Now all we need is a large screen in the House and Senate and allow anyone to call up the video from the past.
Congress person A: "Well I never said that we should cut funding to orphans."
Congress person B: "Let's go to the play back. On June 28th at 10:45 am you gave a speech on the floor, let's listen in,'We should cut funding to orphans.' Sounds to me like now you are lying."
I would watch CSPAN 24-7 just to see both sides tripped up by their own words.
Sorry, it might have not been coal. I was going off of memory. All that I remember is that not long after the Sago mine collapse, where several miners were killed, a mine collapsed in Europe. Because of the stricter laws the miners had a bunker they retreated to that had food, water and air for all of them. A few days later when the rescuers dug them out, they were fine. Without the bunker, they would have died. People asked about doing something like that in the US, and the answer was, "It's too costly." At that time, a former Mine owner was in charge of US mine safety, and would not push for more regulation.
My point was that I would rather pay more for gas, coal, copper, iron, or whatever, knowing that the people who are risking their lives are given every chance to survive a disaster.
The Nuclear Power Industry does this all the time. They have a horrid record when it comes to cost over runs and delays. Now they are trying to get rate payers to pay for the possible construction of a new nuclear plant that may or may not be built in the next 5 to 10 years.
No insurance company will insure a nuclear plant.* No bank will loan money for construction of a nuclear plant.*
Yes, because I really want to get cancer from drinking water that is polluted by the mine that gathers these elements, or die in a mine collapse because the mine owner is too cheep to provide for safety bunkers.
The number one rule for business is to internalize the profits, and externalized the costs.
It is why gas is taxed to high in Europe. They are trying to capture the costs of the pollution and environmental hazards caused by the use of oil. It is why coal miners in the US die in a collapse, and the European coal miners spend 3-4 days in an emergency shelter waiting to be dug out.
Think about it. You are sitting still on a chair, in your house, on the Earth. The Earth is moving around the sun. The sun in moving around the Milky Way Galaxy. The Milky Way Galaxy is moving in whatever direction it is moving in the Local group. The Local Group is moving in whatever direction it is moving. Heck, the entire universe might be moving through some other medium. Who knows. The point is that we are always moving, even when we are sitting still.
The Fire Departments are a coercion. If I ever get trapped in my burning house, a privet company that knows how to turn a profit should be called out. And if I don't have the money to pay, well, tough luck, I should have bought coverage for that.
Social Security is not a failure. The only problem with it is that millionaires don't contribute the same % as the rest of us. Take off the cap and everything will be fine.
I don't want my medical insurance company worried about a profit. What do they do? They don't run one test. They don't check one temperature, they don't sew one stitch. They just take your money, take 30% for themselves for the hard work of taking your money, then deny paying it back to you when you need it. In every other industrialized country, for profit primary health insurance is a CRIME.
Social Security is an insurance program that everyone in the US has to buy in to. This program pays out not only in old age, but in death to the worker's family, disabling injury, and in the case of my 35 year old brother terminal cancer care. This program helps keep you from having to take care of your parents and your kids at the same time. Only the first $90,000 is taxed. If we remove the cap, we will have no issues paying for it. Yes, people making millions of dollars would never get all their money back, but we don't have hundreds of thousands of old people begging for food on the street. We don't have millions of old people burdening their kids for food, shelter etc. We don't just write off the guy who broke his neck and is stuck in a wheel-chair the rest of his life. We don't let a mother and her kids live on the street when her husband is killed in an accident.
It's more about rights of women. When women have equal rights, they tend to have less kids. Having birth control available is worthless if a husband does not allow his wife to use it. We first need to push equal rights along with education. Birth control and population control will follow.
The legislation is so wrong. I want universal health care, in the same way that I have universal fire coverage, or universal military coverage. I don't want my doctor to be working for the government, but I do want to kill off the insurance companies. They add NOTHING. They take our money, then deny coverage, then pay themselves millions, and in at least one case billions of dollars.
