The Senate will likely have its final vote on the bill, sponsored by Joseph Lieberman (D-Connecticut) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), Wednesday night.
As I said before, don't trust any of the major parties to safeguard your privacy. This may, however, close the lack of information sharing between the agencies leading up to 9/11 that people bitched about.
Disclaimer: I'm not a Bush supporter, infact, in my past posts and journal, I even stated that I may end up voing for Kerry as lesser of two evils (Nader is too extreme for me).
However, I do not believe that Kerry is a solution to all our problems as many of the slashdotters believe and below are my reasons.
Patent reform: While I can't picture Bush doing anything about it, I highly doubt that Kerry will either as both Kerry and Edwards are lawyers, not to mention that lawyers are their biggest contributors. They don't have any incentives for patent reform as far as I can see, not to mention that non of the candidates mentioned about it during the debates.
Medical Cost: While Kerry's wish to make medical care affordable to every one's commendable, I have the following issues with him. When Bush confronted Kerry about malpractice suit issues during the debate, Kerry just replied "That is someone we need to take a look at". And just like the patent reform issue above, it may be hard for him to come up with the malpractice suit reform due to his interests. As for the lowering drug costs by allowing imports from Canada, do you honest believe that Canada will let Americans buy up all its supplies and leave their own citizens high and dry?
Not to mention that 2/3 of American adults are overweight and obesity causes host of other problems, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol level, and sleep apnea, which further drives up the medical costs.
Government deficit: I do believe that Bush's tax plan will increase the government deficit unless there's enough growth to cover it. But Kerry's plan will also increase the government deficit unless there's enough growth to cover it as well. Kerry's camp stated that rolling back the tax cut for the rich will increase the tax revenue by 800 billion dollars over 10 years. Bush stated during the debate that Kerry's plan will cost 2.2 trillion dollars, which Kerry did not dispute (please let me know if you have unbiased figure of Kerry's plan cost). That does not seem to be a balanced budget to me.
RIAA/MPAA issues: TV/Movies/Music industry historically donated more to the Democrats than the Republicans, so I don't see a reason why Kerry will deal with them differently than Bush did.
But if many of the major corporations crash and burn, there will be less works to support our Social Security payments when we retire. Thus, I believe that there is a strong tie between the Social Security and businesses.
My take on Social Security is to save for retirment as if it didn't exist. If it sitll exists when you retire, that just means more money for you to spend, and if not, you are still covered.
Social security does have some issues, but i would never trust it to corporate america after they have failed miserably with insurance, healthcare, prescription drugs and other privatized industries.
Both the governmnet and megacorps lie constantly, and it'd be foolish to rely on any of them.
As stated before, S&P 500 had a historic return of over 10%. If you want guarantees, put your money on savings and CDs, but they are only guaranteed up to 100,000 (FDIC insurance) and their meager returns make them unsuitable for retirement purposes.
This reminds me of the last debate. Both of them pretty much gave indirect short answers and spent the remind time on their campaign slogans. I guess they are trying to limit answers that can be used against them later on.
What does it prove? Only a systemic analysis makes sense in the end, and when they are done (as in Barlett and Steele's book), the difference in waiting times between the US and Canada overall is remarkably small. Especially given how often people in the US bring up wait times in Canada as a reason to avoid a Canadian-ish system.
The B&S book sounds interesting, I'll have to pick that up someday. As for Canada, I found another poll that 49% of Canadians are for two tier system where you can pay extra to get faster medical care so I still do believe that there is a noticable gap. As for the MRI example in the report, Canada as around 1 MRI machine per 8 million people where as U.S. has one per 2 million. That means that wait time for MRI scan in the U.S. is shorter, but the cost is more expensive as more cost of the MRI machine is passed on to the patients. So you can have a cheaper medcial care, or faster medcial care, but not both.
The link you provided for the malpractice situation makes it reasonably clear that if there is a clear culprit for the rise in premiums paid by doctors, it would lie in the insurance industry rather than anywhere else. Actual case filings are down, awards are down, yet premiums continue to rise
I'm not saying that insurance industry is innocent. However, I don't recall countries with socialised medical care having malpractice suit probelms as U.S. does. That point I'm trying to make is that higher liabiliy you have, higher your premium gets. If you don't believe me, try doubling the coverage on your car insurance and see if the premium stays the same.
