The handler, looking displeased and suspicious at a kid who isn't some double-blind in a line-up, could signal the dog anyway. He could do so intentionally.
Yes, and the cop could just shoot the kid, or push his car off a cliff, or plant drugs on him, blah blah. We get it. You think cops are evil, corrupt guys who just want other people to suffer. Hope you never have to call one because your life is at risk or someone you know is in real trouble. Actually, I do hope so, because you might change your tune, even just a bit.
This whole cartoon-villain cop thing is ridiculous. If you're going to deny the signaling from all of these very talented dogs and hard working handlers because you think there's a bad handler out there, then you need to be just as ready to assume that everyone these guys encounter are exactly the scumbags you're so sure they're not. You can't have it both ways.
Sure, but remember that the people at Pixar routinely rent themselves out to third party studios and lots of indirectly related industries that you're probably not even considering. They have skills and software and experience that they continue to seel, mercenary-style, throughout that industry. I suspect the parent company will be equally happy to keep the ILM guys busy in the same way.
Nah, I just make observations about people shouting shrilly about how horrible they think I am for being realistic. Thank you for being one of them, and making my point. You can't process even a whiff of satire or sarcasm, which is characteristic of the whole mindset.
On a more specific note:
Nuclear disaster happens, people lose their shit, governments respond.
Great example. The reality: earthquake and tsunami happen, and plant is damaged... though actual injuries and damage to population pale compared to the coal burned in the new coal-fired plants that places like China are putting online every week, or the coal that's now being burned for Germans to make up for shutting down nukes. The real story is that the "governments respond" thing you mention is really a bunch of un-informed, emotional nutjobs reacting irrationally, and a bunch of politicians pandering to them while switching back to dirtier energy that's more dangerous.
Of course you know all that, but I realize you need to vent in order to distract from it. Go ahead, have a tantrum.
green means a sensible combination of renewable and efficient
To the people that shout "green" the loudest, it means that nobody nearby gets to burn anything, but that the heavy industry necessary to make the stuff you really want is simply performed overseas where you can't see it or smell it. The all-green people are operating on baked-in hypocrisy, or are utterly misinformed, or are completely disingenuous, or are more interested in posturing than in actually doing what they say. The holier-than-thou hybrid/electric drivers who cover their ears and say "la-la-la" when you mention toxic battery manufacturing or the huge energy that goes into making their silent pedestrian killing car are great examples.
I'm reminded of the countries that are piously shutting down their nuclear energy facilities, but are then forced to import electricity from other countries using nukes, or go back to burning huge amounts of hydrocarbons.
Two shops full of the best brains working under the same virtual roof. Might be interesting. Especially if we get writing/direction from someone other than George. Love ya, George, but hopefully the only wooden acting we'll see from now on will by Woody The Cowboy.
Yes. I can deny a company any revenue that might hope to get from me. I can - in a way never before possible in human history - make an eloquent pitch to hundreds millions or billions of other people, encouraging them to do the same. I just have to be peruasive, which means having a valid point. And of course most of the "OMG teh evil corporationplutocrats are pwning my cheezeburgers!" rants are based on pure BS or nothing more than lazy resentment, and thus unable to inspire the ranter's desired change. This is why idiots like the Occupy types just get angrier and angrier... because they fail to see how shrill most of their rants actually sound to most sensible people. But when groups like that focus cogently on legitimate concerns (for example, strains of the Tea Party types who focus like a laser on massive deficit spending) they get somewhere, at least enough to change some legislative seats here and there.
So, you can be powerful with nothing more than words and some personal spending or voting decisions. But you have to have a damn point. Pure BS doesn't float anymore, because information gets around too quickly.
What are you talking about? We're addressing the "not knowing what's legal" part of the post. The people who own the property have the right to prohibit behavior (like photography). I haven't spoken to the issue of how a particular person handled someone else, I'm talking about his implication that the property owners and the guards employed there are "unsure of the legality of taking pictures." Where did that come from. There isn't a shopping mall on the planet that is unsure of their own policy about people photographing inside their businesses.
I am surprised at how idiots think assault is "okay" when a corporation's representatives does it on their property just cause they decide they don't like your attitude.
And I'm surprised... no, these days I'm not, any more... when people who don't like hearing facts pointed out reduce themselves to ranting against imaginary strawman opponents that didn't say anything at all along the lines against which they're ranting. That kind of cluelessness doesn't do much to make your opening threat sound merely rhetorical - just obnoxious.
He obviously took a picture of the security doing something they knew they would get in trouble (ie lawyers) later.
