In some cases, the Japanese usage is to equate the character to a Japanese word that sounds the same as the Chinese word that was originally associated with the symbol (from whichever Chinese language the Japanese first came into contact with).
But mostly, the Japanese use is the same as the Chinese, so yes, it would be mostly readable...
Note, by the by, that even if one assumes that all executions in the USA are purely random (as opposed to punishment for a specific crime), the chance of being killed by lightning is about twice as high as the chance of being executed.
then the $1 trillion has to go somewhere. It goes to profit or reduced costs. There's no other place for it to go.
Well, the 5% extra money can also go to cover the 10% more people who are now uninsured, but who will be insured under this plan.
Note, by the way, that my previous post analyzed it in terms of reduced costs - if the whole trillion goes to reduced costs, it'll reduce the routine annual premium increase for this year by about half. And that'll just about soak it up entirely - there'll be no effect on routine increases after the first year it's in effect.
As to profits, I point out that health insurers have an average profit margin of barely over 2%. You're better off investing in T-bills than in health insurance companies....
If I were to accept this, I'd want to know the total bill.
No way of telling, really. I'm recalling a study I read about 15 years ago. Things may have changed since then. People may have changed. Better studies might have been done leading to the opposite conclusion.
But betting that people will make less use of a system that costs them less to use isn't a very safe bet....
Yeah... I think the press pass should be limited to people who:
1. Have covered such events in the past.
2. Have a measurable audience somehow... be it web, print, TV, radio, etc.
3. Haven't caused problems at previous events.
1. So, in order to cover such an event, you must have a Press Pass, and in order to get a Press Pass, you must have covered such an event.
2. In order to have an audience, you must get the news. In order to get the news, you've got to have an audience.
3. In order to get a Press Pass, you have to have covered such an event without one. Which pretty much means going past police barricades or some similar illegal activity. So, pretty much be definition, you'll have misbehaved at a previous event.
The healthcare industry is about 14% of our GDP. Call it $2 trillion per year. It will be getting a cash infusion of $1 trillion per decade (nominally - actually, a lot of the benefits of the Bill won't apply for four-five years, though all the costs associated with the Bill will apply immediately), which translates to about a 5% increase in healthcare spending (assuming nothing is wasted).
Healthcare costs are increasing at more than 5% per year. Even if the full trillion began to be input into the system this year (it won't until at least 2014), it will, at best, result in a slightly lower premium increase than normal for THIS YEAR ONLY. No downstream effect at all.
As to the rest of your commentary, note that the Healthcare Reform bill is not intended or expected to actually cover everyone. Depending on which version of the Bill is in play, it will leave between five and ten million uninsured. So part of the healthcare industries costs associated with the uninsured will remain intact. How large a part is uncertain.
Note also that in one of my posts I mentioned the fine associated with not getting insurance. And I mentioned that that fine is considerably less than the cost of insurance. What I didn't bother to mention was that insurance companies will be required to insure you even with a pre-existing condition.
Net result? If you're reasonably healthy, you can game the system by paying your fine every year until you really need health insurance, then go buy some health insurance. Keep it till the medical bills are paid, then dump it again.
This represents a potentially large hole for money to pour out of insurance company coffers. They're not going to lower rates on the rest of us when they have the potential of having pay for someone's cancer treatments on six months of non-discriminatory premiums.
And finally, note that people who are paying for health insurance tend to use the system more than people who are paying for healthcare out of their own pockets. If this trend continues through this bill, it is likely that some part of that trillion per decade will be consumed in largely unnecessary tests/treatments/whatever (depending on what is covered, and that won't be clear until all the 50 States have weighed in with their own opinions as to what the ideal health plan OUGHT to cover - want to bet that at least one State will cover cosmetic surgery?)
So, no, for all the above reasons, I don't expect this Bill to save any money for anyone. But it ought to be a dandy source of campaign contributions for decades to come....
I read that as the feds are going to pay $1 trillion to private insurance companies.
Mostly, it'll cover the subsidies for people who can't afford insurance. The feds are also imposing a bunch of small taxes and fees on medical equipment manufacturers, hospitals, etc. That money will also go to cover the subsidies.
Theoretically, that should lower the insurance bills and hospital bills by that same $1 trillion.
None of that will result in lower premiums (note that there is absolutely nothing in the current healthcare reform bill that is intended to lower healthcare costs). It'll just allow about two thirds of the people currently uninsured who are also too wealthy for Medicaid to get insurance.
