So that would explain why America has so many more fat and obese people than does the UK or other European countries with free health services would it ?
So you got a gash in your hand because you were wandering around drunk, and your fellow taxpayers got to foot the bill for your stupidity
Yes, I was ( up until the horrible accident ) enjoying myself and I'm happy my fellow taxpayers are happy to pay for me to enjoy myself even though there may be some risk attached to the results of my actions.
I'm perfectly happy to pay taxes on the basis of allowing people to go hang gliding, base jumping or whatever and making sure they fare as well as they can when these things go wrong and they need emergency or on-going medical treatment.
I think you can only take selfishness and a me, me, me attitude so far before you end up with a society of really horrible people. I expect people will abuse my tax money ( fraud, free-loading etc ) and although I'd rather they didn't I'd prefer to cater to the well being of the majority than the selfishness of the minority.
No, I'm not being harmed by the system overall. There is no doubt I have paid enough taxes to cover the cost of that particular treatment but I may not have have paid enough yet to cover the major heart bypass operation or cancer treatment which I may need ( touchwood, hopefully not ) in a few years time.
I think the taxes I'm currently paying are more or less reasonable ( obviously I'd prefer them to be less but it's not killing me to pay at the current rate - still have plenty of free cash left over each month ) and I'm happy that the money I'm paying to the NHS is being used to help heal other people whilst I'm currently in good health because I know that should the worst come to the worst I too will be healed without having to choose between having life saving operations or foreign holidays.
You might say, then why don't I buy health insurance and pay less tax since the effect would be the same. I'd rather the government taxed everyone for the health service since it is there for the use of everyone and a healthy population is better for all of us. Whilst I'm healthy there's very little incentive for me to buy any health insurance myself and, being the sort of person who doesn't plan for the future very well, I probably wouldn't bother which means less money for the whole system and a worse level of care for everyone. In addition to this the insurance companies would be making money from the money I was paying to safe guard my health and looking for whatever reasons they could not to pay out should I become ill. They would also attempt to interfere in my treatment to make it more cost effective for them which they would count as a factor more important than my health.
In the end the NHS works very well for me, and everyone else in Britain so why would we want to change it ? If I wanted private health insurance and treatment I could buy that too.
Finally, because the money is raised through taxation it's basically not a problem paying for it, I bet if the NHS didn't exist my taxes would be about the same since it's my belief that the taxation level is set more around the level the government thinks the population will bear rather than as a function of the total costs of all the things the government would like to spend it on.
I live in the UK and I think it's interesting to read your experience and contrast it with mine where there is a nationalised health service.
I was drunk one night walking home from the pub and decided to investigate the railway near my house a little more closely. Whilst climbing back over the fence to the road I lost my balance and fell off. On the way down I grabbed the top of the fence and unfortunately put the palm of my hand onto a rusty nail embedded in the fence. The nail ripped a large gash from the palm of my hand to just before the base of my middle fingers.
Since it was around 3AM in the morning I went to the A&E department at the local hospital ( 5mins in a car ). First of all a doctor examined the wound and picked out bits of fence and rust and then a nurse put in 15 or so stitches. I was seen by the doctor immediately and was back at my house around 40mins later. I also had a tetnus injection.
The next day I went back to the hospital where I saw another doctor ( 15min wait for that ) who checked for any nerve damage or other problems with the gash and I think an X-Ray as well and they gave me a load of bandages.
A week later I went to my local doctor to get a sick note for work ( it was my right hand ) and also saw her nurse to check it was all healing and decide when the stitches should come out and a while after that I went back to have the stitches out.
All of this cost me nothing ( except 3 weeks paid holiday from work ) and I think I got a very efficient and effective service. This is the first time I've ever been to hospital and the 2nd time I've ever seen my doctor in 30 years ( the other was for a yellow fever injection before I went on holiday somewhere ) so I really doubt I'd have been bothered to get any medical insurance if I didn't have the NHS to look after me.
Agreed, I think that most people who use private hospitals here in the UK do so for that kind of surgery as well. For serious life threatening problems it's the NHS all the way.
If people wish to pay for private healthcare to supplement what they can get on the NHS I don't see that as either a problem or a failing of the NHS, it simply means people who can afford to pay for it can get things like hip replacements more quickly and reduces the strain on the NHS allowing those who can't pay to also get their new hips more quickly. Those who can't afford private healthcare will still get the same procedure but they may have to wait a little longer. A lot of people argue this is unfair and creates a two tier system for the haves and have nots, which it does, but basically life is unfair and the current system is the most effective way we have for ensuring everyone is looked after.
