You must be getting all your news from CNN and NBC if you actually believe that all Tea Party members are racist or retarded.
Nope, all it took was driving by one of their rallies.
Let's hear a detailed list of the real policy issues you have with them
For starters, they all claim to be "Christian." And screaming about how taxes need to be cut on the rich (when most of them are not rich in the slightest but labor under the psychotic delusion that they will somehow hit the lottery soon) so they can "keep more of my money."
What did Jesus have to say about this? Ah yes: Matthew 19:24, "Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a greedy man to enter the kingdom of God."
Isn't it nice how much of a bunch of un-christian greedy ratbastards the Greed Over People (GOP) party and the Ree Tardiers really are?
It's not the guns, it's the neanderthal GOP morons who tend to misuse them.
Same thing for Jesus. Jesus was a nice man who had a lot of good things to say - among them that greed was bad, taking care of the poor and infirm is good, and treating people with respect is a wonderful thing.
The GOP, meanwhile, are a hateful bunch of assholes who believe in rewarding greed and fucking the poor over at every turn. Not to mention their attitude on the elderly - two of these GOP scumbags on a local radio station were actually joking and laughing at the idea of holding an "Alpo Drive" to feed impoverished seniors recently.
Not to mention the MMO's and other applications now sending around their updates via Torrent protocols.
And the people who telecommute.
Or use Skype.
Or use a lot of Hulu Plus.
I don't torrent, and yet my "usage" always seems to be about 2/3 of my ISP's cap. Just wait till apps get even hungrier, in 2 years time everyone will be hitting cap and either getting PO'ed or start dropping those services... which is what the ISP monopolies want so they can force people back into cable TV, pay-channels, etc.
“Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.” - Calvin & Hobbes.
I don't care about bad taste jokes, being a South Park fan, but get your facts straight if you're going to make a joke. Plural Marriage has been banned in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints since 1890 [wikipedia.org] and those choosing to ignore this ban (very rare) are subject to excommunication.
Another factor: Credit card transaction fees can be ridiculously high.
Ever gone to a Chinese restaurant and seen "minimum credit card purchase: $20" on a sign? Guess why - they're being charged $4 or more per transaction, if you buy a $10 lunch, they just lost money after the credit card company takes their bite.
So you can understand why Microsoft, Steam, et al would want to do it similarly. They may have negotiated a lower transaction fee through large-house power, but the Visa/Monstercard monopoly is a monopoly even worse than MS, and even if they got the fee down to $1 per transaction, $1 times millions of transactions still = Millions of Dollars.
Just have to be smarter than the "tha sky iz fallin! Global warmin is a commie conspiracy! Obama iz a kenyan muzlim! Jebus wantz me to be rich and hatez tha poor! I gotz to have ma gunz in case tha guvmint tries to put troops in ma howze!" lunatic fringe.
In other words - the Retardican fools who get their daily brainwashing from Rush, Hannity, Beck, and Drudge.
Yeah. Everything to program the neanderthal Retardicans needs to be right at the front - they have a limited size buffer in those protohuman brains, if you overflow it everything else goes into the bit-bucket rather than into long-term storage.
Screenings are one thing. Regularly scheduled screenings and checkups are an important part of medicine, if for no other reason than they establish a usable baseline that can be referenced against for future medical tests.
What goes on in the US of ADD, however? Just plain lawyer- and politician-induced stupidity.
If you are in an "interchangeable" role like an ER doc, the hospital *may* cover the malpractice side. But then they'll alter the steps above and I guarantee you are "paying" the hospital for it either way, it's just a question of whether it shows up on your gross or not.
If you are a "Practice that just happens to be located in the hospital", which is what more hospitals are going to because it makes the hospital's balance sheets look better, the hospital will do what I described above. This despite the fact that the hospital will either "contract" or "hire" you to get your practice in, and will only take X number of specialists in each role.
If you're a specialist doc, chances are far greater that you will be shunted into the "Practice that just happens to be located in the hospital" situation as well.
Hospitals generally "pay the malpractice costs" for ER docs, only. This is because ER docs don't "set up their own practice" and when you go to the ER, you see whichever doctor is available to see you.