Think of that as a $1 trillion payoff to the insurance carriers for allowing a health care bill to be passed.
No, the payoff to the insurance companies is the requirement that everyone get health insurance. A very large fraction of the uninsured in the USA are young and healthy. They won't drain the system by making much use of it, but their premiums will bolster than Insurance companies' bottom line.
My own preference, still, is to extend Medicare to cover everyone from birth. Alas, the prospect of tripling the Medicare taxes doesn't seem to appeal to Congress right now.
Note, by the way, that Medicare also distorts healthcare costs in the USA, as it is currently set up. Whenever Congress wants to look fiscally responsible, they find "savings" in Medicare by reducing the payouts to doctors and hospitals. Again, the doctors and hospitals make up the lost revenue by raising prices for everyone else.
Note, in the above, that "everyone else" is the people with insurance. Every time I've had to spend money on doctors or hospitals while uninsured, I've gotten a discount for being uninsured. Yes, I'm aware that conventional wisdom holds it that the reverse is true, but my experience is the opposite of conventional wisdom.
Anyways, don't look for cost reductions in the current bill. There aren't any. There aren't even any intentions that costs should go down.
What about medicaid and medicare just who is paying for that?
Medicaid is coming out of general revenues, so we're all paying for that. Which doesn't terribly bother me, really.
Medicare is paid for out of Medicare taxes - it's part of that 7.7% that gets taken out of our paychecks no matter what (well, assuming you're making less than $100-odd thousand per year, anyway. It caps otherwise). Theoretically, all of Medicare is paid for out of Medicare taxes.
Note that somewhere in the next decade, lacking action from Congress, Medicare will be paying out less than it takes in in taxes.
Note also that that condition may apply this year (and possibly the next one, and conceivably the one after), since Medicare tax revenues are down due to high unemployment/underemployment. It is even possible that we won't drag ourselves out of this hole before Medicare finds itself permanently short of revenue (again, lacking Congressional action).
Congress will probably do something about Medicare/SSA sometime in the next five years. But there's going to be a lot of flak over raising the FICA taxes, since they're larger than income taxes for a lot of people (and after they raise them enough to matter, they'll be larger than income taxes for most all the middle class). So they'll put it off till they can find some way to blame someone else for doing it. Which means just after an election, but before the new guys are seated, probably.
Do you have a source for this? I don't believe it is at all true.
The only thing even being considered at the moment is an individual mandate to buy insurance. It's total bullshit to anyone who doesn't own a health insurance company, but not because of the fictional situation you described.
Boy, are you out of touch!
You will be required to buy insurance. If you fail to do so, you will be fined. Note that the fine is much lower than the cost of insurance.
If you cannot afford insurance, your insurance will be subsidized by the Federal government. This is what he meant when he talked about subsidizing others. Yes, this is a subsidy, since you'll be paying for your own health insurance, as well as paying your share of the taxes required to cover all the people being subsidized.
Note, however, that you are ALREADY subsidizing other people's healthcare. Emergency rooms are required by law to treat anyone who comes in, even if they can't pay. Hospitals deal with the financial hit thus imposed by raising rates for everyone who CAN pay. To the extent that more people will have insurance after the Reform, this particular bit of your healthcare costs should be reduced.
Whether we'll come out ahead or behind on this deal isn't terribly clear. Other than the $1 trillion pricetag on the Healthcare Reform bill. That tends to suggest that we'll be paying more afterwards than before. Otherwise, why is the bill going to cost $1 trillion?
Now, that I think about it, I wonder if these effects are limited to oxygen enriched beer, or if it's just the oxygen itself. If it's just O2, you could have a portable O2 enricher that lets you breath pure O2 for a little while... Or O2 enriched water (oh yay, another way for them to charge more for H20)...
Seems to me I have read before that fighter pilots have been using a shot of O2 to clear up a hangover for a long time. At least since the 80's.
probably whispered "union" and he and all his close contacts were immediately fired.
If that were true, then both of them would have some pretty serious lawsuit material. It's against the law for firing someone for wanting to unionize. Yeah, you can cover up the firing by giving another reason, but there are plenty of lawyers who would take the case (and win) anyway, since the feds are inclined to look suspiciously at any firing in close proximity to a unionization attempt.
But in all seriousness, if you dropped a 600 million metric ton ice cub into the ocean, what would happen?
Well, the iceberg that just broke off of Antarctica was about 1000 times as large, if that helps.
