the 'healthcare crisis' is because the nature of healthcare changed and the delivery mechanism did not. In the 1970s, healthcare was very limited. A doctor could set a bone, stitch you up, and blast you with radiation hoping for the best. In 40 years we've moved to things like personalized medicine (where for the price of $10,000 a month an aids patient can thrive, plus a raft of preventative medicines and maintenance medicines. Do you see the shift? We've gone from caring for a few major disasters and making you comfy when you die to maintaining the human body like you would any other machine.
An insurance model for delivering healthcare works for disasters and a one time end of life expense. It breaks when you're using healthcare for maintenance. The thing anyone without socialized medicine is, unless you're so rich you can drop $10k/mo, you don't really have healthcare. Because as soon as you need it, I'm mean you're really going to use it and use it regularly, your insurance provider is going to take it away. That's why America socialized medicine... for the elderly. But even they're going to lose it soon. Just you wait. You think it's there, but it's not. And by the time you realize it, it'll be too late. Poverty will crush you and you won't matter any more. You'll just fall by the way side.
not to put a damper on things, but how does this really hurt any of these groups? I might be able to buy something on Universal Music, but I'm not very likely too. The other sites are just business portals. All Anonymous really did was mildly inconvenience some low level employees trying to log into their corporate intranet. Meanwhile MegaUpload's still down and the owner's still facing criminal charges and decades in prison...
Sorry, once again I'm jumbling terms. That gets back to what I said about it being a complex issue, after all. It's difficult to articulate, especially in an early morning/. post:).
Anyway, strictly speaking it's not a scam so much as a philosophy of doing business. This philosophy includes Goldman Sachs, Bain Capital and the entire mortgage & securities industry circa 2005. It comes down to one thing: finding clever ways to capture large amounts of our civilization's output without producing anything. Financial Vampirism.
Here's a good question to illustrate my point: we often talk about how many months a year you work for the gov't, but have you ever thought how many of those month's you work for the 1%? Even a conservative/ right wing estimate says they have 50% of all wealth in their hands. It stands to reason you're spending 6 months every year toiling for someone else.
is why isn't anyone up in arms that Microsoft is going to heavily subsidize Windows 8 Tablet & phone sales. Isn't that an Anti-Trust violation? I'm pretty sure Walmart did the same thing with cosmetics and got in all sorts of trouble...
trying to follow an American style system of finances. The basics of the scam are you borrow money to buy up properties, use those properties as collateral to borrow more money, and pay yourself huge sums of money in management an consulting fees. Then when whole house of cards collapses you just get bailed out by the tax payer buy using a fraction of your ill gotten gains to buy off the gov't. See Bain Capital for the classic example of this, but they're hardly the only one. The other major component to this are financial vampires like Goldman Sachs who do billions of micro trades a day to siphon money off the top. No actual investment goes on, they're just pocketing money from other investors.
If you're noticing a pattern here, it's a wealth transfer from the middle and lower classes up to the 1%. Trickle up economics. The middle class goes away, and without them the economy crashes. You know American isn't in a recession, right? But do you know why? It's because the 1% are making so much money that they skew the numbers. Take them out and large sections of the US economy are in depression, let alone recession.
but I agree with the sentiment. Right now I'm waiting for my kid to finish getting ready to school, so I've got time to post to/. . After that it's off to my day job for 9 hours. Right now a lobbyist for SOPA is doing the same thing, but he's going to spend 9 hours fighting for it. Oh, at the end of my 9 hour shift I'm going to study programming in hopes of getting a better job.
If I'm going to fight SOPA, PIPA or any of the other horrid things the 1% has in store for me, then I need more leisure time. That's what the rich were talking about in the 1800s when they said 'Idle hands are the devil's plaything'. That said, the 1% are working hard to make sure I don't get it. They're busing Unions, dividing Americans against one another based on race, creed & sexual orientation. They're scaring us with terrorists. They're fighting on multiple fronts, and I can't get the time to fight on one. This, folks, is why I'm a socialist in favor of 'Basic Income' (google it when wikipedia comes back up).
