for Nursing. All told it's going to cost me about $140k for 4 years (tuition, books, room, board, the car I had to buy her because it's physically impossible to take a bus from her morning classes to her clinicals in time, etc). Starting salary will be between $50-$70k/yr depending on the job she takes and where she takes it.
A trade pays $9/hr to start, $15/hr after a few years and then tops out at $25/hr. I did a stint as an electrician's apprentice so I'm pretty familiar (cut those numbers by about 30% for inflation and you know where I was at). You're gonna top out around $50k/yr, which is where my kid _starts_. Over 40-60 years of work that will add up fast. Not to mention she will have much, much better benefits.
Heck, if you're a teacher in it for the money you can start around $40k/yr as long as you're willing to move and/or commute to a wealthy district (the way districts are funded means if you want to teach in a poor neighborhood because you grew up there plan on getting shafted).
I see a lot of folks saying a degree ain't worth it, but it always seems to be the kind of folks who don't want to pay for kids to go to school. It's expensive as hell ($140k in my case and I'm cutting corners) so I get where they're coming from, but this is why our country gets flooded with H1-Bs. It lets the companies go to Congress and say "Well, we wanted to hire American, but we just can't find anyone with the _skills_ we need".
we've been replacing high skill, high pay manufacturing jobs with low skill, low wage service sector jobs. This is largely due to automation and process improvements (about 86% of it, with the other 14% being due to outsourcing and cheap work visas).
We're producing more with less workers, leaving more money at the top for the (literal) capitalists who own everything. Combine that with a lack of worker solidarity and a general war on the working class and yeah, folks are pretty boned.
On the plus side at least that shmuck in TFA is honest:
'I'm looking for low-wage, entry-level workers".
But let's face it, what he's really doing is posturing for more H2-Bs. He's gonna get 'em too. The President & Congress just doubled the allotment for next year.
I think the real problem is that healthcare is too complex for laymen to price out. You say "colonoscopy" but there's a lot that goes into that. And there might be follow up tests after it, like having the results referred to a specialist. And then let's say I get my colonoscopy at hospital A and then want the follow up at B. I've just added a bunch of complexity to move the documents around and deal with potentially different processes and formats. More stuff a layman doesn't know/think about.
When I buy a car it's a finished thing. I know exactly what I'm getting. In terms of complexity there's no comparison between the human machine and a car. There's just too many variables for you to go shopping around.
intervening. The government runs Medicare with 99% efficiency. And I've never met anyone who'd trade VA healthcare for the mess that is private care.
The problem is that healthcare and insurance are fundamentally incompatible. Insurance works for clean up after random disasters. But healthcare stopped being about that decades ago. Today we can and do perform maintenance and actual repair work. A family member of mine had childhood cancer. 20 years ago they'd be dead. Today they're in their 2nd year of college.
There's also the complexity of healthcare and the fact that when you need it you _need_ it. Also it's not something you can just swap other goods out for. If I'm hungry and steak's too expensive I can settle for pizza. I can't do the same with insulin.
This is a classic square peg in a round hole. Insurance needs to go away. The individual hospitals and doctors can be private, that's been shown to work just fine. But when it comes to paying for it that needs to be done by the Fed. Take the money I give mega corp insurance companies ($1200/mo if you include what my company pays) and give it to the Fed and let them run it through that 99% efficient Medicare program. Problem solved.
when your car gets totaled they pay you in dealer invoice. If you can afford it you buy gap coverage and other misc insurance but you're always wondering what's gonna happen if something does happen because they'll fight you. And that's over a $25,000 car. Take that and do it for a $1,000,000+ dollar illness.
You're right about getting rid of insurance but you haven't gone far enough. We know the solution: single payer. In the States this means expanding Medicare for All.
Healthcare is too important and too complex to leave paying for it to corporations. The care itself can be handled privately (as has been demonstrated in numerous other countries) but the paying for part needs to be done by the Fed.
