You sure about that? I'm a practicing American anesthesiologist, and I routinely use small amounts of nitrous at the end of a case to speed the wakeup. Go back to older anesthetics, and nitrous use was very common - the older gases were more fat-soluble, so they tended to hang around longer, but you could use less of them if you used nitrous.
And the Nordic countries are much, much more homogenous societies, with small populations. The population of the Houston metropolitan area is larger than that of Norway or Denmark. Sweden has roughly the same population as Georgia or North Carolina. Compare them to Minnesota - population not much different from Norway or Denmark, either in number or ethnic background; it has a long history of social programs that work. Very different from other parts of the country.
We use guns because we like them, but murder has long been a favorite crime in the USA regardless of method. We murder people way, way out of proportion to other countries. OTOH, other crime rates are pretty comparable, and many violent crimes are less common in the US than in comparable parts of the EU - NYC is generally safer than London, for example. So as long as you're not in the drug trade, or romantically involved with a crazy person, you're fine.
Funnily enough, none of the SEC schools are in New York. And 40B only applies to "legitimate theatres, burlesque theatres, music
halls, opera houses, concert halls and circuses."
Those are areas protected under law - race, color, creed, ethnicity, gender, and in some places sexual orientation. It's perfectly legal to exclude everyone whose name starts with the letter "A", because that's not a protected category.
All three of those are audited and subject to civil and criminal penalties for failure to do their jobs. Is that what you meant?
Incidentally, my butcher has a visible thermometer in the case (and based on the feel of the meat, it's right) and cuts it right in front of me. And it's actually pretty easy to use pill markings to look up what it is.
Argue with yourself if you like, but I said that the very-low-productivity people never get hired, at any wage, because you can't profitably hire someone whose work is worth less than the minimum wage + taxes. I did NOT say that minimum wage means that you're worthless; it means that you're worth at least the minimum wage. But it doesn't mean that everyone who would have gotten a job without it got the same job but with higher pay. The only time that would obtain would be in a very tight labor market - when wages would be driven up anyway.
ex-auto workers couldn't make it at a fast food restaurant because the pace of work was too fast for them. Kinda dispels your idea that minimum wage = low productivity.
Too fast? At a fast food place? IOW, their productivity at FAST FOOD was so poor that they weren't even worth minimum wage? Sounds to me like they were guys who didn't deserve to have their previous jobs.
As for myself, while I did have plenty of steps in the right direction - I did well in school, got a full scholarship to college, and had a two-parent household - none of those is dependent on growing up rich (because I didn't). The guy who cuts my yard has a ninth-grade education, if that, and has barely enough backup resources to keep his car running - but he's pulling down $30/hr cash doing lawns. The detail shop I take my car to does an amazing job. The guy that runs it started working at 16; by 20 he had saved up enough to start his own place, and five years later he's looking to expand.
So I get that you love the minimum wage, and think it should be higher. How high would you set it? Why not set it at $20/hr? Do you acknowledge that, at some point, the minimum wage starts to do more harm than good?
Actually, neither of them meets my needs, which is why I'm a T-Mobile subscriber about to move to a regional carrier. But I was replying to the English guy who talked about how crappy American cell service is, and how coverage sucks.
No. Minimum wage just makes it unprofitable to hire someone worth less than the minimum wage + taxes. It doesn't mean that they're automatically going to produce that much, so very-low-productivity people are never hired. Not all minimum-wage workers are worthless idiots, but an adult who's been working minimum wage for, oh, six months? There's probably a very good reason they're not rising up.
I didn't work for minimum wage for very long as a teenager because I had skills that were worth more.
... and this is why I said that
AT&T and VZW were the only real players in the market.
If I expect to be way out there, sure, I'm prepared. I'm talking more about inconvenience than survival. Besides, I still carry a CB when I do serious road travel.
My experience with Sprint is several years old. At the time, I can assure you, they were on the interstates only. I'm glad to hear it's changed. I have T-mobile myself, and they're the same way - fine in urban areas, okay on the big highways, dead in the boonies. The problem is that while I spend most of my usage near my home, I really, really want service when my car dies on the way to BFE State Park.
Come try the place; you might find out it's not quite as bad as you've heard. Although the weather really is that awful.
Our healthcare is, for the vast majority of people, just fine. That's not excusing the people for whom it isn't, but hospitals have to take care of you if you show up, regardless of your ability to pay. Inability to pay might lead to bankruptcy, if you can't work something out (generally, you can), and it can make getting routine services a problem - doctors are small businessmen with payrolls to make, so they can't afford to see a lot of indigent patients - but it's not pay or die.
