Something attained through fraud is never attained at all. Or something like that.
Immigrants are prevented from being President as well, which isn't a practical limitation unless you are Arnold Schwarzenegger, but under your reasoning might also make all immigrants "second class citizens". The best part though is that their kids born here have all the rights of someone who's family has been here for centuries.
My wife's great-aunt learned she had cancer shortly before Christmas several years back. She was still totally of sound mind and able to make her own decisions, so she: A) had everyone over for Christmas that year, B) checked herself into hospice in April, and C) died about a week later. My wife spent the week with her in hospice.
No hospitals. No medical care. She didn't want any of that. And I don't think she had to go through all the same hassles. But depending on the illness, not everyone is able to make their own decisions like that. And, once you are put into a hospital, it's very difficult to get out if you're not "recuperating", imo.
Re:This is what's wrong with private healthcare.
on
How Doctors Die
·
· Score: 1
Was your mother's husband alive at the time? The difference is probably due to different hospital policies, but I wonder if it also has to do with whether or not the spouse is the one making the decisions.
I know when my grandfather's wife died in the early 1990s, he was allowed to make such a decision without being given shit by the doctors. However, it was a different hospital AND they were married, and being married carries all sorts of implied things including extra-strong medical POA.
If your mother's husband wasn't there enforcing her wishes, and she wasn't deemed sane enough to have made the choices herself, then I would assume it comes down to hospital policy.
Books don't cost less at the school where the professor teaches though. Otherwise there would be a thriving business buying textbooks at the schools where their authors teach and selling them to all the other schools.
If the professor isn't collecting the royalty, then either the publisher or the school's book store is. And using the book at the professor's school has to be good for marketing, which leads to greater adoption and more royalties.
It's the seller of the violin, not the buyer, that needs their money laundered. Presume that you, the buyer of the violin, is a rich drug dealer who bought $1 million in cocaine from a drug supplying cartel. Since you're a bit short of untraceable cash at the moment, and for some reason your cartel wants to legitimize their income and pay capital gains taxes on it, they sell you an "authentic" million dollar violin. You pay the money, get a crap violin and the drugs.
This assumes that your $1 million in cash had already been laundered, but needed to be used for a criminal purpose. If you had $1 million in untraceable dirty cash, you could have just bought your drugs with that cash and left the seller to launder his own money.
Reading your post, all I can think about is X10 Cameras that used to have those godawful pop-up advertisement back before browsers could block them well. I keep thinking "Why would a crappy web camera need a light bulb, and why did so many Slashdot users click on those popups, buy something, and then admit it?"
(Yes, I see it's some sort of home automation standard too.)
That visa application could be the first step in the long line toward citizenship. And the U.S., like most countries, cannot expel a citizen.
However, if you sign a false declaration in the process of becoming a citizen, you can be prosecuted for that crime, stripped of your earned citizenship, and then expelled. The U.S. has done this several times, usually to grandfathers who were Nazi prison guards in their youth.
The reason the U.S. still asks is because we want to remind all those genocide-committing folks out there today that their crimes won't be forgotten, and even if they think they can get away with something then move on with their lives, they can be caught at any time and punished. Maybe that fear will prevent (or has prevented) a few crimes against humanity. And that's well worth the hassle you had to go through filling out a visa application.
So your son and daughter really only have two years (each) that they have to attend the school two hours away. At your quoted rates that's $22k and $32k (total) for their educations.
Are your son and daughter living alone at college? An apartment with four roommates, and a college student's food budget shouldn't cost $1375 a month ($11k for "pay rent, buy food, pay utilities, etc." divided into eight months of college a year, with the other three months spent at home working a summer/Christmas job).
I don't know what part of the country you live in, but during my last two years of college my wife and I lived together in a one-room apartment for $420 a month, all utilities included. We had a $300 food budget per month on top of that. We paid for the apartment through the summer (while we were home) so we wouldn't lose it. That's about 2/3rds of what you claim it costs your son or daughter, and that was for TWO of us! At a college that was 1000 miles from home.
If someone there had medical power of attorney for your grandmother, that person should have been able to stop the resuscitation attempt. Alternatively and preferably, she should be moved from a regular hospital bed to hospice if time permits. In hospice the nurses are merely there to alleviate pain while their patients die; morphine is unrestricted if needed and desired, and there are no resuscitation attempts.
And from a heartless practical standpoint, hospice costs you/your insurance/taxpayers/whatever much less.