It wouldn't even be a change. The money that leaves your check now would just go somewhere else. And most estimates are it would save us $5 Trillion every 10 years. Wanna pay off the national debt? Because that's how tyou do it.
Gog, Steam, Origin, Uplay, Battle.net, whatever the heck Bethesda calls theirs and now Epic's. If I got less DRM (especially Denuvo, which has been shown to kill frame times) or better prices maybe. But so far it's just more logins and more hassle. At least with Gog I can save the games to a DVD and be done with it.
discrimination? That's what the current system is, after all. You're getting "Group Rates" negotiated by a company (your insurance company) on your behalf.
The real problem here is that you're trying to fit the square peg of healthcare into the round hole that is capitalism. Capitalism works great for things that you buy periodically, can obtain and understand all or nearly all relevant information on, lend themselves to competition and are relatively low risk for the individual. Think twinkies, soda pop, video games and even cars.
Capitalism breaks down when paying for healthcare because you can't do any of that. You can't comparison shop for a heart transplant, you'll pay anything for it since without it you die and you can't understand what makes one hospital better than another for a transplant (and no, looking at a few statistics isn't enough, how much do you know about the doctor doing the transplant? The heart being transplanted? The staff who will care for you before and after?).
Oh, and this is before we discuss how your insurance company has every incentive to try and avoid paying for your care. RE: Pre-existing conditions.
This is why folks in the know (like the doctors and nurses themselves) want single payer. But you're taught from childhood that the only answer to any problem is capitalism. When I took econ 101 in high school socialism wasn't even discussed. Capitalism was at fait accompli. A given. No other competing solutions or systems were brought into play. They didn't even try and bad mouth it, it was just capitalism rah-rah-rah for 6 months. It's tough to get out of that mindset. And I assure you, that's by design. Go look up why pubic schools were formed sometime. They're not there to teach you to be a good citizen, they're there to teach you to be a good worker. I'm not saying that's the only thing they do (don't get me wrong, I support public schools), but we need to think about where we came from and where we're going.
One of the dirty little secrets is that America had at least 3 separate occasions when we got ready to implement a single payer healthcare system. All three times it was shot down because northern states insisted all citizens be covered while southern states, still in the age of "Separate by Equal" didn't want blacks covered (we're talking pre WWII here folks).
Once again the "Southern Strategy" of using race to divide the working class cost us Americans something valuable. I wish we could kill it once and for all.
but TFA makes it clear that in California the big corps are making "Company Towns" with their own kitchens. This is especially galling since those corps often get massive tax breaks with the assumption that they'll be lots and low skill service sector jobs to support them. Those jobs exist, but not directly inside the community proper. Instead they're clustered in the suburb where the company set up shop.
e.g. the right wing of the Democratic party opposes it. The actual left wing of the Democratic party is in favor of it so long as we use diplomacy to protect the Kurds from a Genocide.
If you want change you need the actual left. That's the Bernie Bros, the Justice Democrats and the folks running "Our Revolution".
until they put them down. If you get a dog from a pound (which most poors do) that's still better then them being put down right then and there for overcrowding. And those poors don't see docs themselves until they're hurting bad, what makes you think their pets would?
This is sort of the problem, folks who come from middle class families don't consider what life is like when you don't. The idea of not taking your pet to a vet every year is nonsensical. Among the poor that's just how it is. Hell, if she gets to take her dog to a vet to be put down in it's old age she's doing a lot better than a lot of rural folks who do it with a bullet.
so they could skirt around European anti-trust rules that said they couldn't bundle a competitive product with an unrelated product (since that would be an abuse of their defacto OS monopoly). This way they could go to the EU and say "See, it's not that we're bundling IE with Windows in order to leverage our monopoly and break open Internet standards, it's just every so crucial to our OS". Worked too. The downside is everytime IE breaks it takes everything with it.
Take a bad engineering decision by Microsoft and you'll almost always fine evil, and not incompetence, at the heart of it.
