You don't have any idea what you're talking about. Many industrial scale cattle, swine and chicken operations use subtherapeutic doses of antibiotics in feed as a growth enhancing technique. Over 70% of all antibiotics used in teh US are used in agriculture, and the vast majority of those are used in feed, and subtherapeutic doses are the problem. The ag CAFOs are where many of these bugs get a toehold.
"Have you tried the HTC phones with the sense UI (which, by the way, has multitouch)?"
Yes, I have an HTC with the sense UI - it's an incredibly lackluster interface, and it's only skin deep, all the guts of the thing are still WinMobile trash. You don't know what you're talking about.
Well, then it appears you're uninformed. If you tax cap gains at a higher rate, you make it less likely that people will exercise a sale due to high tax pain, which in this case means it'd be more likely that the 4.x billion dollars that S&B will have to spend and invest ways would never make it into the economy. Perhaps S&B will use the $4bn funding the next Google, or the 21st century's version of Jonas Salk, or maybe it's as simple as providing work for a few thousand people who will build homes and aircraft for them. Maybe they'll use it to fund a new source of clean energy. Unsold, the paper wealth would just sit there on a balance sheet doing nothing - the economy would not see the 4.x billion, and the federal govt would not see the $825 million while S&B wait for a more hospitable tax environment.
Would you want that to happen just to see your pound of flesh extracted? You should be appreciative of the 15% cap gain rate, not the reverse.
"Er... no. The profits will be taxed as capital gains. The top capital gains rate is 15 percent I believe, and there's no social security or medicare tax on capital gains. So they'll pay tax at a considerably lower rate than someone who works at McDonald's"
Yes, but if they worked at McDonalds there would be no Google, and if there were no Google the federal govt wouldn't be getting 15% of the sale of Sergey and Brin's $5.5Bn of Google stock, or $825 million.
"Yeah, sure, nothing tells us better about the effects of human activity on Earth than looking at something that human activity cannot affect high in the sky."
Translation: Looking at the sun for clues about earth climate cycles and change can produce no helpful argument for imposition of global command economy, so stop looking up there.
Well, it isn't only GWB - Jimmy Carter, too, mispronounced the word in the exact same fashion. The difference is that while Bush was never associated with nuclear powerplants or propulsion in any way, the same cannot be said of Carter, as he was in the middle of U.S. Navy nuclear powerplant operator training when his father died, an event which caused Carter to resign his Navy commission. In other words, Bush may have consistently mangled the word, and that's bad, but not nearly as bad as Carter mangling it when he most certainly knew better and should have had the habit knocked out by Rickover's crew. Carter's the bigger dolt in this case.
When I'm in my best shape, meaning very little fat, good muscle tone and good endurance capability, I weigh between 175lbs and 180lbs. I'm 5'7" tall. Six foot, 200lb people are not necessarily overweight, they may have much more natural muscle mass than others. Your BMI charts have never applied to the entirety of the population.
I didn't copy/paste anything, and I don't think foreigners are dirty. To insinuate such things is insulting and stupid. Look, if you prefer to have fewer health care options that take longer to get, that's your business, but don't assume that I want that for me and my family, because I don't.
"And why do so many Americans come to Canada and lie to get basic medical treatment?"
Because you give it away for "free"? I don't agree with that practice, scumbags exist.
"And here's the kicker: Our Socialized medicine will pay for Canadians to go to the US for these treatments when they aren't offered here."
So you lament the fact that individuals from the US scam your system to get "free" health care, but you have no problems with the fact that your system appears to be designed to keep costs in check by sponging off the more robust health care apparatus in the US? That's pretty rich. What will you do when some American bureaucrat decides to cut the treatments you get in the US? You'll go without, that's what. Sounds great!
"No single country has the best treatment for all diseases. Rich Americans often leave the US to seek treatment in other countries."
