who take any available job and try to work their way up, but opportunities never appear.
Yeah, this story shouldn't be used as representative of immigrants being better entrepreneurs. Had this guy come here and started the firm on his own, THAT would have been a good story.
Here, he happened to come into contact with someone who needed someone to help them and took a chance. This guy then used the money he earned there to parlay it into a business he most likely would not have been able to start otherwise.
It's a good story, not trying to knock this guy, but when hacks like Forbes try to show the spirit of entrepreneurship and capitalism is alive and well, they always seem to leave out the part where that person got a lucky break or windfall through no effort on their own.
Facebook, for as much as I detest it, is a good example of entrepreneurship. Zuckerberg might have had the inkling from the twins, but it was he who saw it through to the bitter end and made the company what it is.
You couldn't manage with 2 gigs? WTF are you doing? Let me guess, you're one of those who saves the email with the attachment rather than saving the attachment and deleting the email.
I tell people where I work, you have your email quota (set by another agency) and you get 1 pst file of 2 gigs. If you can't manage your email with that amount space, you're doing something wrong.
When they follow my suggestion, it's amazing how much space they suddenly have.
And before those of you start whining about how space is cheap, it costs about 1 penny per email per person per day to maintain. That's storage space, manpower to manage the space, backups and electricity to keep everything running. Multiply out the potentially millions of emails in an organization by that cost and you'll see why deleting emails and saving the attachment is the correct path.
When they come across a groups of chimps smaller than them they slaughter them
I saw that one time on some special. There was a small group of chimps, 4 I think, who climbed up trees and surrounded a monkey. The monkey kept jumping from tree limb to tree limb trying to escape but in the end, the chimps caught him. The next thing they did was beat the bugger against the tree until it was dead and then ate him.
So, we have planning (I want to eat that monkey), group coordination (you go there, I'll go here), intent (we're going to kill that guy) with an overall end point (we get to eat meat).
Maybe not the brightest of the apes, but most definitely intelligent.
They all say the same thing: getting dirty as a kid and growing up in a rural environment reduces ones vulnerabilities to infections and afflictions. It's called the hygiene hypothesis and makes perfect sense when the evidence is examined.
People, particularly kids, who grow in more sterile environments (constantly using hand sanitizers, over using antibiotics, keeping everything spotless) on the whole, have more allergies and other issues than those who don't go OCD or, if you prefer, Monk.
Not sure how much more evidence you need when it's staring you in the face.
Here's the really fun part; if you wanted to turn the table on Heartland, you could develop an ad using Hitler, saying he ignored the evidence until it was too late, then use the same metaphor for climate change but making a point to include Heartland Institute as the deniers.
Oh the howls that would ensue but it would prevent them from using the folks listed above and force them to come out and whine about being lambasted, thus making them explain how climate change isn't happening and showing them for the shills they are.
They would also have to explain why it was acceptable for them to use Kaczynski et al but not ok for someone to use Hitler as a reference to their denial.
Yeah, I like making people squirm by using their own actions and words against them.
The green t-shirt would feel depressed because it only got 4 likes.
And if I had a Facebook account, I would be one of the ones to Like it.
I once found an ultra-bright yellow shirt from Izod at a store that was going out of business. It was nearly as bright as the noonday sun and I wanted it. Unfortunately, it was only just that shirt and it was in an XL size (I'm a small) so I couldn't get it.
I have searched every store I go in, including outlets, trying to find that shirt, but to no avail. It would have a glorious day as I walked around my work, people shielding their eyes as I walked by, and it would have been even worse (read, better) outside on a sunny day.
That shirt would have been one of my prized possessions.:(
If this goes through, does this mean that providers such as Comcast, Verizon, et al, who both provide the physical means of communications and who also offer the services described in the article, will now be treated as telecommunication companies, subject to all the rules and regulations therein?
If so, does that mean we can finally get competition for broadband without those companies wanting to charge exorbitant rates to competitors for line usage?
I don't want integration. I want my radio to be my radio and my GPS (if I had a GPS) to be my GPS. I don't want co-mingling of technology.
Haven't we learned anything from Battlestar Galactica? You don't network everything. You keep things separate.