Our data services have no excuse. They suck. They're the major suck factor in American mobile phone service - the calls are pretty cheap, this dumb article aside. And the land-based data services are almost as bad.
As for vacation, it's kind of a strange cultural expectation. I've probably taken three total weeks of vacation over the past 4 years. I've got tons of it stored up. It's worth more to me as a paycheck when I leave my employer than as time off, and if I wanted more I could negotiate for it.
I used wunderground.com and picked Uppsala just to avoid the moderating influence of the water on cities like Stockholm. Uppsala's average winter low is -6 C, and average summer high is 22 C. That's 28 degrees between max and min. In Minneapolis, make those -16 and 28 C. That's 44 degrees. Or Dallas, a much warmer climate, where they're 1 and 36. Or Denver, -9 and 31.
It is really difficult to explain to most Europeans just how incredibly moderate your weather is. Minneapolis is south of Milan but colder than Moscow. Dallas' highs and lows are almost exactly the same as those in Damascus.
So? You can easily drive 4500 km in the US without ever losing signal or paying a single penny in roaming charges. You can't do that in Europe unless you're doing circles. Roaming is relevant.
1. The study is crap. The "high usage" plan is 1600 minutes/YEAR, 660 SMS/YEAR. That's not high usage; it's barely even light usage. The US plan selected has a low number in "fixed" but a high number in "usage"; this would suggest that they calculated what it would cost based on the cheapest-available plan. US overage charges are indeed ridiculous, in the 40c/min range, but nobody ever pays them because adding airtime to a plan costs very little.
2. US plans offer coverage nationwide and with no charges other than airtime for calls from anywhere to anywhere in the country. When there's an EU-wide plan providing the same coverage - no international charges - then we're getting close to an apples-to-apples comparison.
3. Population density is a real problem. I think the person upthread who suggested that the real metric that should be used is total # of subscribers divided by total # of towers is right - average population density is misleading.
No, the clerks were doing their jobs well, but then Enron wasn't bad decisions - it was fraud. My point is that a lot of people were arguing the labor theory of value: the UAW workers made all the money for the company, which was then driven into the ground by bad management. Bad management can kill companies, but so can bad workers, and it's pretty hard to argue that the UAW's unionized workers were responsible for the company's profits when times were good, but that they bore none of the responsibility when things went south.
There's a really interesting book called Sabotage in the American Workplace that has a story from a line worker that dedicated his life - and he was a long way from the only one doing it - to sabotaging the cars they manufactured so that nobody would ever buy one from the company they hated so much. When workers are that short-sighted, they deserve what they get.
I'm sure it was a manufacturing defect, and it probably came from some small supplier. Although I'm not a big union fan, my point wasn't about them, and it still stands: that guy, personally, cost me $3000 in repairs that I could ill afford. I don't see people clamoring for personal liability to attach to those guys, so why should executives face the same? (For non-criminal behavior.)
The first half of the 20th century were an odd experiment in civilizational suicide which is not likely to be repeated any time soon. Europe decided, after having gone out and conquered the whole damned planet, to kill itself in stages. World War I killed off the aristocracy, and World War II killed the industrial heartland of Europe (and colonialism, FWIW). The US and Canada were left in possession of the only intact industrial architecture in the world, an immense amount of natural resources, and the best talent of the world. FAILING to become gobsmackingly wealthy in such a situation would have required an incredible amount of effort.
We all know it's his name. And I'm really on your side. But nobody but Rush and Co. call him "Barack Hussein Obama", so even if it's accurate it's a pretty good mark that you're a crank.
BTW: not a slam on Rush, just his radio persona. Before anyone calls Rush an idiot, consider that he makes millions of dollars a year from working three hours a day, five days a week.
Just as soon as the line workers are each held personally responsible for the proper performance of their jobs, too. The timing chain on my old car broke 30,000 miles before it was even supposed to be inspected, and cost me $3000 for a new engine. At the time, that represented over 10% of my yearly household income. I'd be happy to go back and take it out of his pocket. I mean, who is he to evade screwing up his job?
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Ask an asthmatic how much they like their new HFA-propellant inhalers vs the old CFC-driven ones, which are now banned.