Technology has changed. Cameras and sensors got cheap. Drones got cheap.
Better analytics mean we know that the value of a wall at controlling the border is less than other alternatives. Texas sent the national guard to police the border at a cost of $120k per illegal immigrant caught. Statistically we know those illegals would have caused less trouble than their native counterparts, so we know we didn't save any money on crime prevention. We could have given every American put out of work a full, 4 year ride to college with money to support their families for the cost of keeping those illegals out.
And while we're on the subject, if you want to keep illegals out there's a much, much better solution: STOP DESTABILIZING THEIR GODDAMNED COUNTRIES FOR CHEAP FRUIT AND OIL.
Yeah, yeah, I know I shouldn't shout, but come'on. In Brazil our CIA just executed a plan to kick a progressive chief executive out of her position and put a far right one in it's place. This isn't conspiracy, it's pretty well documented we were involved. You don't think that's going to have consequences? Why did we do it? Oil. She would have spend the oil profits on her country, and we can't have that.
If you want to stop the flow of "migrant caravans" you have to stop screwing with Mexico and South America's economies. Yes, that means the price of oil will go up ever so slightly, and it means you're going to have to vote for left wing candidates who oppose CIA intervention for the sake of American Mega Corps. For some that's maybe too bitter a pill to swallow. But if you actually want your jobs back (or maybe just a "whiter" America, yes, for some people that's the goal and it's naive to pretend it's not) that's how you do it.
They sell small portions for high prices to people with little or no money. How do you think they're so profitable? Toothpaste & Toilet paper are the common examples. But the foodstuff is generally the same. You'll pay less at a regular grocery store but you'll generally have to buy more. Which, since you're generally buying dry goods kinda sucks.
and our wealthy and ruling class are no longer terrified of the Russians. That's really what drove the space race.
History is basically the working class trying, and usually failing, to pry some money out of the hands out of the ruling class. For a brief period of time post-WWII they did that very well. Factories stayed in America because the rulers feared they'd be seized by the commie, resulting in Unions that got better pay and wages. Massive public works projects and good government pay for them further increased wages. And a massive tech boom driven largely by discoveries made at Public Universities helped too (Internet anyone?).
We've swung back the other way and the rich are closing their wallets. If we had more of an appetite for prying those wallets open by force we could do stuff like a trip to Mars. But dat'd be stealing, and stealin's bad, M'Kay. I learned that from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the multi-billion dollar Propaganda machine ^X^X^X^X Nightly news.
or the like. It's either that, communism, or dystopia. We're fast approaching a time when the wealthy and the ruling class just plain don't need us. If you want to see what happens to folks who aren't needed in our current civilization cast your eye to the Indian Reservations pre-casinos or to large swaths of Africa.
I don't see anything wrong with these taxes either. The people who'd be paying them aren't doing any work either, they're letting robots and a few engineers do all the real work. They're not workers, they're owners. The only value they add is "leadership". Anyone who's ever stat through a meeting with their company's upper management knows exactly what that's worth.
How will autonomous cars work in that case? How do you build a society around the idea that our cars are idle if they're all idle at (roughly) the same time?
that finding meaning is remarkably easy. Especially in a civilization where so few are needed to do actual work.
Also, you have completley misunderstood basic income. BI means giving everyone enough for food, shelter healthcare, education and a modicum of entertainment. This has enormous society consequences. Here are a few:
1. People don't have to live in major cities just to have work. Housing prices will drop as a result.
2. The wealthy can no longer leverage their wealth into power as easily. They lose the threat of starvation and death from lack of medical care.
3. People can't be frightened into turning on each other by demagogues. Society as a whole becomes more stable.
4. The bad decisions people make when stressed (multiple studies have shown pressure does _not_ make diamonds, it makes garbage more compact) stop.