Or, if you snerk at that example, haven't we learned anything from Unix/Linux where each piece does it's thing, and ONLY it's thing?
We've seen what an absolute shitfest things become when we try to make things "new and improved", "Now with more features you have to look at and try to decipher while driving!" Hey Ford, how's that wonderful technological tour de force radio and navigation interface working out?
Engineers and developers need to get their heads out of their asses and go back to the ultimate rule: KISS
Bullshit. There is no nutritional difference between organic food and non-organic food. That is just a marketing ploy by the organic growers. Study after study, real studies, not ones done by the organic organizations themselves, have shown there is no difference in nutritional values.
phytoallexin made in response to mold that is the raw material the body uses to kill tumor cells
Phytoallexin is made IN plants in response to physical, biological or chemical stress, not just mold. It is essentially a plants white blood cells (to use a very basic description). So far there is no evidence that the human body uses phytoallexin's to fight tumors. Testing is being done to see if cruciferae plants, which make this compound, can be used in cancer fighting techniques.
This is one of the reasons cancer has shot up since WWII when they began using synthetic fungicides
Or maybe because people are living longer and cancer is a natural function of the body as we age. Studies have shown no conclusive link to cancer and pesticides, though some have hinted at links.
Let me guess, you subscribe to Kevin Trudeau and his "secret" remedies to cure cancer and arthritis.
this would also clear out considerable space from the average bookstore's health section.
Trudeau would have to get a real job rather than claiming "The Man" is trying to keep "free" cancer cures secret from the public and harassing him.
After all, Big Government is in cahoots with Big Pharma so people are bled dry using tested and approved medicines rather than "vitamin" pills to cure cancer.
I've been saying for a while now (post-9/11) that the members of the former KGB must be laughing their heads off when they have their yearly get togethers.
All those years, those hundreds of billions (trillions?) of dollars we spent trying to bring down the "evil empire", espousing how free we were, how we didn't have to worry about the government listening in on our phone conversations, reading our mail, not having to worry about the police being able to walk into our houses at any time just to see if we're doing anything wrong.
The same people who harped on this (yeah Gingrich, I'm looking at you) are now the same people pushing every day to quash the last remnants of the freedoms as written in the Constitution. They want a national ID, just like the former Soviet Union. They want to track who you talk to, just like the former Soviet Union. Track where you go and who you associate with? Same as the former Soviet Union.
The 9/11 attacks were a wet dream come true for both the intelligence communities and more specifically, the right side of the Republican party. The attacks gave them the excuse they needed to strip away rights all in the name of protecting the nation (sound familiar?).
Yet, when one brings up these obvious similarities, you're un-American. Do you want to be killed by terrorists? If you have nothing to hide, why can't you just follow the (new) rules?
We've now come full circle and have become that which we despised. Congrats Newt, Hatch, and the rest of the lot of fascists. You've gone over to the dark side and have drug this country down with you.
Yes, it is. Just because you or I grew up with the Net and have a good (if not spectacular) understanding of how it works, does not mean everyone, particularly those of my, or his, parents age understand it. To them it is mystical.
Put another way, when the "lost" tribe of the Amazon sees a plane or helicopter, to them it's mystical. How does that big silver bird stay up there without flapping its wings?
You and I know how it works, but they don't. They haven't grown up in the trappings of modern society. The same with this guys father. He didn't grow up with BBS, programming or anything else related to how modern telecommunications work.
It's this attitude which ticks me off when dealing with (some) people in the IT world. To them, everything is ho hum and they condescend to those who don't grok whatever the subject is. I'm sure if someone came along and started talking about a subject which you know nothing about, or care to know about, and they started rattling off this and that, to you it would seem mystical because you have no frame of reference.
It's one thing to make fun of people who, after repeatedly being told what to do or not do, still make the same computer mistake. It's quite another to go after people who admit they are ignorant of a subject. At least they're being honest about what they know and don't know.
there will always be the crazy old cat lady with her collection of Disney VHS tapes...
I may not be a crazy old cat lady, but I do own a cat* and have a VCR I use to record that oddball show. I still like to go to Ikea (though the two closest are 1.5 hours away from me [different directions]) and did buy a fantastic tv stand from them over a decade ago which weighs a ton and has no issues holding up my 36" tube tv.