You sure about that? I'm a practicing American anesthesiologist, and I routinely use small amounts of nitrous at the end of a case to speed the wakeup. Go back to older anesthetics, and nitrous use was very common - the older gases were more fat-soluble, so they tended to hang around longer, but you could use less of them if you used nitrous.
Having read the bulk of the responses, and having been 17 ... seventeen years ago, I want to offer a tangential point:
Don't give it to her when she's 17. It will mean very little to her then. Give it to her at the birth of her first child.
And the Nordic countries are much, much more homogenous societies, with small populations. The population of the Houston metropolitan area is larger than that of Norway or Denmark. Sweden has roughly the same population as Georgia or North Carolina. Compare them to Minnesota - population not much different from Norway or Denmark, either in number or ethnic background; it has a long history of social programs that work. Very different from other parts of the country.
We use guns because we like them, but murder has long been a favorite crime in the USA regardless of method. We murder people way, way out of proportion to other countries. OTOH, other crime rates are pretty comparable, and many violent crimes are less common in the US than in comparable parts of the EU - NYC is generally safer than London, for example. So as long as you're not in the drug trade, or romantically involved with a crazy person, you're fine.
Funnily enough, none of the SEC schools are in New York. And 40B only applies to "legitimate theatres, burlesque theatres, music halls, opera houses, concert halls and circuses."
Those are areas protected under law - race, color, creed, ethnicity, gender, and in some places sexual orientation. It's perfectly legal to exclude everyone whose name starts with the letter "A", because that's not a protected category.
All three of those are audited and subject to civil and criminal penalties for failure to do their jobs. Is that what you meant?
Incidentally, my butcher has a visible thermometer in the case (and based on the feel of the meat, it's right) and cuts it right in front of me. And it's actually pretty easy to use pill markings to look up what it is.
ex-auto workers couldn't make it at a fast food restaurant because the pace of work was too fast for them. Kinda dispels your idea that minimum wage = low productivity.
Too fast? At a fast food place? IOW, their productivity at FAST FOOD was so poor that they weren't even worth minimum wage? Sounds to me like they were guys who didn't deserve to have their previous jobs.
As for myself, while I did have plenty of steps in the right direction - I did well in school, got a full scholarship to college, and had a two-parent household - none of those is dependent on growing up rich (because I didn't). The guy who cuts my yard has a ninth-grade education, if that, and has barely enough backup resources to keep his car running - but he's pulling down $30/hr cash doing lawns. The detail shop I take my car to does an amazing job. The guy that runs it started working at 16; by 20 he had saved up enough to start his own place, and five years later he's looking to expand.
So I get that you love the minimum wage, and think it should be higher. How high would you set it? Why not set it at $20/hr? Do you acknowledge that, at some point, the minimum wage starts to do more harm than good?
Actually, neither of them meets my needs, which is why I'm a T-Mobile subscriber about to move to a regional carrier. But I was replying to the English guy who talked about how crappy American cell service is, and how coverage sucks.
No. Minimum wage just makes it unprofitable to hire someone worth less than the minimum wage + taxes. It doesn't mean that they're automatically going to produce that much, so very-low-productivity people are never hired. Not all minimum-wage workers are worthless idiots, but an adult who's been working minimum wage for, oh, six months? There's probably a very good reason they're not rising up.
I didn't work for minimum wage for very long as a teenager because I had skills that were worth more.
With T-Mobile, right? Did you pay extra per minute, or were you just unable to use data services?
This could well explain the price differential between AT&T and T Mo, and VZW and Sprint. Better networks cost more.
... and this is why I said that AT&T and VZW were the only real players in the market.
If I expect to be way out there, sure, I'm prepared. I'm talking more about inconvenience than survival. Besides, I still carry a CB when I do serious road travel.
My experience with Sprint is several years old. At the time, I can assure you, they were on the interstates only. I'm glad to hear it's changed. I have T-mobile myself, and they're the same way - fine in urban areas, okay on the big highways, dead in the boonies. The problem is that while I spend most of my usage near my home, I really, really want service when my car dies on the way to BFE State Park.
Come try the place; you might find out it's not quite as bad as you've heard. Although the weather really is that awful.
Our healthcare is, for the vast majority of people, just fine. That's not excusing the people for whom it isn't, but hospitals have to take care of you if you show up, regardless of your ability to pay. Inability to pay might lead to bankruptcy, if you can't work something out (generally, you can), and it can make getting routine services a problem - doctors are small businessmen with payrolls to make, so they can't afford to see a lot of indigent patients - but it's not pay or die.