How is this obvious? What do you know that nobody else does?
Walk the kid outside and see what's on that camera!
So, the police would be the ones paying to have his film developed? First they have to know where there's still a one-hour lab within 10km or so - increasingly rare.
you shouldn't assault a kid when you are unsure of the legality of taking pictures
You shouldn't use your hipster retro film cameras on someone's private property without asking, first, if the property owners are serious about the "no photography" policy that's posted on property (which is the case is almost every shopping mall in almost every country).
A mall is a privately owned public place. If you invite the public into your privately owned property it is a public place and there is a limit to the crap you can throw at them.
But when - as in almost every case - the owner of the private property puts up a sign indicating that photography isn't allows on the premises, that's pretty damn straightforward.
So your theory is that in the actual, real world, we shouldn't ever deal with anyone we dislike in any way, even if it's to push back against a totalitarian regime that has killed millions of people and which wants to loot the world to make up for the baked-in failure of communism. You want, in the face of a war either cold or hot, to only associate with nuns, boy scouts, and elderly librarians who've never set foot outside their town. I'm guessing you'd not have cooperated with the Soviets in working against the Nazi push through Europe, right? Yeah.
No, no. There's a better one. The Obama campaign just came out with an actual glossy printed brochure that they say finally provides his plan to create jobs. Other than the fact that it doesn't contain any (let along any new) actual information and that it's nothing more than aspirational plans to borrow more money from elsewhere and spend it like the last round of stimulus money, but mostly on transient government jobs that don't actually create anything... other than that, I'm told that the graphics and the quality of the paper are very nice. They indicate that they're going to print several hundred thousand and slip them under the door of undecided voters. Now there's some quality fiction for you.
I would like to see the math basis for borrowing and taxing the economy into prosperity, though. Especially the part on taxes. The actual math says that if you taxed rich people at 100% of their earnings, it wouldn't even close the government's spending deficit past the month of May in a given year. So, some math fiction that gets creatively around that unpleasant detail would be good reading indeed.
Let's see... who's sexist? The guys shooting female school teachers in Afghanistan because they are women teaching girls to read, or someone who's pointing out that that must be stopped so those girls (and thus their wider culture) can get an education?
Since you seem in favor of allowing the Taliban to slaughter teachers and prevent girls from learning, I think we know enough about who is the sexist here. Did a literate girl do something really mean to you once, maybe? You need to get over that.
Like, for example, more people with a basic education and some critical thinking skills. All the really good stuff comes easily afer that, everywhere it happens.
The problem is that there are organizations dedicated to preventing that from happening. You know, marching into a school, dragging the teacher out into the town square, and shooting her in the head for... teaching. Especially for teaching girls how to read and write. So, you know those guys, half a dozen of them riding around in the back of a pickup truck with AK47s? They need to be stopped from killing people who want to do things like read, write, and have a rational government with little things like constitutions and the rule of law. And guess what! Sometimes you have to use actual force to shut those guys down.
Now, clearly you don't like the idea of surgical strikes, drones, etc., because you'd rather deal with guys like that and the camps where they gather by sending in a column of troops, armor, supply chains, and doing it all with on-the-ground firefights. Because, presumably, you'd like those guys to have lots of warning that the troops are coming, and you think that ground combat involves an acceptable (to you) number of casualties on the part of those defending the schools, and an acceptable amount of carnage and destruction from urban street-level combat. Why you'd rather have all of that mayhem and death and civilians-in-the-crossfire stuff instead of using modern technology to minimize it is a bit of a mystery. But I'm sure it all starts with your obsession with "you guys" instead of with girls who want to be educated.
By the way, the whistle blowers and printers of government secrets are heroes and patriots, and we need to protect them the way we protect national treasures
So, you don't consider people who put their lives on the line to protect you to be national treasures? Or is the person who's willing to dump their name into the open along with hundreds of thousands of random sensitive documents more of a hero and patriot?
I've never heard of a law prohibiting the reporting of news or running of ads in the US close to elections
Then you missed out on part of McCain-Feingold, which did ban some speech along those lines. That's part of what the supreme court recently found to be unconstitutional: muzzling communication like that runs very contrary to one of the founding principles of our constitution. The law allowed, for example, a business like General Electric or News Corp (which both run media outlets, though of different political orientations) to use their editorial voices to communicate about candidates and ballot issues right up through poll closing - but prohibited others (like you or me, or groups we might join, like the NRA or Greenpeace and the like) from doing the same. Completely capricious, and justifiably shot down in the court. But it was the law of the land for a while there.
