Would all new currencies be deflationary? BitCoin is set up like a physical thing... There was an initial gold rush, when BTC was just lying on the ground and could be economically mined by CPUs. Then that supply was exhausted, and you had to have some equipment to get it out of the surface of river beds, and had to be mined by GPU. Then you had to start major operations to locate any amount, so you had to use the dedicated mining processors. Initially, the value of gold was fairly minimal, it was just pretty. Then it started getting used for trade and demanded some investment by more people. And then it was recognized as intrinsically tied to a currency and entire business formed around it. If a thing you trade is actually harder and harder to come by, it becomes worth more per unit... But ONLY if people accept it in trade for anything.
So far, I am convinced that the BTC that you pay me with can only be used once by you, and that there isn't a trivial way for someone to inject unlimited BTC into the system. That's sufficient to represent debts to me. But I am perhaps a fool.
If prime numbers were currency... We know there are actually an unlimited number of them. There are some that are easy to "mine"... But then they require further and further investments of energy to "mine". Assuming a way to make sure only one person at a time can "own" a given prime number, it would work just fine for the functions of currency: Giving some fluidity to trade. That's all I use Bitcoin for. That's all I use USD for, too. My wealth is stored in either more tangible things (land, house, vehicles, etc) or far more intangible things (stock, 401k, etc).
I was interested in the technical workings of BitCoin and what the user experience was really like, but I just couldn't wrap my head around it without, you know, USING it. So I purchased about $40 worth of BitCoin via Western Union to one of the exchanges. At the time, that net me about 3 BTC. I started playing around with it, transferring it from my PC wallet to my phone wallet... getting an idea of how transfers went. It was an interesting concept "loading" my phone with BitCoin from my PC "safe" and then carrying that around with me. Then I started looking for things to do with it... I got on BitMit and purchased a few Steam games, some USB cables... All at a pretty hefty USD discount. And it was pretty neat just scanning a QR code and bam, payment sent. Granted the USB cables haven't arrived yet because they're shipping from China... But, whatever.
After actually SPENDING it, I decided to start accepting it at my GunBroker auctions. PayPal doesn't (knowingly) handle transactions related to firearms or firearm accessories, and a lot of buyers were interesting in this "BitCoin" thing. An instant way to transfer funds with almost no fees? Yes please. Unfortunately, most of them got stuck at obtaining it, much as I would be confused about how to obtain Euros if someone accepted only Euros. So far, no one has paid in BTC.
However, I am seeing more BTC accepting auctions out there, which corresponds to its value increasing. That's pretty neat.
I don't plan on keeping my money in BTC, as I don't trust it that fully, but I've gotten comfortable enough with getting money in and out of BTC-land that the transactions have become pretty fluid. Right now, my only concern is its volatility. It sucks to buy something for the $20 USD equivalent and then having it arrive when that $20 worth of BitCoin is now worth $50 USD. It works for me, though.
My rule for gun technology is generally... I'll use it when the military and/or police have been using it in active service for 10 or more years. Before then, I might not mind having it on any of my range-use-only guns, but never on a carry piece. My requirements are generally the same as a police department's, because if I ever have to use my gun it will be in defense of the same criminals the police encounter.
"Assault weapon" is a term that was made up by the legislature, and is, very generally, a semi automatic firearm capable of accepting "high capacity magazines", with two or more (or was it more than two...) features from a list of: barrel shroud, bayonet mount, pistol grip, collapsing stock, etc. Cosmetic features. "Assault weapon" is a bullshit term, but it DOES mean something now, since several states have defined them, and the federal government did as well.. "Assault rifle", however, was a term coined in the military to refer to small caliber fully automatic rifles.
An AR-15 of certain configurations is considered, legally, an "assault weapon" by several states and under the previous "Assault Weapons Ban". However, identically functioning and almost identically appearing AR-15's are not. "Assault weapon" is a buzzword made up by the anti-gun legislators because it puts fear into people. I even wanted to ban them before I actually got into the politics of firearms and understood what they were actually talking about. You do not need a Class 3 for an "assault weapon".
