The idea that the French work a significantly shorter work week than Americans is a largely a myth. The French do enjoy longer annual leave, but I suspect that in the US, the productivity gains resulting from a little more rest at certain points in the year would more than make up for the lost working time.
I'm not an EU citizen in the EU. I'm a resident of one EU country. However, because my residence permit is not an EU identity card, when travelling in other EU countries I show my non-EU (US) passport. And doing so, I have never been charged.
I think everyone is trading anecdotal evidence, but in well over a decade of living in Europe and never bothering to make an EHIC, but sometimes falling ill when travelling in another EU country than my own, I have never been charged, and other travellers I know report that they have not been charged more often than not.
You would expect to be charged at an airport clinic, as this is a place that gets a lot of foreigners, so their billing is streamlined for it. Your treatment in a small town hospital that rarely sees foreigners would likely have been quite different.
A few years ago I became interested in Kyrgyz folk music through the Smithsonian Folkways disc Tengir-Too. Like all Central Asian nomadic peoples, the Kyrgyz have cultivated the jew's harp, or kobuz. This instrument has only one vibrating element, and though it can produce only a single tone, the performer can create a variety of sounds through changing the contours of his mouth and lips. It's a humble instrument but so endless. During a trip to Kyrgyz, I bought a kobuz of my own, and though I'll probably never master it enough produce the virtuosic songs of the musicians on that disc, I'll certainly never get bored.
Within the European Union, doctors who treat foreigners (i.e. non-EU patients, or EU patients who can't show an EHIC) for one-off emergency visits commonly waive payment. It's just considered too much of a hassle to draw up all the billing, especially if the person may leave the country immediately after. Now, if the patient is going to receive a course of treatment, lots of tests, etc., then of course things are taken more seriously and he will be charged fees.
None of what you say contradicts my point. Even had he whipped up a Perl script, doing so just to post Space Nutter first posts is itself a sign of obsession, and it would also imply that he were always around the computer. Whether he is doing things in a clumsy manual fashion or using some scripting solution, it's not healthy either way.
Is claiming that a status quo is unjust not wishing for change?
Your use of the term "currently" when referring to the ex-pats implies a short-term nature of the ex-pat status, which also makes them less than location-independent.
I don't see where you get that from. Merriam-Webster defines "currently" as simply " happening or existing now" with no connotation that it's a temporary thing. Many US citizens abroad have left the US for good (or have never lived there, but simply received US citizenship through ius sanguinis), and they now, as they vote, are living somewhere else.
With regard to the American Revolution, the colonists who pushed for a break with England supposedly wanted no taxation without representation. US citizens abroad must file US taxes, and denying them the right to vote would mean being taxed without representation.
Dear Space Nutter troll, don't you think it's cause for concern that you manage to get a first post on nearly every space-related post on Slashdot? That must mean that you are constantly at the computer and obsessively reloading Slashdot. I'm not keen on the space program myself, and somewhere in comments threads I've occasionally shared my views on the subject, but geez, man, there are other things out there in life. You've gone from being a helpful dose of reality for deluded nerds to a worrying crank with an idée fixe, and thus you are undermining your own cause.
No, "load shedding" is the local English term used in Nepal for scheduled blackouts. See, for example, timetable from one of Nepal's English-language newspapers.
If you are going to India as an IT worker, you're likely going to the south, and to big cities that are full of nouveau riche people with gadgets, and so they are well-served. I spent six months in India in 2009, and already then it was easy to find good internet; lots of establishments had free wifi with speeds similar to the West, and in the years since mobile broadband has exploded. You may feel when you get there that putting Wikipedia on a USB drive was a waste of your time.
Are you going to Nepal, by any chance? The country has load shedding, in the winter you may have electricity only for two non-contiguous 5-hour blocks a day in big cities like Pokhara or Kathmandu, and it can be even worse elsewhere. Sometimes that time when electricity is available is the middle of the night. My advice would be to focus on hobbies that don't require a stable electric connection. Get a Kindle or similar ebook reader with backlight (battery lasts for weeks) and pirate a tonne of ebooks to broaden your mind. Focus on learning the local language (you can easily find textbooks for the major languages of the area like Nepali when you get there).
Competition is a good thing. And even government monopolies shouldn't be protected forever.
Completely private industries have the possibility to keep their prices low for long enough to seriously threaten public transportation expansion plans or even existing infrastructure, and then raise their prices as soon as they no longer have to compete. In some cities, public transportation is answerable enough to the electorate that fare increases can be prevented.