Also, as the other reply states, if you or someone there with medical POA did tell them to stop, and the proceeded anyway, you should have filed a civil suit, not because it would help your grandmother but because it would help the next person who wanted to die with dignity in that hospital.
The argument is that, if you are suffering excruciating pain, then you are under mental duress, and those under mental duress can't make rational decisions for themselves.
You need to have that DNR paperwork along with a medical POA set up when you are still relatively healthy, relatively pain free, and relatively unmedicated, then have the person you assigned to manage your care argue your case for you.
Re:This is what's wrong with private healthcare.
on
How Doctors Die
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Your uncle needed someone with medical power of attorney to be there with him. It sounds like, had he chosen to arrange that with you, you could have helped him suffer less. I say this with the hope that anyone else reading this could arrange things now, before their elderly relatives aren't capable of signing such legal documents.
My wife had medical POA with her 94-year-old grandfather when he got sick and died in 2010. She literally had to sit by his bed to be there when a random doctor would come in and try to intubate or give him something the legal paperwork he'd signed years ago said he would refuse, and she had to tell the doctor NO and wave the POA and No Heroic Measures paperwork at him. She had to do the same thing when the social workers would come by to try to plan his treatment. each new care provider would make or take a photocopy of all the paperwork. (My wife had like 40 copies made.) This took a few weeks until eventually he was transferred to hospice. Even there one of the regular care nurses was furious when they stopped all treatment. In this case, though, the hospice nurse told the regular nurse to STFU and stay out of the way while my wife watched her grandfather die.
With a medical POA and No Heroic Measures paperwork, not only would the paper exist but there would be a family member there with the legal authority to enforce it.
Re:I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my Da
on
How Doctors Die
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I was told that applying oxygen along with chest compressions is better than compressions alone.
However...and this is important...911 operators who are trying to coax someone into giving CPR can usually get them to do the chest compressions, but all too often when the operator tells someone to breath into the dying person's mouth, the line goes dead, as does the person. When the EMTs arrive the person who was giving CPR will have faded back into the crowd. This was from an Austin EMT instructor.
Also, a nonskilled person might take too long switching from compressions to breaths and back, during which time overall blood pressure drops. It takes a while for pumping to boost blood pressure sufficiently to move it around to the brain, so the pauses to put more air in the blood can be worse than just moving around what little air is already there.
In other words, the science is pretty clear: oxygen with compressions is better than compressions alone. However, the sociology is in debate as to whether or not bystanders can be made to do things the better way, or if the less-good-but-better-than-nothing way is more likely to be implemented.
You should be happy that it was on at all while you weren't in the room. In Japan the whole room - air conditioner, lights, electrical outlets - cut off when you leave, because they are only enabled when your room key is in a slot just inside the door.
In general, making a few stereotypical assumptions, the air conditioners are probably "undersized" because A) Europeans don't mind a little sweat to conserve energy, and B) Europeans probably have less body fat to cool down.
I have a small selection of companies I've picked and like, and invest in. There's an equally small list of companies I've picked that burnt me, but I always got out before I lost too much. Overall I'm ahead. Some of the ones I've held onto are way up in value and I'll sell them as soon as I think they can't sustain that value. At least one stock hasn't gained -anything- in the 3-4 years I've held it, but they consistently pay out about 8% annually in dividents, and I consider that a pretty good return.
I've learned the most about investing through the stocks I bought myself. It's not that bad to take $2000 or so, find a company whose products you believe in, and invest. You'll learn a lot about how the market works.
We have a pretty wide selection of savings on top of that - 401k, two Roth IRAs (one of which is a 2010 conversion of a 2009 401k rollover), cash savings, company stock (held only as long as I have to), home equity - so I feel we're as diversified as we can be to hedge against losses. I'm the type of person that never really closes an account (we have four credit union accounts in two states) so it doesn't bother me to spread out investments with different companies and methods.
If only Lucas had demanded a little less $$$ for the franchise rights, they could have put a few baffles in the air ducts of their first Death Star to block torpedoes...
And allegedly access to newer games that "require" the latest firmware to run...
But when you bought your PS3, there was no guarantee that newer games would ever exist. What if the platform bombed and Sony discontinued it? Would you have grounds to sue (and not be tossed out)? Probably not.
Not that Sony aren't dicks in this case... and in every case. I just don't see the argument that "I can't run games that didn't exist when I bought the hardware" to be a strong one.
