The US system relentlessly drags both parties to the center of the electorate. The parliamentary systems of much of the world allow disproportionate influence by the smaller parties that make up the ruling coalition. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. Don't forget that the people that wrote the Constitution knew exactly how Westminster worked and consciously rejected that model.
I'm scared to get tested, because if I do have it, I may never get any form of medical care again
I'm going to assume you meant "health insurance" rather than "medical care" here. Glaucoma isn't going to get you rejected, especially if it's under control, but you also have another option if you want to be paranoid: pay cash and use a fake name when you get tested. If positive, stress that you are paying cash for your meds and then use a fake name at the pharmacy.
This is somewhat offtopic, but it's also worth noting that when you buy (e.g.) a Lexus ES (rather than a Toyota Camry) you get a made-in-Japan vehicle instead of a made-in-America vehicle. The trim is a major part of the price difference, but it's not the only thing that changes.
Actually, it's called "comprehensive" - as I noted, I have one vehicle with it and one without, so I'm pretty familiar with the different types (including uninsured motorist coverage). However, the liability coverage is for the driver, not the car. My liability coverage covers any vehicle I drive - mine, my wife's, a rental, a friend's. It's not attached to the car at all - is your state's policy just some odd means of preventing the buy-insurance-register-car-cancel-insurance gambit?
Technically, they can't demand ID for someone on foot. They can demand to know your identity, and they can detain you for long enough to confirm it. Of course, that detention will occur downtown, and when they let you out 48 hours later they're not going to take you back to where you were before...
I think I'm missing something: are you telling me that Florida requires you to insure a car, rather than a driver? I have to insure my car - it's a lease, it actually belongs to Toyota - but my wife's ten-year-old Tahoe is a completely uninsured vehicle. She has insurance, but it doesn't. If she runs off the road and smacks it into a ditch, that's too-bad-so-sad for us.
And if it happened today, you would have had to cope not only with the loss of a child but with being hounded by the media and other parents for being so negligent. You might even face criminal charges. Look at Arlington's standards for when children can be unsupervised. And they think that is the minimum acceptable oversight.
Actually, you should do that every time that you are approached by the police, whether or not you have a question why they approached you. And your response should always be silence or departure, depending on whether or not you have been formally detained.
If you want to talk about things that have actual, tangible, real value, there aren't many. Nonperishable foodstuffs, potable water (or water that can be made potable by simple mechanisms like boiling or chlorine), weapons and ammunition, fuel, shelter. Possibly land, although it may have to be defended. Everything else is icing on the cake. Even these are potentially quite arbitrary - in southern Louisiana, water that is safe to drink after boiling is essentially everywhere. In Nevada, it's a very different story.
Ugh. Had a nice long response written to you, Firefox died. Short version: your links are long on opinion and short on fact. In particular, just because 82 stores close in the two years after WM shows up doesn't tell you anything about how many stores were closed in the two years previous to its arrival, and it doesn't take into account the fact that people who save money by shopping at Wally World have more money in their pockets for other things. I suspect, though I cannot know (because none of the studies are actually linked to), that they looked at clothing, grocery, electronics, etc., retailers and ignored the possibility that people who save money might choose to buy categories of goods that would not previously have been affordable to them.
The stores in small towns that die when WM shows up mostly suck. In my city, I can save about 15% on groceries by shopping at Wal-Mart instead of Kroger (which isn't a mom-and-pop operation by any stretch of the imagination). By comparison to small-town grocery stores, it's even better savings combined with a far superior selection. I do not weep for Piggly-Wiggly any more than I do for buggy whip makers.
As for books, you like paper in your hand, right away, and the kind of advice that you can get if you go to, say, City Lights. That's absolutely a better experience than Amazon. But here in flyover country, we don't have the option to meet the authors - they don't come here. The independent bookstores have always had poor selections (and I'm in my late 30s, old enough to remember what buying books was like before the Internet was anything more than an academic curiosity). My choices are to be a solitary reader, convince my wife or one of my friends to read a book so we can talk about it, or go online to find people to talk about it with. And I love-love-love my Kindle. For 95% of my reading, it's better than the paper copy. My wife and I don't even buy paper books anymore if the ebook is available
No, I haven't. I live in a small market; the "authors" who do book talks here are people who self-publish. Amazon actually means that I'm not limited to bestseller-of-the-week when I want to find something to read - and its suggestions and reader reviews are at least as good as (if not better than) serendipity at the average bookstore.
do you drive several miles out of your way to save three cents a gallon on gas?