Perhaps this can come up during the debate. Obama can once again mention is understanding of intercontinental railroads. His understanding of those must - in his head - involve some sort of underwater tracks.
Neither was Obama's multiple references to intercontinental railroads. So, obviously you cannot support him either, because you're also sad about that. Right?
If malpractice suits are costing them 3% operating cost
You still don't get it. The spending is done in order to prevent those suits from happening in the first place. The 3% (for example) represents the suits that do happen. When a trial lawyer, working on a contingency fee and trying to decide if there's a big windfall available, looks at what the doctors did before Mrs. Nusbaum died, and see that an entire battery of tests was run for $15,000, they know right away that they can't just dive in for a $1,000,000 suit or settlement by being able to claim the doctors didn't run every conceivable test. They're looking for low-hanging fruit that it won't cost them (the trial lawyers) a lot of money to trot out as a possibly ineffective angle in front of a jury.
So the doctors/hospital use the entire gambit of tests and procedures - even when they aren't even remotely necessary - so that when Mrs. Nusbaum inevitably dies of old age anyway, her family's lawyer (which they hired from a late night TV ad and a web site) can't squeeze millions of dollars out of the hospital and everyone associated with it for having failed to be heroic or failed to use every possible tool, no matter how expensive, at their disposal. Don't you see? The hospital spends all that money on pointless tests and treatments for dying people so that the lawyers will simply give up and go away. They are fending off suits, pre-emptively, by practicing a huge amount of unnecessary, expensive care involving lab techs, nurses, doctors, equipment contractors, supplies, and time. None of that shows up in your law suit dollar stats because it's done to prevent expensive, frivalous lawsuits that trial lawyers win by convincing idiot juries that Mrs. Nusbaum could have lived at least another 10 days in cancer-ridden misery if it weren't for those evil doctors not finding another $125,000 worth of stuff to try.
So why go to all of this trouble? Because the trial lawyers are a big constituency of the democrats in congress who take every possible measure to block tort reform. And that leaves the landscape wide open for those lawyers to make millions of dollars off of single cases. All they have to do is find one or two times a year that some doctor, somewhere, missed trying one little thing on any of the millions of people who are treated for millions of things... and it's a brand new mansion and a couple new sports cars for the lawyer. And Mrs. Nusbaum is still just as dead as she was going to be anyway.
Tort reform isn't about the 3% that's spent on lottery-like malpractice awars. It's about the enormous amount that's spent to keep that 3% as low as it is by making every hospital visit as lawyer-proof as possible, even if a sprained ankle costs thousands of dollars by the time it's all done. And there goes the cost of health care, through the roof, for everybody.
If the hospitals are behaving rationally, the amount of money they would spend on avoiding malpractice suits would be in proportion to their expected cost of loss from the suits themselves
You don't get it. They aren't spending the money. You are spending the money. For them, it's just a cost they pass along, which is completely rational. If your cost of operating goes up, you raise your prices in order to not go bankrupt. Simple as that. Which means it's the patients that pay. Except many don't, which means it's a small minority of the patients that pay.
these people have no idea and are going way over the top
They don't see it as going over the top. They see it as taking steps - which someone else pays for - in order to not be sued for millions of dollars by ambulance chasers every single day.
people are out for themselves, and care not about end results, but about making money
Do you care if you make enough money to keep functioning? Do you want your employer to care enough to make enough money to make sure your paycheck doesn't bounce? If nobody cares about covering an organization's costs, then the organization collapses. That not only costs jobs, but it removes a health care facility from whatever demographic wasn't paying enough to keep it a viable operation. Not that I want to see tax-based health care, but even if it was all based on taxes, somebody has to allocate $X to one hospital, and $Y to another. If they don't care about the actual amount of $, what do you think is going to happen?
instead of sabotaging each other in pursuit of short term gain
The only people who stand to gain by playing gotcha - the only people - are the trial lawyers who make an industry out of suing doctors for a living.
Republicans like to bang the malpractice is causing all the problems drum but they are at least honest it's a minor addition of costs.
You are (deliberately, it seems) missing the big picture. It isn't malpractice, per se. It's the enormous use of people, supplies, fantasitcally expensive equipment, time, space, and a mile-long wake of paperwork that comes from practicing over-the-top procedures, tests, and drug use designed to fend off spurious malpractice suits. So something like a $10 urine dip-stick test that could be done a couple of times over a couple of 5-minute office visits becomes a $2500 speciality lab visit to the hospital so that the doctor's favorite specialist can do a bladder exam... so that one in a hundred thousand people who might have more than a the normal drop of blood in their urine and also happen to have something else you might catch through the multi-thousand-dollar exame might be caught sooner, though not likely.