My doctor no longer accepts the insurance I (used) to have. Do I switch? My doctor is no longer on the list of PPO's for my insurance scheme. Do I switch? And is Medicaid (socialized medicine as it exists in the US today) a good thing or a bad thing? If its a good thing, why is it good only as a safety net?
That's a tough call. You can either switch, stay and more pay out of your pocket (I'm not sure about your PPO plan, but ours allow you to see out of network doctors, at higher cost), or ask your doctor if he's willing to accept the insurance. As for Medicaid, I believe that it is a bandaid that helps the needy, but does nothing for the middleclass. And as for the switch issue, Americans can consider cheaper HMO plan if they don't switch doctors often.
and actually have wait times for most procedures within a statistically insignificant margin of Canada and much of western Europe.
I guess you haven't seen this report. And it's also interesting that how you bash the "free market" running the health care, yet fail to mention the malpractice suit crisis here in the U.S.
Whatever might have been good about the US health care system, say 20 years ago, has faded in the stupid experiment of a "free market" running health care.
As far as I remember, whenever I needed to see my doctor, I can usually see him on the same or next day. I'm satisfied with my doctor, and if I'm not, there are host of other doctors that I can switch to. And when my wife's slutty friend got knocked up, she didn't have any problems getting medical care and Medicaid even picked up the whole tab.
And as for your 43% gains this year, lucky you. Just glad you weren't retiring in a period that saw persistent declines in stock values, let alone right after a massive drop like '87 or the tech bubble blowout.
If you put all your retirment funds into tech stocks, you got what you deserved. And there is a reason why many financial experts recommend that you should put 30% of your funds into bonds, with that perchange increasing as you get near retirment, as bonds usually go up when the stocks go down, thus providing a "buffer" for your investment account.
I conclusion, it doesn't make sense that everyone needs to suffer because you have a shitty doctor or due to your lack of investment knowledge.
If you were to put away $500 into a tax deferred account earning 10% a year, you'll be retiring in 30 years with $1,130,243.96 in your retirement account.
Social Security may not provide the best investment return you're hoping for, but it has allowed millions of Americans the ability to retire with some sense of stability.
If you honestly believe that Social Security will allow you to reitre with some sense of stability, you need to start asking seniors if Social Security allowed them to retire with stability. Why do you think that people put money into 401ks and various IRAs if Social Security was such a great thing?
But I think the problem of poor people gaming the system is nothing compared to that of rich people who game the system and don't pay their fair share of taxes.
First of all, I came from a poor family and let me tell you this; the poor pay very little or no tax at all. In somecases, the poor actually get money via various tax credits. As for the rich, unless they are comitting a tax fraud, they are paying their fair share. It's just that they have the money to hire CPAs and tax lawyers to maximize their tax savings. I'm taking tax classes now and I learned many tax tips that even the middle class can use to maximize their tax savings. Of course, it's a lot easier to complain on Slashdot than educating yourself.
Without these social benefit programs, the number of people living on the streets would be far, far greater than it is now and our country's status in the world would be far, far lower.
That wouldn't be such a bad thing, as too many people are racking up debt unwisely and need a swift kick to the rear instead of constantly looking toward the government to bail them out.
In a civilized society, the good of the many outweigh the good of the few. It may be overplayed, but it's true.
Sure, in socialist/communist world, everyone would be equal, equally poor. Unless you happend to be a party memeber, in which case, you'll be fat and happy.
Social security is not an "investment" it's a pyramid scheme. Or if you want to be less harsh, you could think of it as a pension fund with 0% return, where distributions are outpacing funding.
While I'm not a fan of Social Security, many people are better off with a forced savings are 0% as they don't have the discipline to put away their own money for retirement. Of course, this does hurt those who do have the will power to invest smartly.
This goes hand in hand with pay as you go tax system. If the government didn't take the taxes out of each paycheck, many people would be panicking because they didn't save enough for the lump sum tax payment on April.
It's good thing that we don't have Socialists on power, since they will raid your retirement fund (via extra high taxes on withdraws, and you can kiss Roth IRAs goodbye) to pay for the retirement of those people who blew their money away on excessive houses, SUVs, drugs, Evercrack accounts, etc.