In order for us to develop our civilisation to the point where we are able to take our first steps into space we have relied on a global civilisation stretching over a period of 5 or 6 thousand years. In the more developed nations, Europe in particular almost every aspect of the landscape has been altered and shaped by man, the courses of rivers, agricultural land use, tunnels through mountains, reclaimed land from the sea and so on and so on.
20,000 years is a long time but we are still finding a lot of fossils from that time and indeed much further back than that such that we have a fair idea of the kind of environment prevalent in a particular area at a particular period in time and the sort of animals which lived there.
Whilst it's possible that there was either an extremely localised yet advanced civilisation which was able to develop space faring technologies or that there was a global civilisation which through some freak of chance happened to build soley in areas which have since been geologically removed from our sight I think that is so highly unlikely we can pretty much disregard it completely. First of all any space program is going to need a wide variety of raw materials which are extremely unlikely to be available in one location and would therefore require a global trading system and mining operation.
Even the latest glaciation periods didn't cover the entire globe and any civilisation able to develop space ships is, assuming it isn't technologically advanced enough to live in amongst the ice, certainly going to migrate to the areas where they can grow crops and enjoy a better climate. These areas would then bear massive evidence of civilisation.
Even if glaciers did scrape away all traces of the cities, roads, railways, ports, tunnels, trash heaps, power stations, communication and power cables, sewerage systems, canals, dams, mines and everything else they would still deposit all that trash somewhere, so far as I know we haven't come across too many examples of large expanses of twisted metal and concrete left behind by glaciers.
Both the Bimini road and the Yonaguni Monuments are most likely naturally formed despite what Von Danniken and others would have you believe.
If there had been any other spacefaring civilisations on this planet in the last 20,000 years we could not help but stumble over evidence of their existence every single day.
I can't say that I have, to be honest from what I've read about it I'm a bit put off the seemingly extreme levels of pretenciouness and lack of humour that seems to be exhibited ( although I realise this might not be what it's really like ).
In any case comparing a single two week festival to a civilisation capable of achieving space flight is something of a stretch. All the stuff people take to Burning Man is manufactured elsewhere where even today you could probably go and see direct evidence of its creation and when you say the area is cleaned up afterwards you really mean it's all taken off and dumped elsewhere.
Actually, it seemed like a pyramid or structure of sorts that was composed of smallish beings, horribly clownlike and mechanized, who were juggling orbs of luminous multicolored energy in an extremely fast and deft manner. The whole thing was completely alien to my mind, and if it was attempting to communicate something to me, whatever it was I hadn't the faintest idea.
Obviously he's just seen Daft Punk, nothing to be scared of at all.
I met someone on the weekend who was an internationally acclaimed poet having won several worldwide poetry contests from the age of 6 yet couldn't recite any of his poems, in addition to this remarkable achievement he was also able to read Enid Blyton books by the age of 2, yet is unaware that Timmy is a dog, and has been specially trained in dozens of scientific and artistic disciplines. He makes his living as a crusty traveller doing occasional roadie work for circuses and later on in the year will be sailing from Hull to Los Angeles in a converted fishing trawler with 7 sounds systems on it. Yes, 7 sound systems.
I also met another person who is an international jet setter and spent the last year living in somewhere called Leningrad in Russia, he was able to predict the future and read auras yet was unable to predict I was going to tell him to fuck off somewhere else not 3 mins later. He also played drums for Led Zeppelin and was an international modela and sex symbol.
Believing anyone at face value can often be a very silly thing to do, especially if they have some weird story to tell.
Personally I think it's extremely highly unlikely. This all took place 60 years ago, whilst it may be possible to scare people for a year or two it's a lot harder to scare them for 5 years, 10 years is beginning to really push it and I'd say after 20 you have no chance.
Maybe there has been plenty of time but if there really were dozens of space-faring hominid civilisations predating us then they must have spent an awfully long time cleaning up after themselves before they disappeared.
Space faring civilisations do not form around a few remote huts in a jungle somewhere, they require hundreds of thousands of workers, millions of support workers, thousands of cities, millions of acres of farmland, millions of miles of roads - communications cabling, plumbing and electricity, thousands of power plants requiring thousands of square miles of mines etc. I think you get the picture, it is more or less impossible to erase completely all traces of this massive infrastructure so if there had been advanced civilisations predating us we'd almost certainly be well aware of them by now.
A better analogy is to think of Google as a enormous green fingered space worm slowly oozing across galaxies. The enormous green fingered space worm gains the energy for it's oozing and gardening from eating red dwarfs but gardens only black holes properly - it's gardening on red dwards is haphazard and lacksadasical.