Multiply that scenario by thousands of other conditions and tests, mostly involving entire teams of people operating hideously expensive radiological devices or blood sniffing devices, and all of the record keeping, etc., and you've got your ridiculous costs. And it's all done to avoid making malpractice insurance premiums go even higher, because of slimes like John Edwards who get rich over nonsense suits. The suits are down because spending to head them off has gone through the roof, by untold billions of dollars.
Does it mean it is a-OK to essentially dethrone a government legally chosen by its constituency?
It depends entirely on what that government does. Just because a majority set up a government doesn't mean that what that government does is protected from international efforts to counter it.
Your point of view is not consistent with U.S. rhetoric on Assange.
So you're saying that the language used by individual legislators (senators) is the US position on him?
You obviously know better and are trolling, but just in case someone else takes you seriously:
Either the entire legislature (the house, and the senate) pass a law the specifically impacts this situation, and the president signs and acts on the law in a way might have some bearing on the case... or, what you're talking about is just the spoken opinion of some individual legislators. They (as legislators) have absolutely nothing to do with the position of the law enforcement agencies, the state department, the military, and the executive branch's top man (Obama) as it relates to Assange. And none of them have done a single thing to put him in legal jeopardy of any kind. Which, again, you know perfectly well is the case. You're just playing a walk-on role in his ongoing high school drama.
If what an indivisual legislator says were "the rhetoric" of a nation, then not a single head of state would ever travel to any other country... because their are legislators in every country who spout off about every single head of state being a war criminal, etc., blah blah blah. That some US senators have called for his prosecution is no more important to what actually happens than when some other legislators call for the immediate arrest for Clinton, or Bush, for "war crimes" in attacking the Taliban. There's a reason that legislators have to act as a body and vote as a group to get anything done. And the separation of powers exists so that the executive branch and the judiciary have a different take on things, and a different role to play - all checks and balances.
My "point of view" is reflective of the facts. Assange's point of view is based on fantasy and PR stunt-ery. I'm not sure what to make of your atempt at disinformation. It's unlikely that you actually believe what you said, so there's more to it.
Right. There are dozens of cops camped out around the building he cannot leave because Sweden wants him for questioning
Right. Because a foreign government (the Ecuadoran administration, in a PR/theater stunt aimed squarely at their home audience) has decided to make a diplomatic incident out of something that would normally involve the guy evading his sex assault investigation simply being arrested at an airport or train station. Assange knows he'd be picked up by police, just like anyone else with a court order like that on the table, but he has decided to make a spectacle out of it, and the president of Ecuador - a wannabe Hugo Chavez - is making a deliberate point of maximizing the drama so he can score faux political points in an empty gesture.
Why is "we will not extradite Assange" such a hard thing to say.
Should every government release an official state department press release about how they won't seek extradition against every person who is dodging another country's police? Why? The US has no involvement in this. There are no court papers in play, no extradition pending, no request to either the UK or Sweden with respect to Assange whatsoever. Assange only wants the US to say that so that he can have bragging rights about having forced another country to say something completely irrelevent.
What is lost by simply saying that and ending the whole issue?
First, there is no issue. Assange is making it up so that he can hang on to a few more of his uninformed fanbois. There are people who think the US has actually asked the UK or Sweden for access to Assange. Of course that's total fiction, but Assange isn't going to dimish his comic opera by straightening out any of his deluded, hyperventilating desciples on that front. He wants people to be mis-informed on the subject because being a high profile martyr is his only currency. And since the US isn't doing what he wants (pursuing him legally), he's just going to pretend they are, in hopes that a few twits will think it's real, and continue to send him money.
Why should any government prop up his little fake drama by giving into his demands for an empty gesture connected to nothing? All that does is set a precedent for every other media-seeking idiot out there that can't enough twitter and facebook time unless they can gin up some fake involvement from a large government. No government should agree to be used as a prop in a school play like Assange's, and of course the US has no interest in giving him bogus street cred that way.
What you really should be asking is, "What is lost by Assange simply doing what the Swedish government asks and ending the whole issue?" You know perfectly well that doing so will end a nice big Drama Queen moment for him, and then he won't have as many options to keep people talking about him. And that's all he wants: you talking about him, personally, for his own ego's sake. And you're playing the part perfectly.