What should have happened in this fight is that the Dems should have called up all the other industrial countries that have universal health care and ask them, "What works? What doesn't work? What would you do better? What would you do if you could start over?" Then craft a bill from what other major countries do.
The problem is that there is too much MONEY involved. Republicans and Democrats take too much money from businesses and craft laws that reflect that fact.
So "provide for the common defense" has more weight to you then "promote the general welfare"? I would argue that I can't have "Life liberty and the pursuit of happiness" without health care.
Without health care, I can't have life. At least not for long.
Without health care, I can't have liberty, if I am not free to do whatever job I want, because I am tied to my job for health insurance.
Without health care, I can't pursue my happiness, because being self-employed, health insurance is too expensive.
I would rather people of this country be free to follow their dreams. Many people can't quit their jobs because they need the insurance.
A 35 year old with no insurance starts coughing. He can't afford to go to the doctor, but after a few weeks of coughing finally pays out of pocket to see a doctor. The doctor can't do an x-ray because it costs too much and he has a history of bronchitis anyway. He get's some drugs to see if that will help. A few months later he goes to the ER with chest pains, and it turns out he has stage 4 lung cancer. He then get almost free treatment to the tune of tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. He lives for 6 months.
The above man is my brother Matt. He was working as a chef in a small diner. He made about 10 an hour. The owner did not offer health insurance until you have worked for 6 months. Before he could get insurance from work, he got sick. The state and social security paid to keep him alive for 6 months.
If he had public insurance, he could have gotten the chest x-ray when the drugs did not help. The treatment for stage 1 or 2 cancer is less costly then stage 4, and more importantly he would still be alive. So when asked, should I, working in the computer industry making good money, have to support my neighbor, my answer is YES! My neighbor is someone's brother or sister or father or mother or child.
The book publishers are the drug dealers, not the libraries. The libraries are just a way to get your free book fix, before you start to buy books. If the publishers force all the libraries to close, then people will not get the first "hit" free.
When I was growing up, my family did not have a lot of money. Almost all the books I read were borrowed from a library. As I got older, my mom and dad moved in to better jobs, and some of my books were purchased. By the time I was in high school and college, the only time I went to the library was to do research for school papers.
Now that I make good money, I never to go the library. I buy all my books (from independent book stores if I can).
Like any good drug dealer they need to keep the first "hit" free.
Why should you pay for police protection for your neighbor? Why should you pay for schools, when you don't have kids? Why should you pay for Air Traffic Control, when you are scared to fly? Why should you pay for a bridge you will never use? Why should you pay for someone to come up with and enforce building codes? Why should you pay for roads that you will never drive on? Why should you pay for farm aid to a wheat farmer when you can't eat wheat? Why should you pay for anything?
We live in a society. We all live together. Even if you never use the fire department, you know they are there. You know that they will respond to the fire next door, and hopefully keep it from spreading to your house.
We make choices as a society of things that benefit us all. Having police patrol the neighborhood and respond to calls, helps you and everyone else. Having schools helps kids become productive members of society and keeps them off the street. Air Traffic Control keeps planes from crashing in to one another, and falling on you. New building codes keep the roof over your head from falling on you in an earthquake. or from the wiring from catching on fire. I can go on, but I hope you get the point.
We can't have a ME ME ME ME attitude all the time, and live with one another.
In addition, final assembly of Toyota, Honda, BMW, and Kia cars != building cars in the US. If almost all of the parts come from Japan, Germany or Keora, and are only put together in the US, it's not really made in the USA. It's good PR, and you can put a, "Made in the USA" sticker on the car, but look at all the parts. A car is just the sum of its parts. If all the parts are made outside the USA, then the car can't really said to be, "Made in the USA."
Government regulation works, when we want it to work. The problem is that since the 80s we had people in charge of government that hate government. Look at the last administration. We had a horse trader in charge of FIMA. We had a mine owner in charge of mine safety. Today we have a big banker in charge of policing the banks.
