Except your stupid attempt at humor ignores a massive difference between Christian and Muslim ideals. Muslim suicide bombers are hailed as martyrs, and they get to go to Heaven. Christian ideals see murderous suicide as a sin, which cannot be forgiven because you are dead, thus sending you to Hell. The idea of the Rapture is that you ascend to Heaven before the Apocalypse, rather than as/after you cause it.
The interesting thing is that both ancient and modern organized Christianity tend to see murderous suicide as a sin, but just plain murder as fine so long as the people you're murdering aren't Christian (and sometimes even just the wrong kind of Christian). In fact, soldiers who fought off pagans in the early years of Christianity occasionally became honored saints (e.g. Demetrius of Thessaloniki. Many Christians also applauded when Christian Europeans were slaughtering American Indians, writing cheerily about how God had protected their communities by inflicting massive plagues on Arawaks and Wampanoags and Powhatans. Heck, many modern American Christians are quite overjoyed at the fact that US soldiers are killing Muslims.
Basically, organized religions in general have definitions of morality that change depending on circumstance, even if they claim differently. You'd think "Thou shalt not kill" would be easy enough to follow, but very few of the religions that claim to believe in that rule have ever come close to actually following that (notable exceptions: Quakers, Jainists).
Except, of course, that with a bank, there are laws that make it impossible for the bankers and professional bank robbers to rob you, only to rob either the bank or the taxpayers.
What a lot of smarter companies do is set up their base load infrastructure with real actual servers under their control, and then fire up cloud resources as the load gets to be too high (or the primary can't function, because, say, the building they were housed in burned to the ground).
Because of the near insane lucrativeness of the US health care market, there is vast incentive to develop new treatments, instruments, and medications. Nothing else in the world compares. Socialize that, and you remove the primary reason for companies to develop technologies to improve human health.
Yes, Econ 101 says that's what should happen. Reality suggests otherwise: 1. Companies aren't the sole source of technological improvements. Many improvements and technologies come from universities and government research.
2. Scientists (who, of course, do the actual research) don't necessarily make more money based on their technical discoveries. If I'm working away in a lab run by Pfizer, and I develop an effective new drug that makes Pfizer $20 million, I might get a raise or promotion, but I'm certainly not getting $20 million or even close to that amount.
3. People who go into medicine and medical research are more often than not motivated more by a desire to save people's lives than they are with making big bucks. I'm not saying they don't want to live comfortably, but if they were really after cash they would have gone into finance, not medicine.
4. After the first $5 million or so, more money doesn't really make much difference in a person's life. Big monetary rewards are only motivating up to a point.
Employers match SS taxes taken out of employee paychecks
Which, for hourly employees, varies linearly with the number of hours worked unless your hourly workers can earn over $110,100 annually.
and they also pay for unemployment insurance by law in many states.
Actually, that's a federal tax, which is also taxable wages and thus also varies linearly with the number of hours worked.
Further still there are pension plans and 401k(403b) retirement plan matching that they contribute on as well.
Again, those retirement plans typically involve a match up to the point of a certain percentage of wages.
Furthermore, depending on the nature of the work they need to carry insurance by head count to cover injuries.
Of all the costs you've mentioned, this is the only one that varies with head count rather than taxable wages.
So to do some very approximate math here, let's say you're paying your workers $10 per hour and your taxes and retirement amount to 20% of the wage. So if you have 2 workers working 30 hours a week, that's about 3200 hours a year total * $12 effective cost per hour = $38,400 a year for both workers. Whereas if you have 1 worker working 60 hours a week, that's about 2100 hours * $12 + 1100 * 18 (due to the time-and-a-half rule) = $25,200+$19,800 = $44,000. So if the increased insurance costs due to head count are $5600 per employee, you lose money by making the 1 person work more, even assuming no burnout effects like the article describes.
With that precedent, you can use bias intimidation charges to charge and convict preachers for preaching against homosexuality in churches or comics for making "inappropriate" jokes in comedy houses.
No, you can't. Any judge would throw that out in a heartbeat citing obvious First Amendment issues.
