Until then, I want to FORCE these leechers who decide not to buy health insurance (or can't afford it) to contribute to the system (which they benefit from). That is what "Obamacare" does and why I support it.
What if they just got billed by the hospital, and made payments on that until it was gone? Or, better yet, set up a government program to pay the hospital and hold it out of their tax returns until it was repaid?
Besides, if we're giving them tax dollars to buy their insurance with, and/or if we're not penalizing them more than they would spend on insurance, what exactly ARE we accomplishing? Aside from dictating how other people live so we can feel better, that is?
You are going to have to raise taxes, especially on the "rich". Cutting anything else is peanuts, so unless you're planning to back-stab the old white folks that voted in this congress you are going to have to raise taxes.
You've got a strategy, but I think the opposing view is a better one. Let the "rich" have their tax cuts, and perhaps they'll hire a few more workers. Those will each pay taxes, "rich man"s business will pay taxes on each of them, sales taxes will be collected on groceries bought with dollars rather than stamps, and so on...
Fuck, am I the only one who remembers the 2006 elections? You know, the ones where the Democrats swept into control in reaction to Bush's epic fail? What the hell is wrong with you people? Are you not taking your ginkgo biloba? Have I slipped in from a parallel Earth? What? What?
Oh hell, that's nothing. Scroll up and you'll find a post where they only had fifty days of power. The evil Red team had it ALL the rest of the time.
If this was just a warning to Democrats then why was someone like Russ Feingold, a well-loved non-partisan who has been fighting the good fight for Wisconsin for a long time, ousted by a high-school drop-out who married into money and had no platform other than "Lets fix things with Tea Party principles." No plan to cut entitlement programs, no plan to cut military, and really no concrete plan at all. He's the epitome of the empty suit millionaire who will vote in anything to help his other millionaire friends.
Probably because that's the message the people want to hear right now. You can belittle the Tea Party platform if it makes you feel better, but a 'back to basics' approach is exactly what people want in bad times such as these. There's just no splitting hairs over that. If the electorate is confident that he'll cast votes that help decrease the size, and therefore cost, of government, great!
It doesn't take an Ivy League education to understand that, and I can only chalk it up to hubris that these people won any elections at all. If the Blue team had lowered their snooty noses for long enough to consider what the opposition was shouting, they could have co-opted that message with due haste. They didn't. They did as you have done here and focused on the 'high school dropout' or 'we are better than they are' angle. Obama did the same with his 'you are just to dumb to understand my brilliance' speeches. Just a truly stupid move, really.
The message you won't be hearing is about the Citizens United ruling which led to unrestrained campaign spending this year. The Dems were outspent 7 to 1. That's right, 7 to 1. This election was shamelessly bought.
I'm not at all clear on how ads directly relates to votes. Everyone in both parties drastically ramped up spending, did we see a commensurate amount of increase in voter turnout? Or maybe, just maybe, the people that were going to vote used some other source than attack ads to decide which ballot to cast?
Voting for either major party because you think one is fiscally more responsible than the other is stupid. Sorry.
You're overlooking the influence of the Tea Party. Time will tell, for sure, but I suspect fiscal responsibility to increase greatly for a least a short while. Anyone in office now will be realigning their message and positions to pander to this particular political force, and that's genuinely in our best interests, in my opinion.
You fix it in government the same way you do at home. You cut back what you can and pay down one credit card at a time until they're all gone. You do NOT go out and spend on gigantic splurgey things like entire car companies and free health insurance for everybody.
2) Many who oppose the current version of HCR wanted single payer. Do I oppose it? Yes, but not because it went too far.
You seem to lack a logistical comprehension of what's going on here. 'Single payer' is like a bus that takes you half the way to work and expects you to drive the rest of the way. You've replaced the insurance system, but have done absolutely nothing to control costs.
If we want 'socialized medicine' that really works, then we need to completely socialize the entire system. Doctors need to be government employees, hospital boards elected by their counties, etc. If healthcare were truly a 'right' then you would see more people advocate this position.
If we want 'capitalist medicine' then we need to allow market forces to work their magic.
Any mix of garbage in between is going to screw SOMEBODY over. There's no getting around it. 'Single payer' simply means the hospitals laugh all the way to the bank.