Have you seen some of the research into serial killings? One study from 2007 implied that we may underestimate the number of people killed by serial killers each year by a factor of 10.
So yeah, I agree that there are probably hundreds of thousands of small- to big-time crooks that are getting away with their crimes on a year-to-year basis, undetected, not making all the dumb mistakes. Occasionally one of them gets caught and makes the news and we're all horrified that this was happening "just under our noses" and we're all happy that it's over, but in reality it just keeps going with some other criminal a little ways down the road...
You are assuming that he was willing to speak to the police at all after he was arrested. He may have been more fearful of his life then.
Unfortunately letting all underlings get off the hook with "They'd kill me if I didn't (x)!" would pretty much let all of them operate with impunity. Either they risk their life saying 'No' to the boss, they risk their life testifying against their boss when they get caught, or they take the prison sentence and be given a comfortable retirement by the mob when they are released (as their reward for serving a sentence in silence). This is assuming we won't give them all witness protection, which I guess we don't.
And here's a hint: the tool they envisioned to adapt and change was not the Supreme Court deciding that the meaning and intention of words written more than 200 years ago has somehow changed over time.
200 years? More like 16 years. Thomas Jefferson, the person whom you appear to hold in such high regard (by your mention of him twice in your post) disagreed with the result of the very first case of judicial review. He thought the Supreme Court was already interpreting the words of the Constitution incorrectly.
At that point, while most all of the framers of the Constitution were still alive, they could have chosen to create and pass an amendment to stop the Supreme Court from continuing to decide the meaning and intention of words written 16 years prior. They didn't. So while no one expected the Supreme Court to take on the job it did, no one (not even those founders you idolize) tried to stop them.
That doesn't stop people. I was on my city's planning and zoning commission. Plenty of the big issues we saw were due to adjacency issues, and in many cases the homes were newer than whatever business they were complaining about. (Usually the business was trying to rezone so as to start a new use and stop doing whatever people were complaining about, but people would still complain, and too often the rest of the commission and the city council would vote it down.)
Do you not see the word "should"? I realize Firefox will do something else, at which time I'll drop using their browser and hold them to the low regard I hold Microsoft during their worst years.
Slashdot Mirror
Something attained through fraud is never attained at all. Or something like that.
Immigrants are prevented from being President as well, which isn't a practical limitation unless you are Arnold Schwarzenegger, but under your reasoning might also make all immigrants "second class citizens". The best part though is that their kids born here have all the rights of someone who's family has been here for centuries.
My wife's great-aunt learned she had cancer shortly before Christmas several years back. She was still totally of sound mind and able to make her own decisions, so she: A) had everyone over for Christmas that year, B) checked herself into hospice in April, and C) died about a week later. My wife spent the week with her in hospice.
No hospitals. No medical care. She didn't want any of that. And I don't think she had to go through all the same hassles. But depending on the illness, not everyone is able to make their own decisions like that. And, once you are put into a hospital, it's very difficult to get out if you're not "recuperating", imo.
Was your mother's husband alive at the time? The difference is probably due to different hospital policies, but I wonder if it also has to do with whether or not the spouse is the one making the decisions.
I know when my grandfather's wife died in the early 1990s, he was allowed to make such a decision without being given shit by the doctors. However, it was a different hospital AND they were married, and being married carries all sorts of implied things including extra-strong medical POA.
If your mother's husband wasn't there enforcing her wishes, and she wasn't deemed sane enough to have made the choices herself, then I would assume it comes down to hospital policy.
Books don't cost less at the school where the professor teaches though. Otherwise there would be a thriving business buying textbooks at the schools where their authors teach and selling them to all the other schools.
If the professor isn't collecting the royalty, then either the publisher or the school's book store is. And using the book at the professor's school has to be good for marketing, which leads to greater adoption and more royalties.
It's the seller of the violin, not the buyer, that needs their money laundered. Presume that you, the buyer of the violin, is a rich drug dealer who bought $1 million in cocaine from a drug supplying cartel. Since you're a bit short of untraceable cash at the moment, and for some reason your cartel wants to legitimize their income and pay capital gains taxes on it, they sell you an "authentic" million dollar violin. You pay the money, get a crap violin and the drugs.
This assumes that your $1 million in cash had already been laundered, but needed to be used for a criminal purpose. If you had $1 million in untraceable dirty cash, you could have just bought your drugs with that cash and left the seller to launder his own money.
This was also covered in Chuck during the last half season.