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The handler, looking displeased and suspicious at a kid who isn't some double-blind in a line-up, could signal the dog anyway. He could do so intentionally.
Yes, and the cop could just shoot the kid, or push his car off a cliff, or plant drugs on him, blah blah. We get it. You think cops are evil, corrupt guys who just want other people to suffer. Hope you never have to call one because your life is at risk or someone you know is in real trouble. Actually, I do hope so, because you might change your tune, even just a bit.
This whole cartoon-villain cop thing is ridiculous. If you're going to deny the signaling from all of these very talented dogs and hard working handlers because you think there's a bad handler out there, then you need to be just as ready to assume that everyone these guys encounter are exactly the scumbags you're so sure they're not. You can't have it both ways.
Sure, but remember that the people at Pixar routinely rent themselves out to third party studios and lots of indirectly related industries that you're probably not even considering. They have skills and software and experience that they continue to seel, mercenary-style, throughout that industry. I suspect the parent company will be equally happy to keep the ILM guys busy in the same way.
On a more specific note:
Nuclear disaster happens, people lose their shit, governments respond.
Great example. The reality: earthquake and tsunami happen, and plant is damaged ... though actual injuries and damage to population pale compared to the coal burned in the new coal-fired plants that places like China are putting online every week, or the coal that's now being burned for Germans to make up for shutting down nukes. The real story is that the "governments respond" thing you mention is really a bunch of un-informed, emotional nutjobs reacting irrationally, and a bunch of politicians pandering to them while switching back to dirtier energy that's more dangerous.
Of course you know all that, but I realize you need to vent in order to distract from it. Go ahead, have a tantrum.
green means a sensible combination of renewable and efficient
To the people that shout "green" the loudest, it means that nobody nearby gets to burn anything, but that the heavy industry necessary to make the stuff you really want is simply performed overseas where you can't see it or smell it. The all-green people are operating on baked-in hypocrisy, or are utterly misinformed, or are completely disingenuous, or are more interested in posturing than in actually doing what they say. The holier-than-thou hybrid/electric drivers who cover their ears and say "la-la-la" when you mention toxic battery manufacturing or the huge energy that goes into making their silent pedestrian killing car are great examples.
I'm reminded of the countries that are piously shutting down their nuclear energy facilities, but are then forced to import electricity from other countries using nukes, or go back to burning huge amounts of hydrocarbons.
Two shops full of the best brains working under the same virtual roof. Might be interesting. Especially if we get writing/direction from someone other than George. Love ya, George, but hopefully the only wooden acting we'll see from now on will by Woody The Cowboy.
Do you feel powerful?
Yes. I can deny a company any revenue that might hope to get from me. I can - in a way never before possible in human history - make an eloquent pitch to hundreds millions or billions of other people, encouraging them to do the same. I just have to be peruasive, which means having a valid point. And of course most of the "OMG teh evil corporationplutocrats are pwning my cheezeburgers!" rants are based on pure BS or nothing more than lazy resentment, and thus unable to inspire the ranter's desired change. This is why idiots like the Occupy types just get angrier and angrier ... because they fail to see how shrill most of their rants actually sound to most sensible people. But when groups like that focus cogently on legitimate concerns (for example, strains of the Tea Party types who focus like a laser on massive deficit spending) they get somewhere, at least enough to change some legislative seats here and there.
So, you can be powerful with nothing more than words and some personal spending or voting decisions. But you have to have a damn point. Pure BS doesn't float anymore, because information gets around too quickly.
What are you talking about? We're addressing the "not knowing what's legal" part of the post. The people who own the property have the right to prohibit behavior (like photography). I haven't spoken to the issue of how a particular person handled someone else, I'm talking about his implication that the property owners and the guards employed there are "unsure of the legality of taking pictures." Where did that come from. There isn't a shopping mall on the planet that is unsure of their own policy about people photographing inside their businesses.
I am surprised at how idiots think assault is "okay" when a corporation's representatives does it on their property just cause they decide they don't like your attitude.
And I'm surprised ... no, these days I'm not, any more ... when people who don't like hearing facts pointed out reduce themselves to ranting against imaginary strawman opponents that didn't say anything at all along the lines against which they're ranting. That kind of cluelessness doesn't do much to make your opening threat sound merely rhetorical - just obnoxious.
He obviously took a picture of the security doing something they knew they would get in trouble (ie lawyers) later.
How is this obvious? What do you know that nobody else does?
Walk the kid outside and see what's on that camera!