Our data services have no excuse. They suck. They're the major suck factor in American mobile phone service - the calls are pretty cheap, this dumb article aside. And the land-based data services are almost as bad.
As for vacation, it's kind of a strange cultural expectation. I've probably taken three total weeks of vacation over the past 4 years. I've got tons of it stored up. It's worth more to me as a paycheck when I leave my employer than as time off, and if I wanted more I could negotiate for it.
Only two games in town: Verizon and AT&T. Everyone else is a bit player that doesn't have a real network.
I used wunderground.com and picked Uppsala just to avoid the moderating influence of the water on cities like Stockholm. Uppsala's average winter low is -6 C, and average summer high is 22 C. That's 28 degrees between max and min. In Minneapolis, make those -16 and 28 C. That's 44 degrees. Or Dallas, a much warmer climate, where they're 1 and 36. Or Denver, -9 and 31.
It is really difficult to explain to most Europeans just how incredibly moderate your weather is. Minneapolis is south of Milan but colder than Moscow. Dallas' highs and lows are almost exactly the same as those in Damascus.
So? You can easily drive 4500 km in the US without ever losing signal or paying a single penny in roaming charges. You can't do that in Europe unless you're doing circles. Roaming is relevant.
Several factors to consider:
1. The study is crap. The "high usage" plan is 1600 minutes/YEAR, 660 SMS/YEAR. That's not high usage; it's barely even light usage. The US plan selected has a low number in "fixed" but a high number in "usage"; this would suggest that they calculated what it would cost based on the cheapest-available plan. US overage charges are indeed ridiculous, in the 40c/min range, but nobody ever pays them because adding airtime to a plan costs very little.
2. US plans offer coverage nationwide and with no charges other than airtime for calls from anywhere to anywhere in the country. When there's an EU-wide plan providing the same coverage - no international charges - then we're getting close to an apples-to-apples comparison.
3. Population density is a real problem. I think the person upthread who suggested that the real metric that should be used is total # of subscribers divided by total # of towers is right - average population density is misleading.
No, the clerks were doing their jobs well, but then Enron wasn't bad decisions - it was fraud. My point is that a lot of people were arguing the labor theory of value: the UAW workers made all the money for the company, which was then driven into the ground by bad management. Bad management can kill companies, but so can bad workers, and it's pretty hard to argue that the UAW's unionized workers were responsible for the company's profits when times were good, but that they bore none of the responsibility when things went south.
There's a really interesting book called Sabotage in the American Workplace that has a story from a line worker that dedicated his life - and he was a long way from the only one doing it - to sabotaging the cars they manufactured so that nobody would ever buy one from the company they hated so much. When workers are that short-sighted, they deserve what they get.
I'm sure it was a manufacturing defect, and it probably came from some small supplier. Although I'm not a big union fan, my point wasn't about them, and it still stands: that guy, personally, cost me $3000 in repairs that I could ill afford. I don't see people clamoring for personal liability to attach to those guys, so why should executives face the same? (For non-criminal behavior.)
The first half of the 20th century were an odd experiment in civilizational suicide which is not likely to be repeated any time soon. Europe decided, after having gone out and conquered the whole damned planet, to kill itself in stages. World War I killed off the aristocracy, and World War II killed the industrial heartland of Europe (and colonialism, FWIW). The US and Canada were left in possession of the only intact industrial architecture in the world, an immense amount of natural resources, and the best talent of the world. FAILING to become gobsmackingly wealthy in such a situation would have required an incredible amount of effort.
Who cares what the guy's middle name is? He didn't pick it; his parents did.
I can't stand his political beliefs, but nobody is responsible for their name unless they go to court and have it changed.
We all know it's his name. And I'm really on your side. But nobody but Rush and Co. call him "Barack Hussein Obama", so even if it's accurate it's a pretty good mark that you're a crank.
BTW: not a slam on Rush, just his radio persona. Before anyone calls Rush an idiot, consider that he makes millions of dollars a year from working three hours a day, five days a week.
Just as soon as the line workers are each held personally responsible for the proper performance of their jobs, too. The timing chain on my old car broke 30,000 miles before it was even supposed to be inspected, and cost me $3000 for a new engine. At the time, that represented over 10% of my yearly household income. I'd be happy to go back and take it out of his pocket. I mean, who is he to evade screwing up his job?