Reading your post, all I can think about is X10 Cameras that used to have those godawful pop-up advertisement back before browsers could block them well. I keep thinking "Why would a crappy web camera need a light bulb, and why did so many Slashdot users click on those popups, buy something, and then admit it?"
(Yes, I see it's some sort of home automation standard too.)
That visa application could be the first step in the long line toward citizenship. And the U.S., like most countries, cannot expel a citizen.
However, if you sign a false declaration in the process of becoming a citizen, you can be prosecuted for that crime, stripped of your earned citizenship, and then expelled. The U.S. has done this several times, usually to grandfathers who were Nazi prison guards in their youth.
The reason the U.S. still asks is because we want to remind all those genocide-committing folks out there today that their crimes won't be forgotten, and even if they think they can get away with something then move on with their lives, they can be caught at any time and punished. Maybe that fear will prevent (or has prevented) a few crimes against humanity. And that's well worth the hassle you had to go through filling out a visa application.
So your son and daughter really only have two years (each) that they have to attend the school two hours away. At your quoted rates that's $22k and $32k (total) for their educations.
Are your son and daughter living alone at college? An apartment with four roommates, and a college student's food budget shouldn't cost $1375 a month ($11k for "pay rent, buy food, pay utilities, etc." divided into eight months of college a year, with the other three months spent at home working a summer/Christmas job).
I don't know what part of the country you live in, but during my last two years of college my wife and I lived together in a one-room apartment for $420 a month, all utilities included. We had a $300 food budget per month on top of that. We paid for the apartment through the summer (while we were home) so we wouldn't lose it. That's about 2/3rds of what you claim it costs your son or daughter, and that was for TWO of us! At a college that was 1000 miles from home.
If someone there had medical power of attorney for your grandmother, that person should have been able to stop the resuscitation attempt. Alternatively and preferably, she should be moved from a regular hospital bed to hospice if time permits. In hospice the nurses are merely there to alleviate pain while their patients die; morphine is unrestricted if needed and desired, and there are no resuscitation attempts.
And from a heartless practical standpoint, hospice costs you/your insurance/taxpayers/whatever much less.
Also, as the other reply states, if you or someone there with medical POA did tell them to stop, and the proceeded anyway, you should have filed a civil suit, not because it would help your grandmother but because it would help the next person who wanted to die with dignity in that hospital.
The argument is that, if you are suffering excruciating pain, then you are under mental duress, and those under mental duress can't make rational decisions for themselves.
You need to have that DNR paperwork along with a medical POA set up when you are still relatively healthy, relatively pain free, and relatively unmedicated, then have the person you assigned to manage your care argue your case for you.
Your uncle needed someone with medical power of attorney to be there with him. It sounds like, had he chosen to arrange that with you, you could have helped him suffer less. I say this with the hope that anyone else reading this could arrange things now, before their elderly relatives aren't capable of signing such legal documents.
My wife had medical POA with her 94-year-old grandfather when he got sick and died in 2010. She literally had to sit by his bed to be there when a random doctor would come in and try to intubate or give him something the legal paperwork he'd signed years ago said he would refuse, and she had to tell the doctor NO and wave the POA and No Heroic Measures paperwork at him. She had to do the same thing when the social workers would come by to try to plan his treatment. each new care provider would make or take a photocopy of all the paperwork. (My wife had like 40 copies made.) This took a few weeks until eventually he was transferred to hospice. Even there one of the regular care nurses was furious when they stopped all treatment. In this case, though, the hospice nurse told the regular nurse to STFU and stay out of the way while my wife watched her grandfather die.
With a medical POA and No Heroic Measures paperwork, not only would the paper exist but there would be a family member there with the legal authority to enforce it.
I was told that applying oxygen along with chest compressions is better than compressions alone.
However...and this is important...911 operators who are trying to coax someone into giving CPR can usually get them to do the chest compressions, but all too often when the operator tells someone to breath into the dying person's mouth, the line goes dead, as does the person. When the EMTs arrive the person who was giving CPR will have faded back into the crowd. This was from an Austin EMT instructor.
Also, a nonskilled person might take too long switching from compressions to breaths and back, during which time overall blood pressure drops. It takes a while for pumping to boost blood pressure sufficiently to move it around to the brain, so the pauses to put more air in the blood can be worse than just moving around what little air is already there.
