Unfortunately, I posted above so I can't mod you up.
I'm on a mailing list for people who have/had the kind of cancer I had. I've noticed a definite trend between the Canadian and US list members (there are only a couple from anywhere else). The Canadian members, with only one exception I've seen so far, have to wait about two to three months between diagnosis and starting chemo.
In the US, the average wait is under a month. I personally went from the xray where they looked for pneumonia and instead found tumors, through the scans, biopsy, and blood tests and all, to my first chemo treatment, in two weeks flat. It turned out my cancer had already metastatized and was trying to take over my lungs; if I'd had to wait 2-3 months for chemo I'd be dead. Now, I'm assuming that places like Canada and the UK aren't going to make someone wait if it is life-threatening like that, but the fact remains that cancer spreads and gets continually harder to treat. In the case of the type I had, a month is unlikely to make a difference in staging, but three months certainly could. And being a higher stage means you have to get more treatment, which (aside from costing your government/insurance more money) puts you at higher risk for secondary problems later.
Overall, even though my insurance wasn't great and I still had to pay 20%, I'm glad I was at least able to get timely care so that it didn't get any worse. And many of the hospitals were happy to write off the 20% as a charity writeoff; public hospitals are required to do so many of those a year anyhow. (Unfortunately, my main oncologist, with whom I had the biggest bills, wasn't one of those, so I do still owe quite a bit that I'm slowly paying off. But it's not wreaking financial havoc or anything.)
And if there is, you're just about out of luck anyway since many carriers won't cover existing conditions.
Many companies only exclude pre-existing conditions if you are without insurance for 30 days or more before signing up with them. If you keep continuous coverage, you're fine.
Of course, that doesn't mean they have to agree to cover you at all if you have a pre-existing condition, but that's another story.
I agree that the wife should have good coverage at least for a while yet, and a comprehensive plan for the baby is essential. Personally, I wouldn't recommend a catastrophic plan to anyone, but that's only because my random cancer diagnosis at 24 has left me super-paranoid about insurance.:) Most people aren't going to be that kind of anomaly, but it doesn't hurt to remember that it happens.
In other words, the more a company focuses on beating its competitors, rather than on the bottom line, the worse it is likely to do.
Interesting. Psychology studies have shown that when you compare people who have performance goals (focused on performing at a certain level to win outside approval or rewards, or avoid punishments) with those who have mastery goals (focused on mastering a task in order to learn, grow, reach personal goals, etc rather than to gain outside approval), the people with performance goals do much worse in the face of challenge. They adopt self-defeating behaviors and give up quickly, whereas the mastery-oriented people keep working at it and modify their strategies in useful ways.
I guess since companies are made up of a bunch of people, it makes sense that on some levels they work the same way as those people work. If they're focused on beating the outside competition, they falter, whereas if they're focused on improving themselves (even if that's profit-wise, since that's what's important to a company), they prosper.
A week or so ago, I got to preview the Wii at a Gamestop. The guy in front of me was trying to play excitetruck while holding the remote with the buttons facing him, instead of facing upwards. It was kinda painful to watch, but I didn't want to embarrass him by saying anything.
But in all seriousness, not liking Safari is no reason not to get a Mac. Since I don't have 10.4 at home so I can't use the newest Safari anyhow (and old Safari really sucks) I use Firefox almost exclusively on my emac.
Yes, I'm an incredibly chauvinistic 27-year-old woman. What I said probably equally applies to middle-aged men and women, and to 80-year-olds, and to the few teenagers who have never touched a console game in their life. My experience just happened to be with my MIL a couple weeks ago, and she's a middle-aged woman. Yes, there are some who can play console games just fine - but what percentage? I defy you to show me a statistic stating that middle-aged women play console games as often as twentysomethings.
Second, part of my point was that the GC controller is not just a D-pad. It's far more complex than that, so even though you only need one d-pad/analog stick plus two buttons to play Wario's Woods, you have to figure out which of the many items on the controller are the relevant ones. That's hard for someone who's never touched a game in their life.