What you can use bias intimidation charges for a preacher who preaches against homosexuality, finds a (closeted) gay couple in town with their curtains not quite closed, films them enjoying what they think is a private moment, and then shows that film in the middle of his church service.
If the culprit secretly set up a camera to video tape his straight roommate masturbating and posted it to a gay porn site, and the straight person was so humiliated after they found out about it that they committed suicide, would the gay person be charged with a hate crime? The likely answer would be no.
At least in a legal sense, the question becomes whether the goal was embarrassing his roommate or embarrassing straight people. If the former, that's a crime but not a hate crime. If the latter, it's a hate crime. Ravi's actions were the second one.
Serial killers. Serial rapists. Home invasion, FFS.
Those are typically crimes targeting individuals. Multiple individuals, one at a time, but individuals nonetheless.
Hate crime laws were designed for behaviors like picking a black person at random and murdering them because they were black, with the very express intent of "sending a message" to all black people that they needed to leave town if they didn't want to be murdered. This has happened with groups other than racial ones, with Leo Frank and Michael Shepard being some of the most notable cases.
Should also mention that the NYPD is particularly bad on the police state mentality: * Their attacks on peaceful protesters during Occupy Wall St, most notably Anthony Bologna pepper-spraying. Forget the First Amendment's assembly clause. * They're currently engaged in a massive program to spy on Muslims, all without a warrant, without even notifying the jurisdictions they're sending their officers into, and of course violating the First Amendment's free exercise clause by very explicitly targeting anybody who practices Islam. * The stop-and-frisk policy, where people (who are overwhelmingly black or Latino) just walking down the street are stopped and searched by police. Not because they're suspected of committing a crime, just because the officers feel like it. Roughly 90% of the 4 million people stopped this way were guilty of no crime whatsoever. Forget the Fourth Amendment's protections.
And of course the occasional black or brown person shot to death by the NYPD for no obvious reason.
That assumes the individual gets overtime or comp time or some other benefit for working more than 40hrs/week. That's not universal at all.
For hourly workers, in the United States, overtime pays 1.5*(regular wage) by law. If that doesn't apply to you, you're unemployed, an independent contractor, an exempt salaried employee, working under the table, or a victim of the crime of wage theft. If you don't know, check which tax form you got: 1099: contractor, W-2: probably salaried, nothing (and probably paid in cash): working under the table.
This is actually the strongest argument for completely socialized medicine: If everybody gets health care, always, from the same source, then it's more expensive (in hourly positions) to hire 1 person to work 60 hours per week than it is to hire 2 people to work 30 hours per week. And it's the sort of thing that every industry that isn't health care ought to be pushing for, because the benefits far outweigh the added taxes.
You're still going to have a problem with workers that are considered 'exempt', which includes almost every American on/. with a job, as well as doctors, lawyers, and many other professionals. My understanding is that in Europe, professionals who don't work for themselves are not considered exempt from limits on how long they can be required to work.
When was the last time THE PEOPLE had a REAL VOTE on how their country worked?
In Ohio, November 8, 2011: After getting the requisite number of signatures, a law that would have banned collective bargaining by public worker unions (similar to what Scott Walker wanted to do in Wisconsin that sparked so much protest there) was voted down by about a 3-2 margin. The reason the citizens of Ohio could do that was because about 120 years ago, there was a Progressive movement that took over several states and demanded that they institute the ability for citizens to force a referendum on any law passed, and also demanded that citizens be given the chance to vote on an official remaining in office before their term would normally be up (recall).
Now, as far as nationally is concerned, then you're partially right, but states and cities often have real elections.
No, the TSA is being dumb here. Two major flaws: 1. You aren't necessarily who your documents say you are. For instance, if you stole somebody's credentials, did a quick photo switcheroo, and created legitimate-looking copies, all of a sudden you've convinced the TSA agent that you're the pre-checked Mr Smith when you are in fact Mr Reid with a bomb in your shoe.