And if it doesn't help, assuming that it would cause about as much effect as tossing a normal ice cube into an Olympic-sized swimming pool wouldn't be too far off. Though the normal ice-cube in the Olympic-sized pool would cool things down a bit more....
It has been and always will be "cost/kilowatt" and depending on the application add "/meter"
It doesn't matter if a panel is expensive or cheap, it matters if it will deliver a certain number of electrical kilowatts for a particular cost. Of course, with square footage limited by rooftops or other locations, it can't have an efficiency too low..
Well, yes. If cost is low because we're measuring cost in $/cm^2, then it's pretty much meaningless.
But, in general, we measure cost in some meaningful way - $/car, $/box of raisin bran, etc. Cost for solar cells ought to be measured in $/m^2 or $/kw output. So if we measure these panels the same way we'd measure any other solar panel, and decide it's much cheaper, that's a good thing.
It is, in fact, an exciting thing. I'm not going to put solar panels on my roof if it's going to cost me $30k to do it. For $20k, I'll be looking into it seriously. For $10k, I'll be calling an installer tomorrow....
Sucks that you got water damage, truly, but IMO the government insuring people who are daft enough to build in flood-prone areas is sheer madness.
Let's see. There have been two floods in the last half century that got water into my house.
The last one, Katrina, only got water into the house because the Jefferson Parish President panicked and shut down the pumping stations when he shouldn't have.
The first one was in the 60's, before the Federal Flood Insurance program.
So that particular program has had a payout on my house exactly once. And wouldn't have had that one if Brousard had had any sense.
So I'm not seeing where we're all that flood-prone.
Now, this is not to suggest that I think the Feds should do flood insurance. Nonetheless, someone figured he could buy a bunch of votes a long time ago by doing this.
Note, for the record, that when the program was authorized we had an overwhelmingly Democratic House, a filibuster-proof Democratic Senate, and a Democrat in the White House.
Turns out the only benefits to this are the flexibility and low cost (which are good, sure, but not that exciting).
Actually, low cost is far more exciting than high efficiency. Low cost means it'll be used. A lot. High efficiency plus expensive just means we have a better grade of "no, we can't afford that right now"....
Flood Insurance isn't the Insurance Company's money - it's federal dollars. So the insurance companies had very little incentive to not hand it out like candy.
I got a much larger payout on my flood insurance than on my regular homeowner's insurance, even though the water damage wasn't really all that severe on my house.
In practice this means any state could implement a system of proportional representation of their electors
Note that several States do this already.
Note that those States basically have no influence on the outcome of Presidential election, since in practice, there is effectively one one electoral vote to be gained in each of those States (in general, most States are split pretty evenly Rep/Dem, so the winner in a proportional award State tends to get half rounded up votes, the loser gets half rounded down votes).
Since even the smallest winner-take-all State gives you three Electoral votes, you're better off winning Alaska (one of those "smallest" winner-take-all States - Montana is another) than two proportional States.
Which means that the proportional States tend to get ignored completely in election years.
I've always wondered why we have term limits for the president and no one else in the government.
George Washington refused to run for a third term as President, thus setting a precedent followed for nearly 150 years that a President would only serve two terms.
Then along came FDR. FDR decided that he was so important to the country that he couldn't step down after two terms, so he basically become President for Life (he died in his fourth term).
Afterwards, the Congress decided to fix things so that noone else would do that. So they amended the Constitution so that Washington's precedent became mandatory.
As to why Congress has no term limits, that's mostly a case of Congress being necessary to amend the Constitution to limit their own personal power - ain't gonna happen!
Sorry but I need to throw in my two cents: as a college student I started to miscarry my baby, so I showed up at the local hospital in Berkeley. I wasn't even allowed in to see a doctor to be stabilized or sent by ambulance to the county hospital in Oakland. They literally couldn't hurry me off their property fast enough. I had to have someone drive me the half hour to Highland. It was shocking and awful.
Two things:
1) You can probably sue their socks off for this, since it is quite illegal in the USA.
2) Isn't Berkeley the Mecca of the Loony Left? If they really believed in equal medical care for all, doing what they did would seem to be contrary to their own stated goals.
I didn't vote for Obama, hell I didn't even vote. Crap like this is why.
You figured Obama would pull some "crap", so you didn't oppose him, despite having a consequence- and cost-free way of doing that? I fail to follow your logic here.