* As I tell people, my cat is better behaved and listens better than a vast majority of people I either work with or come into contact with on any given day.
While no longer technically helpdesk, a vast part of my job is spent doing the job of our helpdesk and solving the world's problems. These are a few of my oddballs.
1 A person at a field office could no log on to the Staples site. She contacted Staples who said her cookies must have been deleted which is why her information no longer auto-populated but they reset her password and sent her the information. She still couldn't log in.
I looked at the email that had been sent to her and something clicked in. I asked her if she hadn't transposed the company ID and her ID when logging in. As soon as I said this she started (nicely) cursing under her breath. Sure enough, with those two items switched, she got in with no problem. She all but begged me not to ever tell anyone about this, even when I was completing the ticket to close it. I put in some vague information about possible web site issues but did mark the ticket as 'Education Required'.
2 Whenever I tell someone to open their C: drive, I tell them to go to My Computer (similar to the one story). The only difference is I tell them it's the My Computer icon which is usually located in the upper left corner of the screen. So far, that bit of communication is all that is needed to get them on the right path.
3 I was working to streamline the process by which a visually impaired employee would receive documents from various offices. His screen reading software had issues with certain pdf documents. I finally got all involved to send him Word documents instead.
However, during this conversation, I had remoted into a different person's pc to look at where the documents were being sent from. This person asked me how I knew the documents I was looking at were pdfs. I moved the mouse to the Adobe icon in front of the document and explained this means it's a pdf. I then moved to the end of the document name and said, "See this.pdf extension at the end of the name? That also means it's a pdf document."
I then showed her what Word document icons look like for comparison.
4 A printer was no longer showing it had a high capacity, tray 4. Everything printed fine, it just wouldn't pull from tray 4.
After turning the machine off and on, hoping to reset it, someone mentioned the light for the tray no longer lit. That got me thinking.
I looked at the back of the machine and saw there were 2 power cords. One for the machine itself and one from the machine to the tray. I checked and the plug, which was only inches off the ground, was loose
Only conclusion I could reach was the cleaning crew had whacked it with the vacuum and slightly jarred it loose even though by looking at it you wouldn't have noticed it.
Hardly. If you have the money to pay for your own healthcare, then there is no need for you to have insurance. Or rather, be forced to pay for insurance that you wouldn't use anyway.
People who can't afford to pay for insurance can still pay, though not the full amount. It's called a payment plan. It would go a long way to stopping people from going to the hospital simply because they have a cold.
The word you are looking for is socialism. Or better yet, No Child Left Behind.
That said, you can argue healthcare works on the same proinciple. Those of us who are healthy and don't use medical services have our money diverted to prop up the weak (and accident prone).
So if you support healthcare for all, then you have to be for every cable channel as well, even if you don't watch them.
Yes. Effectively what these wingbats want is a class system whereby only certain people get benefits. These are the same people who protested against blacks marrying whites because "it's against God's will" and other such crap such as separate but equal education.
What's truly funny (in a non-ha ha way) is these are the same people who talk so much about the freedoms of this country, how the Constitution is so great, the evils of Islam, how a blob of cells is a person (who may be gay btw) and shouldn't be allowed to be aborted, yet then go about and do the exact same thing they rail about happening in other countries or try to ignore what the Constitution says.
It's like this, either everyone gets the same rights regardless of their genetic composition, or we start having a stratified society like India (which, while outlawing the practice, still has a series of societal classes) in which certain people are only allowed certain rights. If that is the case, then we need to rewrite the Constitution because currently the Fourteenth Amendment provides equal protection for everyone regardless of their genetic structure :
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. (emphasis mine)
There are 100 planets within 30 light years of us.
The issue isn't the number of planets, the issue is whether they are habitable for us. I don't know about you, but while I prefer my temps on the slightly warm side, I don't fancy living on a planet where the normal daily temp is 300C.
Nor do I wish to attempt to live on a planet without either water or some semblance of soil.