It is quite rare for Americans to seek medical care abroad and typically it only occurs when the Federal government has failed to recognize or authorize a specific type of treatment for use in the US, not because the quality of care is questionable, and certainly not because the timeliness of the care is a problem. Conversely, Canadians often seek care in the US precisely due to quality and timeliness problems in Canada. My former boss, who is a native of Montreal, was so fed up with the poor care and long waits his mother was experiencing with her breast cancer care in Canada that he brought her down to Pittsburgh to be treated. The oncology departments in Montreal are second rate, understaffed, and underfunded. And that is a direct result of the Canadian socialized system. It's sad that socialized medicine, which is usually brought into being under the guise of compassion, ends up causing avoidable suffering.
While not Canada, I have some experience with and understanding of the socialized health care milieu in the UK. There are entities there which are set up expressly for the purpose of lobbying government lawmakers and bureaucrats in an attempt to get them to authorize treatments and drugs. This happens in any country, but in the UK new therapies are routinely rejected solely based on cost, with the result being that, if you're not able to afford private care, you're not getting those treatments no matter how effective they are because some government bean counter had decided it's not worth it.
Granted, US insurance companies refuse to pay for drugs or procedures in some cases, but the key point here is that Americans can choose another insurance plan to get the type of care and access to treatments they desire. Under single payer, socialized medicine, a person only has options if they're wealthy. Normal folk are at the mercy of the bureaucrat hack.
"When scheduling a procedure more than 2 days in advance you can basically go to any hospital in the world."
This assertion is simply untrue. Ask suffering Canadians on waiting lists to get hemorrhoid surgery if they can call their local hospital and request surgery in 2 days.
"The real problem is not the peek quality of the US healthcare system it's all the gap's which kill people."
We in America may have 40 million without health care insurance, but if you discount illegal immigrants, young, healthy people who decide to spend their money elsewhere, and the stupid, the number becomes relatively small. The uninsured argument is a canard that's artfully used by the left to promote attacks on the free market.
If the Canadian health care system doesn't have a piss-poor record regarding waiting lists and unavailable procedures, why do so many Canadians visit US hospitals for treatment? The good old American hospitality? The "fact" is that wealthy people in countries w/ socialized health care find a way to opt out and get decent care elsewhere - from private health care providers if they are allowed by the govt, or from private providers abroad if they don't. And they opt out because they know that with a single payer system comes qualitative and quantitative decline. In the end it's only those who are not wealthy who need to deal with the mediocrity (or worse) that invariably arrives with socialized medicine.
The insidiousness of socialized medicine (or socialized anything) is that no matter how terrible the results may be, once it's implemented it is almost impossible to do away with. Look at the massive Ponzi scheme that is American Social Security for an apt example.
Why bother explaining it to them, Shadow? Their worldview is so ass-backwards you'll never make any headway. We'll just have to sit back and watch until enough of them have had to wait for months or years for a medical procedure they can get on-demand now for them to come around. Canadians facing long waits or poor care have an option now, they can come to the US for treatment, and they do. When we socialize our healthcare, there'll be no place for us to go. We're about to taste a gigantic shit sandwich.
First, you'd have to relay exactly what kind of standard of living I'd be afforded on $150k per year in Somalia - it may very well be that it'd be preferable...
I realize you were referring to business tax, but the amount of income taxes I pay exceeds the amount I pay per year for my own "infrastructure", namely, my housing, vehicle, insurance and clothing. I don't believe that paying the federal government more than I pay for a nice, 12y/o, 3bdrm ranch style on 2 acres of land, decent car, and passable wardrobe can be considered a worthy "investment" by any stretch of the imagination. It's just way beyond BS.
And someone responded to you, correctly, saying that the PI would then be an agent of the state, and would be bound by the same rules and regs as the cops are.
"We don't have the US-style urban sprawl here because we have an extensive mass transit network, not the other way around."
No, you don't have the required land area to support American style urban sprawl, so stop trying to prop yourself up as some kind of uber society, prophetically able to foresee the best ways to support population growth - you have better mass transit because it's easier to implement on your comparatively diminutive scale, and more cost effective to maintain when you have hundreds of humans per square mile to reduce the average cost per ride.
