Are you sure? Has this changed? I had a friend in college who had worked, during high school, in a NJ pharmacy that was still in the pre-scanner era (this was early 90s). Anyway, in the eyes of the state of NJ, while toothbrushes were a non-taxed "necessity", toothpaste was not. ISTR that she also said that toilet tissue was not considered a "necessary" item. She always thought that was a bizarre bit of logic.
Wal-Mart has stores that presumably benefit from police, fire, and emergency medical services. Those stores occupy space which is actually in North Carolina, and can be sold to other people interested in owning a bit of North Carolina should the land become more valuable than a Wal-Mart. IOW, they actually do business in North Carolina. I don't buy soft drinks, potato chips, or fresh meat and cheese off Amazon - I buy them at my local grocery store, because they are heavy or perishable goods that cost a fortune to ship in anything other than massive quantities - and because I like to look at what I'm buying. For books and music, Amazon is often less expensive, but my local bookstore gives me a book right now AND lets me try before I buy!
So why does Amazon owe a nickel to North Carolina? Just because individual North Carolinians like their stuff? The only part of the Amazon food chain that costs NC a penny is delivery - and UPS, FedEx, and DHL all have physical presences and pay taxes.
Nah, not really. After all, it's only going to be a hot-button issue to you until you're 21, no matter how much you think it's wrong. No way to sustain the momentum for more than one Congress.
Incidentally, you can pretty easily identify any drug that could be abused just by looking it up on Erowid. If nobody there has taken it, nobody would ever want to.
Wow. The/. literal-interpretation brigade is almost never this bad.
Re:Electronic Health Records is very hard
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It is public domain, but the underlying software system is... extremely taxing to deal with. The user interface is decent, though, once you get it up and running. The problem is getting it up and running. Oh, and the imaging software is terrible. TERRIBLE. It's the only part of the VA computer system I hated using.
Re:Electronic Health Records is very hard
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Doctors are often subject to intense time pressure and will resist anything that slows them down.
Well, when you get paid the same whether your job takes a minute or an hour, how would you react to something that slows you down? Especially if you know that none of the money saved in the slowdown will be sent your way? It may make for inefficiency, but physicians have no real interest in doing something that saves the hospital money but costs them time with their family.
Re:NHS IT: last year's hardware at next year's pri
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Or how about the braindead people at GE who, when designing an EMR, decided that the tab key should NOT skip between fields of entry but should instead skip right down to the commit button at the bottom of the page? Meaning I have to take my hands off the keyboard and put them on the mouse or trackpad for EVERY SINGLE ENTRY.
Physicians come off badly, I know. Many of us seem like arrogant jerks, and some of us really are. Mostly, though, we are people who are paid for piece work - it is generally true that you get $X to see a patient and treat them, whether it takes ten minutes or ten hours. This of course makes us incredibly time-sensitive: one minute per encounter, over the course of a day, means we get to go home a full hour earlier.
Re:Electronic Health Records is very hard
on
IT and Health Care
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· Score: 1
You're missing something here, though it's not your fault.
Medicine is, in many ways, human engineering. It attracts people who have engineering personalities. Yes, some physicians have no clue about technology, but a LOT of them are geeks. So why do they like paper?
Let's say I've just seen a patient and need to write a note about what I found and an order changing a medication. Even if the chart isn't physically available, I can grab a blank progress note sheet and a blank order form, write the patient's name and medical record # on the sheets, and write what I have to - and then hand those to the secretary and have them put into the chart whenever it shows up. If it's electronic, I end up waiting (and waiting, and waiting) for an empty computer to open up so that I can then log in and start the process. It's incredibly less convenient. On rounds, I can drag a whole stack of charts around with me and write everything I need to just after stepping out of the room. With a computer I have to wheel a laptop around (and you know they'll never be charged) or run back to the nurses' station after every single room.
Experience has shown that nobody around is actually trustworthy. It's not to say that government can't work; it obviously does, in some places, but this isn't one of them.
Around here, the services that work are those that are more like the postal service: they are funded by their own sales, they have their own accounting, and they don't take money out of a general grab bag of funds. Water, sewer, and waste collection are all in that category here, although many municipalities have no government provision of water/sewer at all - they have independent, cooperative water supply districts. In rural areas, fire service is generally volunteer.
