I'not an employee of RQ Riley, but they've been selling plans for DIY cars for ages, including options for electric propulsion. Some cool shit, especially the hybrid Diesel DIY car that reputedly gets 225 mpg.
You are going to have to work hard to convince me this is anything more than an article paid for by a lobbying firm working for a US company trying to win a supply contract.
Most likely. But the question is begged, where does this unnamed American company buy its gear? Highly unlikely they make their own in the US...
Problem is, lawyers stick together. And judges are lawyers. Ever hear of a lawyer taking a suit against another lawyer? Yeah, it's happened, but I can't for the life of me think of when or where, except that idiot in Florida a few years ago who was painting video games as the Most Evil Thing On The Planet to drum up some business.
Ah, but this is Capitalist, from the viewpoint of the medial insurance 'industry'. They legislated guaranteed profits directly to themselves when they wrote this bill, and you can be damned sure they put enough 'gotchas' in the legislation to cover their asses.
You're also forgetting that this legislation was introduced near the beginning of Bush II's lame duck term by Republicans at the request of their campaign contributors, and it took forever for it to get through Congress. 'Obamacare' my ass. You need to switch off FauxNews now and again.
No, you don't get the message. YOU join the fight against everybody else on the planet, and you may get benefits of veterans medical care!
Been there, done that. I'm a Vietnam Era veteran. I've dealt with the VA in the past, and some of my friends deal with the VA today, being Gulf War I/Gulf War II/Afghanistan vets. Everything I've experienced at the hands of the VA convinced me that if I was a quadreplegic, it's in my best interest to crawl as far as I can from the VA on my lips, if possible.
The VA is continually being defunded. Why do you think there are foundations like the PVA and the Wounded Warriors Project? If the VA was up to snuff, there wouldn't be as much need for them.
The summary doesn't go into a whole lot of detail. Sure, the summary says no American is to be denied healthcare coverage by 2014 due to pre-existing conditions, but nothing is said about the price in the summary. And as you pointed out, there is nothing requiring a company to market adult medical coverage in any specific area, say, the ghetto.
Keep in mind a couple interesting points.
1. The 'Obamacare' bill was written by the medical insurance 'industry'. It was designed to legislate a revenue stream to guarantee their profits. 2. The 'Obamacare' bill was written and moving through Congress WAY before the '08 election. It got sat on through most of '08 waiting the results of the election. 3. It was submitted by Republicans. 4. The timing of the bill is being used by the Republicans as a 'poison pill'. They shoved it down Obama's throat. Had he not signed the bill, they would have barbequeued him for 'abandoning the middle class', but since he signed it, they get to lambast him for 'adding to the national debt'. Win/win, as far as they're concerned, because they get to make him look bad depending on the spin they apply.
They're working on that here in the States. Problem is, they want to do it the capitalist way by requiring everybody to buy health insurance. Main problem is, the insurance companies are not required to sell it to you. And they can pull numbers out of their asses to 'justify' any premium they want to charge you with if they do condescend to sell you health insurance.
I'm all for socialised medicine. Just stop fighting everybody else on the planet and you can afford to take it out of my taxes.
Ares was supposed to take us to Mars. I wouldn't want to be stuck in this tin can for 6-18 months on a trip to Mars even with Pamela Anderson in the left seat. It's just too damned small. All this capsual is, is the Lockheed version of the Dragon, with the same design as the Apollo capsual. Deep space capable my ass.
SpaceX has flown a Dragon into orbit and gotten it back in one piece a couple times already, including the recent ISS resupply mission. They're already prepping for their next two missions. Orion has flown on paper, and is going to be collecting dust for 2 years until the Senate kills it off, or legislates SpaceX out of business.
John Doe #4 may have some serious legal chops in his skillset, but keep in mind that a lawyer's primary function is to figure ways to bypass the law. And the legal teams fielded by the *AAs tend to be high priced, high powered, and goddamned good at what they do, or they wouldn't bother doing it.
Try the South's attempts to industrialise, countered by the North's attempts to keep that from happening unless the North got a serious cut of the money. The major market for the South's cotton was the textile mills of New England. The North's major market for those textiles was Engladn and Europe. The North didn't want to give up its monopoly. Hint: It worked. The South didn't industrialise until the Reconstruction. Now, all other things being equal, take slavery out of the equation. Without the labor supply or industrialisation, , the South would have been dirt poor, and easy to keep in line
It sounds like you believe the sole purpose of prison is revenge against the offender. I don't want to live in a society where that's the purpose of justice.