I can't overstate the impact of #2 and #3. And these are just the most obvious. Keeping our entire society except a lucky few at the top in a constant state of mild terror at the prospect of losing everything has far reaching consequences.
besides the desperate struggle for survival. Sure, you might be shallow to want any of them, but what about the rest of us? Folks who can be content to study, read, play video games, write music, paint, write software.
There's this Puritanical belief, crammed into your skull by various ruling classes, that the only thing that gives meaning to human life is desperately working to survive. We'd shook it off in the 60s and 70s, at least in the nerd community, and were looking forward to a life without constant toil and desperation. And somehow, against all odds, we sucked it down again.
I don't get it. In 2018 we shouldn't be struggling to survive. And we sure as hell shouldn't be romanticizing a desperate struggle for survival. I mean, I get that it's easy to fall for propaganda (that's kinda D'Souza's thing, he's a propagandist) but you'd think we'd have grown out of that too. It's not like we don't know what it is.
that's where climate change comes in. Red Tide due to phosphorus is a problem, but it's exacerbated by warming due to climate change. All sorts of things we used to get away with become untenable once climate change is factored in.
Florida's elections are staggeringly corrupt and pretty close. There's also a mounting of disenfranchisement. 1.5 million Floridians can't vote because of a criminal conviction. They've restored virtually noone's voting rights either. A law was passed to give 1 million of them their rights back and their corrupt legislature is blocking it. And that's just one example. There's a ton of evidence of votes not being counted, voting machines not working in left leaning districts, etc, etc.
The FL GOP is as crooked as a dog's leg. If the national media was doing it's damn job they'd all be in prison.
Female. The reason I had her was she was freakishly huge and too big to breed so I got her at the pound. These are dogs bred to run along carriages and kill bandits. This is my 20s so she got plenty of exercise, which a 63 year old woman wouldn't be doing with her dogs. She cost me $20 bucks month and that was 'cause I bought the sightly higher quality dog food (having lost a cat to the cheap stuff).
Yes, you can spend a fortune on dogs if you want. But if you've just got a raft of them for protection/companionship their dirt cheap.
Slashdot Mirror
for Nursing. All told it's going to cost me about $140k for 4 years (tuition, books, room, board, the car I had to buy her because it's physically impossible to take a bus from her morning classes to her clinicals in time, etc). Starting salary will be between $50-$70k/yr depending on the job she takes and where she takes it.
A trade pays $9/hr to start, $15/hr after a few years and then tops out at $25/hr. I did a stint as an electrician's apprentice so I'm pretty familiar (cut those numbers by about 30% for inflation and you know where I was at). You're gonna top out around $50k/yr, which is where my kid _starts_. Over 40-60 years of work that will add up fast. Not to mention she will have much, much better benefits.
Heck, if you're a teacher in it for the money you can start around $40k/yr as long as you're willing to move and/or commute to a wealthy district (the way districts are funded means if you want to teach in a poor neighborhood because you grew up there plan on getting shafted).
I see a lot of folks saying a degree ain't worth it, but it always seems to be the kind of folks who don't want to pay for kids to go to school. It's expensive as hell ($140k in my case and I'm cutting corners) so I get where they're coming from, but this is why our country gets flooded with H1-Bs. It lets the companies go to Congress and say "Well, we wanted to hire American, but we just can't find anyone with the _skills_ we need".
We're producing more with less workers, leaving more money at the top for the (literal) capitalists who own everything. Combine that with a lack of worker solidarity and a general war on the working class and yeah, folks are pretty boned.
On the plus side at least that shmuck in TFA is honest:
But let's face it, what he's really doing is posturing for more H2-Bs. He's gonna get 'em too. The President & Congress just doubled the allotment for next year.
I think the real problem is that healthcare is too complex for laymen to price out. You say "colonoscopy" but there's a lot that goes into that. And there might be follow up tests after it, like having the results referred to a specialist. And then let's say I get my colonoscopy at hospital A and then want the follow up at B. I've just added a bunch of complexity to move the documents around and deal with potentially different processes and formats. More stuff a layman doesn't know/think about.