2. Bad guys don't necessarily do anything that would show up on a background check prior to committing terrorism. A terrorist was almost definitely an ordinary person in their society earlier in their life, and suicide bombings are often a means of terrorist groups making use of people who are devout terrorists but stupid enough that they might do damage to the group, which means they're usually early on in their terrorism and may not have accumulated any kind of record.
The Netherlands being more homogenous culturally and ethnically, combined with 7th in the world per capita net worth and a tiny population, have absolutely nothing to do with it.
If I'm reading you correctly, the usual perception that's being expressed here is that the higher crime rate must be black and Hispanic people. This is not an uncommon belief in the US, but statistics don't back up that perception: For instance, check out Connecticut crime statistics from 2000-2004: There were over 3 times as many whites as blacks arrested for burglary, larceny, aggravated assault, and arson, and about twice as many white rapists as black rapists. The difference in incarceration rates is mainly because black criminals were far more likely to be convicted and sentenced to prison time than white criminals who had committed the same offense.
No amount of marketing can change the number of people who need a drug. That is fixed.
Actually, it isn't. For instance, there are endless TV ads describing a list of symptoms and instructing the viewers to diagnose themselves with a disorder X and ask their doctor for a prescription for treatment Y. This may motivate somebody to seek out medical aid for a real problem, but what the drug companies are really hoping for is that a layperson will be convinced they have X (even if their regular doctor tells them they don't) and shop around until they get a prescription for Y. And since it's a treatment rather than a cure, this same person will get treated with Y for years regardless of whether they really need it, so long as the side effects aren't too bad.
This is part of what's wrong with for-profit health care: It's profitable to create demand that's not only useless but actually counterproductive and sometimes dangerous.
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Joe LIEberman is retiring...
Don't you mean Senator Palpatine?
Except your stupid attempt at humor ignores a massive difference between Christian and Muslim ideals. Muslim suicide bombers are hailed as martyrs, and they get to go to Heaven. Christian ideals see murderous suicide as a sin, which cannot be forgiven because you are dead, thus sending you to Hell. The idea of the Rapture is that you ascend to Heaven before the Apocalypse, rather than as/after you cause it.
The interesting thing is that both ancient and modern organized Christianity tend to see murderous suicide as a sin, but just plain murder as fine so long as the people you're murdering aren't Christian (and sometimes even just the wrong kind of Christian). In fact, soldiers who fought off pagans in the early years of Christianity occasionally became honored saints (e.g. Demetrius of Thessaloniki. Many Christians also applauded when Christian Europeans were slaughtering American Indians, writing cheerily about how God had protected their communities by inflicting massive plagues on Arawaks and Wampanoags and Powhatans. Heck, many modern American Christians are quite overjoyed at the fact that US soldiers are killing Muslims.
Basically, organized religions in general have definitions of morality that change depending on circumstance, even if they claim differently. You'd think "Thou shalt not kill" would be easy enough to follow, but very few of the religions that claim to believe in that rule have ever come close to actually following that (notable exceptions: Quakers, Jainists).
There's a very real problem though: One of the players may need to use the bathroom.
Except, of course, that with a bank, there are laws that make it impossible for the bankers and professional bank robbers to rob you, only to rob either the bank or the taxpayers.
What a lot of smarter companies do is set up their base load infrastructure with real actual servers under their control, and then fire up cloud resources as the load gets to be too high (or the primary can't function, because, say, the building they were housed in burned to the ground).
According to the System Requirements documentation, LibreOffice will run without Java, but still has some features that make use of it.
Because of the near insane lucrativeness of the US health care market, there is vast incentive to develop new treatments, instruments, and medications. Nothing else in the world compares. Socialize that, and you remove the primary reason for companies to develop technologies to improve human health.
Yes, Econ 101 says that's what should happen. Reality suggests otherwise:
1. Companies aren't the sole source of technological improvements. Many improvements and technologies come from universities and government research.
2. Scientists (who, of course, do the actual research) don't necessarily make more money based on their technical discoveries. If I'm working away in a lab run by Pfizer, and I develop an effective new drug that makes Pfizer $20 million, I might get a raise or promotion, but I'm certainly not getting $20 million or even close to that amount.