If the US had the population density of France, 310,000,000 Americans would be living east of the Mississippi river on roughly 1,000,000 square miles, leaving the 2,000,000 square miles and all of the states in the lower 48 west of the mississippi unoccupied. With that type of population density, where all Americans lived east of the Mississippi, it'd be a lot easier to do efficient mass transit in America.
A better way to think about it would be, in France, how efficient would mass transit be if you had 6.4 million people to service instead of 64? That's the kind of density disparity we have here.
If you're challenging my assertion that there was a noticeable improvement in air quality in Pittsburgh when the diesel busses were not on the road due to the driver strike, you're wrong. Diesels produce up to 400 times the amount of particulate pollution vs. gasoline engines. Mass transit busses remain on the roads all day and most of the night, unlike a commuting auto, which is normally used an hour or two per day. There was a significant improvement in air quality when those diesel busses were not running - it felt literally like a breath of fresh air.
Busses running on natural gas would be a big improvement for urban areas, and it appears natural gas is being used more frequently now.
As for needing it adopted by everyone, you go right ahead. The less time I have to ride around in a closed enviro with every kind of virus carrying, shower-phobic, alcoholic, tourette syndrome suffering mental case in town, the better.
My point isn't that mass transit should be ignored, or that we shouldn't look at doing it in a more effective way where it makes sense, but that wide scale mass transit that has as a stated goal of replacing the automobile in most circumstances, even in rural America, would not be advisable. There are about 303 people per square mile in France (non-euro territories not included), compared to 33 people per square mile in the US (excluding Alaska's area). I've excluded the no-mans-land of Alaska from this equation, but even if you excluded all of the areas where nobody lives in America, you'd still have a significant density difference between France and the US. The issue is not the same here as it is there by a large margin.
The other things is, I was in Pittsburgh in the early 90's during the Port Authority strike - no busses or trains ran in Pittsburgh for a week or more. What I recall is that people found ways to get wherever they needed to go, the air was SIGNIFICANTLY clearer and cleaner without all of the diesel belching busses on the road, and even though everyone had to get to work by private vehicle, traffic moved BETTER, because the slow-assed busses weren't clogging traffic up at every intersection in the city during rush hour.
Regarding the US: Mass transit is fine for many but certainly not all people living in urban areas, a lot fewer people who live in the suburbs, and almost nobody who lives in rural areas. The nearest grocery store to my house is 18 miles away. Mass transit would be an extremely inefficient method of transport out here. Either you'd have to eat a really, really big cost-per-ride bill while providing some semblance of decent and frequent service, or you'd have to provide really, really poor, infrequent, PITA service for a more reasonable expenditure.
It'd probably be different if we had population density/distributions similar to Europe, but we don't.
You assume (quite naively) that netzero style advertising revenues would offset the development and operation of a 768kbps wireless internet network that covers 95% of the US, which is what is what was called for in the mandate. There is no possible way that a few banner ads on your screen are going to offset the cost of a nationwide wireless network service rollout. So the commercial subscribers to the wireless company's OTHER products will be the people who pay for this "free" service.
(Did I really need to explain that? It seems so obvious.)
The service provider using the wireless spectrum to offer commercial services to paying customers will have to offer less quality of service to those paying customers than they would have otherwise due to the fact that they have to spend (a lot of) money and time to develop, support and maintain the "free" network, along side their commercial offering. The Mandate calls for free wireless 768kbps service to 95% of the US. That's a gigantic undertaking, and a massive financial burden YOU would be supporting through your commercial service subscription. As a paying customer, how much service degradation are you willing to accept in order to subsidize the mandated "free" network?
The more likely scenario is that, should the "free" mandate remain in place, the wireless services company will decide not to roll their commercial products out at all due to the realization that the mandated "free" services would make the whole enterprise an unprofitable folly. And that, in a nutshell, is likely the real reason the Bush admin is pulling the "free" mandate.
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You don't have any idea what you're talking about. Many industrial scale cattle, swine and chicken operations use subtherapeutic doses of antibiotics in feed as a growth enhancing technique. Over 70% of all antibiotics used in teh US are used in agriculture, and the vast majority of those are used in feed, and subtherapeutic doses are the problem. The ag CAFOs are where many of these bugs get a toehold.