No, because I'm not an idiot. But if I'm going to be driving past a cheap gas station anyway, I'll wait.
the Wal-Mart problem
Wal-Mart is a godsend for people who live in actual, non-quaint small towns all over the country: it provides goods of surprisingly high quality for very good prices, it's open seven days a week (if not 24 hours a day), and it's generally thought of as a good company to work for by those who actually work there.
Some people just don't get the rewards. I've done pretty intense physical training in my life (the first four weeks of football practice in high school always resulted in a 10-15 pound weight loss despite eating as much as I wanted to of anything I wanted to) and while I can definitely say that I'm a happier person generally if I exercise a lot, the exercise itself actually makes me feel like crap.
That's definitely tinfoil hat territory. Why don't you just ask your doctor if s/he is paid by any drug companies? I'm not, I never have been, and the most valuable thing I've ever gotten from a drug company was a dinner worth about $50 while I was in residency.
The first rule of jury nullification is that you don't talk about jury nullification - at least, don't talk about it if you actually intend to do it. "I'm not going to convict him, I think the cop was an unreliable witness and perhaps planted the drugs" is not subject to review by anyone.
skids said, more or less, "American consumers are idiots. They buy junk food and crappy cigarette lighters. How do you explain that?" I replied with the sort of simple answers that ought to be given every time someone throws out overblown rhetorical questions - junk food is cheap and satisfying, and low-quality goods often survive because they will last long enough - my food processor, for example, is a cheap piece of junk, but it cost a tenth as much as a good Cuisinart and clearly proved that we don't use one often enough to justify buying a nice one. I'm not sure how any of that qualifies as anything other than simple sense.
Now, if you want to talk about the banking crisis, we could probably have an interesting but utterly off-topic discussion about that. I would say that Murdoch actually has a point - the housing business was over-regulated, forced to cheapen its standards so that people who would never have qualified for a mortgage 40 years ago could get one. What he doesn't mention is that the mortgage industry suffered from a severe lack of enforcement - for starters, witness that neither Angelo Mozilo nor the legions of politicians to whom he gave sweetheart deals are in jail. SarbOx, nominally crafted in response to Enron (which was really just a sophisticated criminal fraud and should have been prosecuted as such), went so far in increasing the reporting requirements for public companies that it pushed all sorts of companies to become privately held - companies that ordinary people (and their mutual funds) used to be able to buy a piece of are now available only to the very wealthy. That's a massive negative for the public. Not only that, SarbOx probably would not have exposed what was going on at Enron any earlier, because they were already breaking the law!
You think library books explain the nigh-religious fervor with which people have sworn on here that they'll never buy a book reader that doesn't support ePub? Not to mention that those library books are going to have DRM...
If you turn the wireless off, he'll never know it exists. You don't even have to register it to an account in order to use it. Sideloads work just fine. It's yours to do with as you please.
What Amazon should do instead is get the Kindle to work with the epub format, add a SD card slot, so if someone wants 32 GB, they can have it. Since Amazon also has a decent cloud store, why not offer to stream/download from that as well? This doesn't need anything fancy on the screen, although AT&T may not like Whispernet being used for this.
Money, money, money: Amazon has no reason to put things in ePub because it owns the Mobipocket format and its DRM. (However, since Mobipocket is a clearly-described standard, I really can't figure out what it is that people want to do with ePub that they can't with Mobi - except check out library books.) Adding an SD slot costs money, and Amazon has been absolutely dedicated to getting the price down ASAP (it's almost certain that the device will experience a huge jump in purchases once it can be sold below $100). And streaming over Whispernet will never happen because Amazon has to pay AT&T for all that data usage - they'd have to charge a per-byte fee if it ever were used for anything more than book delivery and the very occasional Wikipedia lookup.
The people who vote for that party that claims to hate government intervention and spending are the same folks getting most of that government money
That's true of much of the military and some farmers. However, most of the recipients of federal money in the red states aren't the ones voting Republican, and most of the Republicans aren't getting federal money.
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The US system relentlessly drags both parties to the center of the electorate. The parliamentary systems of much of the world allow disproportionate influence by the smaller parties that make up the ruling coalition. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. Don't forget that the people that wrote the Constitution knew exactly how Westminster worked and consciously rejected that model.