An AR-15 is NOT an assault rifle. It is not fully automatic. Legitimate assault rifles (A term no one uses correctly, and a term that really has no use anyway) require a Class 3 stamp because they are fully automatic, and you can't purchase one that was manufactured after 1986, so the few that are out there are $20,000+ guns. But that's ok because poor people commit all the crime, so goes the anti-gun logic.
You are way wrong on the machine gun. NO fully automatic firearms may be purchased by a civilian that were made after 1986. Period. No amount of paperwork fixes that. The class 3 stamp for full auto machine guns is necessary to purchase a pre-1986 machine gun. You can not purchase one made after 1986 (short of some weird stuff with being an FFL "sample dealer" or whatever)
The important thing since all of this is so complicated... Is that Columbine happened during the federal assault weapon and standard capacity magazine ban, and Connecticut still has an assault weapons ban. There was no detectable drop in violent or gun crime when the federal ban was put in place, and when it expired, violent crime has ever since been on the drop. Gun control has been tried. It does not work in the United States.
As someone who recently moved to the latest and greatest flagship Android phone, I can say... Android lacks a lot of what makes the Blackberry great. Anyone who actually uses their phone for email will really miss that fantastic keyboard. And now when I'm on call I have to wake up for every high severity email because the "best" email app, "Good", doesn't support any rules/filters like the Blackberry had built in. This Samsung phone is way more phone, but the Blackberry worked harder, and I miss it.
I've never seen so many people miss the point... Libertarianism isn't the idea that no one can ever do you wrong or that everything corporations due is right. It's more about people using their actual individual power to do something about it. In this case, he's not appealing to government action... He's informing the public about something that strikes him as unfair or wrong. Informing people is the first step to empowering them.
If you don't see a problem with ABC excluding him, fine. But don't assume that being a libertarian means you have a "Oh well, nothing I can/should do!" attitude. It just means your first reaction isn't "THERE SHOULD BE A LAW!!!!!" when it comes to cases like this.
I could commute to work every day. I even have a good bike to do it. It's not the helmet that prevents me from going to my IT job by bike, it's the sweat. Even commuting 2 miles in this hilly terrain results in me being a sweaty smelly mess. And that's the case even when I rode my bicycle 12 miles every day. Riding to the grocery store still busted me out into a nasty sweat. Hell, walking that 2 miles when it's 80 degrees even results in a sweat soaked button up shirt.
No. It would be more like if you peed 160 million gallons of piss into a 343 quintillion gallon glass. And then you removed 96 million gallons of piss.
Or you served me a 12 fl. oz cup of water, peed.000000000005598 fl oz. into the cup, and then removed.0000000000033588 fl oz. of your piss.
I'd still be horrified that you peed into my glass of water.
FTA: "...some kind of metaphor about America. Ruined by guns, kept alive by nonprofits, technology comes to the rescue? Sure, I think it works."
Riiiiiight. And you're THE editor of grist.org. Guns ruined America... You look at America, and chief amongst its problems are things that you think guns cause? Seriously? Well, welcome to my little corner of communist household!
Revelations 7:9
After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. 10 And they cried out in a loud voice:
For many of those who are trying to "make the apocalypse happen", the above outlines that it can't happen until every nation, tribe, people, and language has been reached by the word of God. Hence groups like the Joshua Project. They want to get the word of God to everyone. Once everyone has been exposed to the word of God, the apocalypse is possible. And the apocalypse is a good thing for believers, so hell yes, let's get on with it. I think the idea to them is... Apocalypse means I get to get off this rock and on to eternal happy-times, apocalypse can't happen until everyone has had a chance to accept God, I need to get God's word out there so that we can get on with the apocalypse.
It's all very Halo/Convenant to me. Activate the rings... divine winds will whisp us off to heaven... everyone else is fucked.
So you're alleging that despite the benefits agreed upon between the enlisted soldier and the U.S. government, the U.S. government widely and regularly breaks this contract and doesn't uphold its end of the bargain?