3. People who go into medicine and medical research are more often than not motivated more by a desire to save people's lives than they are with making big bucks. I'm not saying they don't want to live comfortably, but if they were really after cash they would have gone into finance, not medicine.
4. After the first $5 million or so, more money doesn't really make much difference in a person's life. Big monetary rewards are only motivating up to a point.
Employers match SS taxes taken out of employee paychecks
Which, for hourly employees, varies linearly with the number of hours worked unless your hourly workers can earn over $110,100 annually.
and they also pay for unemployment insurance by law in many states.
Actually, that's a federal tax, which is also taxable wages and thus also varies linearly with the number of hours worked.
Further still there are pension plans and 401k(403b) retirement plan matching that they contribute on as well.
Again, those retirement plans typically involve a match up to the point of a certain percentage of wages.
Furthermore, depending on the nature of the work they need to carry insurance by head count to cover injuries.
Of all the costs you've mentioned, this is the only one that varies with head count rather than taxable wages.
So to do some very approximate math here, let's say you're paying your workers $10 per hour and your taxes and retirement amount to 20% of the wage. So if you have 2 workers working 30 hours a week, that's about 3200 hours a year total * $12 effective cost per hour = $38,400 a year for both workers. Whereas if you have 1 worker working 60 hours a week, that's about 2100 hours * $12 + 1100 * 18 (due to the time-and-a-half rule) = $25,200+$19,800 = $44,000. So if the increased insurance costs due to head count are $5600 per employee, you lose money by making the 1 person work more, even assuming no burnout effects like the article describes.
With that precedent, you can use bias intimidation charges to charge and convict preachers for preaching against homosexuality in churches or comics for making "inappropriate" jokes in comedy houses.
No, you can't. Any judge would throw that out in a heartbeat citing obvious First Amendment issues.
What you can use bias intimidation charges for a preacher who preaches against homosexuality, finds a (closeted) gay couple in town with their curtains not quite closed, films them enjoying what they think is a private moment, and then shows that film in the middle of his church service.
If the culprit secretly set up a camera to video tape his straight roommate masturbating and posted it to a gay porn site, and the straight person was so humiliated after they found out about it that they committed suicide, would the gay person be charged with a hate crime? The likely answer would be no.
At least in a legal sense, the question becomes whether the goal was embarrassing his roommate or embarrassing straight people. If the former, that's a crime but not a hate crime. If the latter, it's a hate crime. Ravi's actions were the second one.
Serial killers. Serial rapists. Home invasion, FFS.
Those are typically crimes targeting individuals. Multiple individuals, one at a time, but individuals nonetheless.
Hate crime laws were designed for behaviors like picking a black person at random and murdering them because they were black, with the very express intent of "sending a message" to all black people that they needed to leave town if they didn't want to be murdered. This has happened with groups other than racial ones, with Leo Frank and Michael Shepard being some of the most notable cases.
Your problem is solved already: Instead of using the word "gay", just say Takei.
My understanding is that the best known general cryptanalytic attacks on AES are only marginally better than brute-force
... known outside the NSA. If they have something that would break AES easily, they probably keep it safely classified.
Should also mention that the NYPD is particularly bad on the police state mentality:
* Their attacks on peaceful protesters during Occupy Wall St, most notably Anthony Bologna pepper-spraying. Forget the First Amendment's assembly clause.
* They're currently engaged in a massive program to spy on Muslims, all without a warrant, without even notifying the jurisdictions they're sending their officers into, and of course violating the First Amendment's free exercise clause by very explicitly targeting anybody who practices Islam.
* The stop-and-frisk policy, where people (who are overwhelmingly black or Latino) just walking down the street are stopped and searched by police. Not because they're suspected of committing a crime, just because the officers feel like it. Roughly 90% of the 4 million people stopped this way were guilty of no crime whatsoever. Forget the Fourth Amendment's protections.
And of course the occasional black or brown person shot to death by the NYPD for no obvious reason.