I'm scared to get tested, because if I do have it, I may never get any form of medical care again
I'm going to assume you meant "health insurance" rather than "medical care" here. Glaucoma isn't going to get you rejected, especially if it's under control, but you also have another option if you want to be paranoid: pay cash and use a fake name when you get tested. If positive, stress that you are paying cash for your meds and then use a fake name at the pharmacy.
This is somewhat offtopic, but it's also worth noting that when you buy (e.g.) a Lexus ES (rather than a Toyota Camry) you get a made-in-Japan vehicle instead of a made-in-America vehicle. The trim is a major part of the price difference, but it's not the only thing that changes.
Actually, it's called "comprehensive" - as I noted, I have one vehicle with it and one without, so I'm pretty familiar with the different types (including uninsured motorist coverage). However, the liability coverage is for the driver, not the car. My liability coverage covers any vehicle I drive - mine, my wife's, a rental, a friend's. It's not attached to the car at all - is your state's policy just some odd means of preventing the buy-insurance-register-car-cancel-insurance gambit?
You probably got that for parking facing the wrong way on the street. Common practice in residential areas, but still illegal.
Technically, they can't demand ID for someone on foot. They can demand to know your identity, and they can detain you for long enough to confirm it. Of course, that detention will occur downtown, and when they let you out 48 hours later they're not going to take you back to where you were before...
I think I'm missing something: are you telling me that Florida requires you to insure a car, rather than a driver? I have to insure my car - it's a lease, it actually belongs to Toyota - but my wife's ten-year-old Tahoe is a completely uninsured vehicle. She has insurance, but it doesn't. If she runs off the road and smacks it into a ditch, that's too-bad-so-sad for us.
Yeah, it could have gone spectacularly badly
And if it happened today, you would have had to cope not only with the loss of a child but with being hounded by the media and other parents for being so negligent. You might even face criminal charges. Look at Arlington's standards for when children can be unsupervised. And they think that is the minimum acceptable oversight.
Melamine can't be microwaved, which does limit it as dinner ware.
Actually, you should do that every time that you are approached by the police, whether or not you have a question why they approached you. And your response should always be silence or departure, depending on whether or not you have been formally detained.
If you want to talk about things that have actual, tangible, real value, there aren't many. Nonperishable foodstuffs, potable water (or water that can be made potable by simple mechanisms like boiling or chlorine), weapons and ammunition, fuel, shelter. Possibly land, although it may have to be defended. Everything else is icing on the cake. Even these are potentially quite arbitrary - in southern Louisiana, water that is safe to drink after boiling is essentially everywhere. In Nevada, it's a very different story.
Ugh. Had a nice long response written to you, Firefox died. Short version: your links are long on opinion and short on fact. In particular, just because 82 stores close in the two years after WM shows up doesn't tell you anything about how many stores were closed in the two years previous to its arrival, and it doesn't take into account the fact that people who save money by shopping at Wally World have more money in their pockets for other things. I suspect, though I cannot know (because none of the studies are actually linked to), that they looked at clothing, grocery, electronics, etc., retailers and ignored the possibility that people who save money might choose to buy categories of goods that would not previously have been affordable to them.
The stores in small towns that die when WM shows up mostly suck. In my city, I can save about 15% on groceries by shopping at Wal-Mart instead of Kroger (which isn't a mom-and-pop operation by any stretch of the imagination). By comparison to small-town grocery stores, it's even better savings combined with a far superior selection. I do not weep for Piggly-Wiggly any more than I do for buggy whip makers.
As for books, you like paper in your hand, right away, and the kind of advice that you can get if you go to, say, City Lights. That's absolutely a better experience than Amazon. But here in flyover country, we don't have the option to meet the authors - they don't come here. The independent bookstores have always had poor selections (and I'm in my late 30s, old enough to remember what buying books was like before the Internet was anything more than an academic curiosity). My choices are to be a solitary reader, convince my wife or one of my friends to read a book so we can talk about it, or go online to find people to talk about it with. And I love-love-love my Kindle. For 95% of my reading, it's better than the paper copy. My wife and I don't even buy paper books anymore if the ebook is available
Have you ever attended a book talk by an author?
No, I haven't. I live in a small market; the "authors" who do book talks here are people who self-publish. Amazon actually means that I'm not limited to bestseller-of-the-week when I want to find something to read - and its suggestions and reader reviews are at least as good as (if not better than) serendipity at the average bookstore.
do you drive several miles out of your way to save three cents a gallon on gas?