I'm not talking about what we think is right or what people think military families are owed. Nor do I think the system is broken and the government is evil when a family, military or not, runs into financial difficulty because of a failure to plan or a series of bad decisions.
Can you provide citations for not just government-ineptitude resulting in slow processing of a family's due payment, but willful disregard of the government's contractual obligations?
These things aren't generally just a flat lump sum payment. And a lot of it I'm sure military members can opt out of, probably for some negligible increase in base pay. Military families aren't left to twist in the wind when their service member dies. If you're father dies in military service, that shouldn't be treated like a winning Mega Millions lottery ticket. As in any job, if you're in the military it is up to you to ensure the financial security of your family. Many of the benefits are opt-in benefits like very cheap life insurance, matched savings plans, etc. If you are the type who doesn't save a dime, lives at the very edge of your means, and doesn't contribute to any kind of retirement/life insurance fund... you've screwed your families future over, not the U.S. Government. Even in the worst case scenario, families are at least compensated sufficiently (financially) for a few years. No amount of money is going to replace a lost loved one on an emotional scale, but seems to me that the U.S. military does a good job of making it plenty financially survivable.
Without all the emotional bull crap, and just cutting to the chase on how the safes fared? I know how important it is that (most of) my kids not be able to get to my guns. I don't need the 6 o' clock news version of this story.
"Healthcare" is a limited resource, consisting of the time and money of doctors and nurses, of the people involved in the creation of medical devices, compounds, and procedures. To say you have a "right" to healthcare is to say you have a right to the time and money of other people. Your right to free speech doesn't mean anyone has to provide you the means to speak, the right to keep and bear arms does not mean you will be furnished a gun. This is huge step in blurring the definition of a "right", and in my opinion just pushes us further towards a world with no consequences for failure or motivation to succeed.
Health insurance is not required for healthcare. They are two separate things. If a tree crashes through your roof and you don't have home owner's insurance, you can still get your roof fixed.
What we've done with Obamacare isn't "making healthcare affordable". It has nothing to do with looking at "why" various components of healthcare are expensive, it just bluntly tries to spread the money around and artificially cap expenses. We've basically made private insurance companies tax collectors. Everyone must pay them now. That means you and I are part owners of that big pool of money, and we will be responsible for making sure it never gets drained. With the added burden that now everyone must be covered by health insurance, the 9 pack a day smoker who eats 12 sausage links at each meal and can't leave the house will be free to drain that pool for their cholesterol medications, Mucinex, eventual cancer drugs, etc. But it is up to us to pay more and more to keep that pool full.
There are very few people who legitimately can't work. That group gets even smaller if you throw away the ones who very squarely put themselves in a position of being unprepared for life, whether through their financial idiocy of not saving a dime their entire lives, or just a series of boneheaded moves. There are some people who are poor, and nothing they could have ever reasonably done would have prevented it. But there are very few of those people, relatively speaking. Since we can't distinguish those who absolutely CAN'T do for themselves... the ones who actually NEED welfare... from those who have turned society's safety net into a hammock, our system of welfare is slowly eroding the beauty of life and living free... living and dying with the decisions you make. There are risks in life, there are unfair things that happen, there are unlucky out of nowhere things that will totally F you through no fault of your own. I would hope that people can donate their time, money, skills, kind words, to people in those situations. However, forcing "charity" like this is wrong on so many levels.
We have moved beyond charity. We have been marching towards becoming a society which has grown so used to comfort, so used to easy existence, that when something bad happens it must be someone else's fault, someone else's responsibility to fix. You're the victim because you paid for college and the degree didn't get you a job. You're the victim because you developed cancer. You're the victim because you don't have any money at retirement, but man those apartments you lived in your whole life sure looked good full of rental furniture. You're the victim because you made a sure-thing investment in a house, the value went to shit, and now you're under water.