Now we have an excellent analogy which explains exactly what's happening at the moment we can easily see that since the universe is so massive and no one cares whether or not black holes or red dwarfs have any gardens on them the space worm can continue oozing on it's way regardless of whatever any insignificant beings on Earth might think.
Before anyone points out that the red dwarfs might decide not to be eaten by the giant oozing space worm unless it also provides them with nice gardens please consider how stupid this will sound.
I was thinking more about this last night, in a real Dr Strangelove scenario I don't think the mine dwellers would survive for all that long.
Only a small percentage of the population would be able to live down the mines leaving the vast majority to slowly die from radiation poisioning above. It wouldn't be long before the rest of population began to think this wasn't exactly fair and started rioting to protest. Eventually I suspect the mine dwellers would be killed by bombs dropped in from above or sabotage to whatever air and water supply they had laid on.
Certainly not, sir. When they go down into the mine, everyone else will still be alive. They will have no shocking memories, and the prevailing emotion should be one of a nostalgia for those left behind, combined with a spirit of bold curiousity for the adventure ahead.
Naturally, they would breed prodigiously, eh? There would be much time and little to do. With the proper breeding techniques, and starting with a ratio of, say, ten women to each man, I should estimate the progeny of the original group of 200,000 would emerge a hundred years later as well over a hundred million. Naturally the group would have to continually engage in enlarging the original living space.
I hasten to add that since each man will be required to perform prodigious service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics, which will have to be of a highly stimulating order.
A special committee would have to be appointed to study and recommend the criteria to be employed, but off-hand, I should say that in addition to the factors of youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence, and a cross-section of necessary skills, it would be absolutely vital that our top government and military men be included, to impart the required principles of leadership and tradition.
When they emerge, a good deal of present real estate and machine tools will still be recoverable, if they are moth-balled in advance. I would guess they could then work their way back to our present gross national product within twenty years.
Man is an amazingly adaptable creature. After all, the conditions would be far superior to those, say, of the Nazi concentration camps, where there is ample evidence most of the wretched creatures clung desperately to life.
It would not be difficult. Nuclear reactors could provide power almost indefinitely. Greenhouses could maintain plant life. Animals could be bred and slaughtered.
A quick survey would have to be made of all the suitable minesites in the country, but I shouldn't be surprised if several hundred thousand of our people could be accomodated.
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So that would explain why America has so many more fat and obese people than does the UK or other European countries with free health services would it ?
Or wouldn't it...
Yes, I was ( up until the horrible accident ) enjoying myself and I'm happy my fellow taxpayers are happy to pay for me to enjoy myself even though there may be some risk attached to the results of my actions.
I'm perfectly happy to pay taxes on the basis of allowing people to go hang gliding, base jumping or whatever and making sure they fare as well as they can when these things go wrong and they need emergency or on-going medical treatment.
I think you can only take selfishness and a me, me, me attitude so far before you end up with a society of really horrible people. I expect people will abuse my tax money ( fraud, free-loading etc ) and although I'd rather they didn't I'd prefer to cater to the well being of the majority than the selfishness of the minority.
No, I'm not being harmed by the system overall. There is no doubt I have paid enough taxes to cover the cost of that particular treatment but I may not have have paid enough yet to cover the major heart bypass operation or cancer treatment which I may need ( touchwood, hopefully not ) in a few years time.
I think the taxes I'm currently paying are more or less reasonable ( obviously I'd prefer them to be less but it's not killing me to pay at the current rate - still have plenty of free cash left over each month ) and I'm happy that the money I'm paying to the NHS is being used to help heal other people whilst I'm currently in good health because I know that should the worst come to the worst I too will be healed without having to choose between having life saving operations or foreign holidays.
You might say, then why don't I buy health insurance and pay less tax since the effect would be the same. I'd rather the government taxed everyone for the health service since it is there for the use of everyone and a healthy population is better for all of us. Whilst I'm healthy there's very little incentive for me to buy any health insurance myself and, being the sort of person who doesn't plan for the future very well, I probably wouldn't bother which means less money for the whole system and a worse level of care for everyone. In addition to this the insurance companies would be making money from the money I was paying to safe guard my health and looking for whatever reasons they could not to pay out should I become ill. They would also attempt to interfere in my treatment to make it more cost effective for them which they would count as a factor more important than my health.
In the end the NHS works very well for me, and everyone else in Britain so why would we want to change it ? If I wanted private health insurance and treatment I could buy that too.
Finally, because the money is raised through taxation it's basically not a problem paying for it, I bet if the NHS didn't exist my taxes would be about the same since it's my belief that the taxation level is set more around the level the government thinks the population will bear rather than as a function of the total costs of all the things the government would like to spend it on.