When I buy a car it's a finished thing. I know exactly what I'm getting. In terms of complexity there's no comparison between the human machine and a car. There's just too many variables for you to go shopping around.
intervening. The government runs Medicare with 99% efficiency. And I've never met anyone who'd trade VA healthcare for the mess that is private care.
The problem is that healthcare and insurance are fundamentally incompatible. Insurance works for clean up after random disasters. But healthcare stopped being about that decades ago. Today we can and do perform maintenance and actual repair work. A family member of mine had childhood cancer. 20 years ago they'd be dead. Today they're in their 2nd year of college.
There's also the complexity of healthcare and the fact that when you need it you _need_ it. Also it's not something you can just swap other goods out for. If I'm hungry and steak's too expensive I can settle for pizza. I can't do the same with insulin.
This is a classic square peg in a round hole. Insurance needs to go away. The individual hospitals and doctors can be private, that's been shown to work just fine. But when it comes to paying for it that needs to be done by the Fed. Take the money I give mega corp insurance companies ($1200/mo if you include what my company pays) and give it to the Fed and let them run it through that 99% efficient Medicare program. Problem solved.
when your car gets totaled they pay you in dealer invoice. If you can afford it you buy gap coverage and other misc insurance but you're always wondering what's gonna happen if something does happen because they'll fight you. And that's over a $25,000 car. Take that and do it for a $1,000,000+ dollar illness.
You're right about getting rid of insurance but you haven't gone far enough. We know the solution: single payer. In the States this means expanding Medicare for All.
Healthcare is too important and too complex to leave paying for it to corporations. The care itself can be handled privately (as has been demonstrated in numerous other countries) but the paying for part needs to be done by the Fed.
It wouldn't even be a change. The money that leaves your check now would just go somewhere else. And most estimates are it would save us $5 Trillion every 10 years. Wanna pay off the national debt? Because that's how tyou do it.
Gog, Steam, Origin, Uplay, Battle.net, whatever the heck Bethesda calls theirs and now Epic's. If I got less DRM (especially Denuvo, which has been shown to kill frame times) or better prices maybe. But so far it's just more logins and more hassle. At least with Gog I can save the games to a DVD and be done with it.
discrimination? That's what the current system is, after all. You're getting "Group Rates" negotiated by a company (your insurance company) on your behalf.
The real problem here is that you're trying to fit the square peg of healthcare into the round hole that is capitalism. Capitalism works great for things that you buy periodically, can obtain and understand all or nearly all relevant information on, lend themselves to competition and are relatively low risk for the individual. Think twinkies, soda pop, video games and even cars.
Capitalism breaks down when paying for healthcare because you can't do any of that. You can't comparison shop for a heart transplant, you'll pay anything for it since without it you die and you can't understand what makes one hospital better than another for a transplant (and no, looking at a few statistics isn't enough, how much do you know about the doctor doing the transplant? The heart being transplanted? The staff who will care for you before and after?).
Oh, and this is before we discuss how your insurance company has every incentive to try and avoid paying for your care. RE: Pre-existing conditions.
This is why folks in the know (like the doctors and nurses themselves) want single payer. But you're taught from childhood that the only answer to any problem is capitalism. When I took econ 101 in high school socialism wasn't even discussed. Capitalism was at fait accompli. A given. No other competing solutions or systems were brought into play. They didn't even try and bad mouth it, it was just capitalism rah-rah-rah for 6 months. It's tough to get out of that mindset. And I assure you, that's by design. Go look up why pubic schools were formed sometime. They're not there to teach you to be a good citizen, they're there to teach you to be a good worker. I'm not saying that's the only thing they do (don't get me wrong, I support public schools), but we need to think about where we came from and where we're going.
One of the dirty little secrets is that America had at least 3 separate occasions when we got ready to implement a single payer healthcare system. All three times it was shot down because northern states insisted all citizens be covered while southern states, still in the age of "Separate by Equal" didn't want blacks covered (we're talking pre WWII here folks).