We have abandoned tightly knit social circles, living within our means, and exchanged them for 700 Facebook friends who don't give a shit about us, 4 flat screen TVs in our apartments, and a thought that retirement is when we are given a bunch of money and get to stop working. We don't have any idea what emergency savings are. We lose our minds and are in complete despair that a car problem will cost us $250, but man Starbucks coffee sure is good every day. We think a 25 year old should still be living under the financial wing of his parents.
If people decided to throw their money into a pot and use it for charitable giving for medical purposes, that woul
If someone posted a story where someone claimed that their grandmother's pacemaker stopped working because the LHC was turned on, it would get voted down as unsupported circumstantial and anecdotal evidence. Most Slashdotters probably also laugh at people who are religious, even those who are convinced they witnessed a miracle from God at some point in their life.
Come on guys. This is 99% a case of seeing what you want to see.
Two of the superficial things that I REALLY look out for... Handicap license plates and the old people that generally accompany them... and cell phones, whether texting or at the ear. I can't explain why... but my passenger notices it too... If someone is weaving back and forth in their lane, tail-gating, changing lanes without a turn signal, stopping rapidly, turning suddenly, driving too slowly, generally driving inappropriately for the conditions, or generally not giving other drivers notice of their upcoming actions... a cell phone being used is a REALLY good bet. On a bike, all of your inputs have to be dedicated to not getting squished, so you notice these things a lot more when your life really depends on it. In my truck, I personally turn into a moron when I pick up the phone to say "Can't talk, driving." Even holding the phone while it's on speaker is a distraction. I can't say why. Using bluetooth in the truck CAN be distracting depending on the discussion, but I don't notice it so much. Having a conversation on my motorcycle helmet's bluetooth is definitely not something I do around town / on the twisties. This is enough evidence to tell me that I personally am not able to drive/ride as well when I'm on a phone, or even talking on Bluetooth. And I've seen enough to convince myself that people physically holding phones turn into total morons when driving. Or perhaps that most moron drivers just like to talk on the phone. Sure, some people think their cell phones don't impact their driving, but 95% of drivers think they're above-average drivers too.
Hang up and drive. Or get a blue-tooth headset. Or a blue-tooth stereo. Whatever. That might still leave you 25% distracted, but it's way better than the simplified version of driving that cell phone users end up when holding it up to their face. "Follow car in front... follow car in front... follow car in front..."
And this is the best thing I've ever seen on it. I wish I could put this in the Slashdot survey as an example of the kind of stuff I come to Slashdot for. No, it's not breaking new ground, but this guy and his friends did a nerd thing just for the hell of it. And that's what we do. He planned it well, it executed well, and the way it was shared with us was awesome.
That said... Why did the Go-Pro shield melt on the way up? Was it the heat conducted through the tube from the burning engines or something?
I've heard this before, and it didn't end well
on
No Higgs Just Yet
·
· Score: 1
It's probably nothing... probably... but... well, no... we're well within normal bounds again. Continuing sequence.
I'm a fan of the Tea Party (I won't go so far as to call myself a member, since it's kind of like Anonymous in that regard... It is what you want it to be) and I've done more free work at my current job than I care to think about. I've also volunteered quite a bit of my time to causes slightly more important than my job. I have a feeling that if I thought my job was keeping planes from falling out of the sky, I'd probably keep doing it through a "blip" in my paycheck. Also, if I thought I would be potentially fired on the resumption of my pay. Would you really be comfortable walking away from your job just because the pay stopped temporarily? Don't pretend that wouldn't be held against you...
If he's examining the grey matter of easily distracted people, I assume he's doing this post-mortem... and it would make sense that these easily distracted people were then motorcycle riders who should have perhaps taken the bus.
Slashdot Mirror
Would all new currencies be deflationary? BitCoin is set up like a physical thing... There was an initial gold rush, when BTC was just lying on the ground and could be economically mined by CPUs. Then that supply was exhausted, and you had to have some equipment to get it out of the surface of river beds, and had to be mined by GPU. Then you had to start major operations to locate any amount, so you had to use the dedicated mining processors. Initially, the value of gold was fairly minimal, it was just pretty. Then it started getting used for trade and demanded some investment by more people. And then it was recognized as intrinsically tied to a currency and entire business formed around it. If a thing you trade is actually harder and harder to come by, it becomes worth more per unit... But ONLY if people accept it in trade for anything.