No, because I'm not an idiot. But if I'm going to be driving past a cheap gas station anyway, I'll wait.
the Wal-Mart problem
Wal-Mart is a godsend for people who live in actual, non-quaint small towns all over the country: it provides goods of surprisingly high quality for very good prices, it's open seven days a week (if not 24 hours a day), and it's generally thought of as a good company to work for by those who actually work there.
Today, you'd just go pirate the books. Much simpler, actually.
If they put you on clozapine, it had to be bad.
Some people just don't get the rewards. I've done pretty intense physical training in my life (the first four weeks of football practice in high school always resulted in a 10-15 pound weight loss despite eating as much as I wanted to of anything I wanted to) and while I can definitely say that I'm a happier person generally if I exercise a lot, the exercise itself actually makes me feel like crap.
That's definitely tinfoil hat territory. Why don't you just ask your doctor if s/he is paid by any drug companies? I'm not, I never have been, and the most valuable thing I've ever gotten from a drug company was a dinner worth about $50 while I was in residency.
With a second, prepaid cell phone that you bought with cash and never take home.
The first rule of jury nullification is that you don't talk about jury nullification - at least, don't talk about it if you actually intend to do it. "I'm not going to convict him, I think the cop was an unreliable witness and perhaps planted the drugs" is not subject to review by anyone.
skids said, more or less, "American consumers are idiots. They buy junk food and crappy cigarette lighters. How do you explain that?" I replied with the sort of simple answers that ought to be given every time someone throws out overblown rhetorical questions - junk food is cheap and satisfying, and low-quality goods often survive because they will last long enough - my food processor, for example, is a cheap piece of junk, but it cost a tenth as much as a good Cuisinart and clearly proved that we don't use one often enough to justify buying a nice one. I'm not sure how any of that qualifies as anything other than simple sense.
Now, if you want to talk about the banking crisis, we could probably have an interesting but utterly off-topic discussion about that. I would say that Murdoch actually has a point - the housing business was over-regulated, forced to cheapen its standards so that people who would never have qualified for a mortgage 40 years ago could get one. What he doesn't mention is that the mortgage industry suffered from a severe lack of enforcement - for starters, witness that neither Angelo Mozilo nor the legions of politicians to whom he gave sweetheart deals are in jail. SarbOx, nominally crafted in response to Enron (which was really just a sophisticated criminal fraud and should have been prosecuted as such), went so far in increasing the reporting requirements for public companies that it pushed all sorts of companies to become privately held - companies that ordinary people (and their mutual funds) used to be able to buy a piece of are now available only to the very wealthy. That's a massive negative for the public. Not only that, SarbOx probably would not have exposed what was going on at Enron any earlier, because they were already breaking the law!
You think library books explain the nigh-religious fervor with which people have sworn on here that they'll never buy a book reader that doesn't support ePub? Not to mention that those library books are going to have DRM...
If you turn the wireless off, he'll never know it exists. You don't even have to register it to an account in order to use it. Sideloads work just fine. It's yours to do with as you please.
What Amazon should do instead is get the Kindle to work with the epub format, add a SD card slot, so if someone wants 32 GB, they can have it. Since Amazon also has a decent cloud store, why not offer to stream/download from that as well? This doesn't need anything fancy on the screen, although AT&T may not like Whispernet being used for this.
Money, money, money: Amazon has no reason to put things in ePub because it owns the Mobipocket format and its DRM. (However, since Mobipocket is a clearly-described standard, I really can't figure out what it is that people want to do with ePub that they can't with Mobi - except check out library books.) Adding an SD slot costs money, and Amazon has been absolutely dedicated to getting the price down ASAP (it's almost certain that the device will experience a huge jump in purchases once it can be sold below $100). And streaming over Whispernet will never happen because Amazon has to pay AT&T for all that data usage - they'd have to charge a per-byte fee if it ever were used for anything more than book delivery and the very occasional Wikipedia lookup.
Also: Texas has a lot of people. Hosting close to a lot of people is a valuable thing.
The people who vote for that party that claims to hate government intervention and spending are the same folks getting most of that government money
That's true of much of the military and some farmers. However, most of the recipients of federal money in the red states aren't the ones voting Republican, and most of the Republicans aren't getting federal money.