If you are able to source all of your own food, and products you buy, good for you. The rest of have to have some group that checks on companies and products to make sure they are following the rules.
Yes, why make clothes in the US by adults, when you can have kids do it in other countries. Why have an 8 hour work day and allow for sick leave, when you can work people 12 to 14 hours a day and fire them for being pregnant? Why make products with safe, but more expensive chemicals, when you can get away with anything in other locations, and ship it back in to the US? I am not saying that we need to convert the rest of the world in to the US, but having some basic human rights in our trade agreements would go along way.
This is the problem with our Trade Agreements. We enforce IP laws to no end, but other issues? Workers rights and safety issues never seem to come up.
The Libertarian view does not work here. Sure, we can sue Walmart for importing these toys. We can sue the maker, somehow. The problem is that if one kid dies or becomes permanently sick because of these toys, it's too late. We need regulation. We need trade agreements that not only enforce IP, but make sure that the companies are not using methods or materials banned in the US.
The same applies to any company operating in the US. Self regulation only goes so far. We had the Sego mine disaster in 2006. Who was the head of US mine safety? A mine owner. So in Europe when the same thing happened, the workers had a bunker with food, water and air to retreat too. To save money, the US did not have any regulations requiring bunkers. The workers here died.
I think that it comes down to education. When you ask a college age person, "Do you think that you would be hired at a job if your future employer knew you got passed out drunk on weekends?" I would assume that most people would answer, "no." I think that if people were educated more on what is good and not so good to post online, things would be different. I saw an public service add on MTV about sexting, reminding kids that once you send out the naked picture of yourself, you lose control of it. You might just want it for your boyfriend/girlfriend, but nothing stops them from passing it on, to everyone you know.
Like any new technology, we are experiencing growing pains. The same thing happened when the telephone was wide spread use. You had to teach kids not to say they were home alone when a stranger called. We need to teach kids and people that posting misadventures on Facebook is not a good idea.
As a general rule, "Never say anything on a cell phone, or post anything on the internet that you would not want to see in a court room."
No, we do not stand alone. We look out for ourselves, our people first. I never said that we stop importing products from other countries, just that we impose tariffs. We will never make French Wine in the US, I am fine importing French Wine. We make US wines. The problem that we have today is that a large amount of the jobs that you could do with just a high school education are gone. Before the 80s, you could support a family on an assembly line job. You would not be "rich" but you would not be poor. Before the 80s being a supermarket bagger was a good paying union job that you could survive on, and live a pretty good life. Those jobs don't really exists anymore in the US.
We got rid of these jobs, and at the same time made higher education a costly practice. Who want's to finish school with tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of debt? In the 60s the conservatives looked at the Black Panthers, the SLA, and the war protesters and thought that it was the end of the world. The country was falling apart. So what did they do? The did away with cheep or free college. The busted unions to end the middle class. The did all the things I said above to kill the middle class in the country.
If you don't have a safe income, if you don't have free time, it is really hard to look at what is going on in the country, let alone show up an protest or voice your concern. It's hard to go on strike for better wages when you have several thousand people ready to take your place in a heartbeat. It's hard to protest about long hours, when your job can be done over seas for less cost. It's hard to make your voice heard when you have a sick kid and your work's insurance is the only thing keeping her barely alive.
The solutions that I listed above, would return a strong middle class to the US. I never said stand alone, just look out for number one. Look at life in Denmark. Did you know that Denmark is one of the happiest places to live? Why? Well, off the top of my head, they have something like 6 weeks of mandatory vacation. They have health coverage not tied to their work, they have FREE education through college, and even get an allowance to attend, right up through a PHD. Look at the high school drop out rate. It's close to 0. Yes, the taxes are high, but so is the quality of life for almost all of the population. You don't have a large super rich class there. Almost the entire population is middle class.
Slashdot Mirror
Now all we need is a large screen in the House and Senate and allow anyone to call up the video from the past.
Congress person A: "Well I never said that we should cut funding to orphans."