So far, I am convinced that the BTC that you pay me with can only be used once by you, and that there isn't a trivial way for someone to inject unlimited BTC into the system. That's sufficient to represent debts to me. But I am perhaps a fool.
If prime numbers were currency... We know there are actually an unlimited number of them. There are some that are easy to "mine"... But then they require further and further investments of energy to "mine". Assuming a way to make sure only one person at a time can "own" a given prime number, it would work just fine for the functions of currency: Giving some fluidity to trade. That's all I use Bitcoin for. That's all I use USD for, too. My wealth is stored in either more tangible things (land, house, vehicles, etc) or far more intangible things (stock, 401k, etc).
I was interested in the technical workings of BitCoin and what the user experience was really like, but I just couldn't wrap my head around it without, you know, USING it. So I purchased about $40 worth of BitCoin via Western Union to one of the exchanges. At the time, that net me about 3 BTC. I started playing around with it, transferring it from my PC wallet to my phone wallet... getting an idea of how transfers went. It was an interesting concept "loading" my phone with BitCoin from my PC "safe" and then carrying that around with me. Then I started looking for things to do with it... I got on BitMit and purchased a few Steam games, some USB cables... All at a pretty hefty USD discount. And it was pretty neat just scanning a QR code and bam, payment sent. Granted the USB cables haven't arrived yet because they're shipping from China... But, whatever.
After actually SPENDING it, I decided to start accepting it at my GunBroker auctions. PayPal doesn't (knowingly) handle transactions related to firearms or firearm accessories, and a lot of buyers were interesting in this "BitCoin" thing. An instant way to transfer funds with almost no fees? Yes please. Unfortunately, most of them got stuck at obtaining it, much as I would be confused about how to obtain Euros if someone accepted only Euros. So far, no one has paid in BTC.
However, I am seeing more BTC accepting auctions out there, which corresponds to its value increasing. That's pretty neat.
I don't plan on keeping my money in BTC, as I don't trust it that fully, but I've gotten comfortable enough with getting money in and out of BTC-land that the transactions have become pretty fluid. Right now, my only concern is its volatility. It sucks to buy something for the $20 USD equivalent and then having it arrive when that $20 worth of BitCoin is now worth $50 USD. It works for me, though.
My rule for gun technology is generally... I'll use it when the military and/or police have been using it in active service for 10 or more years. Before then, I might not mind having it on any of my range-use-only guns, but never on a carry piece. My requirements are generally the same as a police department's, because if I ever have to use my gun it will be in defense of the same criminals the police encounter.
You are stupendously wrong.
"Assault weapon" is a term that was made up by the legislature, and is, very generally, a semi automatic firearm capable of accepting "high capacity magazines", with two or more (or was it more than two...) features from a list of: barrel shroud, bayonet mount, pistol grip, collapsing stock, etc. Cosmetic features. "Assault weapon" is a bullshit term, but it DOES mean something now, since several states have defined them, and the federal government did as well.. "Assault rifle", however, was a term coined in the military to refer to small caliber fully automatic rifles.
An AR-15 of certain configurations is considered, legally, an "assault weapon" by several states and under the previous "Assault Weapons Ban". However, identically functioning and almost identically appearing AR-15's are not. "Assault weapon" is a buzzword made up by the anti-gun legislators because it puts fear into people. I even wanted to ban them before I actually got into the politics of firearms and understood what they were actually talking about. You do not need a Class 3 for an "assault weapon".
An AR-15 is NOT an assault rifle. It is not fully automatic. Legitimate assault rifles (A term no one uses correctly, and a term that really has no use anyway) require a Class 3 stamp because they are fully automatic, and you can't purchase one that was manufactured after 1986, so the few that are out there are $20,000+ guns. But that's ok because poor people commit all the crime, so goes the anti-gun logic.