I guess one of the really big problems is, SOPA is just a symptom of a larger, more complex problem. Americans are big on simple answers to complex problems. That's why George Bush jr resonated so well with them. How are we suppose to fight when we don't even know there's a war going on?
it's not so much that the teachers are better, it's that they're equally distributed. In America, property taxes pay for public schools. So if you live in a poor neighborhood you have low value property, low property taxes and therefore underfunded schools. It's a clever way for the rich to have nice public schools w/o paying for the poor to get same. Finland doesn't allow that, they distribute the funds equally, and have no private schools. Adam Smith talked about this in Wealth of Nations. One of the checks and balances on the evils of Capitalism was suppose to be that the rich lived in the same environment as the poor (social and economic as well as natural); so if they screwed the poor they were really just screwing themselves. The world is big enough that that isn't true. Heck, forget the world, just the good 'ol US of A is big enough for the rich to ignore the plight of the poor.
He's publicly said he'd veto it, so sneaking it into a bill is a death sentence for that bill. Romney opposes it too, but I'm a little worried. As has been pointed out in another thread the basic principles of the bill are in line with the right wing's general principle that strong hierarchy is a good thing. Moreover, Obama's actually in a position right now where he can veto the bill and has shown he will. Romney's still just campaigning and could easily flip flop. Obama's words carry more weight because he can actually do it, so he's in a put up or shut up position...
$10 bucks doesn't sound worth the effort and risk. If your numbers are right and they really only get $10 bucks for the cable, then that speaks to a frightening level of desperation on a part of your populace. Maybe instead of making cables harder to steal we should make citizens that don't want to steal them...
but recent (3.x) versions of OpenOffice ate my kids documents. It really sucked. From what I can gather it's a known bug in the document recovery module that hasn't been fixed to this day. The program crashes, writes a blank document out as the 'recover' document, then cheerfully overwrites all your original file and any of the automatically made backups. I suppose that somewhere along the line there was some user error. My kid probably could have said 'no' to something and stopped the whole mess. But seriously, she shouldn't have too. I've got a 500 frickin' gig drive in her machine. The biggest word doc I've ever seen in my life was 5 megs (mostly pictures). Why the hell do we still delete shit? Just make a huge undo buffer or something. I've got half a fscking terabyte. Come on OO.org, just use it already!
Paid Advertisements do. You buy elections with media paid blitzes, not a few twits going on about crap no one cares about. As Rachel Maddow points out Fox news, the highest rated news broadcast in America, gets owned by Spongebob, WWE & Hanna Montana.
just ban organizations from donating money. Only individuals can donate money to a politician. Next, ban donating to a campaign you can't vote in. If you can't vote in California's elections why are you donating money? Next, strict caps on donations. Lastly, enforce the policy with a lifetime ban on holding political office and/or long, long prison terms. Take your pick. It's clear, it's cut & dry, and it eliminates money.
As for tracking the money, how easy would it be to spot a candidate who has 10x the money of his closest rival?
Also, Java7 is quite possibly the biggest cluster f* since the MS-DOS / Compression fiasco. Seriously, I've yet to have a single piece of software not choke on it. To be fair I write pretty simple stuff, so I'm not gonna spend a lot of time making them work with v7, but I'm not the only one complaining...
the bill will be passed regardless of what you think/want. A Majority of Americans wanted single payer healthcare; Congress shot it down. A Majority of Americans were against the bank bail out. Congress passed it through.
I don't really have a solution. The problem is we're too balkanized. It's easy to divide and conquer. Blacks & Whites. Gays and Straights. Union & non-Union. Hell, a good friend of mine is vehemently anti-Union. He just described to me how the non-Union guys at his work got a pay cut so the Union guys could get a pay raise. He didn't even notice the company was pitting the non-Union against the Union, let alone ask why BOTH groups didn't get a raise...
The only way to win is not to play. Don't have children. If you do; only have one. If there's fewer rats in the race you've got to keep the ones you got alive. Aside from that I'll keep plugin away with my liberal/progressive agenda on/. and hope for the best...
where are my mod points when I need them. Texas is only doing well because of a tonne of short lived oil jobs. When the wells dry up it'll make Detroit look like a summer home.