You're right that it is a philosophical stance; a private corp may be wasteful, but it has major checks on it that government does not: it can be fired and replaced by another, and its shareholders can sue its officers for mismanagement. You can't sue the government unless they allow it, and it shows.
Overall, it's one of my personal observations that most people I know who are pro-government liberals (as opposed to those whose political stance is mostly on social issues) grew up in places where government works, and most of the small-government conservatives (again, as opposed to social ones) grew up in places where it doesn't. I'm in the latter group. There's a lot of opposition even to programs that are run by the federal government, because we know that while it might work well in Minnesota (one of the best-run states in terms of efficiency and low corruption), we aren't going to be lucky enough to get a group of Minnesotans moved here to run our programs - we'll be stuck with the locals. Because I'm going to have to pay for the private version of everything (like recreation, security, and education) anyway in order to have something that doesn't suck, I really don't see the point in forking over a lot of cash to the city government to waste.
Oh, I'm willing to concede that this might be bad construction - see my other comments in this story. The fundamental problem, however, is that the soil shrinks and swells with rainfall - it's not a matter of settling, it's a matter of soil that rises and falls based on water content.
In my case, they certainly did not build up three feet of gravel, so c'est la vie.
Asking people to fund high quality public services is seen as a bit dodgy, socialist or communist or similar?
No, we just don't trust the people running the county to be good stewards of our money. If your tax money will be stolen - as mine is - rather than used to provide you with useful services, why would you ever voluntarily pay more?
I pay 1.5% of my home's assessed value, per year, in property tax - here, that's $2400 - as well as $300 in taxes on two cars (a 9-year-old Nissan Altima and an 8-year-old Chevy Tahoe). For that $2700/yr in taxes I get poorly maintained roads, schools so bad that I could not send a child to them, and a police department that likes to sit around and run speed traps on the locals while providing armed escorts through to high-level drug dealers. Why on earth, given that they can't be trusted with the money I give them now, should I give them more? (This is local and county tax, BTW; the state funds itself with income tax, gas tax, etc.)
... or you have severe problems with shrink-swell soil. Twenty years ago the local government ripped up a road around here, down to the dirt, and re-graded and re-paved the whole thing. Five years later, the road was just as bumpy as before. Now, today, the surface is still better than it was before the repaving - there's nothing wrong with the asphalt - but the experience is still terrible.
Somehow, the tiny handful of concrete roads around here seem to handle it better. One other advantage - in southern climes, concrete sure feels a lot cooler than asphalt.
Rated funny, but the first digital satellite retailer in America was a small outfit in Jackson, Mississippi, thanks to a combination of personal friendship with some higher-ups in the outfit and an incredibly large rural population. TONS of people live in rural or semi-rural areas, or have hunting/fishing/whatever camps out there, and small-dish satellite TV transformed their lifestyle. (After all, it wasn't so long ago that there was a joke: what's the state flower of West Virginia? The 8 foot satellite dish.)
I'm not AC, and it's text only, but here's a riff on Rule 34 for that - scroll down to ONE HUNDRED TWENTY TWO for the Rule 34 bit, or read the whole thing to LYFAO.
Well... I'm not really concerned with the views of Libertarians of the purist type; I've known a few, and they are concerned about ideological purity to a degree that would make Lenin proud. I'm fairly practical. I do, however, read a few libertarian blogger types, and I hadn't seen that argument before. Are they seriously advancing the idea that non-economic, non-punitive damages need to be larger? "Tort reform" largely concerns itself with non-economic, non-punitive damage awards - indeed, I've never seen it address anything else. You are entitled to sue for any actual harm, and punitive damages may be awarded by the court; the limitation is largely on "pain and suffering" awards. Tort reform need not make torts not worth suing over; I agree that any argument that it makes satisfaction easier is pretty dumb. The purpose is to shift the balance away from the trial lawyers' bar by taking away the source of large awards for relatively small actual damages.
I'm aware you're being over the top here, but follow me out.