I probably should have added a second example: A few years ago, we brought Crazy Taxi (I think it was on Dreamcast) along with a steering wheel + pedals setup over to my 70-year-old grandmother's house. Although she wouldn't even touch the games that used a regular controller, she gave CT a try and had no problem using the wheel and pedal controls. Her only downfall was that she was trying to drive well and got upset whenever she knocked over another car. But she got a hang of the control, etc much much faster than my MIL did with Wario's Woods and the GC controller, despite a much greater overall level of technophobia.
They replaced a simple controller with one that is much more complex
If you think that current controllers are simple, you haven't tried to teach a middle-aged woman to play a modern video game. When my MIL was in town, she was watching my husband and I play Animal Crossing, and within that the Wario's Woods NES puzzle game. We tried to show her how to play Wario's Woods - which only uses a couple buttons because it was designed for the NES controller. It was extremely difficult for her to remember what to press for what action, and it was only the GC's nice button layout (that makes A much larger and easier to press) that made it possible at all. If she had to play a game that used all the buttons, she'd just give up.
What's that? You don't care if middle-aged women can play video games? Well, then, that's the difference between you and Nintendo.
Ha ha, yes! Not just seeing the blocks, but actually playing through real moves. I got my entire dorm floor addicted to it in college, too, even though the world had moved all the way on to Dreamcasts by then.
The only reason I was scrolling through all the comments was to see if anyone had mentioned Tetris Attack yet. Most addicting game ever. Hopefully they'll put it on the Wii virtual console so it can have a new life, because my SNES won't live forever.
My other picks would be Mario Kart, Soul Calibur, and Bubble Bobble (which, admittedly, I had forgotten about until someone mentioned it above).
a) DVDs vs tapes in general is a different situation. That's more comparing the PS2 or Gamecube to the PS3 or Wii - new generation of technology, of course it will eclipse the old. Back in the early 80s, did you have to buy a VHS soon after buying your Betamax because you couldn't find new movies on Beta anymore? Some of us would rather not have to (or can't) buy expensive new electronics every year.
b) I never said you should buy what your friends buy or any of that crap. I was just saying that it's one reason why people might be interested in the information. I may still decide to buy a PS3 even if it looks like it's going to flop because I must have one or two games, but just because I know which one I want doesn't mean I won't be at all interested in what the broader picture looks like. Might give me a heads up to save up for the next console I'll have to buy once I run out of games for this one. Or, if I were debating between two and thought they'd both be great, it might give me a reason to pick one over the other.
c) Or I could just think it's fun to read this shit. And not so fun to read the rantings people who think it's their place to tell me I'm stupid for thinking it's fun to read.
I don't know if you can play a PS3 anywhere, but I played Excite Truck on the Wii at a Gamestop last weekend. It was pretty fun, aside from the fact that I'm really bad at racing games and the new controller didn't make me magically better.
It's nice that you can keep watching your old shows over and over again, but what happens when you want to watch a new movie?
The one reason I can see for people to care is that it can matter whether or not you picked the winning pony. It'll suck for me if I get a Wii because I want to play Zelda and Super Mario Galaxy, but nobody else buys one, and so two years from now there are no good new games coming out for it. So instead of spending $50/pop on new games, I have to spend a couple hundred on another console. (This is all purely hypothetical, of course, since I don't pay launch prices for either consoles or games.)
Since they're all available at the same time, it makes sense for people who are deciding which one to buy to be at least somewhat interested in how well each is likely to do, because it might have an impact on things down the road. And not everyone has the cash to buy a new console every two years.
But you could argue that that's likely to be balanced out by the non-porn members-only pages. Ever tried to google something in Lexis-Nexis? (I doubt they included scholar.google.com in this search.)
However, it is very difficult to find an original Earthbound cart!!!
It's not hard at all, there are always several on eBay. But you do have to be willing to pay $40+ for a SNES game, which I haven't been able to bring myself to do yet.
My SNES lived in a minivan for several years (hooked up to a TV in the middle console for playing in the backseat), having god knows what spilled on it all the time, getting tromped on my kids, etc. It's still alive and kicking, and I've had it for about 12 years total. Not so pretty, but works fine.
It is much harder (while still possible) to find a scientist that supports "coexistence".