Finally, 30 lights years is only near compared to the overall distance to everything else in the universe. Even if you achieve speed 1/10 the speed of light, you are looking at a time to travel of 300 years, minimum. That's assuming you instantly achieve that speed. However, instantly accelerating to that speed from a standstill tends to do bad things to the human body such as squish it into a fine paste (Star Trek and Star Wars aside).
Then there is the issue of supplying yourself and your offspring for those centuries and hoping that during your travel you don't run into a grain of sand or other space debris which would turn you into swiss cheese.
Others more knowledgeable than I have been thinking about this idea for decades and can give you encyclopedias on what is involved in long-term space travel. Imagine the number of books/manuals/whatever that were needed just to get three guys to the Moon and back. Now multiply that out by an order of magnitude.
As an aside, I've been contemplating attempting to write a book on this subject and came to the conclusion it's easier to bypass the travel mess and just go about describing the conflict that will ensue between the offspring of the travelers 300 or so years after the landings. Think Science v. Religion but on a planetary scale with the usual SiFi bent. (And now tell me what I already know. That other, more talented, writers have already done this.)
No time wasted on driving or wandering through the store.
Yes, because getting out in the world is a horrible thing. Congratulations on contributing to the idea that those in the tech field live in basements and are pasty white.
And yes, I don't need a self driving car. I'm not a lazy, incompetent git who thinks driving like they're from the ghetto while holding their cell phone in one hand while trying to text isn't endangering those around them.
I don't mind driving. It's the idiots around me that make it annoying. If people would use one iota of common sense, the vast majority of issues would be resolved.
Instead, we're trying to find a technical solution to a human problem when if the humans would use their supposed intelligence, this wouldn't be an issue.
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who take any available job and try to work their way up, but opportunities never appear.
Yeah, this story shouldn't be used as representative of immigrants being better entrepreneurs. Had this guy come here and started the firm on his own, THAT would have been a good story.
Here, he happened to come into contact with someone who needed someone to help them and took a chance. This guy then used the money he earned there to parlay it into a business he most likely would not have been able to start otherwise.
It's a good story, not trying to knock this guy, but when hacks like Forbes try to show the spirit of entrepreneurship and capitalism is alive and well, they always seem to leave out the part where that person got a lucky break or windfall through no effort on their own.
Facebook, for as much as I detest it, is a good example of entrepreneurship. Zuckerberg might have had the inkling from the twins, but it was he who saw it through to the bitter end and made the company what it is.
and our 2 gigabyte quotas.
You couldn't manage with 2 gigs? WTF are you doing? Let me guess, you're one of those who saves the email with the attachment rather than saving the attachment and deleting the email.
I tell people where I work, you have your email quota (set by another agency) and you get 1 pst file of 2 gigs. If you can't manage your email with that amount space, you're doing something wrong.
When they follow my suggestion, it's amazing how much space they suddenly have.
And before those of you start whining about how space is cheap, it costs about 1 penny per email per person per day to maintain. That's storage space, manpower to manage the space, backups and electricity to keep everything running. Multiply out the potentially millions of emails in an organization by that cost and you'll see why deleting emails and saving the attachment is the correct path.
When they come across a groups of chimps smaller than them they slaughter them
I saw that one time on some special. There was a small group of chimps, 4 I think, who climbed up trees and surrounded a monkey. The monkey kept jumping from tree limb to tree limb trying to escape but in the end, the chimps caught him. The next thing they did was beat the bugger against the tree until it was dead and then ate him.
So, we have planning (I want to eat that monkey), group coordination (you go there, I'll go here), intent (we're going to kill that guy) with an overall end point (we get to eat meat).
Maybe not the brightest of the apes, but most definitely intelligent.
only that this study was far from conclusive.
Fine, this study was not conclusive. How about we add in this study (2008), the same comment from the Mayo Clinic, this study (2012) or this one (2012).
They all say the same thing: getting dirty as a kid and growing up in a rural environment reduces ones vulnerabilities to infections and afflictions. It's called the hygiene hypothesis and makes perfect sense when the evidence is examined.
People, particularly kids, who grow in more sterile environments (constantly using hand sanitizers, over using antibiotics, keeping everything spotless) on the whole, have more allergies and other issues than those who don't go OCD or, if you prefer, Monk.