I've noticed, lately, that one unifying characteristic of the people I know who are big-government liberals (as opposed to those who adopt it primarily for social stances) is that they grew up in places where government works, while the small-government conservatives (again, as opposed to social ones) grew up in places where it doesn't. I was 23 years old before I got much more than a nickel's worth of what my parents had paid in state and local taxes, except for the roads - I went to private schools (because the public ones were both bad and unsafe), private pools, private camps, private everything except the city parks that were - surprise surprise - maintained primarily by volunteers, except for the city coming and cutting the grass once a month. I'm 34 now, and pay 1.5% of my home's value every year in property taxes for which I get: a police department that hasn't ever solved a crime occurring to me or my acquaintances; schools that I can't send kids to; roads that are in astonishingly bad shape; refusal to enforce quality-of-life ordinances; a city council that is a laughingstock; and two (TWO!) public parks, one about the size of a football field, the other a bit larger, in an area of town covering about 30k people. Their latest project? Cutting and re-casting the sidewalks at street corners along a busy road that has essentially zero pedestrians to make them handicapped-accessible. When one of my liberal friends said he didn't mind paying a bit more in taxes if he got something worthwhile for it, I realized that he had grown up somewhere that government actually provides functional services, as opposed to throwing it down a rathole to a crony.
Why are you surprised, by the way, at the dislike for serial single mothers? The first child might be a surprise, but when you see 19 year olds who have had four children on the welfare rolls, the idea that you ought to be paying for them to do anything other than get sterilized is mighty compelling. Single motherhood is a very tough road, but it's hard to develop too much compassion when you run into the incredibly sociopathic attitudes of the single mother of four or five kids who all have different fathers - the fact that they can't pay for the children they have is no compelling reason (to them) to try to avoid having another.
Deep down, I agree with the guy up-thread who said that it wasn't evidence of racism, just that she plays identity politics. Still, she didn't say "different". She said "better".
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Are you sure? Has this changed? I had a friend in college who had worked, during high school, in a NJ pharmacy that was still in the pre-scanner era (this was early 90s). Anyway, in the eyes of the state of NJ, while toothbrushes were a non-taxed "necessity", toothpaste was not. ISTR that she also said that toilet tissue was not considered a "necessary" item. She always thought that was a bizarre bit of logic.
Wal-Mart has stores that presumably benefit from police, fire, and emergency medical services. Those stores occupy space which is actually in North Carolina, and can be sold to other people interested in owning a bit of North Carolina should the land become more valuable than a Wal-Mart. IOW, they actually do business in North Carolina. I don't buy soft drinks, potato chips, or fresh meat and cheese off Amazon - I buy them at my local grocery store, because they are heavy or perishable goods that cost a fortune to ship in anything other than massive quantities - and because I like to look at what I'm buying. For books and music, Amazon is often less expensive, but my local bookstore gives me a book right now AND lets me try before I buy!
So why does Amazon owe a nickel to North Carolina? Just because individual North Carolinians like their stuff? The only part of the Amazon food chain that costs NC a penny is delivery - and UPS, FedEx, and DHL all have physical presences and pay taxes.
Nah, not really. After all, it's only going to be a hot-button issue to you until you're 21, no matter how much you think it's wrong. No way to sustain the momentum for more than one Congress.
Where do you live? I'd love to have cops that were professionals.
It's equivalent to two OTC pills.
Incidentally, you can pretty easily identify any drug that could be abused just by looking it up on Erowid. If nobody there has taken it, nobody would ever want to.
Wow. The /. literal-interpretation brigade is almost never this bad.
It is public domain, but the underlying software system is... extremely taxing to deal with. The user interface is decent, though, once you get it up and running. The problem is getting it up and running. Oh, and the imaging software is terrible. TERRIBLE. It's the only part of the VA computer system I hated using.
Doctors are often subject to intense time pressure and will resist anything that slows them down.
Well, when you get paid the same whether your job takes a minute or an hour, how would you react to something that slows you down? Especially if you know that none of the money saved in the slowdown will be sent your way? It may make for inefficiency, but physicians have no real interest in doing something that saves the hospital money but costs them time with their family.
