I've read some of the material, and I pretty much agree. Its good if you want to be able to get laid as often as possible for as little effort as possible. Its terrible if you're trying to do things like have interesting conversation or build an actual relationship with someone. And to be quite honest, sex is kinda shallow and boring if its just getting laid and not a relationship.
There are quite a few gems in the material (for example, getting out of a scarcity mentality, being able to re-frame things so that you're focusing on how to improve rather than on the rejection, etc), so I'd say its worth reading some of it. Just be skeptical and try to take away the strategies that focus on improving your mentality and confidence, and disregard the scripts and tricks to jab at the girls' self-esteem, and you will learn a lot.
I always find it amusing when people reference "The Game," as some sort of getting-laid gospel, considering Strauss ends up making the pick-up artists look like total losers by the end of the book. By the end of the book, the message seemed to be to live life, have fun, and not sweat how much you're getting laid. But that may be my interpretation of it.
It depends. It was less so at my college, but I was still told many times that CS students were those that couldn't hack EE, and were not real engineers. Of course, this was while I was taking some of the most difficult undergraduate EE courses in our college. Shocked more than one EE student to find out that a CS student was passing their EE classes.
Its not just Slashdot. A good number of people I meet personally "hate" Vista despite having not tried it. There are some that do have a Vista computer, have genuinely tried it, and do hate it (incidentally, most of these people used it on laptops, FWIW), but a lot of people are just hearing the negative buzz and watching Apple commercials, then deciding that it must suck. That was kinda the whole point of the "Mojave experiment" that people ridicule so much around here: let people try the OS without pre-conceived notion, and you get a much better response.
Of course, the whole Vista-ready debacle leaves me with no doubt that a lot of consumers were given Vista machines with hardware not suited for it, which is Microsoft's fault and probably a great deal of the "Vista sucks" hate.
Still not worth the money though, IMO. Like I said, I ditched it when I switched jobs and no longer had an MSDN. Then again, through a series of fortunate circumstances, I've never payed more than $5 for a Microsoft OS.
I can't say I ran into many issues with 32-bit software in 64-bit Windows. I had 1 problem total, with a crappy game with equally crappy anti-cheat software. I could still play the game fine, but it would kill most of my open programs. I assumed that it did some comparisons against the task-manager, and the appended text identifying 64/32 bit processes messed with it.
As a software dev, the only change I needed to make to move my code base to 64-bit was to wrap calls to a 32-bit COM object in a separate process, so that it would run in WoW. It was a trivial change. Then again, it was C#, and thus a JIT-compiled language, but if you're writing competent C/C++ code you should be able to just recompile it similarly.
Oh, and just to preempt the inevitable reply that you couldn't possibly run Vista, and by extension Windows 7, on a processor old enough to be 32-bit... I'm sure it would run fine on an Intel Core Duo processor. That processor is not all that different than my old Athlon 4200.
People with older 32-bit chip sets? Not everyone has a new computer. You do realize that most Linux distro's specifically offer 32-bit and 64-bit versions, don't you? How is that any different?
What I do know is that when I ran Vista 64 bit I was running a plethora of 32-bit applications. I do know that system-level drivers required 64-bit versions, but I had no issues finding those for my hardware. I don't anymore as I lost my MSDN subscription when my job changed, and frankly Vista isn't worth paying for when I have XP already, but it worked fine when I did.
Um, what? I'm not sure what 32-bit/64-bit dilemma you are talking about. Vista 64-bit works just fine. Vista can run 32-bit apps on a 64-bit version just fine. I can't recall if I loaded 32-bit drivers, but I believe that userland drivers can be 32-bit. The default account does not have admin privileges. You have to escalate privileges via UAC before you can access areas of the OS that require admin, unless you disable UAC. As a result of UAC, it is *trying* to eliminate the bad habits of application developers via UAC, but sadly people preferred to blame UAC popups on Microsoft instead of the shitty application developers, do it didn't pan out that way.
Pretty much every point you are taking Microsoft to task for is wrong.
Hell, thats how my future in-laws do it TODAY in Japan. The entire house didn't have heaters, they just put a kotatsu (basically a table with a blanket over it and a small heater under it, so the heat is trapped) and a small space heater in the room. They have a very small energy footprint; we tripped a breaker on accident which started a discussion on how much energy they have available to their house. It was some ridiculously low amount. When sleeping, we just slipped an electric blanket over the futon.