Not sure how much more evidence you need when it's staring you in the face.
Here's the really fun part; if you wanted to turn the table on Heartland, you could develop an ad using Hitler, saying he ignored the evidence until it was too late, then use the same metaphor for climate change but making a point to include Heartland Institute as the deniers.
Oh the howls that would ensue but it would prevent them from using the folks listed above and force them to come out and whine about being lambasted, thus making them explain how climate change isn't happening and showing them for the shills they are.
They would also have to explain why it was acceptable for them to use Kaczynski et al but not ok for someone to use Hitler as a reference to their denial.
Yeah, I like making people squirm by using their own actions and words against them.
Come back in 12.7 billion years and I'll let you know.
The green t-shirt would feel depressed because it only got 4 likes.
:(
And if I had a Facebook account, I would be one of the ones to Like it.
I once found an ultra-bright yellow shirt from Izod at a store that was going out of business. It was nearly as bright as the noonday sun and I wanted it. Unfortunately, it was only just that shirt and it was in an XL size (I'm a small) so I couldn't get it.
I have searched every store I go in, including outlets, trying to find that shirt, but to no avail. It would have a glorious day as I walked around my work, people shielding their eyes as I walked by, and it would have been even worse (read, better) outside on a sunny day.
That shirt would have been one of my prized possessions.
If this goes through, does this mean that providers such as Comcast, Verizon, et al, who both provide the physical means of communications and who also offer the services described in the article, will now be treated as telecommunication companies, subject to all the rules and regulations therein?
If so, does that mean we can finally get competition for broadband without those companies wanting to charge exorbitant rates to competitors for line usage?
I don't want integration. I want my radio to be my radio and my GPS (if I had a GPS) to be my GPS. I don't want co-mingling of technology.
Haven't we learned anything from Battlestar Galactica? You don't network everything. You keep things separate.
Or, if you snerk at that example, haven't we learned anything from Unix/Linux where each piece does it's thing, and ONLY it's thing?
We've seen what an absolute shitfest things become when we try to make things "new and improved", "Now with more features you have to look at and try to decipher while driving!" Hey Ford, how's that wonderful technological tour de force radio and navigation interface working out?
Engineers and developers need to get their heads out of their asses and go back to the ultimate rule: KISS
Just get the Nazis to design your engines.
but organic food has more nutrition
Bullshit. There is no nutritional difference between organic food and non-organic food. That is just a marketing ploy by the organic growers. Study after study, real studies, not ones done by the organic organizations themselves, have shown there is no difference in nutritional values.
phytoallexin made in response to mold that is the raw material the body uses to kill tumor cells
Phytoallexin is made IN plants in response to physical, biological or chemical stress, not just mold. It is essentially a plants white blood cells (to use a very basic description). So far there is no evidence that the human body uses phytoallexin's to fight tumors. Testing is being done to see if cruciferae plants, which make this compound, can be used in cancer fighting techniques.
This is one of the reasons cancer has shot up since WWII when they began using synthetic fungicides
Or maybe because people are living longer and cancer is a natural function of the body as we age. Studies have shown no conclusive link to cancer and pesticides, though some have hinted at links.
Let me guess, you subscribe to Kevin Trudeau and his "secret" remedies to cure cancer and arthritis.
it makes me feel nauseous.
To quote Sheldon:
You also made a common grammatical mistake, you said nauseous when you meant nauseated. But go on.
Math is logically consistent in itself,
Math can't be that logical if you can use imaginary numbers to solve problems.
this would also clear out considerable space from the average bookstore's health section.
Trudeau would have to get a real job rather than claiming "The Man" is trying to keep "free" cancer cures secret from the public and harassing him.
After all, Big Government is in cahoots with Big Pharma so people are bled dry using tested and approved medicines rather than "vitamin" pills to cure cancer.
I've been saying for a while now (post-9/11) that the members of the former KGB must be laughing their heads off when they have their yearly get togethers.
All those years, those hundreds of billions (trillions?) of dollars we spent trying to bring down the "evil empire", espousing how free we were, how we didn't have to worry about the government listening in on our phone conversations, reading our mail, not having to worry about the police being able to walk into our houses at any time just to see if we're doing anything wrong.