So, the police would be the ones paying to have his film developed? First they have to know where there's still a one-hour lab within 10km or so - increasingly rare.
you shouldn't assault a kid when you are unsure of the legality of taking pictures
You shouldn't use your hipster retro film cameras on someone's private property without asking, first, if the property owners are serious about the "no photography" policy that's posted on property (which is the case is almost every shopping mall in almost every country).
A mall is a privately owned public place. If you invite the public into your privately owned property it is a public place and there is a limit to the crap you can throw at them.
But when - as in almost every case - the owner of the private property puts up a sign indicating that photography isn't allows on the premises, that's pretty damn straightforward.
So your theory is that in the actual, real world, we shouldn't ever deal with anyone we dislike in any way, even if it's to push back against a totalitarian regime that has killed millions of people and which wants to loot the world to make up for the baked-in failure of communism. You want, in the face of a war either cold or hot, to only associate with nuns, boy scouts, and elderly librarians who've never set foot outside their town. I'm guessing you'd not have cooperated with the Soviets in working against the Nazi push through Europe, right? Yeah.
No, no. There's a better one. The Obama campaign just came out with an actual glossy printed brochure that they say finally provides his plan to create jobs. Other than the fact that it doesn't contain any (let along any new) actual information and that it's nothing more than aspirational plans to borrow more money from elsewhere and spend it like the last round of stimulus money, but mostly on transient government jobs that don't actually create anything ... other than that, I'm told that the graphics and the quality of the paper are very nice. They indicate that they're going to print several hundred thousand and slip them under the door of undecided voters. Now there's some quality fiction for you.
I would like to see the math basis for borrowing and taxing the economy into prosperity, though. Especially the part on taxes. The actual math says that if you taxed rich people at 100% of their earnings, it wouldn't even close the government's spending deficit past the month of May in a given year. So, some math fiction that gets creatively around that unpleasant detail would be good reading indeed.
Judging by your sexist rant
Let's see ... who's sexist? The guys shooting female school teachers in Afghanistan because they are women teaching girls to read, or someone who's pointing out that that must be stopped so those girls (and thus their wider culture) can get an education?
Since you seem in favor of allowing the Taliban to slaughter teachers and prevent girls from learning, I think we know enough about who is the sexist here. Did a literate girl do something really mean to you once, maybe? You need to get over that.
The world desperately needs a lot of new things
Like, for example, more people with a basic education and some critical thinking skills. All the really good stuff comes easily afer that, everywhere it happens.
... teaching. Especially for teaching girls how to read and write. So, you know those guys, half a dozen of them riding around in the back of a pickup truck with AK47s? They need to be stopped from killing people who want to do things like read, write, and have a rational government with little things like constitutions and the rule of law. And guess what! Sometimes you have to use actual force to shut those guys down.
The problem is that there are organizations dedicated to preventing that from happening. You know, marching into a school, dragging the teacher out into the town square, and shooting her in the head for
Now, clearly you don't like the idea of surgical strikes, drones, etc., because you'd rather deal with guys like that and the camps where they gather by sending in a column of troops, armor, supply chains, and doing it all with on-the-ground firefights. Because, presumably, you'd like those guys to have lots of warning that the troops are coming, and you think that ground combat involves an acceptable (to you) number of casualties on the part of those defending the schools, and an acceptable amount of carnage and destruction from urban street-level combat. Why you'd rather have all of that mayhem and death and civilians-in-the-crossfire stuff instead of using modern technology to minimize it is a bit of a mystery. But I'm sure it all starts with your obsession with "you guys" instead of with girls who want to be educated.
By the way, the whistle blowers and printers of government secrets are heroes and patriots, and we need to protect them the way we protect national treasures
So, you don't consider people who put their lives on the line to protect you to be national treasures? Or is the person who's willing to dump their name into the open along with hundreds of thousands of random sensitive documents more of a hero and patriot?
I've never heard of a law prohibiting the reporting of news or running of ads in the US close to elections
Then you missed out on part of McCain-Feingold, which did ban some speech along those lines. That's part of what the supreme court recently found to be unconstitutional: muzzling communication like that runs very contrary to one of the founding principles of our constitution. The law allowed, for example, a business like General Electric or News Corp (which both run media outlets, though of different political orientations) to use their editorial voices to communicate about candidates and ballot issues right up through poll closing - but prohibited others (like you or me, or groups we might join, like the NRA or Greenpeace and the like) from doing the same. Completely capricious, and justifiably shot down in the court. But it was the law of the land for a while there.