Of course, everyone wore sweatshirts. I didn't have one, much to their amusement. I explained that not only is the heat almost always on in American housing, in a lot of my apartments it was controlled by the building, and I couldn't even turn it off.
I'm not saying that everyone should live in freezing houses, but I bet we could collectively save energy by lowering the thermostat, wearing a sweatshirt, and using the fireplace/space heater/electric blankets.
First off, you are mixing me up with someone else. You are the only person that has replied to me in this particular thread. I am not the person who first responded to you, and only chimed in. Nowhere in this thread has someone parsed my "initial response" other than you. I am writing strongly but not angrily; any anger you are reading into this is your own interpretation.
Second, you are twisting what I am actually saying into what you think I am saying. You speak of mis-characterizations while at the same time doing exactly the same to me.
I at no time said that people should feel guilty for being successful, especially if that success was achieved at the end of hard work. What I said was that people should realize that no matter how hard you work, you do not get there completely on your own. Some people get more help than others, but at the very least you had parents that raised you. What I am saying is that one should consider that fact, and consider that some people do not have the same fortunes as others, and may never succeed despite working just as hard as others. I am saying that its important to not look down on the poor as being lazy and unmotivated, because there are a helluva lot of motivated, hard-working poor people out there. I am saying that there is some amount of social responsibility that goes with having success.
Of the wealthy people I have met, most are acutely aware of their social responsibility. They would not characterize their success as being completely of their own doing. They will point out the hard work they did, but also point out the people that stood by them and made that possible. They give to charity because they are kind and generous, and because they feel that they should give back to those who did not have the opportunities that they did. The people who talk about being self-made usually do so as an excuse to why the poor do not deserve help, at least in my experience.
I don't know where you got that I am guilty about my success. I achieved it by working my way through college, living within my means, saving, honing my skills, and constantly being on the lookout for better opportunities. I have no reason whatsoever to be guilty of that. But I also had a family that gave me a safe environment to learn and grow, specifically lived in areas with good schools, raised me to have a good work ethic, and encouraged me in my endeavor. I owe my success in part to them, and the society that enabled me to live safely and go to school.
As far as the "third world hellhole" thing, no, I don't think I would have succeeded as much because of the lack of a stable society. This is not because I am lazy and only stumbled upon my success, but because a lot of success is about having the opportunities to begin with. I could probably do well relative to the population, but relative to the population is fairly meaningless. Its extremely unlikely that I would be doing as well as I am doing now.
I find it humorous that you are trying to portray me negatively for plainly stating my living conditions. I did not due so to brag, but to counter your assertions that I am "... basically looking for excuses as to why you have not achieved your full potential by blaming people and circumstances around you that you can't control" and that I "... let someone control the direction of your life (which I can only surmise is your situation)." If you were not trying to say that I am a lazy underachiever then I apologize, but you came off that way very VERY strongly.
I do happen to give to charity, but that particular one is not on my list. I happen to be from a military family, so I am aware what the military does for this country, FYI. And since you seem to mis-characterize me, I am only pointing this out because you seem to be implying very negative things to me, and mention charity with the presumption that I do not back my words with actions. It is not my intent to brag about this.
In summary, its ok if you're done with me. You do not want to
I couldn't remember if Crohn's was fatal or not, so I googled it, and found that there is a mortality rate, albeit low if treated. I was perhaps being hyperbolic by calling it a death sentence, but left untreated it is possible to cause death. Not everyone has it at the same severity, and I'd hardly stop at calling the removal of most of the large intestine (and possibly all) simply "unpleasant."
I also don't see how its unreasonable to claim that having to pay the full cost of health insurance over the course of 2-3 months, and being severely screwed if you happen to lose your job, dramatically lessens job mobility. I appreciate that this is a resource for Huntington's sufferers and that they have more medical costs than Crohn's. But this is hardly a case of problem-fixed-job-done. Nothing can be perfect, but we can do a lot better than "Well if you jump through the appropriate hoops and pay enough money, and don't have a run of bad luck, then you should be able to keep getting treated for your illness."
Its a good step, and it dramatically reduces the risk of a job change, but it by no means lowers it to the risk of his healthier peers.