That assumes the individual gets overtime or comp time or some other benefit for working more than 40hrs/week. That's not universal at all.
For hourly workers, in the United States, overtime pays 1.5*(regular wage) by law. If that doesn't apply to you, you're unemployed, an independent contractor, an exempt salaried employee, working under the table, or a victim of the crime of wage theft. If you don't know, check which tax form you got: 1099: contractor, W-2: probably salaried, nothing (and probably paid in cash): working under the table.
This is actually the strongest argument for completely socialized medicine: If everybody gets health care, always, from the same source, then it's more expensive (in hourly positions) to hire 1 person to work 60 hours per week than it is to hire 2 people to work 30 hours per week. And it's the sort of thing that every industry that isn't health care ought to be pushing for, because the benefits far outweigh the added taxes.
You're still going to have a problem with workers that are considered 'exempt', which includes almost every American on /. with a job, as well as doctors, lawyers, and many other professionals. My understanding is that in Europe, professionals who don't work for themselves are not considered exempt from limits on how long they can be required to work.
Perhaps he's taking time away from his angry wife to spend it with your angry ex-wife?
When was the last time THE PEOPLE had a REAL VOTE on how their country worked?
In Ohio, November 8, 2011: After getting the requisite number of signatures, a law that would have banned collective bargaining by public worker unions (similar to what Scott Walker wanted to do in Wisconsin that sparked so much protest there) was voted down by about a 3-2 margin. The reason the citizens of Ohio could do that was because about 120 years ago, there was a Progressive movement that took over several states and demanded that they institute the ability for citizens to force a referendum on any law passed, and also demanded that citizens be given the chance to vote on an official remaining in office before their term would normally be up (recall).
Now, as far as nationally is concerned, then you're partially right, but states and cities often have real elections.
Or, more likely, the chair making the revote decision was on the side that conjured up the 3 phantom votes.
No, the TSA is being dumb here. Two major flaws:
1. You aren't necessarily who your documents say you are. For instance, if you stole somebody's credentials, did a quick photo switcheroo, and created legitimate-looking copies, all of a sudden you've convinced the TSA agent that you're the pre-checked Mr Smith when you are in fact Mr Reid with a bomb in your shoe.
2. Bad guys don't necessarily do anything that would show up on a background check prior to committing terrorism. A terrorist was almost definitely an ordinary person in their society earlier in their life, and suicide bombings are often a means of terrorist groups making use of people who are devout terrorists but stupid enough that they might do damage to the group, which means they're usually early on in their terrorism and may not have accumulated any kind of record.
Just like any other drug.
No, those are escaped French POWs.
The Netherlands being more homogenous culturally and ethnically, combined with 7th in the world per capita net worth and a tiny population, have absolutely nothing to do with it.
If I'm reading you correctly, the usual perception that's being expressed here is that the higher crime rate must be black and Hispanic people. This is not an uncommon belief in the US, but statistics don't back up that perception: For instance, check out Connecticut crime statistics from 2000-2004: There were over 3 times as many whites as blacks arrested for burglary, larceny, aggravated assault, and arson, and about twice as many white rapists as black rapists. The difference in incarceration rates is mainly because black criminals were far more likely to be convicted and sentenced to prison time than white criminals who had committed the same offense.
And here I was thinking it sounded like "Fuggedaboudit" instead of "ribbit".
No amount of marketing can change the number of people who need a drug. That is fixed.
Actually, it isn't. For instance, there are endless TV ads describing a list of symptoms and instructing the viewers to diagnose themselves with a disorder X and ask their doctor for a prescription for treatment Y. This may motivate somebody to seek out medical aid for a real problem, but what the drug companies are really hoping for is that a layperson will be convinced they have X (even if their regular doctor tells them they don't) and shop around until they get a prescription for Y. And since it's a treatment rather than a cure, this same person will get treated with Y for years regardless of whether they really need it, so long as the side effects aren't too bad.
This is part of what's wrong with for-profit health care: It's profitable to create demand that's not only useless but actually counterproductive and sometimes dangerous.