Congress person B: "Let's go to the play back. On June 28th at 10:45 am you gave a speech on the floor, let's listen in,'We should cut funding to orphans.' Sounds to me like now you are lying."
I would watch CSPAN 24-7 just to see both sides tripped up by their own words.
Sorry, it might have not been coal. I was going off of memory. All that I remember is that not long after the Sago mine collapse, where several miners were killed, a mine collapsed in Europe. Because of the stricter laws the miners had a bunker they retreated to that had food, water and air for all of them. A few days later when the rescuers dug them out, they were fine. Without the bunker, they would have died. People asked about doing something like that in the US, and the answer was, "It's too costly." At that time, a former Mine owner was in charge of US mine safety, and would not push for more regulation.
My point was that I would rather pay more for gas, coal, copper, iron, or whatever, knowing that the people who are risking their lives are given every chance to survive a disaster.
The Nuclear Power Industry does this all the time. They have a horrid record when it comes to cost over runs and delays. Now they are trying to get rate payers to pay for the possible construction of a new nuclear plant that may or may not be built in the next 5 to 10 years.
No insurance company will insure a nuclear plant.*
No bank will loan money for construction of a nuclear plant.*
*Without government guarantees.
Yes, because I really want to get cancer from drinking water that is polluted by the mine that gathers these elements, or die in a mine collapse because the mine owner is too cheep to provide for safety bunkers.
The number one rule for business is to internalize the profits, and externalized the costs.
It is why gas is taxed to high in Europe. They are trying to capture the costs of the pollution and environmental hazards caused by the use of oil. It is why coal miners in the US die in a collapse, and the European coal miners spend 3-4 days in an emergency shelter waiting to be dug out.
Think about it. You are sitting still on a chair, in your house, on the Earth. The Earth is moving around the sun. The sun in moving around the Milky Way Galaxy. The Milky Way Galaxy is moving in whatever direction it is moving in the Local group. The Local Group is moving in whatever direction it is moving. Heck, the entire universe might be moving through some other medium. Who knows. The point is that we are always moving, even when we are sitting still.
Only when playing pinball.
I can't wait to meet the new boss, as long as we don't get fooled again.
The Fire Departments are a coercion. If I ever get trapped in my burning house, a privet company that knows how to turn a profit should be called out. And if I don't have the money to pay, well, tough luck, I should have bought coverage for that.
Social Security is not a failure. The only problem with it is that millionaires don't contribute the same % as the rest of us. Take off the cap and everything will be fine.
I don't want my medical insurance company worried about a profit. What do they do? They don't run one test. They don't check one temperature, they don't sew one stitch. They just take your money, take 30% for themselves for the hard work of taking your money, then deny paying it back to you when you need it. In every other industrialized country, for profit primary health insurance is a CRIME.
Social Security is an insurance program that everyone in the US has to buy in to. This program pays out not only in old age, but in death to the worker's family, disabling injury, and in the case of my 35 year old brother terminal cancer care. This program helps keep you from having to take care of your parents and your kids at the same time. Only the first $90,000 is taxed. If we remove the cap, we will have no issues paying for it. Yes, people making millions of dollars would never get all their money back, but we don't have hundreds of thousands of old people begging for food on the street. We don't have millions of old people burdening their kids for food, shelter etc. We don't just write off the guy who broke his neck and is stuck in a wheel-chair the rest of his life. We don't let a mother and her kids live on the street when her husband is killed in an accident.
Social Security is an insurance program.
It's more about rights of women. When women have equal rights, they tend to have less kids. Having birth control available is worthless if a husband does not allow his wife to use it. We first need to push equal rights along with education. Birth control and population control will follow.
foreign country + cheep office in a state + incorporation = foreign governments directly influencing American elections
The legislation is so wrong. I want universal health care, in the same way that I have universal fire coverage, or universal military coverage. I don't want my doctor to be working for the government, but I do want to kill off the insurance companies. They add NOTHING. They take our money, then deny coverage, then pay themselves millions, and in at least one case billions of dollars.