You are way wrong on the machine gun. NO fully automatic firearms may be purchased by a civilian that were made after 1986. Period. No amount of paperwork fixes that. The class 3 stamp for full auto machine guns is necessary to purchase a pre-1986 machine gun. You can not purchase one made after 1986 (short of some weird stuff with being an FFL "sample dealer" or whatever)
The important thing since all of this is so complicated... Is that Columbine happened during the federal assault weapon and standard capacity magazine ban, and Connecticut still has an assault weapons ban. There was no detectable drop in violent or gun crime when the federal ban was put in place, and when it expired, violent crime has ever since been on the drop. Gun control has been tried. It does not work in the United States.
As someone who recently moved to the latest and greatest flagship Android phone, I can say... Android lacks a lot of what makes the Blackberry great. Anyone who actually uses their phone for email will really miss that fantastic keyboard. And now when I'm on call I have to wake up for every high severity email because the "best" email app, "Good", doesn't support any rules/filters like the Blackberry had built in. This Samsung phone is way more phone, but the Blackberry worked harder, and I miss it.
I've never seen so many people miss the point... Libertarianism isn't the idea that no one can ever do you wrong or that everything corporations due is right. It's more about people using their actual individual power to do something about it. In this case, he's not appealing to government action... He's informing the public about something that strikes him as unfair or wrong. Informing people is the first step to empowering them.
If you don't see a problem with ABC excluding him, fine. But don't assume that being a libertarian means you have a "Oh well, nothing I can/should do!" attitude. It just means your first reaction isn't "THERE SHOULD BE A LAW!!!!!" when it comes to cases like this.
I could commute to work every day. I even have a good bike to do it. It's not the helmet that prevents me from going to my IT job by bike, it's the sweat. Even commuting 2 miles in this hilly terrain results in me being a sweaty smelly mess. And that's the case even when I rode my bicycle 12 miles every day. Riding to the grocery store still busted me out into a nasty sweat. Hell, walking that 2 miles when it's 80 degrees even results in a sweat soaked button up shirt.
We need showers and changing rooms!
I knew I didn't like Obama, I just didn't realize I had been killed and have been living in a concentration camp?
No. It would be more like if you peed 160 million gallons of piss into a 343 quintillion gallon glass. And then you removed 96 million gallons of piss. .000000000005598 fl oz. into the cup, and then removed .0000000000033588 fl oz. of your piss.
Or you served me a 12 fl. oz cup of water, peed
I'd still be horrified that you peed into my glass of water.
FTA: "...some kind of metaphor about America. Ruined by guns, kept alive by nonprofits, technology comes to the rescue? Sure, I think it works."
.foxnews.com .grist.org
Riiiiiight. And you're THE editor of grist.org. Guns ruined America... You look at America, and chief amongst its problems are things that you think guns cause? Seriously? Well, welcome to my little corner of communist household!
>squid.conf
acl SmallMinded dstdomain
http_access deny SmallMinded
Republicans want to try to keep you from doing evil, Democrats want to force you to do good.
Revelations 7:9
After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. 10 And they cried out in a loud voice:
For many of those who are trying to "make the apocalypse happen", the above outlines that it can't happen until every nation, tribe, people, and language has been reached by the word of God. Hence groups like the Joshua Project. They want to get the word of God to everyone. Once everyone has been exposed to the word of God, the apocalypse is possible. And the apocalypse is a good thing for believers, so hell yes, let's get on with it. I think the idea to them is... Apocalypse means I get to get off this rock and on to eternal happy-times, apocalypse can't happen until everyone has had a chance to accept God, I need to get God's word out there so that we can get on with the apocalypse.
It's all very Halo/Convenant to me. Activate the rings... divine winds will whisp us off to heaven... everyone else is fucked.