For actual PRACTICE docs, they have to pay their own malpractice insurance. The hospital processes the payments, but here's how it works:
- Patient and/or insurance "Pays the Hospital" minus any "Negotiated Discount From Normal Rates." - Hospital "Credits the account of Doctor's Practice." - Hospital "Bills for Hospital's cut, space rent, etc." - Doctor's Practice then has to pay Doctor, any practice-specific staff, and Malpractice Insurance. - Doctor's Practice then has to pay taxes, based on Step 2 gross figure above rather than net figure post-Step 4. - Doctor then has to pay personal income taxes on top of all that.
Medical accounting thanks to hospitals and the scam that is the insurance industry (trust me if not for those "Negotiated Discounts", the "raw costs" would be half or less, because no insurance company EVER pays more than half the "list price" and hospitals/doctors have defensively raised the "list price" to compensate, knowing damn well they will never get anywhere close to it from an insurance company or government medicare/medicaid) is one step above MafiAA or Hollywood accounting on the fraud scale. The only difference is, it's not deliberately designed to "Lose" money, just make it fucking hard to track where the money went unless you know where to look.
Funny. Assholes like Moammar Gadhafi, Newt Gingrich, Robert Mugabe, Hamid Karzai, Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat... they all seem to have no problem finding doctors.
My friend's wife is a doctor (OB/GYN), specializes in at-risk pregnancies and neonatal care in rural settings. By "gross earnings" she makes around $200k/year (remember, rural = not rich people, so she can't charge as much). After you take out taxes, the hospital's cut, the insurance company kickbacks and "reductions", and malpractice insurance she's lucky to clear 60k in a good year. Oh, and remember that to make that much she's now paying back on a few hundred thou in student loans built up through the getting of a medical doctorate followed by time spent in residency in order to get licensed.
Admittedly anecdotal evidence. But she seems fairly representative of her field. Someone working urban might gross 1/3 more than she does but there's a corresponding increase in the hospital's take, insurance "adjustments", and malpractice insurance cost on that anyways.
otherwise you might as well not have doctors at all and leave medicine to some giant, complex algorithm.
You now realize the goal.
Everything has to be "standardized." Nevermind that even the "standard body temperature" fluctuates a decent amount throughout the day, and varies from person to person. Everything has to be peggable to a chart such that it can be fed into a computer, printed back, and the "answer" just read off.
Study after study shows people with access to assloads of cash live longer.
There, fixed that for you.
And don't worry. It fits right in with the Retardican plan. Right now the goal is to make sure all the "little people" no longer live long enough to retire, or only live a couple years after it. That way they can get expenditures down enough that they can justify their Tax Breaks For Billionaires, Fuck The Poor mantra of the past three decades.
Here's what generally happens in the US of ADD. Someone comes in to the doctor's office overtired. They have a cold because they overworked themselves and shot their immune system to hell through fatigue.
The doctor then proceeds to order up bloodwork, EKG, MRI... a thousand useless tests. Even worse is the "full body scan" crap advertised on Right Wing Wacko Radio lately. Spend thousands of dollars getting scanned, followed by thousands of dollars fixing the 3-4 "abnormalities" it finds in every human that are of no danger to your life whatsoever.
Y'know what would have worked equally well? Send them home with a doctor's note, have them get some fucking rest, and while we are at it, reinstitute actual worker protections so that they weren't burning the candle at 5 ends at their job taking home 50+ hours of work home each week on top of the 60 they already spend in the office including "working through lunch" out of fear that thanks to the the Retardicans fucking up the economy they're going to get downsized or replaced or their job sent to India.
Slashdot Mirror
You're going to be waiting a long time.
You must be getting all your news from CNN and NBC if you actually believe that all Tea Party members are racist or retarded.
Nope, all it took was driving by one of their rallies.
Let's hear a detailed list of the real policy issues you have with them
For starters, they all claim to be "Christian." And screaming about how taxes need to be cut on the rich (when most of them are not rich in the slightest but labor under the psychotic delusion that they will somehow hit the lottery soon) so they can "keep more of my money."
What did Jesus have to say about this? Ah yes:
Matthew 19:24, "Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a greedy man to enter the kingdom of God."