No, you haven't figured out where I am coming from at all. I am far better off than most of the population. As a matter of fact, last time I checked, I was upper-middle class, and had a decent shot of being lower-upper class. I love in a nice place in a good city, have plenty of extra cash for entertainment and travel, and don't have to worry about next month's bills. I'm in a good position in life, and its rather presumptuous of you to assume that I'm some lazy sap looking for a handout.
What you haven't figured out is that I'm trying to be honest about where my success came from instead of patting myself on the back and turning up my nose at people less fortunate than myself.
The thing is that I realize that there are a lot of people and outside circumstances that contributed to put me where I am. A large part of it was my own effort and decisions, but I also had a lot of help along the way, and that's not substantially different than a lot of people, especially people who claim to have themselves up by their own bootstraps.
When taking a close look at my life and success, and the lives and successes of others, I've come to realize that the self-made-man is myth that people use to make themselves feel better. Its used so that people can denigrate poor people as just being lazy or unethical. Its used to reassure people that those rich guys really deserve everything because they're just so much better than the rest of us. Its used so that people can turn a blind eye to their fellow humans without feeling like assholes.
What I'm saying is that people need to take a good hard look at where their success comes from instead of patting themselves on the back too hard. It might be that we realize that we do have some social responsibility, because society gave us the opportunity to grab our success. Despite my best efforts, I would not be who I am today if I grew up in Africa or some third world hell-hole.
That is where I'm coming from: an honest assessment of reality instead of an idealized myth.
Every insurance company I have dealt with ever has been so thick with bureaucracy that I try to deal with them as little as possible. I don't see how the government can be any worse. Maybe not better, but definitely not worse. At least I wouldn't have to deal with it when I'm sick and waiting for my appointment.
Are they? I used to live in Illinois, and the roads were pretty good quality. The parts that weren't were getting construction for repair or expansion. And I don't see why Obama in a federal position would have any authority over state-run road construction.
I'm talking about the post office that routinely delivers my letters, even after changing my address twice in a month. I'm talking about the post office where I can put a cheap stamp on a letter and drop it off in a box along the street, and be 99% sure that it will arrive in less than a week.
Yeah so there's some wastes of money. Its not perfect. So what? You can't tell me with a straight face that CEOs and corporate owners don't pull all of the same crap, and indulge in far worse. And yes, YOU pay for those CEO indulgences too, through higher product costs.
Something doesn't have to be perfect to be efficient and useful. The post office is efficient and useful. Its certainly good enough for all the companies that I do business with to deliver bills and documents to me.
But that isn't all that works well for me. I can drive anywhere in the United States easily and safely due to our road system. The much maligned DMV has been extremely efficient and well run in places that its been well funded (as in, the one DMV that was a hellhole was chronically under-staffed). I can eat out at restaurants with reasonable assumption that I'm not going to get food poisoning. I know what side effects any medications can have. Food I buy isn't likely to contain poisonous materials. NASA has done significant scientific research on a shoe-string budget. I went through a publicly funded education that enabled me to go through college and receive a well-paying job. I could go on, but while the government does a lot of shitty and wasteful things, it also does a lot of wonderful and efficient things.
Who payed for the education you had to get to even a low-level pizza job? Who payed for you to survive until you were old enough to hold that job? Who payed for the roads that you used to deliver that pizza? Someone else paid the pizza company to pay you to deliver that pizza. The pizza company hired you.
Your education and success in life was heavily helped, subsidized, and affected by the people around you. We're part of a society, and we can lift each other up because we cooperate as part of a society. No-one alive in America today has made their success completely on their own. They're simply blinded to the innumerable ways their family, heritage, and society have helped lift them up.
As far as rich people paying more, they have far more to lose from an unstable society and have gained far more from what society has put into place than poor people. If you took those rich people and replayed their lives in Africa, its highly doubtful they would still be rich.
Yes, and the gist of that is that we already have socialized health insurance. It's just that its far more expensive and inefficient. If libertarians want the true free market ideal, then we need to repeal that law. If you can't afford treatment then your life is not worthwhile, and its perfectly OK to let you die in a gutter. That's what an unfettered free market would decide, and precisely why I believe that health care coverage should be filed under "right to life".
And, given that his condition requires continual treatment, and the assloads of caveats with exclusionary periods and days without coverage (two months), its basically still incredibly risky for him to switch a job. That is, unless I'm reading this wrong, which is possible, because I'm terrible at parsing all the terms they use in these sorts of things.