These days if I hand someone a flier and they proclaim "Oh, I don't read" without pride in their voice I consider that a victory. Americans aren't just ignorant, their willfully ignorant. Ask a marketer, and one of the things they'll tell you that works is an appeal against "elitism". There's just about nothing Americans hate than somebody who "knows better then them". Even if they do. On of George Bush jr's biggest political selling points is he was just a dumb as they where; American like to believe there are simple answers to problems and in the myth of 'common sense'.
My recommendation? Focus on living a life where you don't feel the need to drown out the misery in copywrited content. I find most people fall back on movies/music/TV as a way to cope with and escape from the misery that is their day to day lives. Keep needless and unpleasant complications out of your life and to hell with the rest of the world.
the poor aren't addicts; they're self medicating. The point of Nationalized Healthcare and other progressive reforms is to create a world where the poor don't do that.
As for taxes pushing people to quit; you're right. Tobacco sales in the US are half today what they were in 2005. The drop has been attributed to higher taxes and a bad economy. The only people left smoking in America are the poor, and they can't afford to anymore.
Oh, and for all the ninny's saying cigarette taxes are regressive; that's only true if you use the gains to extend tax cuts on the rich instead of investing in social programs. There's a phrase for it: Balancing the budget on the backs of the poor.
You know I should add, I know I'm trolling, but I'm bitter the movement was shut down so fast. You know they used the %@#$ Patriot Act to crack down on the protestors? I was really hoping it would go somewhere. Change the National Narrative. I wish I could say it was nice while it lasted but it didn't even last that long...
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the 'healthcare crisis' is because the nature of healthcare changed and the delivery mechanism did not. In the 1970s, healthcare was very limited. A doctor could set a bone, stitch you up, and blast you with radiation hoping for the best. In 40 years we've moved to things like personalized medicine (where for the price of $10,000 a month an aids patient can thrive, plus a raft of preventative medicines and maintenance medicines. Do you see the shift? We've gone from caring for a few major disasters and making you comfy when you die to maintaining the human body like you would any other machine.
An insurance model for delivering healthcare works for disasters and a one time end of life expense. It breaks when you're using healthcare for maintenance. The thing anyone without socialized medicine is, unless you're so rich you can drop $10k/mo, you don't really have healthcare. Because as soon as you need it, I'm mean you're really going to use it and use it regularly, your insurance provider is going to take it away. That's why America socialized medicine... for the elderly. But even they're going to lose it soon. Just you wait. You think it's there, but it's not. And by the time you realize it, it'll be too late. Poverty will crush you and you won't matter any more. You'll just fall by the way side.
not to put a damper on things, but how does this really hurt any of these groups? I might be able to buy something on Universal Music, but I'm not very likely too. The other sites are just business portals. All Anonymous really did was mildly inconvenience some low level employees trying to log into their corporate intranet. Meanwhile MegaUpload's still down and the owner's still facing criminal charges and decades in prison...
Sorry, once again I'm jumbling terms. That gets back to what I said about it being a complex issue, after all. It's difficult to articulate, especially in an early morning /. post :).
Anyway, strictly speaking it's not a scam so much as a philosophy of doing business. This philosophy includes Goldman Sachs, Bain Capital and the entire mortgage & securities industry circa 2005. It comes down to one thing: finding clever ways to capture large amounts of our civilization's output without producing anything. Financial Vampirism.
Here's a good question to illustrate my point: we often talk about how many months a year you work for the gov't, but have you ever thought how many of those month's you work for the 1%? Even a conservative/ right wing estimate says they have 50% of all wealth in their hands. It stands to reason you're spending 6 months every year toiling for someone else.
is why isn't anyone up in arms that Microsoft is going to heavily subsidize Windows 8 Tablet & phone sales. Isn't that an Anti-Trust violation? I'm pretty sure Walmart did the same thing with cosmetics and got in all sorts of trouble...
trying to follow an American style system of finances. The basics of the scam are you borrow money to buy up properties, use those properties as collateral to borrow more money, and pay yourself huge sums of money in management an consulting fees. Then when whole house of cards collapses you just get bailed out by the tax payer buy using a fraction of your ill gotten gains to buy off the gov't. See Bain Capital for the classic example of this, but they're hardly the only one. The other major component to this are financial vampires like Goldman Sachs who do billions of micro trades a day to siphon money off the top. No actual investment goes on, they're just pocketing money from other investors.