I am aware that US citizens abroad can be subject to US taxes, and states may demand ownership of property for one to legally maintain voting rights there. However, I'm not sure that simply filing income taxes and keeping a property around would satisfy Obfuscant's demand that one be able to vote in a place only if one is subject to the overall laws there. The US simply has too old a tradition of people who have permanently left, and whose sole encounter with US authorities is income tax filing (on which most don't even pay anything anyway), but who still vote in US elections.
And you can explain why they should have any say in any election in a country they've chosen not to live in? I don't particularly care about those who think they should change where I live to be more like where they live.
I don't really feel the need to explain why. It's simply how things are and have been since well before I was born. It's you who is arguing for a change to a very old tradition in America (and many other developed nations) of absentee voting.
"If you care so little about a place that you cannot bother to live there, why should you be allowed to vote there?" Really, you remind me of those tiresome Slashbots in the early millennium who read a little too much Heinlein and urged a requirement of military service before one could have voting rights. They were so out of touch with reality they thought such a demand should be taken seriously.
Not legally. It's hard to claim residency in one state when you don't live there anymore.
Some states have very lax requirements for maintaining residence and voting rights there.
Neither are an example of location-independent people
You think that having US citizenship makes one somehow bound to the US? Not only are there people who have left the US for good but still vote (often so that they can try to make the US more like the country they currently enjoy living in). but there are also many thousands of people who hold US citizenship but have never lived a day in their life in the US. And with regard to out of state voting, it's entirely possible to be registered to vote in one state, and then spend the rest of one's life in another state.
You can have all the virtual-space representative government you want, just as long as it doesn't intrude on the meat-space real government we all have to live with.
One's relationship with "meat-space real government" has already been carried out through the post, or increasingly online, for a long time now, from filing and payment of taxes to various license applications. People who want to bring something to their local representatives's attention typically send a letter or e-mail or make a phone call, they don't drive down to his office. Again, I don't see why voting can't proceed that way, especially when voting by post is so accepted.
Voting on location-dependent laws has been and should be done by location-dependent people who are subject to them.
US citizens abroad, or voters registered to vote in one state but currently in another state, have been able to vote by post since time immemorial.
Snide answer: How about getting off your ass and actually going to the polling place to vote?
We are in the 21st century. I work from home (or from wherever country I care to travel to and work from there). I can order online virtually any good I need delivered, even food. My finances have also mainly moved online and very rarely would I need to visit a bank branch. Special-interest clubs are dying across the West, as nowadays people often go online to community with people that share their hobbies.
When all the rest of human activity is moving to virtual spaces, why should the practice of representative government not do the same? Granted, secure online voting is a hard problem, and as long as security is not taken seriously, then it's best to avoid such platforms. But I see no reason why voting must forver remain an exception to the general tendency of location-independent life. Postal voting has already been a thing in many countries for decades now.
Sad thing is they'll starve either way. Whatever does actually manage to grow will be confiscated by kleptocrat warlords who will use it to secure power and wealth while the NGOs spectate.
The masses are starving and warlords rule in Ghana?
You act as if mass shootings are something that have existed only in the time that SSRIs have been available. The US saw a number of prominent mass shootings in the 1960s and 1970s. This is not a new problem, though your anecdotal experience consuming contemporary mass media might mislead you to believe it is.
The US is nowhere near as heterogenous as you think. We're not a nation of soil-bound farmers anymore. Moving from one state to another for work or studies is common, and has been for many decades now (mass mobilization during World War II and Vietnam, and the great African-African migration north are just some historical phenomena that led to a blurring of the 19th-century regional boundaries). Americans broadly expect things to work the same everywhere, and if one particular state offers something they find attractive, changes are they would vote for whoever is supporting it at the federal level anyway.
Real federalism never enjoyed a consensus among the Founding Fathers, and it was pretty much dead before the War of 1812 anyway. A lot of states receive more funds from the federal government than they contribute to it. So, why should there be state taxes any more? Lots of developed countries have centralized tax collection where it all goes to the central government and then is redistributed to the regions. It's obvious that more and more sales will happen online and cross state borders, so why maintain the facade of empowered states collecting revenue?
Actually he has a point - every mass killer in the past 30 years has been prescribed some sort of psychotropic SSRI.
False. Anders Brevik, for example, had never been prescribed such medication. Nor had Michael Carneal (he was examined by a psychiatrist only after the shooting) or Charles Andrew Williams. If one wanted to spend more time reading depressing histories of shootings, I'm sure more counterexamples to your claim could be found.