Isn't it nice how much of a bunch of un-christian greedy ratbastards the Greed Over People (GOP) party and the Ree Tardiers really are?
It's not the guns, it's the neanderthal GOP morons who tend to misuse them.
Same thing for Jesus. Jesus was a nice man who had a lot of good things to say - among them that greed was bad, taking care of the poor and infirm is good, and treating people with respect is a wonderful thing.
The GOP, meanwhile, are a hateful bunch of assholes who believe in rewarding greed and fucking the poor over at every turn. Not to mention their attitude on the elderly - two of these GOP scumbags on a local radio station were actually joking and laughing at the idea of holding an "Alpo Drive" to feed impoverished seniors recently.
"Tool" in the case of a GOP operative would be spelled either B-R-I-B-E-D or C-O-R-R-U-P-T.
Tor looks like the best present workaround.
How very interesting...
Not to mention the MMO's and other applications now sending around their updates via Torrent protocols.
And the people who telecommute.
Or use Skype.
Or use a lot of Hulu Plus.
I don't torrent, and yet my "usage" always seems to be about 2/3 of my ISP's cap. Just wait till apps get even hungrier, in 2 years time everyone will be hitting cap and either getting PO'ed or start dropping those services... which is what the ISP monopolies want so they can force people back into cable TV, pay-channels, etc.
“Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.” - Calvin & Hobbes.
Given the number of Americans who can't manage to speak proper English either...
But that would make sense!
I don't care about bad taste jokes, being a South Park fan, but get your facts straight if you're going to make a joke. Plural Marriage has been banned in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints since 1890 [wikipedia.org] and those choosing to ignore this ban (very rare) are subject to excommunication.
wink wink nudge nudge
Say no more.
Another factor: Credit card transaction fees can be ridiculously high.
Ever gone to a Chinese restaurant and seen "minimum credit card purchase: $20" on a sign? Guess why - they're being charged $4 or more per transaction, if you buy a $10 lunch, they just lost money after the credit card company takes their bite.
So you can understand why Microsoft, Steam, et al would want to do it similarly. They may have negotiated a lower transaction fee through large-house power, but the Visa/Monstercard monopoly is a monopoly even worse than MS, and even if they got the fee down to $1 per transaction, $1 times millions of transactions still = Millions of Dollars.
Don't have to be "smarter than everybody else."
Just have to be smarter than the "tha sky iz fallin! Global warmin is a commie conspiracy! Obama iz a kenyan muzlim! Jebus wantz me to be rich and hatez tha poor! I gotz to have ma gunz in case tha guvmint tries to put troops in ma howze!" lunatic fringe.
In other words - the Retardican fools who get their daily brainwashing from Rush, Hannity, Beck, and Drudge.
If you go to Sludge for "news", you're already too far gone to save.
Yeah. Everything to program the neanderthal Retardicans needs to be right at the front - they have a limited size buffer in those protohuman brains, if you overflow it everything else goes into the bit-bucket rather than into long-term storage.
I lost a very good friend to Campus Crusade of Crap. Most definitely, they are a nasty cult.
Republicans - "Freedom." See also "Arbeit Macht Frei."
Screenings are one thing. Regularly scheduled screenings and checkups are an important part of medicine, if for no other reason than they establish a usable baseline that can be referenced against for future medical tests.
What goes on in the US of ADD, however? Just plain lawyer- and politician-induced stupidity.
If you are in an "interchangeable" role like an ER doc, the hospital *may* cover the malpractice side. But then they'll alter the steps above and I guarantee you are "paying" the hospital for it either way, it's just a question of whether it shows up on your gross or not.
If you are a "Practice that just happens to be located in the hospital", which is what more hospitals are going to because it makes the hospital's balance sheets look better, the hospital will do what I described above. This despite the fact that the hospital will either "contract" or "hire" you to get your practice in, and will only take X number of specialists in each role.
If you're a specialist doc, chances are far greater that you will be shunted into the "Practice that just happens to be located in the hospital" situation as well.
Too true.
She sees a lot of Meth babies in her area. Large number with damage due to alcoholic mothers, too.