That realization wasn't caused by mortgage failure, it was caused by failing home prices, which meant their assets went down.
You don't seem to be reflecting on why the home prices fell. Why not?
Many, my self included, don't actually see the prices as having changed much. It was the credit that changed. The prices merely reflected the increased supply of funny money. And buyers were willing to pay it because it wasn't their money. This happened on my own home purchase, actually. The price was 15K over what it seemed like it should have been, but the entire market was that way, and the loan covered it, so we went for it.
Credit was the cause. When it dried up, so did everything else.
Unless the collapse was cause by the war on terror, I'm not really sure how you can blame the Red team for it. As I understand it, the housing market bubble was created by financing changes signed into law by Clinton, but maybe Osama was really to blame?
The whole "death panel" debacle was completely distorted rhetoric on something very sensible and important: end of life planning and counseling.
While death panels may not be real, rationing certainly is. Let's not belittle the underlying issue by applying that particular label to it. Someone, some where will have to decide who gets care and who waits until they die. It used to be decided by how much money you had - which is generally something you have some influence over. In the government-run scenario, it will be decided by some other factor. There's simply no denying this as being true.
That's not true; the mandate PROTECTS insurance companies.
That's only partially true. It protects the industry, in that it will exist as a whole, but individual companies will be forced to compete for individual business on the exchanges only. Businesses will, due exactly to the mandate and the stipends, drop coverage completely. They'll save money by doing so.
This environment means that only those few companies that find a way to excel on the exchanges will have any hope of survival. A great many of them will have to go out of business.
Republican health care ideas might have lead to some savings in some areas, but they aren't going to fix the real problems.
While you're absolutely right, the simple fact is that the transitional period is worse than the original problems were. It used to be hard to find an affordable kids-only plan, and now it is impossible because they're simply not sold any longer.
The 'real problems' involve things like health care not being 'free', and rather quite expensive, and it might be best to try and support the ancillary businesses around that industry rather than declaring war on them. ESPECIALLY during economic times such as these.
Did you hear about how AT&T can save billions under Obama's plan by completely dropping insurance altogether? That is what we're spending money on today, and this represents 'the car in R' more than anything else.
The working class works, that's what they're there for, someone needs to produce something of value for the rich, err sorry, the "middle class" to exploit.
And here we see laid bare the liberal agenda. They want to establish only two classes of people - poor and elite. Either slave or slave-owner, welfare recipient or taxpayer. On the blue team, there is no middle ground.
The center of the country doesn't see themselves as poor nor elite, and they strive towards the higher end of that scale rather than the lower. This is why the red team did so well this time around, because on issues like healthcare, most people really did not see any benefit in it for them. "I am not poor, so why would I want this" is staple for the Tea Party's point of view.
Comments like yours here are genuinely doing you more harm than good.
If your business site requires Flash to view (specifically, the "no Flash==blank page" type), you're not getting my business whether I'm "out and about" with my iPhone or sitting in front of my quad-core desktop. It's not 2002, go back to web design school.
If you want business leaders going back to web design school as a good use of their time, then please tell me where you shop so I can avoid those places.
I'd personally rather see web designers going to web design school and business leaders running successful businesses. But maybe that's just me.
I'll give this one more shot, then, for your mom's sake.
You have no intellectually honest grounds upon which to say that Redhat 5.1 and Redhat 5.2 are fundamentally different enough to be different 'operating systems'. Same for Redhat and Whitebox or Centos. Same for Debian and Ubuntu. Same for Ubuntu and Fedora. And so on.
These are simply too similar to constitute separate categorization within a system as imprecise as the one you're using. This isn't genus/phylum stuff. These are terms with a common usage as well.
operating system –noun Computers . the collection of software that directs a computer's operations, controlling and scheduling the execution of other programs, and managing storage, input/output, and communication resources.
All of the above is handled by the Linux kernel. All of it. In all of the examples I gave, from Redhat to whatever, none of the features on the list I quoted are missing. None.
You're discarding the word 'dog' in favor of 'Canis lupus familiaris', and you're not actually communicating anything of value.
When you notice that your mom is continuing to use the word 'hard drive' and is not relenting to your will, please remember this conversation and consider how you might better communicate with her and others.
As for the Dell Keybind utility; If you cannot discern the difference between a program and a user space, that is the fault of your educators and not mine.