Fine if you think that way about systemd, but you don't think it's creepy that systemd is the only thing you post on Slashdot about? This site features submissions on a variety of topics every day. There's more to life out there than systemd.
Damn, son. It would be bad enough were you someone involved with systemd that has come on Slashdot to shill for it. It is sadder still if you are someone with no involvement with the project who has simply latched onto systemd as a consuming idée fixe.
Slashdot Mirror
The idea that the French work a significantly shorter work week than Americans is a largely a myth. The French do enjoy longer annual leave, but I suspect that in the US, the productivity gains resulting from a little more rest at certain points in the year would more than make up for the lost working time.
I'm not an EU citizen in the EU. I'm a resident of one EU country. However, because my residence permit is not an EU identity card, when travelling in other EU countries I show my non-EU (US) passport. And doing so, I have never been charged.
I think everyone is trading anecdotal evidence, but in well over a decade of living in Europe and never bothering to make an EHIC, but sometimes falling ill when travelling in another EU country than my own, I have never been charged, and other travellers I know report that they have not been charged more often than not.
You would expect to be charged at an airport clinic, as this is a place that gets a lot of foreigners, so their billing is streamlined for it. Your treatment in a small town hospital that rarely sees foreigners would likely have been quite different.
A few years ago I became interested in Kyrgyz folk music through the Smithsonian Folkways disc Tengir-Too . Like all Central Asian nomadic peoples, the Kyrgyz have cultivated the jew's harp, or kobuz. This instrument has only one vibrating element, and though it can produce only a single tone, the performer can create a variety of sounds through changing the contours of his mouth and lips. It's a humble instrument but so endless. During a trip to Kyrgyz, I bought a kobuz of my own, and though I'll probably never master it enough produce the virtuosic songs of the musicians on that disc, I'll certainly never get bored.
Within the European Union, doctors who treat foreigners (i.e. non-EU patients, or EU patients who can't show an EHIC) for one-off emergency visits commonly waive payment. It's just considered too much of a hassle to draw up all the billing, especially if the person may leave the country immediately after. Now, if the patient is going to receive a course of treatment, lots of tests, etc., then of course things are taken more seriously and he will be charged fees.
None of what you say contradicts my point. Even had he whipped up a Perl script, doing so just to post Space Nutter first posts is itself a sign of obsession, and it would also imply that he were always around the computer. Whether he is doing things in a clumsy manual fashion or using some scripting solution, it's not healthy either way.
Is claiming that a status quo is unjust not wishing for change?
I don't see where you get that from. Merriam-Webster defines "currently" as simply " happening or existing now" with no connotation that it's a temporary thing. Many US citizens abroad have left the US for good (or have never lived there, but simply received US citizenship through ius sanguinis), and they now, as they vote, are living somewhere else.
With regard to the American Revolution, the colonists who pushed for a break with England supposedly wanted no taxation without representation. US citizens abroad must file US taxes, and denying them the right to vote would mean being taxed without representation.
Dear Space Nutter troll, don't you think it's cause for concern that you manage to get a first post on nearly every space-related post on Slashdot? That must mean that you are constantly at the computer and obsessively reloading Slashdot. I'm not keen on the space program myself, and somewhere in comments threads I've occasionally shared my views on the subject, but geez, man, there are other things out there in life. You've gone from being a helpful dose of reality for deluded nerds to a worrying crank with an idée fixe, and thus you are undermining your own cause.
No, "load shedding" is the local English term used in Nepal for scheduled blackouts. See, for example, timetable from one of Nepal's English-language newspapers.
If you are going to India as an IT worker, you're likely going to the south, and to big cities that are full of nouveau riche people with gadgets, and so they are well-served. I spent six months in India in 2009, and already then it was easy to find good internet; lots of establishments had free wifi with speeds similar to the West, and in the years since mobile broadband has exploded. You may feel when you get there that putting Wikipedia on a USB drive was a waste of your time.
Are you going to Nepal, by any chance? The country has load shedding, in the winter you may have electricity only for two non-contiguous 5-hour blocks a day in big cities like Pokhara or Kathmandu, and it can be even worse elsewhere. Sometimes that time when electricity is available is the middle of the night. My advice would be to focus on hobbies that don't require a stable electric connection. Get a Kindle or similar ebook reader with backlight (battery lasts for weeks) and pirate a tonne of ebooks to broaden your mind. Focus on learning the local language (you can easily find textbooks for the major languages of the area like Nepali when you get there).