I also didn't vote this last time around. For the first time ever. Because ALL of the candidates sucked little green horny toads.
And no, voting "none of the above" was pretty much meaningless. Where I live, non-votes are just ignored.
So I stayed home. And will again, if a similar situation arises.
I'm suddenly reminded of Starship Troopers where people do not gain the right to speak, vote, et cetera unless they're first joined the army. That's backwards. It is human rights that come FIRST, and the government that is allowed to exist only because we tolerate it.
In "Starship Troopers", the only Right you gained by doing a term of service was the Right to vote. The rest of what we consider "civil rights" you had automagically.
Note also that you did NOT gain the Right to vote by joining the Army. You gained it by leaving the Army (soldiers had no Right to vote).
Note also that "the Army" is misleading, at best. You had to serve a term of service as a Federal employee. That may mean the Army. But, as was pointed out in the book, if you were blind, deaf, and dumb, they'd find something for you to do, like counting the hairs on a caterpillar by touch, so that you could earn the Vote.
Slashdot Mirror
Unlikely. It's not like there is a lack of Open Source software of this sort freely available from non-USA sources.
Speaking as someone who has cancer, yes. If you can't joke about it, your life probably isn't worth living.
My wife, on the other hand, seems to think my jokes about my cancer are in poor taste. Go figure...
Ninety-five years in the USA.
But mostly, the Japanese use is the same as the Chinese, so yes, it would be mostly readable...
Had to look this one up for it to make sense.
For others who may be confused, in the USA "to table a bill" means basically to dump it. In the UK, "to table a bill" means to begin discussion of it.
Note, by the by, that even if one assumes that all executions in the USA are purely random (as opposed to punishment for a specific crime), the chance of being killed by lightning is about twice as high as the chance of being executed.
Well, the 5% extra money can also go to cover the 10% more people who are now uninsured, but who will be insured under this plan.
Note, by the way, that my previous post analyzed it in terms of reduced costs - if the whole trillion goes to reduced costs, it'll reduce the routine annual premium increase for this year by about half. And that'll just about soak it up entirely - there'll be no effect on routine increases after the first year it's in effect.
As to profits, I point out that health insurers have an average profit margin of barely over 2%. You're better off investing in T-bills than in health insurance companies....
No way of telling, really. I'm recalling a study I read about 15 years ago. Things may have changed since then. People may have changed. Better studies might have been done leading to the opposite conclusion.
But betting that people will make less use of a system that costs them less to use isn't a very safe bet....
1. So, in order to cover such an event, you must have a Press Pass, and in order to get a Press Pass, you must have covered such an event.
2. In order to have an audience, you must get the news. In order to get the news, you've got to have an audience.
3. In order to get a Press Pass, you have to have covered such an event without one. Which pretty much means going past police barricades or some similar illegal activity. So, pretty much be definition, you'll have misbehaved at a previous event.
In summary, your requirements reduce to:
1. No-one will be issued Press Passes.
Skipping quoting, because I'm lazy today.
The healthcare industry is about 14% of our GDP. Call it $2 trillion per year. It will be getting a cash infusion of $1 trillion per decade (nominally - actually, a lot of the benefits of the Bill won't apply for four-five years, though all the costs associated with the Bill will apply immediately), which translates to about a 5% increase in healthcare spending (assuming nothing is wasted).
Healthcare costs are increasing at more than 5% per year. Even if the full trillion began to be input into the system this year (it won't until at least 2014), it will, at best, result in a slightly lower premium increase than normal for THIS YEAR ONLY. No downstream effect at all.
As to the rest of your commentary, note that the Healthcare Reform bill is not intended or expected to actually cover everyone. Depending on which version of the Bill is in play, it will leave between five and ten million uninsured. So part of the healthcare industries costs associated with the uninsured will remain intact. How large a part is uncertain.
Note also that in one of my posts I mentioned the fine associated with not getting insurance. And I mentioned that that fine is considerably less than the cost of insurance. What I didn't bother to mention was that insurance companies will be required to insure you even with a pre-existing condition.
Net result? If you're reasonably healthy, you can game the system by paying your fine every year until you really need health insurance, then go buy some health insurance. Keep it till the medical bills are paid, then dump it again.
This represents a potentially large hole for money to pour out of insurance company coffers. They're not going to lower rates on the rest of us when they have the potential of having pay for someone's cancer treatments on six months of non-discriminatory premiums.