I live in the UK and I think it's interesting to read your experience and contrast it with mine where there is a nationalised health service.
I was drunk one night walking home from the pub and decided to investigate the railway near my house a little more closely. Whilst climbing back over the fence to the road I lost my balance and fell off. On the way down I grabbed the top of the fence and unfortunately put the palm of my hand onto a rusty nail embedded in the fence. The nail ripped a large gash from the palm of my hand to just before the base of my middle fingers.
Since it was around 3AM in the morning I went to the A&E department at the local hospital ( 5mins in a car ). First of all a doctor examined the wound and picked out bits of fence and rust and then a nurse put in 15 or so stitches. I was seen by the doctor immediately and was back at my house around 40mins later. I also had a tetnus injection.
The next day I went back to the hospital where I saw another doctor ( 15min wait for that ) who checked for any nerve damage or other problems with the gash and I think an X-Ray as well and they gave me a load of bandages.
A week later I went to my local doctor to get a sick note for work ( it was my right hand ) and also saw her nurse to check it was all healing and decide when the stitches should come out and a while after that I went back to have the stitches out.
All of this cost me nothing ( except 3 weeks paid holiday from work ) and I think I got a very efficient and effective service. This is the first time I've ever been to hospital and the 2nd time I've ever seen my doctor in 30 years ( the other was for a yellow fever injection before I went on holiday somewhere ) so I really doubt I'd have been bothered to get any medical insurance if I didn't have the NHS to look after me.
Agreed, I think that most people who use private hospitals here in the UK do so for that kind of surgery as well. For serious life threatening problems it's the NHS all the way.
If people wish to pay for private healthcare to supplement what they can get on the NHS I don't see that as either a problem or a failing of the NHS, it simply means people who can afford to pay for it can get things like hip replacements more quickly and reduces the strain on the NHS allowing those who can't pay to also get their new hips more quickly. Those who can't afford private healthcare will still get the same procedure but they may have to wait a little longer. A lot of people argue this is unfair and creates a two tier system for the haves and have nots, which it does, but basically life is unfair and the current system is the most effective way we have for ensuring everyone is looked after.
In order for us to develop our civilisation to the point where we are able to take our first steps into space we have relied on a global civilisation stretching over a period of 5 or 6 thousand years. In the more developed nations, Europe in particular almost every aspect of the landscape has been altered and shaped by man, the courses of rivers, agricultural land use, tunnels through mountains, reclaimed land from the sea and so on and so on.
20,000 years is a long time but we are still finding a lot of fossils from that time and indeed much further back than that such that we have a fair idea of the kind of environment prevalent in a particular area at a particular period in time and the sort of animals which lived there.
Whilst it's possible that there was either an extremely localised yet advanced civilisation which was able to develop space faring technologies or that there was a global civilisation which through some freak of chance happened to build soley in areas which have since been geologically removed from our sight I think that is so highly unlikely we can pretty much disregard it completely. First of all any space program is going to need a wide variety of raw materials which are extremely unlikely to be available in one location and would therefore require a global trading system and mining operation.
Even the latest glaciation periods didn't cover the entire globe and any civilisation able to develop space ships is, assuming it isn't technologically advanced enough to live in amongst the ice, certainly going to migrate to the areas where they can grow crops and enjoy a better climate. These areas would then bear massive evidence of civilisation.
Even if glaciers did scrape away all traces of the cities, roads, railways, ports, tunnels, trash heaps, power stations, communication and power cables, sewerage systems, canals, dams, mines and everything else they would still deposit all that trash somewhere, so far as I know we haven't come across too many examples of large expanses of twisted metal and concrete left behind by glaciers.
Both the Bimini road and the Yonaguni Monuments are most likely naturally formed despite what Von Danniken and others would have you believe.
If there had been any other spacefaring civilisations on this planet in the last 20,000 years we could not help but stumble over evidence of their existence every single day.
You Cornish are subjects of the British Crown and will dammned well do as you're told.
Please return to your campsites and ice cream shops and await further orders.
I can't say that I have, to be honest from what I've read about it I'm a bit put off the seemingly extreme levels of pretenciouness and lack of humour that seems to be exhibited ( although I realise this might not be what it's really like ).
In any case comparing a single two week festival to a civilisation capable of achieving space flight is something of a stretch. All the stuff people take to Burning Man is manufactured elsewhere where even today you could probably go and see direct evidence of its creation and when you say the area is cleaned up afterwards you really mean it's all taken off and dumped elsewhere.
Obviously he's just seen Daft Punk, nothing to be scared of at all.