I hope you don't live in the US, because if you do, then you have not been paying attention for at least the last 30 years. The politicians have turned the penal system into something almost entirely punative because of the "tough on crime" meme. Rehabilitation is practically non-existant.
Rehabilitation is non-existant. Most convicts in the state of Arizona, for instance, are put to work doing various business concerns 'behind the wall' because the companies who open shops 'behind the wall' can pay minimum wage, which is taxed of course. Then the inmate gets to pay for room and board, any restitution the court imposed, etc. If a convict can keep a buck an hour, they're doing good. They won't be able to access it all, as some is put away for 'savings' for when the inmate is supposedly to be released, which can disappear if the warden imposes a fine on them for various infractions of the prison rules, such as, say, getting a tattoo. But the rest is put in the inmate's commisary account where they can then buy soap, toilet paper, toothpaste, and the like.
Prisons are big business these days. And to keep them profitable, you need to keep them filled.
...That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
In other words, we are not responsible for the actions of our government: We are responsible for stopping them when they piss us off or endanger our lives.
Except that the last time somebody actually tried to do that, we ended up in a civil war. Slavery was only the excuse. The issues of state's rights went out the window when the Union won, and there's the whole business of the wholesale looting laughingly refered to as 'the Reconstruction' that I won't even get into. End result? A stronger federal government contrary to the beliefs and intents of the Founding Fathers. The point of a weak fed was to keep massive government stupidity on a local or state-wide level, not to allow it to infect and infest itself across the entire country.
Every president since LBJ has been nudging the system. Nobody's really blatantly come out and tried for a total power grab yet. They're content for now to keep nudging it in the direction they want it to go, to completely give ultimate poewr to the presidency and the executive branch. You can pass all the laws you want, hold all the show trials you want, but at the end of the day, when you have the cops and the troops working for you, who's gonna stop you?
Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot all proved the point. Communism would work wonderfully if it weren't for human beings. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, et al gamed the system, and eventually the system fell apart.
Why the hell won't Obama make an executive order making it illegal to invest speculatively (so basically at all) in gasoline and oil?
Because the instant he did it, he'd be hauled into court for 'overstepping his authority' and rightly so. There's a reason why the federal government was meant to be relatively weak, it was to keep the tyranny of the minority to a minimum and stop the various states from exporting their various stupidities nationwide.
Course, ol' Honest Abe said 'We'll see about that, now, won't we?'
But the real point here is: economists continue to have no clue about the economy, yet are still taken in consideration for policies. What about asking some astrologers too?
The problem with economists is, they get tied up into their own little school of thought and won't budge an inch. Any significantly large system will have rules it seems to run by, and once you figure out the rules, predicting it is reasonably possible. Where everybody falls down is, some people look at the ruleset, game the shit out of the system for their own gain and fuck the rest. Just because there are rules doesn't mean everybody will play by them fairly. They won't. And bending the shit out of the rules past the point where they break fucks up the models.
Marx figured this out in the 1800's, but was so wedded to his model of Communism that he couldn't let go of it to take the data he was seeing to its logical conclusion - once you let human beings into the system, the system will break down. It's the main reason that Engles had to finish Das Kapital, for Marx had lost his faith and wouldn't admit it. If he'd manned up and finished up with what he was seeing, he'd be hailed as a major economic prophet today instead of being relegated to the 'also-ran' pile, and there would have been no Communism as we had inflicted on us.
It's as if producing cyanide has some sort of adaptive advantage to the grass.
Correct. A good many plants create their own natural pesticides. Yeah, I know, citation needed, but google your own damned results, I'm not your high school biology teacher, dammit!
Although the one thing I look back on and laugh about is how one of the main characters survives by ducking down in the front seat of his Volvo and surviving the shock wave. Everyone else on the freeway was vaporized. I remember thinking we really needed to get a Volvo after that.
What gets me is, the article claims the Chinese are going to build a 'big space station'. Actually, the current plans are to have a 60 ton station in orbit by 2020. The ISS, on the other tentacle, weighs approximately 450 tons.
Easy enough to 'get elected' when one of your Party supporters owns the machines the public gets to vote with and guarantees your Party will win in the upcoming election. Failing that, get leverage on the local election boards and get troublesome votes tossed out. Especially easy when your brother is governor of the state involved.