And finally, note that people who are paying for health insurance tend to use the system more than people who are paying for healthcare out of their own pockets. If this trend continues through this bill, it is likely that some part of that trillion per decade will be consumed in largely unnecessary tests/treatments/whatever (depending on what is covered, and that won't be clear until all the 50 States have weighed in with their own opinions as to what the ideal health plan OUGHT to cover - want to bet that at least one State will cover cosmetic surgery?)
So, no, for all the above reasons, I don't expect this Bill to save any money for anyone. But it ought to be a dandy source of campaign contributions for decades to come....
Mostly, it'll cover the subsidies for people who can't afford insurance. The feds are also imposing a bunch of small taxes and fees on medical equipment manufacturers, hospitals, etc. That money will also go to cover the subsidies.
None of that will result in lower premiums (note that there is absolutely nothing in the current healthcare reform bill that is intended to lower healthcare costs). It'll just allow about two thirds of the people currently uninsured who are also too wealthy for Medicaid to get insurance.
No, the payoff to the insurance companies is the requirement that everyone get health insurance. A very large fraction of the uninsured in the USA are young and healthy. They won't drain the system by making much use of it, but their premiums will bolster than Insurance companies' bottom line.
My own preference, still, is to extend Medicare to cover everyone from birth. Alas, the prospect of tripling the Medicare taxes doesn't seem to appeal to Congress right now.
Note, by the way, that Medicare also distorts healthcare costs in the USA, as it is currently set up. Whenever Congress wants to look fiscally responsible, they find "savings" in Medicare by reducing the payouts to doctors and hospitals. Again, the doctors and hospitals make up the lost revenue by raising prices for everyone else.
Note, in the above, that "everyone else" is the people with insurance. Every time I've had to spend money on doctors or hospitals while uninsured, I've gotten a discount for being uninsured. Yes, I'm aware that conventional wisdom holds it that the reverse is true, but my experience is the opposite of conventional wisdom.
Anyways, don't look for cost reductions in the current bill. There aren't any. There aren't even any intentions that costs should go down.
Medicaid is coming out of general revenues, so we're all paying for that. Which doesn't terribly bother me, really.
Medicare is paid for out of Medicare taxes - it's part of that 7.7% that gets taken out of our paychecks no matter what (well, assuming you're making less than $100-odd thousand per year, anyway. It caps otherwise). Theoretically, all of Medicare is paid for out of Medicare taxes.
Note that somewhere in the next decade, lacking action from Congress, Medicare will be paying out less than it takes in in taxes.
Note also that that condition may apply this year (and possibly the next one, and conceivably the one after), since Medicare tax revenues are down due to high unemployment/underemployment. It is even possible that we won't drag ourselves out of this hole before Medicare finds itself permanently short of revenue (again, lacking Congressional action).
Congress will probably do something about Medicare/SSA sometime in the next five years. But there's going to be a lot of flak over raising the FICA taxes, since they're larger than income taxes for a lot of people (and after they raise them enough to matter, they'll be larger than income taxes for most all the middle class). So they'll put it off till they can find some way to blame someone else for doing it. Which means just after an election, but before the new guys are seated, probably.
Boy, are you out of touch!
You will be required to buy insurance. If you fail to do so, you will be fined. Note that the fine is much lower than the cost of insurance.
If you cannot afford insurance, your insurance will be subsidized by the Federal government.
This is what he meant when he talked about subsidizing others. Yes, this is a subsidy, since you'll be paying for your own health insurance, as well as paying your share of the taxes required to cover all the people being subsidized.
Note, however, that you are ALREADY subsidizing other people's healthcare. Emergency rooms are required by law to treat anyone who comes in, even if they can't pay. Hospitals deal with the financial hit thus imposed by raising rates for everyone who CAN pay. To the extent that more people will have insurance after the Reform, this particular bit of your healthcare costs should be reduced.
Whether we'll come out ahead or behind on this deal isn't terribly clear. Other than the $1 trillion pricetag on the Healthcare Reform bill. That tends to suggest that we'll be paying more afterwards than before. Otherwise, why is the bill going to cost $1 trillion?
Seems to me I have read before that fighter pilots have been using a shot of O2 to clear up a hangover for a long time. At least since the 80's.
If that were true, then both of them would have some pretty serious lawsuit material. It's against the law for firing someone for wanting to unionize. Yeah, you can cover up the firing by giving another reason, but there are plenty of lawyers who would take the case (and win) anyway, since the feds are inclined to look suspiciously at any firing in close proximity to a unionization attempt.