Once again the "Southern Strategy" of using race to divide the working class cost us Americans something valuable. I wish we could kill it once and for all.
but TFA makes it clear that in California the big corps are making "Company Towns" with their own kitchens. This is especially galling since those corps often get massive tax breaks with the assumption that they'll be lots and low skill service sector jobs to support them. Those jobs exist, but not directly inside the community proper. Instead they're clustered in the suburb where the company set up shop.
e.g. the right wing of the Democratic party opposes it. The actual left wing of the Democratic party is in favor of it so long as we use diplomacy to protect the Kurds from a Genocide.
If you want change you need the actual left. That's the Bernie Bros, the Justice Democrats and the folks running "Our Revolution".
right here.
until they put them down. If you get a dog from a pound (which most poors do) that's still better then them being put down right then and there for overcrowding. And those poors don't see docs themselves until they're hurting bad, what makes you think their pets would?
This is sort of the problem, folks who come from middle class families don't consider what life is like when you don't. The idea of not taking your pet to a vet every year is nonsensical. Among the poor that's just how it is. Hell, if she gets to take her dog to a vet to be put down in it's old age she's doing a lot better than a lot of rural folks who do it with a bullet.
so they could skirt around European anti-trust rules that said they couldn't bundle a competitive product with an unrelated product (since that would be an abuse of their defacto OS monopoly). This way they could go to the EU and say "See, it's not that we're bundling IE with Windows in order to leverage our monopoly and break open Internet standards, it's just every so crucial to our OS". Worked too. The downside is everytime IE breaks it takes everything with it.
Take a bad engineering decision by Microsoft and you'll almost always fine evil, and not incompetence, at the heart of it.
Technology has changed. Cameras and sensors got cheap. Drones got cheap.
Better analytics mean we know that the value of a wall at controlling the border is less than other alternatives. Texas sent the national guard to police the border at a cost of $120k per illegal immigrant caught. Statistically we know those illegals would have caused less trouble than their native counterparts, so we know we didn't save any money on crime prevention. We could have given every American put out of work a full, 4 year ride to college with money to support their families for the cost of keeping those illegals out.
And while we're on the subject, if you want to keep illegals out there's a much, much better solution: STOP DESTABILIZING THEIR GODDAMNED COUNTRIES FOR CHEAP FRUIT AND OIL.
Yeah, yeah, I know I shouldn't shout, but come'on. In Brazil our CIA just executed a plan to kick a progressive chief executive out of her position and put a far right one in it's place. This isn't conspiracy, it's pretty well documented we were involved. You don't think that's going to have consequences? Why did we do it? Oil. She would have spend the oil profits on her country, and we can't have that.
If you want to stop the flow of "migrant caravans" you have to stop screwing with Mexico and South America's economies. Yes, that means the price of oil will go up ever so slightly, and it means you're going to have to vote for left wing candidates who oppose CIA intervention for the sake of American Mega Corps. For some that's maybe too bitter a pill to swallow. But if you actually want your jobs back (or maybe just a "whiter" America, yes, for some people that's the goal and it's naive to pretend it's not) that's how you do it.
They sell small portions for high prices to people with little or no money. How do you think they're so profitable? Toothpaste & Toilet paper are the common examples. But the foodstuff is generally the same. You'll pay less at a regular grocery store but you'll generally have to buy more. Which, since you're generally buying dry goods kinda sucks.
to climb Everest. There's your problem right there.
and our wealthy and ruling class are no longer terrified of the Russians. That's really what drove the space race.
History is basically the working class trying, and usually failing, to pry some money out of the hands out of the ruling class. For a brief period of time post-WWII they did that very well. Factories stayed in America because the rulers feared they'd be seized by the commie, resulting in Unions that got better pay and wages. Massive public works projects and good government pay for them further increased wages. And a massive tech boom driven largely by discoveries made at Public Universities helped too (Internet anyone?).