So you're alleging that despite the benefits agreed upon between the enlisted soldier and the U.S. government, the U.S. government widely and regularly breaks this contract and doesn't uphold its end of the bargain?
I'm not talking about what we think is right or what people think military families are owed. Nor do I think the system is broken and the government is evil when a family, military or not, runs into financial difficulty because of a failure to plan or a series of bad decisions.
Can you provide citations for not just government-ineptitude resulting in slow processing of a family's due payment, but willful disregard of the government's contractual obligations?
"heros that are sent to war, they die and their families get a flag"
Wrong.
An LA times article on war death benefits:
http://articles.latimes.com/2003/apr/05/news/war-benefits5
And the department of veterans' affairs if you want to go reading more: http://www.vba.va.gov/survivors/agencies.htm
These things aren't generally just a flat lump sum payment. And a lot of it I'm sure military members can opt out of, probably for some negligible increase in base pay. Military families aren't left to twist in the wind when their service member dies. If you're father dies in military service, that shouldn't be treated like a winning Mega Millions lottery ticket. As in any job, if you're in the military it is up to you to ensure the financial security of your family. Many of the benefits are opt-in benefits like very cheap life insurance, matched savings plans, etc. If you are the type who doesn't save a dime, lives at the very edge of your means, and doesn't contribute to any kind of retirement/life insurance fund... you've screwed your families future over, not the U.S. Government. Even in the worst case scenario, families are at least compensated sufficiently (financially) for a few years. No amount of money is going to replace a lost loved one on an emotional scale, but seems to me that the U.S. military does a good job of making it plenty financially survivable.
Without all the emotional bull crap, and just cutting to the chase on how the safes fared? I know how important it is that (most of) my kids not be able to get to my guns. I don't need the 6 o' clock news version of this story.
"Healthcare" is a limited resource, consisting of the time and money of doctors and nurses, of the people involved in the creation of medical devices, compounds, and procedures. To say you have a "right" to healthcare is to say you have a right to the time and money of other people. Your right to free speech doesn't mean anyone has to provide you the means to speak, the right to keep and bear arms does not mean you will be furnished a gun. This is huge step in blurring the definition of a "right", and in my opinion just pushes us further towards a world with no consequences for failure or motivation to succeed.
Health insurance is not required for healthcare. They are two separate things. If a tree crashes through your roof and you don't have home owner's insurance, you can still get your roof fixed.
What we've done with Obamacare isn't "making healthcare affordable". It has nothing to do with looking at "why" various components of healthcare are expensive, it just bluntly tries to spread the money around and artificially cap expenses. We've basically made private insurance companies tax collectors. Everyone must pay them now. That means you and I are part owners of that big pool of money, and we will be responsible for making sure it never gets drained. With the added burden that now everyone must be covered by health insurance, the 9 pack a day smoker who eats 12 sausage links at each meal and can't leave the house will be free to drain that pool for their cholesterol medications, Mucinex, eventual cancer drugs, etc. But it is up to us to pay more and more to keep that pool full.
There are very few people who legitimately can't work. That group gets even smaller if you throw away the ones who very squarely put themselves in a position of being unprepared for life, whether through their financial idiocy of not saving a dime their entire lives, or just a series of boneheaded moves. There are some people who are poor, and nothing they could have ever reasonably done would have prevented it. But there are very few of those people, relatively speaking. Since we can't distinguish those who absolutely CAN'T do for themselves... the ones who actually NEED welfare... from those who have turned society's safety net into a hammock, our system of welfare is slowly eroding the beauty of life and living free... living and dying with the decisions you make. There are risks in life, there are unfair things that happen, there are unlucky out of nowhere things that will totally F you through no fault of your own. I would hope that people can donate their time, money, skills, kind words, to people in those situations. However, forcing "charity" like this is wrong on so many levels.
We have moved beyond charity. We have been marching towards becoming a society which has grown so used to comfort, so used to easy existence, that when something bad happens it must be someone else's fault, someone else's responsibility to fix. You're the victim because you paid for college and the degree didn't get you a job. You're the victim because you developed cancer. You're the victim because you don't have any money at retirement, but man those apartments you lived in your whole life sure looked good full of rental furniture. You're the victim because you made a sure-thing investment in a house, the value went to shit, and now you're under water.