What should have happened in this fight is that the Dems should have called up all the other industrial countries that have universal health care and ask them, "What works? What doesn't work? What would you do better? What would you do if you could start over?" Then craft a bill from what other major countries do.
The problem is that there is too much MONEY involved. Republicans and Democrats take too much money from businesses and craft laws that reflect that fact.
So "provide for the common defense" has more weight to you then "promote the general welfare"? I would argue that I can't have "Life liberty and the pursuit of happiness" without health care.
Without health care, I can't have life. At least not for long.
Without health care, I can't have liberty, if I am not free to do whatever job I want, because I am tied to my job for health insurance.
Without health care, I can't pursue my happiness, because being self-employed, health insurance is too expensive.
I would rather people of this country be free to follow their dreams. Many people can't quit their jobs because they need the insurance.
I see health care as a right, not a privilege.
A 35 year old with no insurance starts coughing. He can't afford to go to the doctor, but after a few weeks of coughing finally pays out of pocket to see a doctor. The doctor can't do an x-ray because it costs too much and he has a history of bronchitis anyway. He get's some drugs to see if that will help. A few months later he goes to the ER with chest pains, and it turns out he has stage 4 lung cancer. He then get almost free treatment to the tune of tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. He lives for 6 months.
The above man is my brother Matt. He was working as a chef in a small diner. He made about 10 an hour. The owner did not offer health insurance until you have worked for 6 months. Before he could get insurance from work, he got sick. The state and social security paid to keep him alive for 6 months.
If he had public insurance, he could have gotten the chest x-ray when the drugs did not help. The treatment for stage 1 or 2 cancer is less costly then stage 4, and more importantly he would still be alive. So when asked, should I, working in the computer industry making good money, have to support my neighbor, my answer is YES! My neighbor is someone's brother or sister or father or mother or child.
The book publishers are the drug dealers, not the libraries. The libraries are just a way to get your free book fix, before you start to buy books. If the publishers force all the libraries to close, then people will not get the first "hit" free.
Someone beat you to it.
http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basSoph3.html
When I was growing up, my family did not have a lot of money. Almost all the books I read were borrowed from a library. As I got older, my mom and dad moved in to better jobs, and some of my books were purchased. By the time I was in high school and college, the only time I went to the library was to do research for school papers.
Now that I make good money, I never to go the library. I buy all my books (from independent book stores if I can).
Like any good drug dealer they need to keep the first "hit" free.
Why should you pay for police protection for your neighbor? Why should you pay for schools, when you don't have kids? Why should you pay for Air Traffic Control, when you are scared to fly? Why should you pay for a bridge you will never use? Why should you pay for someone to come up with and enforce building codes? Why should you pay for roads that you will never drive on? Why should you pay for farm aid to a wheat farmer when you can't eat wheat? Why should you pay for anything?
We live in a society. We all live together. Even if you never use the fire department, you know they are there. You know that they will respond to the fire next door, and hopefully keep it from spreading to your house.
We make choices as a society of things that benefit us all. Having police patrol the neighborhood and respond to calls, helps you and everyone else. Having schools helps kids become productive members of society and keeps them off the street. Air Traffic Control keeps planes from crashing in to one another, and falling on you. New building codes keep the roof over your head from falling on you in an earthquake. or from the wiring from catching on fire. I can go on, but I hope you get the point.
We can't have a ME ME ME ME attitude all the time, and live with one another.
They want the ISS to stay up until 20/20? I just don't see it.
In addition, final assembly of Toyota, Honda, BMW, and Kia cars != building cars in the US. If almost all of the parts come from Japan, Germany or Keora, and are only put together in the US, it's not really made in the USA. It's good PR, and you can put a, "Made in the USA" sticker on the car, but look at all the parts. A car is just the sum of its parts. If all the parts are made outside the USA, then the car can't really said to be, "Made in the USA."