Perhaps this can come up during the debate. Obama can once again mention is understanding of intercontinental railroads. His understanding of those must - in his head - involve some sort of underwater tracks.
Sadly, this isn't an Onion article.
Neither was Obama's multiple references to intercontinental railroads. So, obviously you cannot support him either, because you're also sad about that. Right?
If malpractice suits are costing them 3% operating cost
You still don't get it. The spending is done in order to prevent those suits from happening in the first place. The 3% (for example) represents the suits that do happen. When a trial lawyer, working on a contingency fee and trying to decide if there's a big windfall available, looks at what the doctors did before Mrs. Nusbaum died, and see that an entire battery of tests was run for $15,000, they know right away that they can't just dive in for a $1,000,000 suit or settlement by being able to claim the doctors didn't run every conceivable test. They're looking for low-hanging fruit that it won't cost them (the trial lawyers) a lot of money to trot out as a possibly ineffective angle in front of a jury.
... and it's a brand new mansion and a couple new sports cars for the lawyer. And Mrs. Nusbaum is still just as dead as she was going to be anyway.
So the doctors/hospital use the entire gambit of tests and procedures - even when they aren't even remotely necessary - so that when Mrs. Nusbaum inevitably dies of old age anyway, her family's lawyer (which they hired from a late night TV ad and a web site) can't squeeze millions of dollars out of the hospital and everyone associated with it for having failed to be heroic or failed to use every possible tool, no matter how expensive, at their disposal. Don't you see? The hospital spends all that money on pointless tests and treatments for dying people so that the lawyers will simply give up and go away. They are fending off suits, pre-emptively, by practicing a huge amount of unnecessary, expensive care involving lab techs, nurses, doctors, equipment contractors, supplies, and time. None of that shows up in your law suit dollar stats because it's done to prevent expensive, frivalous lawsuits that trial lawyers win by convincing idiot juries that Mrs. Nusbaum could have lived at least another 10 days in cancer-ridden misery if it weren't for those evil doctors not finding another $125,000 worth of stuff to try.
So why go to all of this trouble? Because the trial lawyers are a big constituency of the democrats in congress who take every possible measure to block tort reform. And that leaves the landscape wide open for those lawyers to make millions of dollars off of single cases. All they have to do is find one or two times a year that some doctor, somewhere, missed trying one little thing on any of the millions of people who are treated for millions of things
Tort reform isn't about the 3% that's spent on lottery-like malpractice awars. It's about the enormous amount that's spent to keep that 3% as low as it is by making every hospital visit as lawyer-proof as possible, even if a sprained ankle costs thousands of dollars by the time it's all done. And there goes the cost of health care, through the roof, for everybody.
If the hospitals are behaving rationally, the amount of money they would spend on avoiding malpractice suits would be in proportion to their expected cost of loss from the suits themselves
You don't get it. They aren't spending the money. You are spending the money. For them, it's just a cost they pass along, which is completely rational. If your cost of operating goes up, you raise your prices in order to not go bankrupt. Simple as that. Which means it's the patients that pay. Except many don't, which means it's a small minority of the patients that pay.
these people have no idea and are going way over the top
They don't see it as going over the top. They see it as taking steps - which someone else pays for - in order to not be sued for millions of dollars by ambulance chasers every single day.
people are out for themselves, and care not about end results, but about making money
Do you care if you make enough money to keep functioning? Do you want your employer to care enough to make enough money to make sure your paycheck doesn't bounce? If nobody cares about covering an organization's costs, then the organization collapses. That not only costs jobs, but it removes a health care facility from whatever demographic wasn't paying enough to keep it a viable operation. Not that I want to see tax-based health care, but even if it was all based on taxes, somebody has to allocate $X to one hospital, and $Y to another. If they don't care about the actual amount of $, what do you think is going to happen?
instead of sabotaging each other in pursuit of short term gain
The only people who stand to gain by playing gotcha - the only people - are the trial lawyers who make an industry out of suing doctors for a living.
Republicans like to bang the malpractice is causing all the problems drum but they are at least honest it's a minor addition of costs.
You are (deliberately, it seems) missing the big picture. It isn't malpractice, per se. It's the enormous use of people, supplies, fantasitcally expensive equipment, time, space, and a mile-long wake of paperwork that comes from practicing over-the-top procedures, tests, and drug use designed to fend off spurious malpractice suits. So something like a $10 urine dip-stick test that could be done a couple of times over a couple of 5-minute office visits becomes a $2500 speciality lab visit to the hospital so that the doctor's favorite specialist can do a bladder exam ... so that one in a hundred thousand people who might have more than a the normal drop of blood in their urine and also happen to have something else you might catch through the multi-thousand-dollar exame might be caught sooner, though not likely.