We've swung back the other way and the rich are closing their wallets. If we had more of an appetite for prying those wallets open by force we could do stuff like a trip to Mars. But dat'd be stealing, and stealin's bad, M'Kay. I learned that from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the multi-billion dollar Propaganda machine ^X^X^X^X Nightly news.
or the like. It's either that, communism, or dystopia. We're fast approaching a time when the wealthy and the ruling class just plain don't need us. If you want to see what happens to folks who aren't needed in our current civilization cast your eye to the Indian Reservations pre-casinos or to large swaths of Africa.
I don't see anything wrong with these taxes either. The people who'd be paying them aren't doing any work either, they're letting robots and a few engineers do all the real work. They're not workers, they're owners. The only value they add is "leadership". Anyone who's ever stat through a meeting with their company's upper management knows exactly what that's worth.
for a pickup. Also one of the major things that makes buses suck is all the stops. That's what takes a 30 minute drive and turns it into 90 minutes.
Don't get me wrong, I really, really want a world where I don't have to own a car. I hate the damn things. I'm just not sure if this'll work.
How will autonomous cars work in that case? How do you build a society around the idea that our cars are idle if they're all idle at (roughly) the same time?
that finding meaning is remarkably easy. Especially in a civilization where so few are needed to do actual work .
Also, you have completley misunderstood basic income. BI means giving everyone enough for food, shelter healthcare, education and a modicum of entertainment. This has enormous society consequences. Here are a few:
1. People don't have to live in major cities just to have work. Housing prices will drop as a result.
2. The wealthy can no longer leverage their wealth into power as easily. They lose the threat of starvation and death from lack of medical care.
3. People can't be frightened into turning on each other by demagogues. Society as a whole becomes more stable.
4. The bad decisions people make when stressed (multiple studies have shown pressure does _not_ make diamonds, it makes garbage more compact) stop.
I can't overstate the impact of #2 and #3. And these are just the most obvious. Keeping our entire society except a lucky few at the top in a constant state of mild terror at the prospect of losing everything has far reaching consequences.
besides the desperate struggle for survival. Sure, you might be shallow to want any of them, but what about the rest of us? Folks who can be content to study, read, play video games, write music, paint, write software.
There's this Puritanical belief, crammed into your skull by various ruling classes, that the only thing that gives meaning to human life is desperately working to survive. We'd shook it off in the 60s and 70s, at least in the nerd community, and were looking forward to a life without constant toil and desperation. And somehow, against all odds, we sucked it down again.
I don't get it. In 2018 we shouldn't be struggling to survive. And we sure as hell shouldn't be romanticizing a desperate struggle for survival. I mean, I get that it's easy to fall for propaganda (that's kinda D'Souza's thing, he's a propagandist) but you'd think we'd have grown out of that too. It's not like we don't know what it is.
that's where climate change comes in. Red Tide due to phosphorus is a problem, but it's exacerbated by warming due to climate change. All sorts of things we used to get away with become untenable once climate change is factored in.
Florida's elections are staggeringly corrupt and pretty close. There's also a mounting of disenfranchisement. 1.5 million Floridians can't vote because of a criminal conviction. They've restored virtually noone's voting rights either. A law was passed to give 1 million of them their rights back and their corrupt legislature is blocking it. And that's just one example. There's a ton of evidence of votes not being counted, voting machines not working in left leaning districts, etc, etc.
The FL GOP is as crooked as a dog's leg. If the national media was doing it's damn job they'd all be in prison.
Female. The reason I had her was she was freakishly huge and too big to breed so I got her at the pound. These are dogs bred to run along carriages and kill bandits. This is my 20s so she got plenty of exercise, which a 63 year old woman wouldn't be doing with her dogs. She cost me $20 bucks month and that was 'cause I bought the sightly higher quality dog food (having lost a cat to the cheap stuff).
Yes, you can spend a fortune on dogs if you want. But if you've just got a raft of them for protection/companionship their dirt cheap.