I'm not sure what you mean by this, but a good percentage of scientists believe in God. I would assume that that would mean that they consider God and their scientific theories to "coexist", or else they are very good at handling cognitive dissonance.
And I suppose it's true that science doesn't "need" God, but maybe that's just because they haven't exhausted all the other theories yet. Where did the matter come from that comprised the tiny, dense point universe before the big bang? Right now, any answer to that question is equally religious to saying "God put it there."
A firsthand source *can* edit, but they need to cite the other places their research has been published. Preferably, of course, peer-reviewed sources, but if it's not empirical research and you've written extensively in magazines and published books on something it would probably be okay. This guy only had one book he'd written, which has been out of print for years. Anyone can publish a book on any crackpot theory they come up with. Research needs to go through a peer-review process to be taken seriously.
If he had published work related to his theory in several journals in addition to a recent book, and cited all of those, it wouldn't be an issue. If you don't require citations like that, then anyone can claim to have done research showing anything.
As the other poster said, the check on power is that if the judge is making bad decisions, they won't get re-elected.
The problem is with the Supreme Court - appointed by the President with the Senate's okay, for life. Unless they're doing something so egregiously wrong that they face impeachment, the only check on their power is a constitutional amendment. Which takes something like 3/4 of Congress and 2/3 of the states (I may have mixed up those two fractions) to approve.
Sorry, just had one thing to add to put the argument in the same terms you used:
just because giving you one of my kidneys will save your life, doesn't mean that I should be forced to hand that kidney over.
But once you've made the choice to give your kidney, you can't demand it back a couple years later and claim that the recipient is forcing you to live without a kidney. You already made the choice, and you have to live with whatever consequences that choice has. Similarly, when a woman makes the choice to have intercourse, she has to live with the consequences of that choice, which can include housing another human being inside her body for nine months. If she regrets that choice, why should the other human being pay for it with their life?
(Again, I don't count a blob of cells as another human being worthy of consideration in this equation. But some people do, and if you're going to argue against them you have to argue against what they're saying, not what you think they should be saying.)
The most obvious argument against what you're saying is that, unless a woman was raped, no one forced her to get pregnant in the first place. Therefore, no one is forcing her to carry it to term. When she had sex (particularly unprotected sex), she made a decision that carries consequences. If she didn't want the consequences, she could have made a different decision. Instead, she chose to have sex, and that is a choice that could include housing another human in her body. Nobody forced her to make that choice.
The bottom line is that the Government can not force a woman to carry a pregnancy to term. The Government has no right to tell anybody what they can do with their body.
Now, I am pro-choice. I want to preface this comment with this so that you don't dismiss me as some right-wing nutjob.
That said, your comments do not argue against the arguments against abortion. The main argument against abortion is that the woman is not choosing what to do to her body, she is choosing what to do with someone else's body. You are not allowed to kill someone else because they are inconvenient to you, and this extends to people who happen to live inside you at the moment. If you do not want someone living inside you, do not have sex. The crux of the disagreement is whether or not the fetus counts as someone else - the extreme right wing says that as soon as that DNA is combined, a new person is formed, even if that person is one cell. The extreme left wing claims that until the child is breathing and eating on its own, it's a part of the mother's body even though it has different DNA and can act independently.
Personally, I am not on the extreme left here. I am an animal welfare activist, and so am committed to reducing suffering wherever it happens in the world. I've come to realize that once a fetus can suffer, it would be hypocritical of me to completely ignore that suffering because it is incovenient, when I'm so adamant about preventing the suffering of dogs and cats and rats. Now, the nervous system isn't developed fully enough to experience pain until the 6th month, so early-term abortions don't really bother me. But I do feel that third trimester abortions (which are already rare and almost never happen for a non-medical reason) *should* be limited to medical emergencies. The suffering of the fetus and the suffering of the mother have to be weighed, taking into account the fact that the mother is more self-aware and has a more highly developed nervous system that is even better at feeling pain than the fetus's - and that if the mother's health is in enough jeopardy, you may lose the fetus anyhow with no benefit to the mother.
If we could humanely euthanize a fetus, then it wouldn't be an issue. But any kind of injection would be passed onto the mother as well, so we are left with abortion methods that *will* cause some measure of pain to a late-term fetus.