Government regulation works, when we want it to work. The problem is that since the 80s we had people in charge of government that hate government. Look at the last administration. We had a horse trader in charge of FIMA. We had a mine owner in charge of mine safety. Today we have a big banker in charge of policing the banks.
If you are able to source all of your own food, and products you buy, good for you. The rest of have to have some group that checks on companies and products to make sure they are following the rules.
Yes, why make clothes in the US by adults, when you can have kids do it in other countries. Why have an 8 hour work day and allow for sick leave, when you can work people 12 to 14 hours a day and fire them for being pregnant? Why make products with safe, but more expensive chemicals, when you can get away with anything in other locations, and ship it back in to the US? I am not saying that we need to convert the rest of the world in to the US, but having some basic human rights in our trade agreements would go along way.
This is the problem with our Trade Agreements. We enforce IP laws to no end, but other issues? Workers rights and safety issues never seem to come up.
The Libertarian view does not work here. Sure, we can sue Walmart for importing these toys. We can sue the maker, somehow. The problem is that if one kid dies or becomes permanently sick because of these toys, it's too late. We need regulation. We need trade agreements that not only enforce IP, but make sure that the companies are not using methods or materials banned in the US.
The same applies to any company operating in the US. Self regulation only goes so far. We had the Sego mine disaster in 2006. Who was the head of US mine safety? A mine owner. So in Europe when the same thing happened, the workers had a bunker with food, water and air to retreat too. To save money, the US did not have any regulations requiring bunkers. The workers here died.
I think that it comes down to education. When you ask a college age person, "Do you think that you would be hired at a job if your future employer knew you got passed out drunk on weekends?" I would assume that most people would answer, "no." I think that if people were educated more on what is good and not so good to post online, things would be different. I saw an public service add on MTV about sexting, reminding kids that once you send out the naked picture of yourself, you lose control of it. You might just want it for your boyfriend/girlfriend, but nothing stops them from passing it on, to everyone you know.
Like any new technology, we are experiencing growing pains. The same thing happened when the telephone was wide spread use. You had to teach kids not to say they were home alone when a stranger called. We need to teach kids and people that posting misadventures on Facebook is not a good idea.
As a general rule, "Never say anything on a cell phone, or post anything on the internet that you would not want to see in a court room."
No, we do not stand alone. We look out for ourselves, our people first. I never said that we stop importing products from other countries, just that we impose tariffs. We will never make French Wine in the US, I am fine importing French Wine. We make US wines. The problem that we have today is that a large amount of the jobs that you could do with just a high school education are gone. Before the 80s, you could support a family on an assembly line job. You would not be "rich" but you would not be poor. Before the 80s being a supermarket bagger was a good paying union job that you could survive on, and live a pretty good life. Those jobs don't really exists anymore in the US.
We got rid of these jobs, and at the same time made higher education a costly practice. Who want's to finish school with tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of debt? In the 60s the conservatives looked at the Black Panthers, the SLA, and the war protesters and thought that it was the end of the world. The country was falling apart. So what did they do? The did away with cheep or free college. The busted unions to end the middle class. The did all the things I said above to kill the middle class in the country.
If you don't have a safe income, if you don't have free time, it is really hard to look at what is going on in the country, let alone show up an protest or voice your concern. It's hard to go on strike for better wages when you have several thousand people ready to take your place in a heartbeat. It's hard to protest about long hours, when your job can be done over seas for less cost. It's hard to make your voice heard when you have a sick kid and your work's insurance is the only thing keeping her barely alive.
The solutions that I listed above, would return a strong middle class to the US. I never said stand alone, just look out for number one. Look at life in Denmark. Did you know that Denmark is one of the happiest places to live? Why? Well, off the top of my head, they have something like 6 weeks of mandatory vacation. They have health coverage not tied to their work, they have FREE education through college, and even get an allowance to attend, right up through a PHD. Look at the high school drop out rate. It's close to 0. Yes, the taxes are high, but so is the quality of life for almost all of the population. You don't have a large super rich class there. Almost the entire population is middle class.