If you're noticing a pattern here, it's a wealth transfer from the middle and lower classes up to the 1%. Trickle up economics. The middle class goes away, and without them the economy crashes. You know American isn't in a recession, right? But do you know why? It's because the 1% are making so much money that they skew the numbers. Take them out and large sections of the US economy are in depression, let alone recession.
but I agree with the sentiment. Right now I'm waiting for my kid to finish getting ready to school, so I've got time to post to /. . After that it's off to my day job for 9 hours. Right now a lobbyist for SOPA is doing the same thing, but he's going to spend 9 hours fighting for it. Oh, at the end of my 9 hour shift I'm going to study programming in hopes of getting a better job.
If I'm going to fight SOPA, PIPA or any of the other horrid things the 1% has in store for me, then I need more leisure time. That's what the rich were talking about in the 1800s when they said 'Idle hands are the devil's plaything'. That said, the 1% are working hard to make sure I don't get it. They're busing Unions, dividing Americans against one another based on race, creed & sexual orientation. They're scaring us with terrorists. They're fighting on multiple fronts, and I can't get the time to fight on one. This, folks, is why I'm a socialist in favor of 'Basic Income' (google it when wikipedia comes back up).
I guess one of the really big problems is, SOPA is just a symptom of a larger, more complex problem. Americans are big on simple answers to complex problems. That's why George Bush jr resonated so well with them. How are we suppose to fight when we don't even know there's a war going on?
it's not so much that the teachers are better, it's that they're equally distributed. In America, property taxes pay for public schools. So if you live in a poor neighborhood you have low value property, low property taxes and therefore underfunded schools. It's a clever way for the rich to have nice public schools w/o paying for the poor to get same. Finland doesn't allow that, they distribute the funds equally, and have no private schools. Adam Smith talked about this in Wealth of Nations. One of the checks and balances on the evils of Capitalism was suppose to be that the rich lived in the same environment as the poor (social and economic as well as natural); so if they screwed the poor they were really just screwing themselves. The world is big enough that that isn't true. Heck, forget the world, just the good 'ol US of A is big enough for the rich to ignore the plight of the poor.
That's because, in America at least, there's no such thing as a good vocational school. They're all diploma mills here. European mileage my vary.
Apple are as Gods among men if they got the record companies to agree to this, even for $25/yr.
He's publicly said he'd veto it, so sneaking it into a bill is a death sentence for that bill. Romney opposes it too, but I'm a little worried. As has been pointed out in another thread the basic principles of the bill are in line with the right wing's general principle that strong hierarchy is a good thing. Moreover, Obama's actually in a position right now where he can veto the bill and has shown he will. Romney's still just campaigning and could easily flip flop. Obama's words carry more weight because he can actually do it, so he's in a put up or shut up position...
$10 bucks doesn't sound worth the effort and risk. If your numbers are right and they really only get $10 bucks for the cable, then that speaks to a frightening level of desperation on a part of your populace. Maybe instead of making cables harder to steal we should make citizens that don't want to steal them...
any fans can tell me why I'd want to run this instead of a Linux flavor?
but recent (3.x) versions of OpenOffice ate my kids documents. It really sucked. From what I can gather it's a known bug in the document recovery module that hasn't been fixed to this day. The program crashes, writes a blank document out as the 'recover' document, then cheerfully overwrites all your original file and any of the automatically made backups. I suppose that somewhere along the line there was some user error. My kid probably could have said 'no' to something and stopped the whole mess. But seriously, she shouldn't have too. I've got a 500 frickin' gig drive in her machine. The biggest word doc I've ever seen in my life was 5 megs (mostly pictures). Why the hell do we still delete shit? Just make a huge undo buffer or something. I've got half a fscking terabyte. Come on OO.org, just use it already!
why is my $15 Walgreens watch waterproof to a depth of 20 meters, but if I sneeze on my $400 Android / iPhone it's ruined and I voided the warranty?