And by the way, I think Bush would side with the RIAA
I'm not a Bush fan, but the TV/Movies/Music Industry seems to have higher rate of donations to Democrats than Republicans, so I don't thin that it will get any better under Kerry.
And as for "hate messages", reading those is not illegal here but the person legally responsible for publishing them would be committing a crime. Who that would be is an issue I don't feel qualified to answer since IANAL.
If Slashdot was based in Europe and did not remove hate messages posted on its threads, will Slashdot be liable for it?
A CB radio is the best "radar detector" money can buy. Truckers are always on the lookout for speed traps, and will continually call out the position of law enforcement officials, whether they're stationary or on the move.
Is there a designated channel that the truckers use for this "service"?
I'm sure, but I do believe it would be best
to let Dropline produce Slackware's GNOME and quit wasting my own time
with it.
It doesn't seem like GNOME will drop off of the face of Slackware as the acticle suggest, but rather, the support for GNOME on Slackware will be off loaded to the Dropline project.
BTW, I'm currently usuing Slackware 10 with GNOME 2.6 for my Linux box. I was looking at the Dropline version of GNOME 2.8 for Slackware. Have any of you tried it?
Many Europeans bash the U.S. for restricting freedom of speech, yet Slashdot is live and well in the U.S. dispite regular anti-government posts. Not to mention that Slashdot will likely be illegal in many parts of Europe for containing hate messages (for examples, try viewing the posts at -1 level).
Look at the number of people who would rather blow whistles at an anti-war rally than write letters to their Senators and Representatives.
My guess is that because it's cooler to riot and get busted than writing some boring letter or actually voting. There is a reason why 18 to 25 year age group has the lowest percentage of voting record.
In summary: shut up. You are not unbiased in any way, shape, or form. Your news sources are not unbiased in any way, shape, or form. You will need to use your head to discern facts from the truth that is given to you, and then use these facts to reconstruct a more likely truth about the situation. What's worse is that you will need to consider that other people can do this, yet come up with a different truth than you.
You took the words right out of my mouth. Will somebody please mod the parent up?
If you don't think the U.S. is angling for a global empire just read the above description of the FBI.
I'm not sure about the rest of Europe, but Germany sure liked having U.S. military in their land.
On February 21, the Secretary of Defense also announced that starting
this year, the U.S. European Command would begin moving most if not all
of its active combat and support units from bases in Germany to others
being established in Poland, The Czech Republic, Hungary and Turkey to
"better position them for rapid deployment to likely hot spots in those
parts of the world". Immediately the business and government leaders in
the German states of Hesse, Rhineland and Wurttemburg, protested the loss
of nearly $6 billion in revenue each year from the bases and manpower to
be displaced.
Those dirty, filthy Europeans are always at the forefront suppressing free speech. America is not safe as long as the Europeans have the ability to reach into our country to suppress our freedom of speech! Fight the fascism, say no to Europe!
Don't you know? According to the Slashdotter logic, it's always Bush's fault.
Did your hamster die? It's Bush's falut.
Did you get an F in your finals because you partied all night? It's Bush's falut.
Did you charged your phat gaming machine on a credit card and now you can't pay it off? It's Bush's falut.
CBS runs feature on Bush's guard memo without verifying it? It's Bush's falut.
Democrats were spineless to stop Bush on the Patriot Act and Iraq? It's Bush's falut.
Thank you for the link to the article. It was informatative but it was referening the 1994 event, not the recent more recent attacks. Not to mention at this was in Alabama, where(southern states in general) the Democrats tend to be more conservative than the Republicans from the northen states. Don't forget that Democrat Sen. Zell Miller from Georgia spoke at RNC and also highest profile Democrat to endorse President Bush for re-election.
I think that we should just agree to disagree at this point. Thank you for the sprited debate and since it seems that both of us want Bush out of the office, best of luck to you!
Slashdot Mirror
Fuck the police! Vote Kerry in 2004! Get your civil rights back!
If you RTFA, you would've noticed that Joseph Lieberman (D-Connecticut) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) are sponsors of this bill.
The Senate will likely have its final vote on the bill, sponsored by Joseph Lieberman (D-Connecticut) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), Wednesday night.