Cool, we're totally clear. You're using microscopic, technical, and pedantic definitions - coupled with thinly-veiled insults - and I'm trying to have a conversation.
So you're merely arguing over the definition of the word, specifically using your own, rather than accepting the common use of it?
That's fine, but you're kind of wasting time having not just said so in the very beginning.
Linux is linux, which is not Windows. You're effectively saying that Windows 7 offered by Compaq and Vista offered by Dell are different Operating Systems. Again that's fine, but I'm not aware of anyone else who uses the terms in this manner. To the rest of us, in a discussion about platforms and their variants, those are examples of the Windows operating system. Their exact version and which exact binaries they were bundled with are just details.
If I uninstall the Dell keybind utility for the f-keys, am I no longer using Windows 7? I simply don't use the term that way...
By that logic, then Red Hat is Yellow Dog, because they use YUM, and PCLinuxOS is Debian, even though they use.deb files on a Mandriva based OS.
Package management similarities are not what make the core of the OS.
No, the part that does THAT is found at 'kernel.org', and remains largely the same on all flavors of Linux. A 'distribution' is in no way, shape, or form, its own 'Operating System' any more than Alaska is its own nation.
really? A time shift mother ship falls under the realm of 'entirely possible"? seriously?
Yep.
In which manner would this not be possible? We're already taking for granted that the device is a cell phone, because we're trying to debunk that it would work. So wherein it is a cell phone, supporting technology could likewise have been brought back, clearly.
Slashdot Mirror
Until then, I want to FORCE these leechers who decide not to buy health insurance (or can't afford it) to contribute to the system (which they benefit from). That is what "Obamacare" does and why I support it.
What if they just got billed by the hospital, and made payments on that until it was gone? Or, better yet, set up a government program to pay the hospital and hold it out of their tax returns until it was repaid?
Besides, if we're giving them tax dollars to buy their insurance with, and/or if we're not penalizing them more than they would spend on insurance, what exactly ARE we accomplishing? Aside from dictating how other people live so we can feel better, that is?
You are going to have to raise taxes, especially on the "rich". Cutting anything else is peanuts, so unless you're planning to back-stab the old white folks that voted in this congress you are going to have to raise taxes.
You've got a strategy, but I think the opposing view is a better one. Let the "rich" have their tax cuts, and perhaps they'll hire a few more workers. Those will each pay taxes, "rich man"s business will pay taxes on each of them, sales taxes will be collected on groceries bought with dollars rather than stamps, and so on...
I mean, the Democrats didn't get two years.
You are correct, sir.
They got four.
Fuck, am I the only one who remembers the 2006 elections? You know, the ones where the Democrats swept into control in reaction to Bush's epic fail? What the hell is wrong with you people? Are you not taking your ginkgo biloba? Have I slipped in from a parallel Earth? What? What?
Oh hell, that's nothing. Scroll up and you'll find a post where they only had fifty days of power. The evil Red team had it ALL the rest of the time.
If this was just a warning to Democrats then why was someone like Russ Feingold, a well-loved non-partisan who has been fighting the good fight for Wisconsin for a long time, ousted by a high-school drop-out who married into money and had no platform other than "Lets fix things with Tea Party principles." No plan to cut entitlement programs, no plan to cut military, and really no concrete plan at all. He's the epitome of the empty suit millionaire who will vote in anything to help his other millionaire friends.
Probably because that's the message the people want to hear right now. You can belittle the Tea Party platform if it makes you feel better, but a 'back to basics' approach is exactly what people want in bad times such as these. There's just no splitting hairs over that. If the electorate is confident that he'll cast votes that help decrease the size, and therefore cost, of government, great!
It doesn't take an Ivy League education to understand that, and I can only chalk it up to hubris that these people won any elections at all. If the Blue team had lowered their snooty noses for long enough to consider what the opposition was shouting, they could have co-opted that message with due haste. They didn't. They did as you have done here and focused on the 'high school dropout' or 'we are better than they are' angle. Obama did the same with his 'you are just to dumb to understand my brilliance' speeches. Just a truly stupid move, really.
The message you won't be hearing is about the Citizens United ruling which led to unrestrained campaign spending this year. The Dems were outspent 7 to 1. That's right, 7 to 1. This election was shamelessly bought.