Documenting it and making sure it is ALL documented so that they will never have a leg to stand on in court eats up an amazing amount of time.
Or you're a fucking clueless moron.
Hospitals generally "pay the malpractice costs" for ER docs, only. This is because ER docs don't "set up their own practice" and when you go to the ER, you see whichever doctor is available to see you.
For actual PRACTICE docs, they have to pay their own malpractice insurance. The hospital processes the payments, but here's how it works:
- Patient and/or insurance "Pays the Hospital" minus any "Negotiated Discount From Normal Rates."
- Hospital "Credits the account of Doctor's Practice."
- Hospital "Bills for Hospital's cut, space rent, etc."
- Doctor's Practice then has to pay Doctor, any practice-specific staff, and Malpractice Insurance.
- Doctor's Practice then has to pay taxes, based on Step 2 gross figure above rather than net figure post-Step 4.
- Doctor then has to pay personal income taxes on top of all that.
Medical accounting thanks to hospitals and the scam that is the insurance industry (trust me if not for those "Negotiated Discounts", the "raw costs" would be half or less, because no insurance company EVER pays more than half the "list price" and hospitals/doctors have defensively raised the "list price" to compensate, knowing damn well they will never get anywhere close to it from an insurance company or government medicare/medicaid) is one step above MafiAA or Hollywood accounting on the fraud scale. The only difference is, it's not deliberately designed to "Lose" money, just make it fucking hard to track where the money went unless you know where to look.
Almost forgot to mention Rush Limbaugh. He certainly has no problem getting all the pills he wants.
Funny. Assholes like Moammar Gadhafi, Newt Gingrich, Robert Mugabe, Hamid Karzai, Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat... they all seem to have no problem finding doctors.
Regarding risk of being sued: why do you think that medical malpractice insurance is so high?
My friend's wife is a doctor (OB/GYN), specializes in at-risk pregnancies and neonatal care in rural settings. By "gross earnings" she makes around $200k/year (remember, rural = not rich people, so she can't charge as much). After you take out taxes, the hospital's cut, the insurance company kickbacks and "reductions", and malpractice insurance she's lucky to clear 60k in a good year. Oh, and remember that to make that much she's now paying back on a few hundred thou in student loans built up through the getting of a medical doctorate followed by time spent in residency in order to get licensed.
Admittedly anecdotal evidence. But she seems fairly representative of her field. Someone working urban might gross 1/3 more than she does but there's a corresponding increase in the hospital's take, insurance "adjustments", and malpractice insurance cost on that anyways.
otherwise you might as well not have doctors at all and leave medicine to some giant, complex algorithm.
You now realize the goal.
Everything has to be "standardized." Nevermind that even the "standard body temperature" fluctuates a decent amount throughout the day, and varies from person to person. Everything has to be peggable to a chart such that it can be fed into a computer, printed back, and the "answer" just read off.
Paging Doctor Lexus...
Study after study shows people with access to assloads of cash live longer.
There, fixed that for you.
And don't worry. It fits right in with the Retardican plan. Right now the goal is to make sure all the "little people" no longer live long enough to retire, or only live a couple years after it. That way they can get expenditures down enough that they can justify their Tax Breaks For Billionaires, Fuck The Poor mantra of the past three decades.
You were demonstrably sick.
Here's what generally happens in the US of ADD. Someone comes in to the doctor's office overtired. They have a cold because they overworked themselves and shot their immune system to hell through fatigue.
The doctor then proceeds to order up bloodwork, EKG, MRI... a thousand useless tests. Even worse is the "full body scan" crap advertised on Right Wing Wacko Radio lately. Spend thousands of dollars getting scanned, followed by thousands of dollars fixing the 3-4 "abnormalities" it finds in every human that are of no danger to your life whatsoever.
Y'know what would have worked equally well? Send them home with a doctor's note, have them get some fucking rest, and while we are at it, reinstitute actual worker protections so that they weren't burning the candle at 5 ends at their job taking home 50+ hours of work home each week on top of the 60 they already spend in the office including "working through lunch" out of fear that thanks to the the Retardicans fucking up the economy they're going to get downsized or replaced or their job sent to India.