Tyson chicken, Smithfield pork, all the big operators use antibiotics in feed. Look it up. http://www.alternet.org/health/145272/the_overuse_of_antibiotics_in_livestock_feed_is_killing_us
"Have you tried the HTC phones with the sense UI (which, by the way, has multitouch)?"
Yes, I have an HTC with the sense UI - it's an incredibly lackluster interface, and it's only skin deep, all the guts of the thing are still WinMobile trash. You don't know what you're talking about.
"No. I just wish they paid more taxes."
Well, then it appears you're uninformed. If you tax cap gains at a higher rate, you make it less likely that people will exercise a sale due to high tax pain, which in this case means it'd be more likely that the 4.x billion dollars that S&B will have to spend and invest ways would never make it into the economy. Perhaps S&B will use the $4bn funding the next Google, or the 21st century's version of Jonas Salk, or maybe it's as simple as providing work for a few thousand people who will build homes and aircraft for them. Maybe they'll use it to fund a new source of clean energy. Unsold, the paper wealth would just sit there on a balance sheet doing nothing - the economy would not see the 4.x billion, and the federal govt would not see the $825 million while S&B wait for a more hospitable tax environment.
Would you want that to happen just to see your pound of flesh extracted? You should be appreciative of the 15% cap gain rate, not the reverse.
"Er... no. The profits will be taxed as capital gains. The top capital gains rate is 15 percent I believe, and there's no social security or medicare tax on capital gains. So they'll pay tax at a considerably lower rate than someone who works at McDonald's"
Yes, but if they worked at McDonalds there would be no Google, and if there were no Google the federal govt wouldn't be getting 15% of the sale of Sergey and Brin's $5.5Bn of Google stock, or $825 million.
Don't you wish they worked at McDonalds?
"Yeah, sure, nothing tells us better about the effects of human activity on Earth than looking at something that human activity cannot affect high in the sky."
Translation: Looking at the sun for clues about earth climate cycles and change can produce no helpful argument for imposition of global command economy, so stop looking up there.
Well, it isn't only GWB - Jimmy Carter, too, mispronounced the word in the exact same fashion. The difference is that while Bush was never associated with nuclear powerplants or propulsion in any way, the same cannot be said of Carter, as he was in the middle of U.S. Navy nuclear powerplant operator training when his father died, an event which caused Carter to resign his Navy commission. In other words, Bush may have consistently mangled the word, and that's bad, but not nearly as bad as Carter mangling it when he most certainly knew better and should have had the habit knocked out by Rickover's crew. Carter's the bigger dolt in this case.
When I'm in my best shape, meaning very little fat, good muscle tone and good endurance capability, I weigh between 175lbs and 180lbs. I'm 5'7" tall. Six foot, 200lb people are not necessarily overweight, they may have much more natural muscle mass than others. Your BMI charts have never applied to the entirety of the population.
I didn't copy/paste anything, and I don't think foreigners are dirty. To insinuate such things is insulting and stupid. Look, if you prefer to have fewer health care options that take longer to get, that's your business, but don't assume that I want that for me and my family, because I don't.
"And why do so many Americans come to Canada and lie to get basic medical treatment?"
Because you give it away for "free"? I don't agree with that practice, scumbags exist.
"And here's the kicker: Our Socialized medicine will pay for Canadians to go to the US for these treatments when they aren't offered here."
So you lament the fact that individuals from the US scam your system to get "free" health care, but you have no problems with the fact that your system appears to be designed to keep costs in check by sponging off the more robust health care apparatus in the US? That's pretty rich. What will you do when some American bureaucrat decides to cut the treatments you get in the US? You'll go without, that's what. Sounds great!
"No single country has the best treatment for all diseases. Rich Americans often leave the US to seek treatment in other countries."