That's just my take on it. I thought I was a freak at first, but I've found a surprising number of liberal animal welfare activists, including some who have had abortions, who feel the same way.
This works pretty well. In 9 years, I've only used Windows for one job for a year, and then it was pretty much Word and web browsing. I haven't done admin stuff on a Windows machine at all in that time. After the first few years, I really did forget how it all worked, and had to start telling my mom "Sorry, but I don't know how to fix Windows anymore." At first it annoyed her, but eventually she realized that I was telling the truth and stopped asking as often.
My sister eventually got a Mac, and I could certainly help her with any problems - but she hasn't had any. So my mom is finally convinced, and when her Dell laptop conks out she's getting a Mac next. Actually, now she uses a Mac at work, and I have been able to help her with a few "switcher" type issues.
Especially considering that they don't break out "somewhat likely" from the stronger responses in their statistics. Many people aren't going to completely discount a product the first time they see it - they'll say somewhat likely and then make a real decision when they have more information. The 58% of iPod owners could be 50% somewhat likelies and 8% stronger responses, for all we know.
I'm not saying the Zune won't take *any* business away from the iPod. I'm sure it'll make a dent in the 75-80%. But assuming that the fact that over half of iPod owners won't dismiss it out of hand means that just as many will buy it is kind of silly.
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I'm on a mailing list for people who have/had the kind of cancer I had. I've noticed a definite trend between the Canadian and US list members (there are only a couple from anywhere else). The Canadian members, with only one exception I've seen so far, have to wait about two to three months between diagnosis and starting chemo.
In the US, the average wait is under a month. I personally went from the xray where they looked for pneumonia and instead found tumors, through the scans, biopsy, and blood tests and all, to my first chemo treatment, in two weeks flat. It turned out my cancer had already metastatized and was trying to take over my lungs; if I'd had to wait 2-3 months for chemo I'd be dead. Now, I'm assuming that places like Canada and the UK aren't going to make someone wait if it is life-threatening like that, but the fact remains that cancer spreads and gets continually harder to treat. In the case of the type I had, a month is unlikely to make a difference in staging, but three months certainly could. And being a higher stage means you have to get more treatment, which (aside from costing your government/insurance more money) puts you at higher risk for secondary problems later.
Overall, even though my insurance wasn't great and I still had to pay 20%, I'm glad I was at least able to get timely care so that it didn't get any worse. And many of the hospitals were happy to write off the 20% as a charity writeoff; public hospitals are required to do so many of those a year anyhow. (Unfortunately, my main oncologist, with whom I had the biggest bills, wasn't one of those, so I do still owe quite a bit that I'm slowly paying off. But it's not wreaking financial havoc or anything.)
Many companies only exclude pre-existing conditions if you are without insurance for 30 days or more before signing up with them. If you keep continuous coverage, you're fine.
Of course, that doesn't mean they have to agree to cover you at all if you have a pre-existing condition, but that's another story.
I agree that the wife should have good coverage at least for a while yet, and a comprehensive plan for the baby is essential. Personally, I wouldn't recommend a catastrophic plan to anyone, but that's only because my random cancer diagnosis at 24 has left me super-paranoid about insurance. :) Most people aren't going to be that kind of anomaly, but it doesn't hurt to remember that it happens.
A commonly-cited article on this is Dweck & Leggett, 1988.
Interesting. Psychology studies have shown that when you compare people who have performance goals (focused on performing at a certain level to win outside approval or rewards, or avoid punishments) with those who have mastery goals (focused on mastering a task in order to learn, grow, reach personal goals, etc rather than to gain outside approval), the people with performance goals do much worse in the face of challenge. They adopt self-defeating behaviors and give up quickly, whereas the mastery-oriented people keep working at it and modify their strategies in useful ways.
I guess since companies are made up of a bunch of people, it makes sense that on some levels they work the same way as those people work. If they're focused on beating the outside competition, they falter, whereas if they're focused on improving themselves (even if that's profit-wise, since that's what's important to a company), they prosper.
A week or so ago, I got to preview the Wii at a Gamestop. The guy in front of me was trying to play excitetruck while holding the remote with the buttons facing him, instead of facing upwards. It was kinda painful to watch, but I didn't want to embarrass him by saying anything.