I met someone on the weekend who was an internationally acclaimed poet having won several worldwide poetry contests from the age of 6 yet couldn't recite any of his poems, in addition to this remarkable achievement he was also able to read Enid Blyton books by the age of 2, yet is unaware that Timmy is a dog, and has been specially trained in dozens of scientific and artistic disciplines. He makes his living as a crusty traveller doing occasional roadie work for circuses and later on in the year will be sailing from Hull to Los Angeles in a converted fishing trawler with 7 sounds systems on it. Yes, 7 sound systems.
I also met another person who is an international jet setter and spent the last year living in somewhere called Leningrad in Russia, he was able to predict the future and read auras yet was unable to predict I was going to tell him to fuck off somewhere else not 3 mins later. He also played drums for Led Zeppelin and was an international modela and sex symbol.
Believing anyone at face value can often be a very silly thing to do, especially if they have some weird story to tell.
Personally I think it's extremely highly unlikely. This all took place 60 years ago, whilst it may be possible to scare people for a year or two it's a lot harder to scare them for 5 years, 10 years is beginning to really push it and I'd say after 20 you have no chance.
Maybe there has been plenty of time but if there really were dozens of space-faring hominid civilisations predating us then they must have spent an awfully long time cleaning up after themselves before they disappeared.
Space faring civilisations do not form around a few remote huts in a jungle somewhere, they require hundreds of thousands of workers, millions of support workers, thousands of cities, millions of acres of farmland, millions of miles of roads - communications cabling, plumbing and electricity, thousands of power plants requiring thousands of square miles of mines etc. I think you get the picture, it is more or less impossible to erase completely all traces of this massive infrastructure so if there had been advanced civilisations predating us we'd almost certainly be well aware of them by now.
A better analogy is to think of Google as a enormous green fingered space worm slowly oozing across galaxies. The enormous green fingered space worm gains the energy for it's oozing and gardening from eating red dwarfs but gardens only black holes properly - it's gardening on red dwards is haphazard and lacksadasical.
Now we have an excellent analogy which explains exactly what's happening at the moment we can easily see that since the universe is so massive and no one cares whether or not black holes or red dwarfs have any gardens on them the space worm can continue oozing on it's way regardless of whatever any insignificant beings on Earth might think.
Before anyone points out that the red dwarfs might decide not to be eaten by the giant oozing space worm unless it also provides them with nice gardens please consider how stupid this will sound.
I like spiders, they creep around.
I was thinking more about this last night, in a real Dr Strangelove scenario I don't think the mine dwellers would survive for all that long.
Only a small percentage of the population would be able to live down the mines leaving the vast majority to slowly die from radiation poisioning above. It wouldn't be long before the rest of population began to think this wasn't exactly fair and started rioting to protest. Eventually I suspect the mine dwellers would be killed by bombs dropped in from above or sabotage to whatever air and water supply they had laid on.
Certainly not, sir. When they go down into the mine, everyone else will still be alive. They will have no shocking memories, and the prevailing emotion should be one of a nostalgia for those left behind, combined with a spirit of bold curiousity for the adventure ahead.
Well yes but to be fair I am a wheelchair bound maniac whose left arm betrays disturbing nazi tendencies.
Naturally, they would breed prodigiously, eh? There would be much time and little to do. With the proper breeding techniques, and starting with a ratio of, say, ten women to each man, I should estimate the progeny of the original group of 200,000 would emerge a hundred years later as well over a hundred million. Naturally the group would have to continually engage in enlarging the original living space.
I hasten to add that since each man will be required to perform prodigious service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics, which will have to be of a highly stimulating order.
But once they've lost it they have nothing so what have they gained ?
A special committee would have to be appointed to study and recommend the criteria to be employed, but off-hand, I should say that in addition to the factors of youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence, and a cross-section of necessary skills, it would be absolutely vital that our top government and military men be included, to impart the required principles of leadership and tradition.
In Soviet Russia wars predict you !
But if they play they lose, so why play ?
When they emerge, a good deal of present real estate and machine tools will still be recoverable, if they are moth-balled in advance. I would guess they could then work their way back to our present gross national product within twenty years.
Man is an amazingly adaptable creature. After all, the conditions would be far superior to those, say, of the Nazi concentration camps, where there is ample evidence most of the wretched creatures clung desperately to life.
It would not be difficult. Nuclear reactors could provide power almost indefinitely. Greenhouses could maintain plant life. Animals could be bred and slaughtered.
A quick survey would have to be made of all the suitable minesites in the country, but I shouldn't be surprised if several hundred thousand of our people could be accomodated.
Every nation would undoubtedly follow suit.