Multiply that scenario by thousands of other conditions and tests, mostly involving entire teams of people operating hideously expensive radiological devices or blood sniffing devices, and all of the record keeping, etc., and you've got your ridiculous costs. And it's all done to avoid making malpractice insurance premiums go even higher, because of slimes like John Edwards who get rich over nonsense suits. The suits are down because spending to head them off has gone through the roof, by untold billions of dollars.
Does it mean it is a-OK to essentially dethrone a government legally chosen by its constituency?
It depends entirely on what that government does. Just because a majority set up a government doesn't mean that what that government does is protected from international efforts to counter it.
Your point of view is not consistent with U.S. rhetoric on Assange.
So you're saying that the language used by individual legislators (senators) is the US position on him?
... or, what you're talking about is just the spoken opinion of some individual legislators. They (as legislators) have absolutely nothing to do with the position of the law enforcement agencies, the state department, the military, and the executive branch's top man (Obama) as it relates to Assange. And none of them have done a single thing to put him in legal jeopardy of any kind. Which, again, you know perfectly well is the case. You're just playing a walk-on role in his ongoing high school drama.
... because their are legislators in every country who spout off about every single head of state being a war criminal, etc., blah blah blah. That some US senators have called for his prosecution is no more important to what actually happens than when some other legislators call for the immediate arrest for Clinton, or Bush, for "war crimes" in attacking the Taliban. There's a reason that legislators have to act as a body and vote as a group to get anything done. And the separation of powers exists so that the executive branch and the judiciary have a different take on things, and a different role to play - all checks and balances.
You obviously know better and are trolling, but just in case someone else takes you seriously:
Either the entire legislature (the house, and the senate) pass a law the specifically impacts this situation, and the president signs and acts on the law in a way might have some bearing on the case
If what an indivisual legislator says were "the rhetoric" of a nation, then not a single head of state would ever travel to any other country
My "point of view" is reflective of the facts. Assange's point of view is based on fantasy and PR stunt-ery. I'm not sure what to make of your atempt at disinformation. It's unlikely that you actually believe what you said, so there's more to it.
Right. There are dozens of cops camped out around the building he cannot leave because Sweden wants him for questioning
Right. Because a foreign government (the Ecuadoran administration, in a PR/theater stunt aimed squarely at their home audience) has decided to make a diplomatic incident out of something that would normally involve the guy evading his sex assault investigation simply being arrested at an airport or train station. Assange knows he'd be picked up by police, just like anyone else with a court order like that on the table, but he has decided to make a spectacle out of it, and the president of Ecuador - a wannabe Hugo Chavez - is making a deliberate point of maximizing the drama so he can score faux political points in an empty gesture.
Why is "we will not extradite Assange" such a hard thing to say.
Should every government release an official state department press release about how they won't seek extradition against every person who is dodging another country's police? Why? The US has no involvement in this. There are no court papers in play, no extradition pending, no request to either the UK or Sweden with respect to Assange whatsoever. Assange only wants the US to say that so that he can have bragging rights about having forced another country to say something completely irrelevent.
What is lost by simply saying that and ending the whole issue?
First, there is no issue. Assange is making it up so that he can hang on to a few more of his uninformed fanbois. There are people who think the US has actually asked the UK or Sweden for access to Assange. Of course that's total fiction, but Assange isn't going to dimish his comic opera by straightening out any of his deluded, hyperventilating desciples on that front. He wants people to be mis-informed on the subject because being a high profile martyr is his only currency. And since the US isn't doing what he wants (pursuing him legally), he's just going to pretend they are, in hopes that a few twits will think it's real, and continue to send him money.
Why should any government prop up his little fake drama by giving into his demands for an empty gesture connected to nothing? All that does is set a precedent for every other media-seeking idiot out there that can't enough twitter and facebook time unless they can gin up some fake involvement from a large government. No government should agree to be used as a prop in a school play like Assange's, and of course the US has no interest in giving him bogus street cred that way.
What you really should be asking is, "What is lost by Assange simply doing what the Swedish government asks and ending the whole issue?" You know perfectly well that doing so will end a nice big Drama Queen moment for him, and then he won't have as many options to keep people talking about him. And that's all he wants: you talking about him, personally, for his own ego's sake. And you're playing the part perfectly.