Paid Advertisements do. You buy elections with media paid blitzes, not a few twits going on about crap no one cares about. As Rachel Maddow points out Fox news, the highest rated news broadcast in America, gets owned by Spongebob, WWE & Hanna Montana.
just ban organizations from donating money. Only individuals can donate money to a politician. Next, ban donating to a campaign you can't vote in. If you can't vote in California's elections why are you donating money? Next, strict caps on donations. Lastly, enforce the policy with a lifetime ban on holding political office and/or long, long prison terms. Take your pick. It's clear, it's cut & dry, and it eliminates money.
As for tracking the money, how easy would it be to spot a candidate who has 10x the money of his closest rival?
Also, Java7 is quite possibly the biggest cluster f* since the MS-DOS / Compression fiasco. Seriously, I've yet to have a single piece of software not choke on it. To be fair I write pretty simple stuff, so I'm not gonna spend a lot of time making them work with v7, but I'm not the only one complaining...
the bill will be passed regardless of what you think/want. A Majority of Americans wanted single payer healthcare; Congress shot it down. A Majority of Americans were against the bank bail out. Congress passed it through.
/. and hope for the best...
I don't really have a solution. The problem is we're too balkanized. It's easy to divide and conquer. Blacks & Whites. Gays and Straights. Union & non-Union. Hell, a good friend of mine is vehemently anti-Union. He just described to me how the non-Union guys at his work got a pay cut so the Union guys could get a pay raise. He didn't even notice the company was pitting the non-Union against the Union, let alone ask why BOTH groups didn't get a raise...
The only way to win is not to play. Don't have children. If you do; only have one. If there's fewer rats in the race you've got to keep the ones you got alive. Aside from that I'll keep plugin away with my liberal/progressive agenda on
where are my mod points when I need them. Texas is only doing well because of a tonne of short lived oil jobs. When the wells dry up it'll make Detroit look like a summer home.
These days if I hand someone a flier and they proclaim "Oh, I don't read" without pride in their voice I consider that a victory. Americans aren't just ignorant, their willfully ignorant. Ask a marketer, and one of the things they'll tell you that works is an appeal against "elitism". There's just about nothing Americans hate than somebody who "knows better then them". Even if they do. On of George Bush jr's biggest political selling points is he was just a dumb as they where; American like to believe there are simple answers to problems and in the myth of 'common sense'.
My recommendation? Focus on living a life where you don't feel the need to drown out the misery in copywrited content. I find most people fall back on movies/music/TV as a way to cope with and escape from the misery that is their day to day lives. Keep needless and unpleasant complications out of your life and to hell with the rest of the world.
showing that most (well over 50%) of people don't feel bad when they pirate stuff? I don't think they need moral justification.
How about some subsidies for fruits and veggies. Apples are $2/lb on sale in my neck 'o the woods;
the poor aren't addicts; they're self medicating. The point of Nationalized Healthcare and other progressive reforms is to create a world where the poor don't do that.
As for taxes pushing people to quit; you're right. Tobacco sales in the US are half today what they were in 2005. The drop has been attributed to higher taxes and a bad economy. The only people left smoking in America are the poor, and they can't afford to anymore.
Oh, and for all the ninny's saying cigarette taxes are regressive; that's only true if you use the gains to extend tax cuts on the rich instead of investing in social programs. There's a phrase for it: Balancing the budget on the backs of the poor.
You know I should add, I know I'm trolling, but I'm bitter the movement was shut down so fast. You know they used the %@#$ Patriot Act to crack down on the protestors? I was really hoping it would go somewhere. Change the National Narrative. I wish I could say it was nice while it lasted but it didn't even last that long...
Yep, Live and Breath the 1st....