I'm not at all clear on how ads directly relates to votes. Everyone in both parties drastically ramped up spending, did we see a commensurate amount of increase in voter turnout? Or maybe, just maybe, the people that were going to vote used some other source than attack ads to decide which ballot to cast?
Show me some numbers, Mr 7-to-1...
Voting for either major party because you think one is fiscally more responsible than the other is stupid. Sorry.
You're overlooking the influence of the Tea Party. Time will tell, for sure, but I suspect fiscal responsibility to increase greatly for a least a short while. Anyone in office now will be realigning their message and positions to pander to this particular political force, and that's genuinely in our best interests, in my opinion.
Your turn - how would YOU fix the problem?
You fix it in government the same way you do at home. You cut back what you can and pay down one credit card at a time until they're all gone. You do NOT go out and spend on gigantic splurgey things like entire car companies and free health insurance for everybody.
2) Many who oppose the current version of HCR wanted single payer. Do I oppose it? Yes, but not because it went too far.
You seem to lack a logistical comprehension of what's going on here. 'Single payer' is like a bus that takes you half the way to work and expects you to drive the rest of the way. You've replaced the insurance system, but have done absolutely nothing to control costs.
If we want 'socialized medicine' that really works, then we need to completely socialize the entire system. Doctors need to be government employees, hospital boards elected by their counties, etc. If healthcare were truly a 'right' then you would see more people advocate this position.
If we want 'capitalist medicine' then we need to allow market forces to work their magic.
Any mix of garbage in between is going to screw SOMEBODY over. There's no getting around it. 'Single payer' simply means the hospitals laugh all the way to the bank.
Blackwater, Haliburton, and other defense contractors did pretty well under GWBush with a Republican controlled congress.
FTFY
Are they doing less-well now, under Obama?
That realization wasn't caused by mortgage failure, it was caused by failing home prices, which meant their assets went down.
You don't seem to be reflecting on why the home prices fell. Why not?
Many, my self included, don't actually see the prices as having changed much. It was the credit that changed. The prices merely reflected the increased supply of funny money. And buyers were willing to pay it because it wasn't their money. This happened on my own home purchase, actually. The price was 15K over what it seemed like it should have been, but the entire market was that way, and the loan covered it, so we went for it.
Credit was the cause. When it dried up, so did everything else.
We need more national political parties. The picking the lessor of two evils is not working.
To recap: Both parties to blame. Two-party system sucks.
This is why I'm so excited about the Paulites and the Tea Party. They're offering something genuinely different at the Federal level.
Want to fix the economy.. make sure that the government can not get anything done. split senate, repub house, dem president.
Spoken like a true rabid Tea Party member, ironically enough.
Small government is one of their platform ideas. Google it some time...
Unless the collapse was cause by the war on terror, I'm not really sure how you can blame the Red team for it. As I understand it, the housing market bubble was created by financing changes signed into law by Clinton, but maybe Osama was really to blame?
Please, do tell.
Or are you just trying to say you want the Health Insurers to be able to drop people when they get sick?
What if things were priced by market forces, and everyone simply paid for their own medical bills?
Is that really too much to ask for?
Assuming you're not just trolling here - is 50 days not long enough to pass a single bill?
Especially, as with Ms Pelosi, you aren't going to even bother reading it until after you pass it?
That may SEEM like a short time, but it genuinely isn't if something is THAT important to you.
The whole "death panel" debacle was completely distorted rhetoric on something very sensible and important: end of life planning and counseling.
While death panels may not be real, rationing certainly is. Let's not belittle the underlying issue by applying that particular label to it. Someone, some where will have to decide who gets care and who waits until they die. It used to be decided by how much money you had - which is generally something you have some influence over. In the government-run scenario, it will be decided by some other factor. There's simply no denying this as being true.
That's not true; the mandate PROTECTS insurance companies.
That's only partially true. It protects the industry, in that it will exist as a whole, but individual companies will be forced to compete for individual business on the exchanges only. Businesses will, due exactly to the mandate and the stipends, drop coverage completely. They'll save money by doing so.
This environment means that only those few companies that find a way to excel on the exchanges will have any hope of survival. A great many of them will have to go out of business.
Republican health care ideas might have lead to some savings in some areas, but they aren't going to fix the real problems.