It is quite rare for Americans to seek medical care abroad and typically it only occurs when the Federal government has failed to recognize or authorize a specific type of treatment for use in the US, not because the quality of care is questionable, and certainly not because the timeliness of the care is a problem. Conversely, Canadians often seek care in the US precisely due to quality and timeliness problems in Canada. My former boss, who is a native of Montreal, was so fed up with the poor care and long waits his mother was experiencing with her breast cancer care in Canada that he brought her down to Pittsburgh to be treated. The oncology departments in Montreal are second rate, understaffed, and underfunded. And that is a direct result of the Canadian socialized system. It's sad that socialized medicine, which is usually brought into being under the guise of compassion, ends up causing avoidable suffering.
While not Canada, I have some experience with and understanding of the socialized health care milieu in the UK. There are entities there which are set up expressly for the purpose of lobbying government lawmakers and bureaucrats in an attempt to get them to authorize treatments and drugs. This happens in any country, but in the UK new therapies are routinely rejected solely based on cost, with the result being that, if you're not able to afford private care, you're not getting those treatments no matter how effective they are because some government bean counter had decided it's not worth it.
Granted, US insurance companies refuse to pay for drugs or procedures in some cases, but the key point here is that Americans can choose another insurance plan to get the type of care and access to treatments they desire. Under single payer, socialized medicine, a person only has options if they're wealthy. Normal folk are at the mercy of the bureaucrat hack.
"When scheduling a procedure more than 2 days in advance you can basically go to any hospital in the world."
This assertion is simply untrue. Ask suffering Canadians on waiting lists to get hemorrhoid surgery if they can call their local hospital and request surgery in 2 days.
"The real problem is not the peek quality of the US healthcare system it's all the gap's which kill people."
We in America may have 40 million without health care insurance, but if you discount illegal immigrants, young, healthy people who decide to spend their money elsewhere, and the stupid, the number becomes relatively small. The uninsured argument is a canard that's artfully used by the left to promote attacks on the free market.
If the Canadian health care system doesn't have a piss-poor record regarding waiting lists and unavailable procedures, why do so many Canadians visit US hospitals for treatment? The good old American hospitality? The "fact" is that wealthy people in countries w/ socialized health care find a way to opt out and get decent care elsewhere - from private health care providers if they are allowed by the govt, or from private providers abroad if they don't. And they opt out because they know that with a single payer system comes qualitative and quantitative decline. In the end it's only those who are not wealthy who need to deal with the mediocrity (or worse) that invariably arrives with socialized medicine.
The insidiousness of socialized medicine (or socialized anything) is that no matter how terrible the results may be, once it's implemented it is almost impossible to do away with. Look at the massive Ponzi scheme that is American Social Security for an apt example.
Why bother explaining it to them, Shadow? Their worldview is so ass-backwards you'll never make any headway. We'll just have to sit back and watch until enough of them have had to wait for months or years for a medical procedure they can get on-demand now for them to come around. Canadians facing long waits or poor care have an option now, they can come to the US for treatment, and they do. When we socialize our healthcare, there'll be no place for us to go. We're about to taste a gigantic shit sandwich.
First, you'd have to relay exactly what kind of standard of living I'd be afforded on $150k per year in Somalia - it may very well be that it'd be preferable...
I realize you were referring to business tax, but the amount of income taxes I pay exceeds the amount I pay per year for my own "infrastructure", namely, my housing, vehicle, insurance and clothing. I don't believe that paying the federal government more than I pay for a nice, 12y/o, 3bdrm ranch style on 2 acres of land, decent car, and passable wardrobe can be considered a worthy "investment" by any stretch of the imagination. It's just way beyond BS.
I wish I had mod points - that sums up a freetard quite nicely.
Oooh, what a big, long, strong, erect arm you Canadians have built. Does a little recognition make you feel more manly and effectual? I hope so...
And someone responded to you, correctly, saying that the PI would then be an agent of the state, and would be bound by the same rules and regs as the cops are.
which country are you referring to when you say "we"?
"We don't have the US-style urban sprawl here because we have an extensive mass transit network, not the other way around."
No, you don't have the required land area to support American style urban sprawl, so stop trying to prop yourself up as some kind of uber society, prophetically able to foresee the best ways to support population growth - you have better mass transit because it's easier to implement on your comparatively diminutive scale, and more cost effective to maintain when you have hundreds of humans per square mile to reduce the average cost per ride.