Or how about the braindead people at GE who, when designing an EMR, decided that the tab key should NOT skip between fields of entry but should instead skip right down to the commit button at the bottom of the page? Meaning I have to take my hands off the keyboard and put them on the mouse or trackpad for EVERY SINGLE ENTRY.
Physicians come off badly, I know. Many of us seem like arrogant jerks, and some of us really are. Mostly, though, we are people who are paid for piece work - it is generally true that you get $X to see a patient and treat them, whether it takes ten minutes or ten hours. This of course makes us incredibly time-sensitive: one minute per encounter, over the course of a day, means we get to go home a full hour earlier.
You're missing something here, though it's not your fault.
Medicine is, in many ways, human engineering. It attracts people who have engineering personalities. Yes, some physicians have no clue about technology, but a LOT of them are geeks. So why do they like paper?
Let's say I've just seen a patient and need to write a note about what I found and an order changing a medication. Even if the chart isn't physically available, I can grab a blank progress note sheet and a blank order form, write the patient's name and medical record # on the sheets, and write what I have to - and then hand those to the secretary and have them put into the chart whenever it shows up. If it's electronic, I end up waiting (and waiting, and waiting) for an empty computer to open up so that I can then log in and start the process. It's incredibly less convenient. On rounds, I can drag a whole stack of charts around with me and write everything I need to just after stepping out of the room. With a computer I have to wheel a laptop around (and you know they'll never be charged) or run back to the nurses' station after every single room.
More to the point, Steve Jobs could almost certainly be a plumber, and a successful one. The reverse is not true.
Always be sure that, if you buy DRMed content, there is a crack for it out there. Strip the DRM as soon as you buy it. Problem solved.
Experience has shown that nobody around is actually trustworthy. It's not to say that government can't work; it obviously does, in some places, but this isn't one of them.
Around here, the services that work are those that are more like the postal service: they are funded by their own sales, they have their own accounting, and they don't take money out of a general grab bag of funds. Water, sewer, and waste collection are all in that category here, although many municipalities have no government provision of water/sewer at all - they have independent, cooperative water supply districts. In rural areas, fire service is generally volunteer.
You're right that it is a philosophical stance; a private corp may be wasteful, but it has major checks on it that government does not: it can be fired and replaced by another, and its shareholders can sue its officers for mismanagement. You can't sue the government unless they allow it, and it shows.
Overall, it's one of my personal observations that most people I know who are pro-government liberals (as opposed to those whose political stance is mostly on social issues) grew up in places where government works, and most of the small-government conservatives (again, as opposed to social ones) grew up in places where it doesn't. I'm in the latter group. There's a lot of opposition even to programs that are run by the federal government, because we know that while it might work well in Minnesota (one of the best-run states in terms of efficiency and low corruption), we aren't going to be lucky enough to get a group of Minnesotans moved here to run our programs - we'll be stuck with the locals. Because I'm going to have to pay for the private version of everything (like recreation, security, and education) anyway in order to have something that doesn't suck, I really don't see the point in forking over a lot of cash to the city government to waste.
Oh, I'm willing to concede that this might be bad construction - see my other comments in this story. The fundamental problem, however, is that the soil shrinks and swells with rainfall - it's not a matter of settling, it's a matter of soil that rises and falls based on water content.
In my case, they certainly did not build up three feet of gravel, so c'est la vie.
Asking people to fund high quality public services is seen as a bit dodgy, socialist or communist or similar?
No, we just don't trust the people running the county to be good stewards of our money. If your tax money will be stolen - as mine is - rather than used to provide you with useful services, why would you ever voluntarily pay more?
I pay 1.5% of my home's assessed value, per year, in property tax - here, that's $2400 - as well as $300 in taxes on two cars (a 9-year-old Nissan Altima and an 8-year-old Chevy Tahoe). For that $2700/yr in taxes I get poorly maintained roads, schools so bad that I could not send a child to them, and a police department that likes to sit around and run speed traps on the locals while providing armed escorts through to high-level drug dealers. Why on earth, given that they can't be trusted with the money I give them now, should I give them more? (This is local and county tax, BTW; the state funds itself with income tax, gas tax, etc.)