He swaps to a new job, they don't like him, they fire him, *bam* death sentence. Disease not covered by new insurance? Death sentence. Current work finds out that he's looking and decides to fire? Death sentence.
The legislation does help a lot (thank you government, fuck you libertarians), but it doesn't put him remotely near the kind of mobility that members of his peer group enjoy.
No, UHC wouldn't solve his problems completely, but it would make them significantly easier to burden. The world cannot be made perfect and fair, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't do our best.
Given the last time I had to use my insurance it was a 2-month wait because it was deemed non-emergency and had to schedule in with the "approved" doctor, well, I don't have much faith in this system's expediency either.
And the last time I went to the DMV, it was extremely well managed and efficient. The only places I've seen with terrible DMVs are places where they're under-funded.
Bullshit. My friends and I would definitely like some tax-funded universal health care, and we all hold down jobs, pay taxes, and pay for our own health care. We have a friend with a severe illness, and have seen the private system fuck him over and prevent him from reaching his potential. We want universal health coverage because we respect peoples' freedom and right to life, and we're willing to suffer (very very very) light inconveniences so that we can secure this. We are not selfish assholes.
I have no faith in the private system. The private system will fuck you over hard and fast given half an opportunity if it can increase their profits by.001%. I don't think people should have their freedom and even life taken away because they had the sheer audacity to become ill.
Back in the day I had issues with Phantasy Star: Universe's anti-cheating system. When I wanted to play online, it'd decide it needed to shut down pretty much any program on my Vista 64 system. I could still play the game, but no multi-tasking. Didn't matter much though... the game sucked pretty thoroughly.
And yet my friend with Crohn's disease wishes he could find a new job but is afraid that he will lose his health insurance. Maybe he is ignorant of the reality, or maybe he's looked into it and its not quite that simple. At the present rate, he is being fucked over, and even with insurance being pushed into debt to merely stay alive and in "good" health.
Slashdot Mirror
I've read some of the material, and I pretty much agree. Its good if you want to be able to get laid as often as possible for as little effort as possible. Its terrible if you're trying to do things like have interesting conversation or build an actual relationship with someone. And to be quite honest, sex is kinda shallow and boring if its just getting laid and not a relationship.
There are quite a few gems in the material (for example, getting out of a scarcity mentality, being able to re-frame things so that you're focusing on how to improve rather than on the rejection, etc), so I'd say its worth reading some of it. Just be skeptical and try to take away the strategies that focus on improving your mentality and confidence, and disregard the scripts and tricks to jab at the girls' self-esteem, and you will learn a lot.
I always find it amusing when people reference "The Game," as some sort of getting-laid gospel, considering Strauss ends up making the pick-up artists look like total losers by the end of the book. By the end of the book, the message seemed to be to live life, have fun, and not sweat how much you're getting laid. But that may be my interpretation of it.
It depends. It was less so at my college, but I was still told many times that CS students were those that couldn't hack EE, and were not real engineers. Of course, this was while I was taking some of the most difficult undergraduate EE courses in our college. Shocked more than one EE student to find out that a CS student was passing their EE classes.
A digestive virus, plus complications.
Its not just Slashdot. A good number of people I meet personally "hate" Vista despite having not tried it. There are some that do have a Vista computer, have genuinely tried it, and do hate it (incidentally, most of these people used it on laptops, FWIW), but a lot of people are just hearing the negative buzz and watching Apple commercials, then deciding that it must suck. That was kinda the whole point of the "Mojave experiment" that people ridicule so much around here: let people try the OS without pre-conceived notion, and you get a much better response.
Of course, the whole Vista-ready debacle leaves me with no doubt that a lot of consumers were given Vista machines with hardware not suited for it, which is Microsoft's fault and probably a great deal of the "Vista sucks" hate.
Still not worth the money though, IMO. Like I said, I ditched it when I switched jobs and no longer had an MSDN. Then again, through a series of fortunate circumstances, I've never payed more than $5 for a Microsoft OS.
Obedience to authority and submission are pretty much human traits, and I don't think you'll ever get rid of them. Check out the Milgram experiments.