If the US had the population density of France, 310,000,000 Americans would be living east of the Mississippi river on roughly 1,000,000 square miles, leaving the 2,000,000 square miles and all of the states in the lower 48 west of the mississippi unoccupied. With that type of population density, where all Americans lived east of the Mississippi, it'd be a lot easier to do efficient mass transit in America.
A better way to think about it would be, in France, how efficient would mass transit be if you had 6.4 million people to service instead of 64? That's the kind of density disparity we have here.
If you're challenging my assertion that there was a noticeable improvement in air quality in Pittsburgh when the diesel busses were not on the road due to the driver strike, you're wrong. Diesels produce up to 400 times the amount of particulate pollution vs. gasoline engines. Mass transit busses remain on the roads all day and most of the night, unlike a commuting auto, which is normally used an hour or two per day. There was a significant improvement in air quality when those diesel busses were not running - it felt literally like a breath of fresh air.
Busses running on natural gas would be a big improvement for urban areas, and it appears natural gas is being used more frequently now.
As for needing it adopted by everyone, you go right ahead. The less time I have to ride around in a closed enviro with every kind of virus carrying, shower-phobic, alcoholic, tourette syndrome suffering mental case in town, the better.
My point isn't that mass transit should be ignored, or that we shouldn't look at doing it in a more effective way where it makes sense, but that wide scale mass transit that has as a stated goal of replacing the automobile in most circumstances, even in rural America, would not be advisable. There are about 303 people per square mile in France (non-euro territories not included), compared to 33 people per square mile in the US (excluding Alaska's area). I've excluded the no-mans-land of Alaska from this equation, but even if you excluded all of the areas where nobody lives in America, you'd still have a significant density difference between France and the US. The issue is not the same here as it is there by a large margin.
The other things is, I was in Pittsburgh in the early 90's during the Port Authority strike - no busses or trains ran in Pittsburgh for a week or more. What I recall is that people found ways to get wherever they needed to go, the air was SIGNIFICANTLY clearer and cleaner without all of the diesel belching busses on the road, and even though everyone had to get to work by private vehicle, traffic moved BETTER, because the slow-assed busses weren't clogging traffic up at every intersection in the city during rush hour.
Regarding the US: Mass transit is fine for many but certainly not all people living in urban areas, a lot fewer people who live in the suburbs, and almost nobody who lives in rural areas. The nearest grocery store to my house is 18 miles away. Mass transit would be an extremely inefficient method of transport out here. Either you'd have to eat a really, really big cost-per-ride bill while providing some semblance of decent and frequent service, or you'd have to provide really, really poor, infrequent, PITA service for a more reasonable expenditure.
It'd probably be different if we had population density/distributions similar to Europe, but we don't.
Cars will remain with us for a long time.
Yeah, that thick slavic accent is a real blood-pumper. I can smell the unibrow from here...
You assume (quite naively) that netzero style advertising revenues would offset the development and operation of a 768kbps wireless internet network that covers 95% of the US, which is what is what was called for in the mandate. There is no possible way that a few banner ads on your screen are going to offset the cost of a nationwide wireless network service rollout. So the commercial subscribers to the wireless company's OTHER products will be the people who pay for this "free" service.
(Did I really need to explain that? It seems so obvious.)
The service provider using the wireless spectrum to offer commercial services to paying customers will have to offer less quality of service to those paying customers than they would have otherwise due to the fact that they have to spend (a lot of) money and time to develop, support and maintain the "free" network, along side their commercial offering. The Mandate calls for free wireless 768kbps service to 95% of the US. That's a gigantic undertaking, and a massive financial burden YOU would be supporting through your commercial service subscription. As a paying customer, how much service degradation are you willing to accept in order to subsidize the mandated "free" network?
The more likely scenario is that, should the "free" mandate remain in place, the wireless services company will decide not to roll their commercial products out at all due to the realization that the mandated "free" services would make the whole enterprise an unprofitable folly. And that, in a nutshell, is likely the real reason the Bush admin is pulling the "free" mandate.