Well, the iceberg that just broke off of Antarctica was about 1000 times as large, if that helps.
And if it doesn't help, assuming that it would cause about as much effect as tossing a normal ice cube into an Olympic-sized swimming pool wouldn't be too far off. Though the normal ice-cube in the Olympic-sized pool would cool things down a bit more....
Well, yes. If cost is low because we're measuring cost in $/cm^2, then it's pretty much meaningless.
But, in general, we measure cost in some meaningful way - $/car, $/box of raisin bran, etc. Cost for solar cells ought to be measured in $/m^2 or $/kw output. So if we measure these panels the same way we'd measure any other solar panel, and decide it's much cheaper, that's a good thing.
It is, in fact, an exciting thing. I'm not going to put solar panels on my roof if it's going to cost me $30k to do it. For $20k, I'll be looking into it seriously. For $10k, I'll be calling an installer tomorrow....
Let's see. There have been two floods in the last half century that got water into my house.
The last one, Katrina, only got water into the house because the Jefferson Parish President panicked and shut down the pumping stations when he shouldn't have.
The first one was in the 60's, before the Federal Flood Insurance program.
So that particular program has had a payout on my house exactly once. And wouldn't have had that one if Brousard had had any sense.
So I'm not seeing where we're all that flood-prone.
Now, this is not to suggest that I think the Feds should do flood insurance. Nonetheless, someone figured he could buy a bunch of votes a long time ago by doing this.
Note, for the record, that when the program was authorized we had an overwhelmingly Democratic House, a filibuster-proof Democratic Senate, and a Democrat in the White House.
Actually, low cost is far more exciting than high efficiency. Low cost means it'll be used. A lot. High efficiency plus expensive just means we have a better grade of "no, we can't afford that right now"....
My own experience says otherwise.
Flood Insurance isn't the Insurance Company's money - it's federal dollars. So the insurance companies had very little incentive to not hand it out like candy.
I got a much larger payout on my flood insurance than on my regular homeowner's insurance, even though the water damage wasn't really all that severe on my house.
Note that several States do this already.
Note that those States basically have no influence on the outcome of Presidential election, since in practice, there is effectively one one electoral vote to be gained in each of those States (in general, most States are split pretty evenly Rep/Dem, so the winner in a proportional award State tends to get half rounded up votes, the loser gets half rounded down votes).
Since even the smallest winner-take-all State gives you three Electoral votes, you're better off winning Alaska (one of those "smallest" winner-take-all States - Montana is another) than two proportional States.
Which means that the proportional States tend to get ignored completely in election years.
George Washington refused to run for a third term as President, thus setting a precedent followed for nearly 150 years that a President would only serve two terms.
Then along came FDR. FDR decided that he was so important to the country that he couldn't step down after two terms, so he basically become President for Life (he died in his fourth term).
Afterwards, the Congress decided to fix things so that noone else would do that. So they amended the Constitution so that Washington's precedent became mandatory.
As to why Congress has no term limits, that's mostly a case of Congress being necessary to amend the Constitution to limit their own personal power - ain't gonna happen!
I assume you don't mean Obama or Bush Jr here. So likely you're talking about Clinton.
Note that in spite of Clinton's "budget surplus", the National Debt increased every year of his Presidency.
I've never been to clear on why we needed to borrow more money to pay the bills if we ran a surplus on revenues....
Two things:
1) You can probably sue their socks off for this, since it is quite illegal in the USA.
2) Isn't Berkeley the Mecca of the Loony Left? If they really believed in equal medical care for all, doing what they did would seem to be contrary to their own stated goals.
I also didn't vote this last time around. For the first time ever. Because ALL of the candidates sucked little green horny toads.
And no, voting "none of the above" was pretty much meaningless. Where I live, non-votes are just ignored.
So I stayed home. And will again, if a similar situation arises.
In "Starship Troopers", the only Right you gained by doing a term of service was the Right to vote. The rest of what we consider "civil rights" you had automagically.
Note also that you did NOT gain the Right to vote by joining the Army. You gained it by leaving the Army (soldiers had no Right to vote).
Note also that "the Army" is misleading, at best. You had to serve a term of service as a Federal employee. That may mean the Army. But, as was pointed out in the book, if you were blind, deaf, and dumb, they'd find something for you to do, like counting the hairs on a caterpillar by touch, so that you could earn the Vote.