I can't say I ran into many issues with 32-bit software in 64-bit Windows. I had 1 problem total, with a crappy game with equally crappy anti-cheat software. I could still play the game fine, but it would kill most of my open programs. I assumed that it did some comparisons against the task-manager, and the appended text identifying 64/32 bit processes messed with it.
As a software dev, the only change I needed to make to move my code base to 64-bit was to wrap calls to a 32-bit COM object in a separate process, so that it would run in WoW. It was a trivial change. Then again, it was C#, and thus a JIT-compiled language, but if you're writing competent C/C++ code you should be able to just recompile it similarly.
Overall, I'm not seeing huge problems.
Oh, and just to preempt the inevitable reply that you couldn't possibly run Vista, and by extension Windows 7, on a processor old enough to be 32-bit... I'm sure it would run fine on an Intel Core Duo processor. That processor is not all that different than my old Athlon 4200.
People with older 32-bit chip sets? Not everyone has a new computer. You do realize that most Linux distro's specifically offer 32-bit and 64-bit versions, don't you? How is that any different?
What I do know is that when I ran Vista 64 bit I was running a plethora of 32-bit applications. I do know that system-level drivers required 64-bit versions, but I had no issues finding those for my hardware. I don't anymore as I lost my MSDN subscription when my job changed, and frankly Vista isn't worth paying for when I have XP already, but it worked fine when I did.
Um, what? I'm not sure what 32-bit/64-bit dilemma you are talking about. Vista 64-bit works just fine. Vista can run 32-bit apps on a 64-bit version just fine. I can't recall if I loaded 32-bit drivers, but I believe that userland drivers can be 32-bit. The default account does not have admin privileges. You have to escalate privileges via UAC before you can access areas of the OS that require admin, unless you disable UAC. As a result of UAC, it is *trying* to eliminate the bad habits of application developers via UAC, but sadly people preferred to blame UAC popups on Microsoft instead of the shitty application developers, do it didn't pan out that way.
Pretty much every point you are taking Microsoft to task for is wrong.
Hell, thats how my future in-laws do it TODAY in Japan. The entire house didn't have heaters, they just put a kotatsu (basically a table with a blanket over it and a small heater under it, so the heat is trapped) and a small space heater in the room. They have a very small energy footprint; we tripped a breaker on accident which started a discussion on how much energy they have available to their house. It was some ridiculously low amount. When sleeping, we just slipped an electric blanket over the futon.
Of course, everyone wore sweatshirts. I didn't have one, much to their amusement. I explained that not only is the heat almost always on in American housing, in a lot of my apartments it was controlled by the building, and I couldn't even turn it off.
I'm not saying that everyone should live in freezing houses, but I bet we could collectively save energy by lowering the thermostat, wearing a sweatshirt, and using the fireplace/space heater/electric blankets.
First off, you are mixing me up with someone else. You are the only person that has replied to me in this particular thread. I am not the person who first responded to you, and only chimed in. Nowhere in this thread has someone parsed my "initial response" other than you. I am writing strongly but not angrily; any anger you are reading into this is your own interpretation.
Second, you are twisting what I am actually saying into what you think I am saying. You speak of mis-characterizations while at the same time doing exactly the same to me.
I at no time said that people should feel guilty for being successful, especially if that success was achieved at the end of hard work. What I said was that people should realize that no matter how hard you work, you do not get there completely on your own. Some people get more help than others, but at the very least you had parents that raised you. What I am saying is that one should consider that fact, and consider that some people do not have the same fortunes as others, and may never succeed despite working just as hard as others. I am saying that its important to not look down on the poor as being lazy and unmotivated, because there are a helluva lot of motivated, hard-working poor people out there. I am saying that there is some amount of social responsibility that goes with having success.
Of the wealthy people I have met, most are acutely aware of their social responsibility. They would not characterize their success as being completely of their own doing. They will point out the hard work they did, but also point out the people that stood by them and made that possible. They give to charity because they are kind and generous, and because they feel that they should give back to those who did not have the opportunities that they did. The people who talk about being self-made usually do so as an excuse to why the poor do not deserve help, at least in my experience.
I don't know where you got that I am guilty about my success. I achieved it by working my way through college, living within my means, saving, honing my skills, and constantly being on the lookout for better opportunities. I have no reason whatsoever to be guilty of that. But I also had a family that gave me a safe environment to learn and grow, specifically lived in areas with good schools, raised me to have a good work ethic, and encouraged me in my endeavor. I owe my success in part to them, and the society that enabled me to live safely and go to school.