The same people who harped on this (yeah Gingrich, I'm looking at you) are now the same people pushing every day to quash the last remnants of the freedoms as written in the Constitution. They want a national ID, just like the former Soviet Union. They want to track who you talk to, just like the former Soviet Union. Track where you go and who you associate with? Same as the former Soviet Union.
The 9/11 attacks were a wet dream come true for both the intelligence communities and more specifically, the right side of the Republican party. The attacks gave them the excuse they needed to strip away rights all in the name of protecting the nation (sound familiar?).
Yet, when one brings up these obvious similarities, you're un-American. Do you want to be killed by terrorists? If you have nothing to hide, why can't you just follow the (new) rules?
We've now come full circle and have become that which we despised. Congrats Newt, Hatch, and the rest of the lot of fascists. You've gone over to the dark side and have drug this country down with you.
And also, the Internet is mystical??!!!
Yes, it is. Just because you or I grew up with the Net and have a good (if not spectacular) understanding of how it works, does not mean everyone, particularly those of my, or his, parents age understand it. To them it is mystical.
Put another way, when the "lost" tribe of the Amazon sees a plane or helicopter, to them it's mystical. How does that big silver bird stay up there without flapping its wings?
You and I know how it works, but they don't. They haven't grown up in the trappings of modern society. The same with this guys father. He didn't grow up with BBS, programming or anything else related to how modern telecommunications work.
It's this attitude which ticks me off when dealing with (some) people in the IT world. To them, everything is ho hum and they condescend to those who don't grok whatever the subject is. I'm sure if someone came along and started talking about a subject which you know nothing about, or care to know about, and they started rattling off this and that, to you it would seem mystical because you have no frame of reference.
It's one thing to make fun of people who, after repeatedly being told what to do or not do, still make the same computer mistake. It's quite another to go after people who admit they are ignorant of a subject. At least they're being honest about what they know and don't know.
there will always be the crazy old cat lady with her collection of Disney VHS tapes ...
I may not be a crazy old cat lady, but I do own a cat* and have a VCR I use to record that oddball show. I still like to go to Ikea (though the two closest are 1.5 hours away from me [different directions]) and did buy a fantastic tv stand from them over a decade ago which weighs a ton and has no issues holding up my 36" tube tv.
* As I tell people, my cat is better behaved and listens better than a vast majority of people I either work with or come into contact with on any given day.
Bender: Being with you guys is the best time I've ever had. Hey, a suicide booth! So long, suckers!
Fry: That's not a suicide booth, that's just an ordinary phone booth.
Leela: What were they for?
Fry: In New York, public restrooms.
Leela: I need to stop for a moment.
While no longer technically helpdesk, a vast part of my job is spent doing the job of our helpdesk and solving the world's problems. These are a few of my oddballs.
1
A person at a field office could no log on to the Staples site. She contacted Staples who said her cookies must have been deleted which is why her information no longer auto-populated but they reset her password and sent her the information. She still couldn't log in.
I looked at the email that had been sent to her and something clicked in. I asked her if she hadn't transposed the company ID and her ID when logging in. As soon as I said this she started (nicely) cursing under her breath. Sure enough, with those two items switched, she got in with no problem. She all but begged me not to ever tell anyone about this, even when I was completing the ticket to close it. I put in some vague information about possible web site issues but did mark the ticket as 'Education Required'.
2
Whenever I tell someone to open their C: drive, I tell them to go to My Computer (similar to the one story). The only difference is I tell them it's the My Computer icon which is usually located in the upper left corner of the screen. So far, that bit of communication is all that is needed to get them on the right path.
3
I was working to streamline the process by which a visually impaired employee would receive documents from various offices. His screen reading software had issues with certain pdf documents. I finally got all involved to send him Word documents instead.
However, during this conversation, I had remoted into a different person's pc to look at where the documents were being sent from. This person asked me how I knew the documents I was looking at were pdfs. I moved the mouse to the Adobe icon in front of the document and explained this means it's a pdf. I then moved to the end of the document name and said, "See this .pdf extension at the end of the name? That also means it's a pdf document."
I then showed her what Word document icons look like for comparison.