As I said before, don't trust any of the major parties to safeguard your privacy. This may, however, close the lack of information sharing between the agencies leading up to 9/11 that people bitched about.
Disclaimer: I'm not a Bush supporter, infact, in my past posts and journal, I even stated that I may end up voing for Kerry as lesser of two evils (Nader is too extreme for me).
However, I do not believe that Kerry is a solution to all our problems as many of the slashdotters believe and below are my reasons.
Patent reform: While I can't picture Bush doing anything about it, I highly doubt that Kerry will either as both Kerry and Edwards are lawyers, not to mention that lawyers are their biggest contributors. They don't have any incentives for patent reform as far as I can see, not to mention that non of the candidates mentioned about it during the debates.
Medical Cost: While Kerry's wish to make medical care affordable to every one's commendable, I have the following issues with him. When Bush confronted Kerry about malpractice suit issues during the debate, Kerry just replied "That is someone we need to take a look at". And just like the patent reform issue above, it may be hard for him to come up with the malpractice suit reform due to his interests. As for the lowering drug costs by allowing imports from Canada, do you honest believe that Canada will let Americans buy up all its supplies and leave their own citizens high and dry?
Not to mention that 2/3 of American adults are overweight and obesity causes host of other problems, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol level, and sleep apnea, which further drives up the medical costs.
Government deficit: I do believe that Bush's tax plan will increase the government deficit unless there's enough growth to cover it. But Kerry's plan will also increase the government deficit unless there's enough growth to cover it as well. Kerry's camp stated that rolling back the tax cut for the rich will increase the tax revenue by 800 billion dollars over 10 years. Bush stated during the debate that Kerry's plan will cost 2.2 trillion dollars, which Kerry did not dispute (please let me know if you have unbiased figure of Kerry's plan cost). That does not seem to be a balanced budget to me.
RIAA/MPAA issues: TV/Movies/Music industry historically donated more to the Democrats than the Republicans, so I don't see a reason why Kerry will deal with them differently than Bush did.
But if many of the major corporations crash and burn, there will be less works to support our Social Security payments when we retire. Thus, I believe that there is a strong tie between the Social Security and businesses.
My take on Social Security is to save for retirment as if it didn't exist. If it sitll exists when you retire, that just means more money for you to spend, and if not, you are still covered.
Social security does have some issues, but i would never trust it to corporate america after they have failed miserably with insurance, healthcare, prescription drugs and other privatized industries.
Both the governmnet and megacorps lie constantly, and it'd be foolish to rely on any of them.
As stated before, S&P 500 had a historic return of over 10%. If you want guarantees, put your money on savings and CDs, but they are only guaranteed up to 100,000 (FDIC insurance) and their meager returns make them unsuitable for retirement purposes.
This reminds me of the last debate. Both of them pretty much gave indirect short answers and spent the remind time on their campaign slogans. I guess they are trying to limit answers that can be used against them later on.
Wow, really? So can you tell me where I can find one of these 10% interest accounts?
S&P 500 has a historic return of over 10%, not to mention that index funds usually also have the lowest expense ratio.
What does it prove? Only a systemic analysis makes sense in the end, and when they are done (as in Barlett and Steele's book), the difference in waiting times between the US and Canada overall is remarkably small. Especially given how often people in the US bring up wait times in Canada as a reason to avoid a Canadian-ish system.
The B&S book sounds interesting, I'll have to pick that up someday. As for Canada, I found another poll that 49% of Canadians are for two tier system where you can pay extra to get faster medical care so I still do believe that there is a noticable gap. As for the MRI example in the report, Canada as around 1 MRI machine per 8 million people where as U.S. has one per 2 million. That means that wait time for MRI scan in the U.S. is shorter, but the cost is more expensive as more cost of the MRI machine is passed on to the patients. So you can have a cheaper medcial care, or faster medcial care, but not both.
The link you provided for the malpractice situation makes it reasonably clear that if there is a clear culprit for the rise in premiums paid by doctors, it would lie in the insurance industry rather than anywhere else. Actual case filings are down, awards are down, yet premiums continue to rise
I'm not saying that insurance industry is innocent. However, I don't recall countries with socialised medical care having malpractice suit probelms as U.S. does. That point I'm trying to make is that higher liabiliy you have, higher your premium gets. If you don't believe me, try doubling the coverage on your car insurance and see if the premium stays the same.