We have abandoned tightly knit social circles, living within our means, and exchanged them for 700 Facebook friends who don't give a shit about us, 4 flat screen TVs in our apartments, and a thought that retirement is when we are given a bunch of money and get to stop working. We don't have any idea what emergency savings are. We lose our minds and are in complete despair that a car problem will cost us $250, but man Starbucks coffee sure is good every day. We think a 25 year old should still be living under the financial wing of his parents.
If people decided to throw their money into a pot and use it for charitable giving for medical purposes, that woul
That's not Google's doing, it's the legal hoops put up by the music industry in each country. Blame them.
If someone posted a story where someone claimed that their grandmother's pacemaker stopped working because the LHC was turned on, it would get voted down as unsupported circumstantial and anecdotal evidence. Most Slashdotters probably also laugh at people who are religious, even those who are convinced they witnessed a miracle from God at some point in their life. Come on guys. This is 99% a case of seeing what you want to see.
(whipsering) Miranda. (/whispering)
Two of the superficial things that I REALLY look out for... Handicap license plates and the old people that generally accompany them... and cell phones, whether texting or at the ear. I can't explain why... but my passenger notices it too... If someone is weaving back and forth in their lane, tail-gating, changing lanes without a turn signal, stopping rapidly, turning suddenly, driving too slowly, generally driving inappropriately for the conditions, or generally not giving other drivers notice of their upcoming actions... a cell phone being used is a REALLY good bet. On a bike, all of your inputs have to be dedicated to not getting squished, so you notice these things a lot more when your life really depends on it. In my truck, I personally turn into a moron when I pick up the phone to say "Can't talk, driving." Even holding the phone while it's on speaker is a distraction. I can't say why. Using bluetooth in the truck CAN be distracting depending on the discussion, but I don't notice it so much. Having a conversation on my motorcycle helmet's bluetooth is definitely not something I do around town / on the twisties. This is enough evidence to tell me that I personally am not able to drive/ride as well when I'm on a phone, or even talking on Bluetooth. And I've seen enough to convince myself that people physically holding phones turn into total morons when driving. Or perhaps that most moron drivers just like to talk on the phone. Sure, some people think their cell phones don't impact their driving, but 95% of drivers think they're above-average drivers too. Hang up and drive. Or get a blue-tooth headset. Or a blue-tooth stereo. Whatever. That might still leave you 25% distracted, but it's way better than the simplified version of driving that cell phone users end up when holding it up to their face. "Follow car in front... follow car in front... follow car in front..."
Even more awesome.
And this is the best thing I've ever seen on it. I wish I could put this in the Slashdot survey as an example of the kind of stuff I come to Slashdot for. No, it's not breaking new ground, but this guy and his friends did a nerd thing just for the hell of it. And that's what we do. He planned it well, it executed well, and the way it was shared with us was awesome. That said... Why did the Go-Pro shield melt on the way up? Was it the heat conducted through the tube from the burning engines or something?
It's probably nothing... probably... but... well, no... we're well within normal bounds again. Continuing sequence.
I'm a fan of the Tea Party (I won't go so far as to call myself a member, since it's kind of like Anonymous in that regard... It is what you want it to be) and I've done more free work at my current job than I care to think about. I've also volunteered quite a bit of my time to causes slightly more important than my job. I have a feeling that if I thought my job was keeping planes from falling out of the sky, I'd probably keep doing it through a "blip" in my paycheck. Also, if I thought I would be potentially fired on the resumption of my pay. Would you really be comfortable walking away from your job just because the pay stopped temporarily? Don't pretend that wouldn't be held against you...
If he's examining the grey matter of easily distracted people, I assume he's doing this post-mortem... and it would make sense that these easily distracted people were then motorcycle riders who should have perhaps taken the bus.