4
A printer was no longer showing it had a high capacity, tray 4. Everything printed fine, it just wouldn't pull from tray 4.
After turning the machine off and on, hoping to reset it, someone mentioned the light for the tray no longer lit. That got me thinking.
I looked at the back of the machine and saw there were 2 power cords. One for the machine itself and one from the machine to the tray. I checked and the plug, which was only inches off the ground, was loose
Only conclusion I could reach was the cleaning crew had whacked it with the vacuum and slightly jarred it loose even though by looking at it you wouldn't have noticed it.
Without healthcare, people die.
Hardly. If you have the money to pay for your own healthcare, then there is no need for you to have insurance. Or rather, be forced to pay for insurance that you wouldn't use anyway.
People who can't afford to pay for insurance can still pay, though not the full amount. It's called a payment plan. It would go a long way to stopping people from going to the hospital simply because they have a cold.
This sounds suspiciously like communism.
The word you are looking for is socialism. Or better yet, No Child Left Behind.
That said, you can argue healthcare works on the same proinciple. Those of us who are healthy and don't use medical services have our money diverted to prop up the weak (and accident prone).
So if you support healthcare for all, then you have to be for every cable channel as well, even if you don't watch them.
would that be better?
Yes. Effectively what these wingbats want is a class system whereby only certain people get benefits. These are the same people who protested against blacks marrying whites because "it's against God's will" and other such crap such as separate but equal education.
What's truly funny (in a non-ha ha way) is these are the same people who talk so much about the freedoms of this country, how the Constitution is so great, the evils of Islam, how a blob of cells is a person (who may be gay btw) and shouldn't be allowed to be aborted, yet then go about and do the exact same thing they rail about happening in other countries or try to ignore what the Constitution says.
It's like this, either everyone gets the same rights regardless of their genetic composition, or we start having a stratified society like India (which, while outlawing the practice, still has a series of societal classes) in which certain people are only allowed certain rights. If that is the case, then we need to rewrite the Constitution because currently the Fourteenth Amendment provides equal protection for everyone regardless of their genetic structure :
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. (emphasis mine)
There are 100 planets within 30 light years of us.
The issue isn't the number of planets, the issue is whether they are habitable for us. I don't know about you, but while I prefer my temps on the slightly warm side, I don't fancy living on a planet where the normal daily temp is 300C.
Nor do I wish to attempt to live on a planet without either water or some semblance of soil.
Finally, 30 lights years is only near compared to the overall distance to everything else in the universe. Even if you achieve speed 1/10 the speed of light, you are looking at a time to travel of 300 years, minimum. That's assuming you instantly achieve that speed. However, instantly accelerating to that speed from a standstill tends to do bad things to the human body such as squish it into a fine paste (Star Trek and Star Wars aside).
Then there is the issue of supplying yourself and your offspring for those centuries and hoping that during your travel you don't run into a grain of sand or other space debris which would turn you into swiss cheese.
Others more knowledgeable than I have been thinking about this idea for decades and can give you encyclopedias on what is involved in long-term space travel. Imagine the number of books/manuals/whatever that were needed just to get three guys to the Moon and back. Now multiply that out by an order of magnitude.
As an aside, I've been contemplating attempting to write a book on this subject and came to the conclusion it's easier to bypass the travel mess and just go about describing the conflict that will ensue between the offspring of the travelers 300 or so years after the landings. Think Science v. Religion but on a planetary scale with the usual SiFi bent. (And now tell me what I already know. That other, more talented, writers have already done this.)
No time wasted on driving or wandering through the store.
Yes, because getting out in the world is a horrible thing. Congratulations on contributing to the idea that those in the tech field live in basements and are pasty white.
Yes, I am special. I can write correct English.
And yes, I don't need a self driving car. I'm not a lazy, incompetent git who thinks driving like they're from the ghetto while holding their cell phone in one hand while trying to text isn't endangering those around them.
I don't mind driving. It's the idiots around me that make it annoying. If people would use one iota of common sense, the vast majority of issues would be resolved.
Instead, we're trying to find a technical solution to a human problem when if the humans would use their supposed intelligence, this wouldn't be an issue.