But in all seriousness, not liking Safari is no reason not to get a Mac. Since I don't have 10.4 at home so I can't use the newest Safari anyhow (and old Safari really sucks) I use Firefox almost exclusively on my emac.
Second, part of my point was that the GC controller is not just a D-pad. It's far more complex than that, so even though you only need one d-pad/analog stick plus two buttons to play Wario's Woods, you have to figure out which of the many items on the controller are the relevant ones. That's hard for someone who's never touched a game in their life.
I probably should have added a second example: A few years ago, we brought Crazy Taxi (I think it was on Dreamcast) along with a steering wheel + pedals setup over to my 70-year-old grandmother's house. Although she wouldn't even touch the games that used a regular controller, she gave CT a try and had no problem using the wheel and pedal controls. Her only downfall was that she was trying to drive well and got upset whenever she knocked over another car. But she got a hang of the control, etc much much faster than my MIL did with Wario's Woods and the GC controller, despite a much greater overall level of technophobia.
If you think that current controllers are simple, you haven't tried to teach a middle-aged woman to play a modern video game. When my MIL was in town, she was watching my husband and I play Animal Crossing, and within that the Wario's Woods NES puzzle game. We tried to show her how to play Wario's Woods - which only uses a couple buttons because it was designed for the NES controller. It was extremely difficult for her to remember what to press for what action, and it was only the GC's nice button layout (that makes A much larger and easier to press) that made it possible at all. If she had to play a game that used all the buttons, she'd just give up.
What's that? You don't care if middle-aged women can play video games? Well, then, that's the difference between you and Nintendo.
Ha ha, yes! Not just seeing the blocks, but actually playing through real moves. I got my entire dorm floor addicted to it in college, too, even though the world had moved all the way on to Dreamcasts by then.
My other picks would be Mario Kart, Soul Calibur, and Bubble Bobble (which, admittedly, I had forgotten about until someone mentioned it above).
That's how my husband and I play just about every video game. :) Collaborative one-player games are fun.
b) I never said you should buy what your friends buy or any of that crap. I was just saying that it's one reason why people might be interested in the information. I may still decide to buy a PS3 even if it looks like it's going to flop because I must have one or two games, but just because I know which one I want doesn't mean I won't be at all interested in what the broader picture looks like. Might give me a heads up to save up for the next console I'll have to buy once I run out of games for this one. Or, if I were debating between two and thought they'd both be great, it might give me a reason to pick one over the other.
c) Or I could just think it's fun to read this shit. And not so fun to read the rantings people who think it's their place to tell me I'm stupid for thinking it's fun to read.
I don't know if you can play a PS3 anywhere, but I played Excite Truck on the Wii at a Gamestop last weekend. It was pretty fun, aside from the fact that I'm really bad at racing games and the new controller didn't make me magically better.
The one reason I can see for people to care is that it can matter whether or not you picked the winning pony. It'll suck for me if I get a Wii because I want to play Zelda and Super Mario Galaxy, but nobody else buys one, and so two years from now there are no good new games coming out for it. So instead of spending $50/pop on new games, I have to spend a couple hundred on another console. (This is all purely hypothetical, of course, since I don't pay launch prices for either consoles or games.)
Since they're all available at the same time, it makes sense for people who are deciding which one to buy to be at least somewhat interested in how well each is likely to do, because it might have an impact on things down the road. And not everyone has the cash to buy a new console every two years.
But you could argue that that's likely to be balanced out by the non-porn members-only pages. Ever tried to google something in Lexis-Nexis? (I doubt they included scholar.google.com in this search.)
It's not hard at all, there are always several on eBay. But you do have to be willing to pay $40+ for a SNES game, which I haven't been able to bring myself to do yet.
My SNES lived in a minivan for several years (hooked up to a TV in the middle console for playing in the backseat), having god knows what spilled on it all the time, getting tromped on my kids, etc. It's still alive and kicking, and I've had it for about 12 years total. Not so pretty, but works fine.