In other words, the science is pretty clear: oxygen with compressions is better than compressions alone. However, the sociology is in debate as to whether or not bystanders can be made to do things the better way, or if the less-good-but-better-than-nothing way is more likely to be implemented.
You should be happy that it was on at all while you weren't in the room. In Japan the whole room - air conditioner, lights, electrical outlets - cut off when you leave, because they are only enabled when your room key is in a slot just inside the door.
In general, making a few stereotypical assumptions, the air conditioners are probably "undersized" because A) Europeans don't mind a little sweat to conserve energy, and B) Europeans probably have less body fat to cool down.
I have a small selection of companies I've picked and like, and invest in. There's an equally small list of companies I've picked that burnt me, but I always got out before I lost too much. Overall I'm ahead. Some of the ones I've held onto are way up in value and I'll sell them as soon as I think they can't sustain that value. At least one stock hasn't gained -anything- in the 3-4 years I've held it, but they consistently pay out about 8% annually in dividents, and I consider that a pretty good return.
I've learned the most about investing through the stocks I bought myself. It's not that bad to take $2000 or so, find a company whose products you believe in, and invest. You'll learn a lot about how the market works.
We have a pretty wide selection of savings on top of that - 401k, two Roth IRAs (one of which is a 2010 conversion of a 2009 401k rollover), cash savings, company stock (held only as long as I have to), home equity - so I feel we're as diversified as we can be to hedge against losses. I'm the type of person that never really closes an account (we have four credit union accounts in two states) so it doesn't bother me to spread out investments with different companies and methods.
If only Lucas had demanded a little less $$$ for the franchise rights, they could have put a few baffles in the air ducts of their first Death Star to block torpedoes...
But your kids when to community college for the first two years while living at home, right?
And allegedly access to newer games that "require" the latest firmware to run...
But when you bought your PS3, there was no guarantee that newer games would ever exist. What if the platform bombed and Sony discontinued it? Would you have grounds to sue (and not be tossed out)? Probably not.
Not that Sony aren't dicks in this case... and in every case. I just don't see the argument that "I can't run games that didn't exist when I bought the hardware" to be a strong one.
Have you seen some of the research into serial killings? One study from 2007 implied that we may underestimate the number of people killed by serial killers each year by a factor of 10.
So yeah, I agree that there are probably hundreds of thousands of small- to big-time crooks that are getting away with their crimes on a year-to-year basis, undetected, not making all the dumb mistakes. Occasionally one of them gets caught and makes the news and we're all horrified that this was happening "just under our noses" and we're all happy that it's over, but in reality it just keeps going with some other criminal a little ways down the road...
You are assuming that he was willing to speak to the police at all after he was arrested. He may have been more fearful of his life then.
Unfortunately letting all underlings get off the hook with "They'd kill me if I didn't (x)!" would pretty much let all of them operate with impunity. Either they risk their life saying 'No' to the boss, they risk their life testifying against their boss when they get caught, or they take the prison sentence and be given a comfortable retirement by the mob when they are released (as their reward for serving a sentence in silence). This is assuming we won't give them all witness protection, which I guess we don't.
And here's a hint: the tool they envisioned to adapt and change was not the Supreme Court deciding that the meaning and intention of words written more than 200 years ago has somehow changed over time.
200 years? More like 16 years. Thomas Jefferson, the person whom you appear to hold in such high regard (by your mention of him twice in your post) disagreed with the result of the very first case of judicial review. He thought the Supreme Court was already interpreting the words of the Constitution incorrectly.
At that point, while most all of the framers of the Constitution were still alive, they could have chosen to create and pass an amendment to stop the Supreme Court from continuing to decide the meaning and intention of words written 16 years prior. They didn't. So while no one expected the Supreme Court to take on the job it did, no one (not even those founders you idolize) tried to stop them.
That doesn't stop people. I was on my city's planning and zoning commission. Plenty of the big issues we saw were due to adjacency issues, and in many cases the homes were newer than whatever business they were complaining about. (Usually the business was trying to rezone so as to start a new use and stop doing whatever people were complaining about, but people would still complain, and too often the rest of the commission and the city council would vote it down.)
Do you not see the word "should"? I realize Firefox will do something else, at which time I'll drop using their browser and hold them to the low regard I hold Microsoft during their worst years.
Or maybe they'll do something to surprise me.
Working on it, but the HOA rules only let one position open each year. Got myself on the board last year, getting someone else on this time.
I honestly have no idea. Our HOA doesn't allow composting so I've never looked into it.