... or you have severe problems with shrink-swell soil. Twenty years ago the local government ripped up a road around here, down to the dirt, and re-graded and re-paved the whole thing. Five years later, the road was just as bumpy as before. Now, today, the surface is still better than it was before the repaving - there's nothing wrong with the asphalt - but the experience is still terrible.
Somehow, the tiny handful of concrete roads around here seem to handle it better. One other advantage - in southern climes, concrete sure feels a lot cooler than asphalt.
Rated funny, but the first digital satellite retailer in America was a small outfit in Jackson, Mississippi, thanks to a combination of personal friendship with some higher-ups in the outfit and an incredibly large rural population. TONS of people live in rural or semi-rural areas, or have hunting/fishing/whatever camps out there, and small-dish satellite TV transformed their lifestyle. (After all, it wasn't so long ago that there was a joke: what's the state flower of West Virginia? The 8 foot satellite dish.)
So get bigger cats. Heck, everybody seems to wonder what to do with mountain lions out west. Import a few.
Yeah, unless - like me - you live in a 1xRTT area for Sprint. Even EDGE is faster, and I'm in an AT&T 3G area.
I'm not AC, and it's text only, but here's a riff on Rule 34 for that - scroll down to ONE HUNDRED TWENTY TWO for the Rule 34 bit, or read the whole thing to LYFAO.
Intriguingly, T-mobile's prepaid service is one of the best prepaid deals in the US.
Well... I'm not really concerned with the views of Libertarians of the purist type; I've known a few, and they are concerned about ideological purity to a degree that would make Lenin proud. I'm fairly practical. I do, however, read a few libertarian blogger types, and I hadn't seen that argument before. Are they seriously advancing the idea that non-economic, non-punitive damages need to be larger? "Tort reform" largely concerns itself with non-economic, non-punitive damage awards - indeed, I've never seen it address anything else. You are entitled to sue for any actual harm, and punitive damages may be awarded by the court; the limitation is largely on "pain and suffering" awards. Tort reform need not make torts not worth suing over; I agree that any argument that it makes satisfaction easier is pretty dumb. The purpose is to shift the balance away from the trial lawyers' bar by taking away the source of large awards for relatively small actual damages.
I'm aware you're being over the top here, but follow me out.
I've noticed, lately, that one unifying characteristic of the people I know who are big-government liberals (as opposed to those who adopt it primarily for social stances) is that they grew up in places where government works, while the small-government conservatives (again, as opposed to social ones) grew up in places where it doesn't. I was 23 years old before I got much more than a nickel's worth of what my parents had paid in state and local taxes, except for the roads - I went to private schools (because the public ones were both bad and unsafe), private pools, private camps, private everything except the city parks that were - surprise surprise - maintained primarily by volunteers, except for the city coming and cutting the grass once a month. I'm 34 now, and pay 1.5% of my home's value every year in property taxes for which I get: a police department that hasn't ever solved a crime occurring to me or my acquaintances; schools that I can't send kids to; roads that are in astonishingly bad shape; refusal to enforce quality-of-life ordinances; a city council that is a laughingstock; and two (TWO!) public parks, one about the size of a football field, the other a bit larger, in an area of town covering about 30k people. Their latest project? Cutting and re-casting the sidewalks at street corners along a busy road that has essentially zero pedestrians to make them handicapped-accessible. When one of my liberal friends said he didn't mind paying a bit more in taxes if he got something worthwhile for it, I realized that he had grown up somewhere that government actually provides functional services, as opposed to throwing it down a rathole to a crony.
Why are you surprised, by the way, at the dislike for serial single mothers? The first child might be a surprise, but when you see 19 year olds who have had four children on the welfare rolls, the idea that you ought to be paying for them to do anything other than get sterilized is mighty compelling. Single motherhood is a very tough road, but it's hard to develop too much compassion when you run into the incredibly sociopathic attitudes of the single mother of four or five kids who all have different fathers - the fact that they can't pay for the children they have is no compelling reason (to them) to try to avoid having another.
Strong tort and tort reform are not mutually exclusive; I'm not aware of any tort reform that proposes to limit damages for injury actually received.
Deep down, I agree with the guy up-thread who said that it wasn't evidence of racism, just that she plays identity politics. Still, she didn't say "different". She said "better".