I'm not sure what you mean by this, but a good percentage of scientists believe in God. I would assume that that would mean that they consider God and their scientific theories to "coexist", or else they are very good at handling cognitive dissonance.
And I suppose it's true that science doesn't "need" God, but maybe that's just because they haven't exhausted all the other theories yet. Where did the matter come from that comprised the tiny, dense point universe before the big bang? Right now, any answer to that question is equally religious to saying "God put it there."
If he had published work related to his theory in several journals in addition to a recent book, and cited all of those, it wouldn't be an issue. If you don't require citations like that, then anyone can claim to have done research showing anything.
The problem is with the Supreme Court - appointed by the President with the Senate's okay, for life. Unless they're doing something so egregiously wrong that they face impeachment, the only check on their power is a constitutional amendment. Which takes something like 3/4 of Congress and 2/3 of the states (I may have mixed up those two fractions) to approve.
just because giving you one of my kidneys will save your life, doesn't mean that I should be forced to hand that kidney over.
But once you've made the choice to give your kidney, you can't demand it back a couple years later and claim that the recipient is forcing you to live without a kidney. You already made the choice, and you have to live with whatever consequences that choice has. Similarly, when a woman makes the choice to have intercourse, she has to live with the consequences of that choice, which can include housing another human being inside her body for nine months. If she regrets that choice, why should the other human being pay for it with their life?
(Again, I don't count a blob of cells as another human being worthy of consideration in this equation. But some people do, and if you're going to argue against them you have to argue against what they're saying, not what you think they should be saying.)
The most obvious argument against what you're saying is that, unless a woman was raped, no one forced her to get pregnant in the first place. Therefore, no one is forcing her to carry it to term. When she had sex (particularly unprotected sex), she made a decision that carries consequences. If she didn't want the consequences, she could have made a different decision. Instead, she chose to have sex, and that is a choice that could include housing another human in her body. Nobody forced her to make that choice.
Now, I am pro-choice. I want to preface this comment with this so that you don't dismiss me as some right-wing nutjob.
That said, your comments do not argue against the arguments against abortion. The main argument against abortion is that the woman is not choosing what to do to her body, she is choosing what to do with someone else's body. You are not allowed to kill someone else because they are inconvenient to you, and this extends to people who happen to live inside you at the moment. If you do not want someone living inside you, do not have sex. The crux of the disagreement is whether or not the fetus counts as someone else - the extreme right wing says that as soon as that DNA is combined, a new person is formed, even if that person is one cell. The extreme left wing claims that until the child is breathing and eating on its own, it's a part of the mother's body even though it has different DNA and can act independently.
Personally, I am not on the extreme left here. I am an animal welfare activist, and so am committed to reducing suffering wherever it happens in the world. I've come to realize that once a fetus can suffer, it would be hypocritical of me to completely ignore that suffering because it is incovenient, when I'm so adamant about preventing the suffering of dogs and cats and rats. Now, the nervous system isn't developed fully enough to experience pain until the 6th month, so early-term abortions don't really bother me. But I do feel that third trimester abortions (which are already rare and almost never happen for a non-medical reason) *should* be limited to medical emergencies. The suffering of the fetus and the suffering of the mother have to be weighed, taking into account the fact that the mother is more self-aware and has a more highly developed nervous system that is even better at feeling pain than the fetus's - and that if the mother's health is in enough jeopardy, you may lose the fetus anyhow with no benefit to the mother.
If we could humanely euthanize a fetus, then it wouldn't be an issue. But any kind of injection would be passed onto the mother as well, so we are left with abortion methods that *will* cause some measure of pain to a late-term fetus.
That's just my take on it. I thought I was a freak at first, but I've found a surprising number of liberal animal welfare activists, including some who have had abortions, who feel the same way.
My sister eventually got a Mac, and I could certainly help her with any problems - but she hasn't had any. So my mom is finally convinced, and when her Dell laptop conks out she's getting a Mac next. Actually, now she uses a Mac at work, and I have been able to help her with a few "switcher" type issues.
I'm not saying the Zune won't take *any* business away from the iPod. I'm sure it'll make a dent in the 75-80%. But assuming that the fact that over half of iPod owners won't dismiss it out of hand means that just as many will buy it is kind of silly.