As far as the "third world hellhole" thing, no, I don't think I would have succeeded as much because of the lack of a stable society. This is not because I am lazy and only stumbled upon my success, but because a lot of success is about having the opportunities to begin with. I could probably do well relative to the population, but relative to the population is fairly meaningless. Its extremely unlikely that I would be doing as well as I am doing now.
I find it humorous that you are trying to portray me negatively for plainly stating my living conditions. I did not due so to brag, but to counter your assertions that I am "... basically looking for excuses as to why you have not achieved your full potential by blaming people and circumstances around you that you can't control" and that I "... let someone control the direction of your life (which I can only surmise is your situation)." If you were not trying to say that I am a lazy underachiever then I apologize, but you came off that way very VERY strongly.
I do happen to give to charity, but that particular one is not on my list. I happen to be from a military family, so I am aware what the military does for this country, FYI. And since you seem to mis-characterize me, I am only pointing this out because you seem to be implying very negative things to me, and mention charity with the presumption that I do not back my words with actions. It is not my intent to brag about this.
In summary, its ok if you're done with me. You do not want to
I couldn't remember if Crohn's was fatal or not, so I googled it, and found that there is a mortality rate, albeit low if treated. I was perhaps being hyperbolic by calling it a death sentence, but left untreated it is possible to cause death. Not everyone has it at the same severity, and I'd hardly stop at calling the removal of most of the large intestine (and possibly all) simply "unpleasant."
I also don't see how its unreasonable to claim that having to pay the full cost of health insurance over the course of 2-3 months, and being severely screwed if you happen to lose your job, dramatically lessens job mobility. I appreciate that this is a resource for Huntington's sufferers and that they have more medical costs than Crohn's. But this is hardly a case of problem-fixed-job-done. Nothing can be perfect, but we can do a lot better than "Well if you jump through the appropriate hoops and pay enough money, and don't have a run of bad luck, then you should be able to keep getting treated for your illness."
Its a good step, and it dramatically reduces the risk of a job change, but it by no means lowers it to the risk of his healthier peers.
No, you haven't figured out where I am coming from at all. I am far better off than most of the population. As a matter of fact, last time I checked, I was upper-middle class, and had a decent shot of being lower-upper class. I love in a nice place in a good city, have plenty of extra cash for entertainment and travel, and don't have to worry about next month's bills. I'm in a good position in life, and its rather presumptuous of you to assume that I'm some lazy sap looking for a handout.
What you haven't figured out is that I'm trying to be honest about where my success came from instead of patting myself on the back and turning up my nose at people less fortunate than myself.
The thing is that I realize that there are a lot of people and outside circumstances that contributed to put me where I am. A large part of it was my own effort and decisions, but I also had a lot of help along the way, and that's not substantially different than a lot of people, especially people who claim to have themselves up by their own bootstraps.
When taking a close look at my life and success, and the lives and successes of others, I've come to realize that the self-made-man is myth that people use to make themselves feel better. Its used so that people can denigrate poor people as just being lazy or unethical. Its used to reassure people that those rich guys really deserve everything because they're just so much better than the rest of us. Its used so that people can turn a blind eye to their fellow humans without feeling like assholes.
What I'm saying is that people need to take a good hard look at where their success comes from instead of patting themselves on the back too hard. It might be that we realize that we do have some social responsibility, because society gave us the opportunity to grab our success. Despite my best efforts, I would not be who I am today if I grew up in Africa or some third world hell-hole.
That is where I'm coming from: an honest assessment of reality instead of an idealized myth.
Every insurance company I have dealt with ever has been so thick with bureaucracy that I try to deal with them as little as possible. I don't see how the government can be any worse. Maybe not better, but definitely not worse. At least I wouldn't have to deal with it when I'm sick and waiting for my appointment.
Are they? I used to live in Illinois, and the roads were pretty good quality. The parts that weren't were getting construction for repair or expansion. And I don't see why Obama in a federal position would have any authority over state-run road construction.
I'm talking about the post office that routinely delivers my letters, even after changing my address twice in a month. I'm talking about the post office where I can put a cheap stamp on a letter and drop it off in a box along the street, and be 99% sure that it will arrive in less than a week.