Completely private industries have the possibility to keep their prices low for long enough to seriously threaten public transportation expansion plans or even existing infrastructure, and then raise their prices as soon as they no longer have to compete. In some cities, public transportation is answerable enough to the electorate that fare increases can be prevented.
I am aware that US citizens abroad can be subject to US taxes, and states may demand ownership of property for one to legally maintain voting rights there. However, I'm not sure that simply filing income taxes and keeping a property around would satisfy Obfuscant's demand that one be able to vote in a place only if one is subject to the overall laws there. The US simply has too old a tradition of people who have permanently left, and whose sole encounter with US authorities is income tax filing (on which most don't even pay anything anyway), but who still vote in US elections.
I don't really feel the need to explain why. It's simply how things are and have been since well before I was born. It's you who is arguing for a change to a very old tradition in America (and many other developed nations) of absentee voting.
"If you care so little about a place that you cannot bother to live there, why should you be allowed to vote there?" Really, you remind me of those tiresome Slashbots in the early millennium who read a little too much Heinlein and urged a requirement of military service before one could have voting rights. They were so out of touch with reality they thought such a demand should be taken seriously.
Some states have very lax requirements for maintaining residence and voting rights there.
You think that having US citizenship makes one somehow bound to the US? Not only are there people who have left the US for good but still vote (often so that they can try to make the US more like the country they currently enjoy living in). but there are also many thousands of people who hold US citizenship but have never lived a day in their life in the US. And with regard to out of state voting, it's entirely possible to be registered to vote in one state, and then spend the rest of one's life in another state.
One's relationship with "meat-space real government" has already been carried out through the post, or increasingly online, for a long time now, from filing and payment of taxes to various license applications. People who want to bring something to their local representatives's attention typically send a letter or e-mail or make a phone call, they don't drive down to his office. Again, I don't see why voting can't proceed that way, especially when voting by post is so accepted.
US citizens abroad, or voters registered to vote in one state but currently in another state, have been able to vote by post since time immemorial.
We are in the 21st century. I work from home (or from wherever country I care to travel to and work from there). I can order online virtually any good I need delivered, even food. My finances have also mainly moved online and very rarely would I need to visit a bank branch. Special-interest clubs are dying across the West, as nowadays people often go online to community with people that share their hobbies.
When all the rest of human activity is moving to virtual spaces, why should the practice of representative government not do the same? Granted, secure online voting is a hard problem, and as long as security is not taken seriously, then it's best to avoid such platforms. But I see no reason why voting must forver remain an exception to the general tendency of location-independent life. Postal voting has already been a thing in many countries for decades now.
The masses are starving and warlords rule in Ghana?
You act as if mass shootings are something that have existed only in the time that SSRIs have been available. The US saw a number of prominent mass shootings in the 1960s and 1970s. This is not a new problem, though your anecdotal experience consuming contemporary mass media might mislead you to believe it is.
The US is nowhere near as heterogenous as you think. We're not a nation of soil-bound farmers anymore. Moving from one state to another for work or studies is common, and has been for many decades now (mass mobilization during World War II and Vietnam, and the great African-African migration north are just some historical phenomena that led to a blurring of the 19th-century regional boundaries). Americans broadly expect things to work the same everywhere, and if one particular state offers something they find attractive, changes are they would vote for whoever is supporting it at the federal level anyway.
Real federalism never enjoyed a consensus among the Founding Fathers, and it was pretty much dead before the War of 1812 anyway. A lot of states receive more funds from the federal government than they contribute to it. So, why should there be state taxes any more? Lots of developed countries have centralized tax collection where it all goes to the central government and then is redistributed to the regions. It's obvious that more and more sales will happen online and cross state borders, so why maintain the facade of empowered states collecting revenue?
False. Anders Brevik, for example, had never been prescribed such medication. Nor had Michael Carneal (he was examined by a psychiatrist only after the shooting) or Charles Andrew Williams. If one wanted to spend more time reading depressing histories of shootings, I'm sure more counterexamples to your claim could be found.
Installing GIMP brings in libsystemd-* packages, which many users do not want, just as they do not want systemd as PID 1.
Fine if you think that way about systemd, but you don't think it's creepy that systemd is the only thing you post on Slashdot about? This site features submissions on a variety of topics every day. There's more to life out there than systemd.
Damn, son. It would be bad enough were you someone involved with systemd that has come on Slashdot to shill for it. It is sadder still if you are someone with no involvement with the project who has simply latched onto systemd as a consuming idée fixe.