My doctor no longer accepts the insurance I (used) to have. Do I switch? My doctor is no longer on the list of PPO's for my insurance scheme. Do I switch? And is Medicaid (socialized medicine as it exists in the US today) a good thing or a bad thing? If its a good thing, why is it good only as a safety net?
That's a tough call. You can either switch, stay and more pay out of your pocket (I'm not sure about your PPO plan, but ours allow you to see out of network doctors, at higher cost), or ask your doctor if he's willing to accept the insurance. As for Medicaid, I believe that it is a bandaid that helps the needy, but does nothing for the middleclass. And as for the switch issue, Americans can consider cheaper HMO plan if they don't switch doctors often.
and actually have wait times for most procedures within a statistically insignificant margin of Canada and much of western Europe.
I guess you haven't seen this report. And it's also interesting that how you bash the "free market" running the health care, yet fail to mention the malpractice suit crisis here in the U.S.
Whatever might have been good about the US health care system, say 20 years ago, has faded in the stupid experiment of a "free market" running health care.
As far as I remember, whenever I needed to see my doctor, I can usually see him on the same or next day. I'm satisfied with my doctor, and if I'm not, there are host of other doctors that I can switch to. And when my wife's slutty friend got knocked up, she didn't have any problems getting medical care and Medicaid even picked up the whole tab.
And as for your 43% gains this year, lucky you. Just glad you weren't retiring in a period that saw persistent declines in stock values, let alone right after a massive drop like '87 or the tech bubble blowout.
If you put all your retirment funds into tech stocks, you got what you deserved. And there is a reason why many financial experts recommend that you should put 30% of your funds into bonds, with that perchange increasing as you get near retirment, as bonds usually go up when the stocks go down, thus providing a "buffer" for your investment account.
I conclusion, it doesn't make sense that everyone needs to suffer because you have a shitty doctor or due to your lack of investment knowledge.
One more thing to add...
If you were to put away $500 into a tax deferred account earning 10% a year, you'll be retiring in 30 years with $1,130,243.96 in your retirement account.
Social Security may not provide the best investment return you're hoping for, but it has allowed millions of Americans the ability to retire with some sense of stability.
If you honestly believe that Social Security will allow you to reitre with some sense of stability, you need to start asking seniors if Social Security allowed them to retire with stability. Why do you think that people put money into 401ks and various IRAs if Social Security was such a great thing?
But I think the problem of poor people gaming the system is nothing compared to that of rich people who game the system and don't pay their fair share of taxes.
First of all, I came from a poor family and let me tell you this; the poor pay very little or no tax at all. In somecases, the poor actually get money via various tax credits. As for the rich, unless they are comitting a tax fraud, they are paying their fair share. It's just that they have the money to hire CPAs and tax lawyers to maximize their tax savings. I'm taking tax classes now and I learned many tax tips that even the middle class can use to maximize their tax savings. Of course, it's a lot easier to complain on Slashdot than educating yourself.
Without these social benefit programs, the number of people living on the streets would be far, far greater than it is now and our country's status in the world would be far, far lower.
That wouldn't be such a bad thing, as too many people are racking up debt unwisely and need a swift kick to the rear instead of constantly looking toward the government to bail them out.
In a civilized society, the good of the many outweigh the good of the few. It may be overplayed, but it's true.
Sure, in socialist/communist world, everyone would be equal, equally poor. Unless you happend to be a party memeber, in which case, you'll be fat and happy.
Social security is not an "investment" it's a pyramid scheme. Or if you want to be less harsh, you could think of it as a pension fund with 0% return, where distributions are outpacing funding.
While I'm not a fan of Social Security, many people are better off with a forced savings are 0% as they don't have the discipline to put away their own money for retirement. Of course, this does hurt those who do have the will power to invest smartly.
This goes hand in hand with pay as you go tax system. If the government didn't take the taxes out of each paycheck, many people would be panicking because they didn't save enough for the lump sum tax payment on April.
It's good thing that we don't have Socialists on power, since they will raid your retirement fund (via extra high taxes on withdraws, and you can kiss Roth IRAs goodbye) to pay for the retirement of those people who blew their money away on excessive houses, SUVs, drugs, Evercrack accounts, etc.