Yeah so there's some wastes of money. Its not perfect. So what? You can't tell me with a straight face that CEOs and corporate owners don't pull all of the same crap, and indulge in far worse. And yes, YOU pay for those CEO indulgences too, through higher product costs.
Something doesn't have to be perfect to be efficient and useful. The post office is efficient and useful. Its certainly good enough for all the companies that I do business with to deliver bills and documents to me.
But that isn't all that works well for me. I can drive anywhere in the United States easily and safely due to our road system. The much maligned DMV has been extremely efficient and well run in places that its been well funded (as in, the one DMV that was a hellhole was chronically under-staffed). I can eat out at restaurants with reasonable assumption that I'm not going to get food poisoning. I know what side effects any medications can have. Food I buy isn't likely to contain poisonous materials. NASA has done significant scientific research on a shoe-string budget. I went through a publicly funded education that enabled me to go through college and receive a well-paying job. I could go on, but while the government does a lot of shitty and wasteful things, it also does a lot of wonderful and efficient things.
Who payed for the education you had to get to even a low-level pizza job? Who payed for you to survive until you were old enough to hold that job? Who payed for the roads that you used to deliver that pizza? Someone else paid the pizza company to pay you to deliver that pizza. The pizza company hired you.
Your education and success in life was heavily helped, subsidized, and affected by the people around you. We're part of a society, and we can lift each other up because we cooperate as part of a society. No-one alive in America today has made their success completely on their own. They're simply blinded to the innumerable ways their family, heritage, and society have helped lift them up.
As far as rich people paying more, they have far more to lose from an unstable society and have gained far more from what society has put into place than poor people. If you took those rich people and replayed their lives in Africa, its highly doubtful they would still be rich.
Yes, and the gist of that is that we already have socialized health insurance. It's just that its far more expensive and inefficient. If libertarians want the true free market ideal, then we need to repeal that law. If you can't afford treatment then your life is not worthwhile, and its perfectly OK to let you die in a gutter. That's what an unfettered free market would decide, and precisely why I believe that health care coverage should be filed under "right to life".
And, given that his condition requires continual treatment, and the assloads of caveats with exclusionary periods and days without coverage (two months), its basically still incredibly risky for him to switch a job. That is, unless I'm reading this wrong, which is possible, because I'm terrible at parsing all the terms they use in these sorts of things.
He swaps to a new job, they don't like him, they fire him, *bam* death sentence. Disease not covered by new insurance? Death sentence. Current work finds out that he's looking and decides to fire? Death sentence.
The legislation does help a lot (thank you government, fuck you libertarians), but it doesn't put him remotely near the kind of mobility that members of his peer group enjoy.
No, UHC wouldn't solve his problems completely, but it would make them significantly easier to burden. The world cannot be made perfect and fair, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't do our best.
The post office. You're welcome.
Given the last time I had to use my insurance it was a 2-month wait because it was deemed non-emergency and had to schedule in with the "approved" doctor, well, I don't have much faith in this system's expediency either.
And the last time I went to the DMV, it was extremely well managed and efficient. The only places I've seen with terrible DMVs are places where they're under-funded.
Bullshit. My friends and I would definitely like some tax-funded universal health care, and we all hold down jobs, pay taxes, and pay for our own health care. We have a friend with a severe illness, and have seen the private system fuck him over and prevent him from reaching his potential. We want universal health coverage because we respect peoples' freedom and right to life, and we're willing to suffer (very very very) light inconveniences so that we can secure this. We are not selfish assholes.
I have no faith in the private system. The private system will fuck you over hard and fast given half an opportunity if it can increase their profits by .001%. I don't think people should have their freedom and even life taken away because they had the sheer audacity to become ill.
Back in the day I had issues with Phantasy Star: Universe's anti-cheating system. When I wanted to play online, it'd decide it needed to shut down pretty much any program on my Vista 64 system. I could still play the game, but no multi-tasking. Didn't matter much though... the game sucked pretty thoroughly.
And yet my friend with Crohn's disease wishes he could find a new job but is afraid that he will lose his health insurance. Maybe he is ignorant of the reality, or maybe he's looked into it and its not quite that simple. At the present rate, he is being fucked over, and even with insurance being pushed into debt to merely stay alive and in "good" health.