While you're absolutely right, the simple fact is that the transitional period is worse than the original problems were. It used to be hard to find an affordable kids-only plan, and now it is impossible because they're simply not sold any longer.
The 'real problems' involve things like health care not being 'free', and rather quite expensive, and it might be best to try and support the ancillary businesses around that industry rather than declaring war on them. ESPECIALLY during economic times such as these.
Did you hear about how AT&T can save billions under Obama's plan by completely dropping insurance altogether? That is what we're spending money on today, and this represents 'the car in R' more than anything else.
The working class works, that's what they're there for, someone needs to produce something of value for the rich, err sorry, the "middle class" to exploit.
And here we see laid bare the liberal agenda. They want to establish only two classes of people - poor and elite. Either slave or slave-owner, welfare recipient or taxpayer. On the blue team, there is no middle ground.
The center of the country doesn't see themselves as poor nor elite, and they strive towards the higher end of that scale rather than the lower. This is why the red team did so well this time around, because on issues like healthcare, most people really did not see any benefit in it for them. "I am not poor, so why would I want this" is staple for the Tea Party's point of view.
Comments like yours here are genuinely doing you more harm than good.
If your business site requires Flash to view (specifically, the "no Flash==blank page" type), you're not getting my business whether I'm "out and about" with my iPhone or sitting in front of my quad-core desktop. It's not 2002, go back to web design school.
If you want business leaders going back to web design school as a good use of their time, then please tell me where you shop so I can avoid those places.
I'd personally rather see web designers going to web design school and business leaders running successful businesses. But maybe that's just me.
I'll give this one more shot, then, for your mom's sake.
You have no intellectually honest grounds upon which to say that Redhat 5.1 and Redhat 5.2 are fundamentally different enough to be different 'operating systems'. Same for Redhat and Whitebox or Centos. Same for Debian and Ubuntu. Same for Ubuntu and Fedora. And so on.
These are simply too similar to constitute separate categorization within a system as imprecise as the one you're using. This isn't genus/phylum stuff. These are terms with a common usage as well.
operating system
–noun Computers .
the collection of software that directs a computer's operations, controlling and scheduling the execution of other programs, and managing storage, input/output, and communication resources.
All of the above is handled by the Linux kernel. All of it. In all of the examples I gave, from Redhat to whatever, none of the features on the list I quoted are missing. None.
You're discarding the word 'dog' in favor of 'Canis lupus familiaris', and you're not actually communicating anything of value.
When you notice that your mom is continuing to use the word 'hard drive' and is not relenting to your will, please remember this conversation and consider how you might better communicate with her and others.
Thanks for your time. No need to reply.
As for the Dell Keybind utility; If you cannot discern the difference between a program and a user space, that is the fault of your educators and not mine.
Cool, we're totally clear. You're using microscopic, technical, and pedantic definitions - coupled with thinly-veiled insults - and I'm trying to have a conversation.
Have a nice night!
So you're merely arguing over the definition of the word, specifically using your own, rather than accepting the common use of it?
That's fine, but you're kind of wasting time having not just said so in the very beginning.
Linux is linux, which is not Windows. You're effectively saying that Windows 7 offered by Compaq and Vista offered by Dell are different Operating Systems. Again that's fine, but I'm not aware of anyone else who uses the terms in this manner. To the rest of us, in a discussion about platforms and their variants, those are examples of the Windows operating system. Their exact version and which exact binaries they were bundled with are just details.
If I uninstall the Dell keybind utility for the f-keys, am I no longer using Windows 7? I simply don't use the term that way...
http://www.mohotta.com/category/All-Hot-Sauces/a
By that logic, then Red Hat is Yellow Dog, because they use YUM, and PCLinuxOS is Debian, even though they use .deb files on a Mandriva based OS.
Package management similarities are not what make the core of the OS.
No, the part that does THAT is found at 'kernel.org', and remains largely the same on all flavors of Linux. A 'distribution' is in no way, shape, or form, its own 'Operating System' any more than Alaska is its own nation.
really? A time shift mother ship falls under the realm of 'entirely possible"? seriously?
Yep.
In which manner would this not be possible? We're already taking for granted that the device is a cell phone, because we're trying to debunk that it would work. So wherein it is a cell phone, supporting technology could likewise have been brought back, clearly.