I post this, which has no redeaming value, and it hasn't been moded down yet. Why is it so hard for people to mod like they should?
Because many on Slashdot believe that they are the center of the world and you are wrong if you disagree with them.
Sumitting your "wife's" website address in a /. link, without having the deciency to use a sevice such as coral.
Guess who's not getting lucky tonight...
And by the way, I think Bush would side with the RIAA
I'm not a Bush fan, but the TV/Movies/Music Industry seems to have higher rate of donations to Democrats than Republicans, so I don't thin that it will get any better under Kerry.
Thanks for your thoughts on this matter.
And as for "hate messages", reading those is not illegal here but the person legally responsible for publishing them would be committing a crime. Who that would be is an issue I don't feel qualified to answer since IANAL.
If Slashdot was based in Europe and did not remove hate messages posted on its threads, will Slashdot be liable for it?
It's Bush's fault that I can't spell.
A CB radio is the best "radar detector" money can buy. Truckers are always on the lookout for speed traps, and will continually call out the position of law enforcement officials, whether they're stationary or on the move.
Is there a designated channel that the truckers use for this "service"?
I'm sure, but I do believe it would be best to let Dropline produce Slackware's GNOME and quit wasting my own time with it.
It doesn't seem like GNOME will drop off of the face of Slackware as the acticle suggest, but rather, the support for GNOME on Slackware will be off loaded to the Dropline project.
BTW, I'm currently usuing Slackware 10 with GNOME 2.6 for my Linux box. I was looking at the Dropline version of GNOME 2.8 for Slackware. Have any of you tried it?
Many Europeans bash the U.S. for restricting freedom of speech, yet Slashdot is live and well in the U.S. dispite regular anti-government posts. Not to mention that Slashdot will likely be illegal in many parts of Europe for containing hate messages (for examples, try viewing the posts at -1 level).
Look at the number of people who would rather blow whistles at an anti-war rally than write letters to their Senators and Representatives.
My guess is that because it's cooler to riot and get busted than writing some boring letter or actually voting. There is a reason why 18 to 25 year age group has the lowest percentage of voting record.
In summary: shut up. You are not unbiased in any way, shape, or form. Your news sources are not unbiased in any way, shape, or form. You will need to use your head to discern facts from the truth that is given to you, and then use these facts to reconstruct a more likely truth about the situation. What's worse is that you will need to consider that other people can do this, yet come up with a different truth than you.
You took the words right out of my mouth. Will somebody please mod the parent up?
If you don't think the U.S. is angling for a global empire just read the above description of the FBI.
I'm not sure about the rest of Europe, but Germany sure liked having U.S. military in their land.
On February 21, the Secretary of Defense also announced that starting this year, the U.S. European Command would begin moving most if not all of its active combat and support units from bases in Germany to others being established in Poland, The Czech Republic, Hungary and Turkey to "better position them for rapid deployment to likely hot spots in those parts of the world". Immediately the business and government leaders in the German states of Hesse, Rhineland and Wurttemburg, protested the loss of nearly $6 billion in revenue each year from the bases and manpower to be displaced.
Those dirty, filthy Europeans are always at the forefront suppressing free speech. America is not safe as long as the Europeans have the ability to reach into our country to suppress our freedom of speech! Fight the fascism, say no to Europe!
Don't you know? According to the Slashdotter logic, it's always Bush's fault.
Did your hamster die? It's Bush's falut.
Did you get an F in your finals because you partied all night? It's Bush's falut.
Did you charged your phat gaming machine on a credit card and now you can't pay it off? It's Bush's falut.
CBS runs feature on Bush's guard memo without verifying it? It's Bush's falut.
Democrats were spineless to stop Bush on the Patriot Act and Iraq? It's Bush's falut.
Thank you for the link to the article. It was informatative but it was referening the 1994 event, not the recent more recent attacks. Not to mention at this was in Alabama, where(southern states in general) the Democrats tend to be more conservative than the Republicans from the northen states. Don't forget that Democrat Sen. Zell Miller from Georgia spoke at RNC and also highest profile Democrat to endorse President Bush for re-election.
I think that we should just agree to disagree at this point. Thank you for the sprited debate and since it seems that both of us want Bush out of the office, best of luck to you!