretty much the same argument that progressives and Democrats used to justify segregation, eugenics, and racial discrimination a century ago. The Democratic and progressive policies on race have changed because scientific results have changed, but the political ideology is still the same: treat people differently based on race and sexuality using scientific results as justification.
Under the government-run universal healthcare system you advocate, the drugs and medical procedures anybody can get are completely determined by the government. If you're talking about abortions, Nazi Germany greatly liberalized abortion law compared to the Christian conservative laws that preceded them, for the same reason that progressives like Sanger promoted abortions in the US: to reduce births among populations considered undesirable. Planned Parenthood still targets minorities. Of course, socialists and fascists are not consistently pro-abortion: when they need cannon fodder or worker bees, they like to force women to have children "for the good of society",
What you like is power, and us faggots, immigrants, and minorities are just politically convenient playthings for your totalitarian aspirations. It's certainly a step forward that you don't have us castrated or locked up anymore, but you are still just totalitarian pricks, your totalitarianism is simply less violent than it used to be.
As for who is closer to libertarianism, all totalitarians have areas where they want to force society to comply and other areas they don't consider important right now. That's why anybody from neo-Nazis to Christian conservatives and communists at times pretends to be in favor of some libertarian ideas.
Yes indeed, and so we have established that you were lying when you claimed that today's left/right distinction was centuries old.
Your reasoning: "There is 'the left' and everybody else is an amorphous mass we leftists call 'the right', and they are all Republicans, or all neo-Nazis, or all corporatists, depending on what kind of propaganda message our tribe wants to get across."
Well, yes: he was a progressive, a socialist, and a fascist. Of course it's stupid to "take him at his word".
Well, that concept has legs. Let's try some more of this.
"Look at this from the perspective of a search engine trying to uprank the best content: if you don't spend half an hour giving them detailed feedback on the pages you visit, they can't uprank the best content; it is therefore perfectly legitimate to give you the choice of either complying or doxxing you and releasing your porn browsing habits."
I don't see what's "false" about the perception. It's reasonable for Google to claim that adding G+ buttons will improve search results, while at the same time viewing it as an abuse of Google's search predominance to push an otherwise bad product.
Well, it was their decision and now they have to live with the consequences.