I'm beginning to believe the line I once heard in 'Land of the Blind': 'If elections had the power to change anything, they'dve been made illegal long ago.'
The US is supposedly a 2-party system. Look closer and you'll see it's a 1-party system with minor hotbutton 'issues' to give you the illusion of choice, though the far right branch of the Party is getting a helluva lot more blatant about its contempt for the public lately...
Slashdot Mirror
Dammit, that was my passphrase.
Now I gotta go through 79 different online services to change it... Thanks a lot, pal!
An electric go-kart. Whoopee.
I'not an employee of RQ Riley, but they've been selling plans for DIY cars for ages, including options for electric propulsion. Some cool shit, especially the hybrid Diesel DIY car that reputedly gets 225 mpg.
Most likely. But the question is begged, where does this unnamed American company buy its gear? Highly unlikely they make their own in the US...
Or they didn't get a big enough bribe.
Er. excuse me. 'Campaign contribution'. Yeah, that's the ticket...
Correlary: Nobody ever won a LAN war in Asia without controlling the opium trade.
Reach me over my heroin, please. The Kardashians are coming on...
Problem is, lawyers stick together. And judges are lawyers. Ever hear of a lawyer taking a suit against another lawyer? Yeah, it's happened, but I can't for the life of me think of when or where, except that idiot in Florida a few years ago who was painting video games as the Most Evil Thing On The Planet to drum up some business.
Ah, but this is Capitalist, from the viewpoint of the medial insurance 'industry'. They legislated guaranteed profits directly to themselves when they wrote this bill, and you can be damned sure they put enough 'gotchas' in the legislation to cover their asses.
You're also forgetting that this legislation was introduced near the beginning of Bush II's lame duck term by Republicans at the request of their campaign contributors, and it took forever for it to get through Congress. 'Obamacare' my ass. You need to switch off FauxNews now and again.
Been there, done that. I'm a Vietnam Era veteran. I've dealt with the VA in the past, and some of my friends deal with the VA today, being Gulf War I/Gulf War II/Afghanistan vets. Everything I've experienced at the hands of the VA convinced me that if I was a quadreplegic, it's in my best interest to crawl as far as I can from the VA on my lips, if possible.
The VA is continually being defunded. Why do you think there are foundations like the PVA and the Wounded Warriors Project? If the VA was up to snuff, there wouldn't be as much need for them.
The summary doesn't go into a whole lot of detail. Sure, the summary says no American is to be denied healthcare coverage by 2014 due to pre-existing conditions, but nothing is said about the price in the summary. And as you pointed out, there is nothing requiring a company to market adult medical coverage in any specific area, say, the ghetto.
Keep in mind a couple interesting points.
1. The 'Obamacare' bill was written by the medical insurance 'industry'. It was designed to legislate a revenue stream to guarantee their profits.
2. The 'Obamacare' bill was written and moving through Congress WAY before the '08 election. It got sat on through most of '08 waiting the results of the election.
3. It was submitted by Republicans.
4. The timing of the bill is being used by the Republicans as a 'poison pill'. They shoved it down Obama's throat. Had he not signed the bill, they would have barbequeued him for 'abandoning the middle class', but since he signed it, they get to lambast him for 'adding to the national debt'. Win/win, as far as they're concerned, because they get to make him look bad depending on the spin they apply.
They're working on that here in the States. Problem is, they want to do it the capitalist way by requiring everybody to buy health insurance. Main problem is, the insurance companies are not required to sell it to you. And they can pull numbers out of their asses to 'justify' any premium they want to charge you with if they do condescend to sell you health insurance.
I'm all for socialised medicine. Just stop fighting everybody else on the planet and you can afford to take it out of my taxes.
Ares was supposed to take us to Mars. I wouldn't want to be stuck in this tin can for 6-18 months on a trip to Mars even with Pamela Anderson in the left seat. It's just too damned small. All this capsual is, is the Lockheed version of the Dragon, with the same design as the Apollo capsual. Deep space capable my ass.
SpaceX has flown a Dragon into orbit and gotten it back in one piece a couple times already, including the recent ISS resupply mission. They're already prepping for their next two missions. Orion has flown on paper, and is going to be collecting dust for 2 years until the Senate kills it off, or legislates SpaceX out of business.
A direct quote. Naughty naughty, here come the Feds...
John Doe #4 may have some serious legal chops in his skillset, but keep in mind that a lawyer's primary function is to figure ways to bypass the law. And the legal teams fielded by the *AAs tend to be high priced, high powered, and goddamned good at what they do, or they wouldn't bother doing it.
Try the South's attempts to industrialise, countered by the North's attempts to keep that from happening unless the North got a serious cut of the money. The major market for the South's cotton was the textile mills of New England. The North's major market for those textiles was Engladn and Europe. The North didn't want to give up its monopoly. Hint: It worked. The South didn't industrialise until the Reconstruction. Now, all other things being equal, take slavery out of the equation. Without the labor supply or industrialisation, , the South would have been dirt poor, and easy to keep in line
Rehabilitation is non-existant. Most convicts in the state of Arizona, for instance, are put to work doing various business concerns 'behind the wall' because the companies who open shops 'behind the wall' can pay minimum wage, which is taxed of course. Then the inmate gets to pay for room and board, any restitution the court imposed, etc. If a convict can keep a buck an hour, they're doing good. They won't be able to access it all, as some is put away for 'savings' for when the inmate is supposedly to be released, which can disappear if the warden imposes a fine on them for various infractions of the prison rules, such as, say, getting a tattoo. But the rest is put in the inmate's commisary account where they can then buy soap, toilet paper, toothpaste, and the like.
Prisons are big business these days. And to keep them profitable, you need to keep them filled.
Except that the last time somebody actually tried to do that, we ended up in a civil war. Slavery was only the excuse. The issues of state's rights went out the window when the Union won, and there's the whole business of the wholesale looting laughingly refered to as 'the Reconstruction' that I won't even get into. End result? A stronger federal government contrary to the beliefs and intents of the Founding Fathers. The point of a weak fed was to keep massive government stupidity on a local or state-wide level, not to allow it to infect and infest itself across the entire country.
Every president since LBJ has been nudging the system. Nobody's really blatantly come out and tried for a total power grab yet. They're content for now to keep nudging it in the direction they want it to go, to completely give ultimate poewr to the presidency and the executive branch. You can pass all the laws you want, hold all the show trials you want, but at the end of the day, when you have the cops and the troops working for you, who's gonna stop you?
Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot all proved the point. Communism would work wonderfully if it weren't for human beings. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, et al gamed the system, and eventually the system fell apart.
Because the instant he did it, he'd be hauled into court for 'overstepping his authority' and rightly so. There's a reason why the federal government was meant to be relatively weak, it was to keep the tyranny of the minority to a minimum and stop the various states from exporting their various stupidities nationwide.
Course, ol' Honest Abe said 'We'll see about that, now, won't we?'
The problem with economists is, they get tied up into their own little school of thought and won't budge an inch. Any significantly large system will have rules it seems to run by, and once you figure out the rules, predicting it is reasonably possible. Where everybody falls down is, some people look at the ruleset, game the shit out of the system for their own gain and fuck the rest. Just because there are rules doesn't mean everybody will play by them fairly. They won't. And bending the shit out of the rules past the point where they break fucks up the models.
Marx figured this out in the 1800's, but was so wedded to his model of Communism that he couldn't let go of it to take the data he was seeing to its logical conclusion - once you let human beings into the system, the system will break down. It's the main reason that Engles had to finish Das Kapital, for Marx had lost his faith and wouldn't admit it. If he'd manned up and finished up with what he was seeing, he'd be hailed as a major economic prophet today instead of being relegated to the 'also-ran' pile, and there would have been no Communism as we had inflicted on us.
Correct. A good many plants create their own natural pesticides. Yeah, I know, citation needed, but google your own damned results, I'm not your high school biology teacher, dammit!
Who says product placement doesn't work???
What gets me is, the article claims the Chinese are going to build a 'big space station'. Actually, the current plans are to have a 60 ton station in orbit by 2020. The ISS, on the other tentacle, weighs approximately 450 tons.
Easy enough to 'get elected' when one of your Party supporters owns the machines the public gets to vote with and guarantees your Party will win in the upcoming election. Failing that, get leverage on the local election boards and get troublesome votes tossed out. Especially easy when your brother is governor of the state involved.
I'm beginning to believe the line I once heard in 'Land of the Blind': 'If elections had the power to change anything, they'dve been made illegal long ago.'
The US is supposedly a 2-party system. Look closer and you'll see it's a 1-party system with minor hotbutton 'issues' to give you the illusion of choice, though the far right branch of the Party is getting a helluva lot more blatant about its contempt for the public lately...