Yes, heaven forbid that everyone get a base level of health care. The next step is sure to be Communism.
The US already has plenty of socialist aspects; social security, unemployment and segments of your health care system are socialized. You seem to have little problem implementing socialized aspects to your safety net, but the word makes half of you act like you've just eaten frog's blood.
The NHS is a wreck for a lot of reasons. And really, it's a hybrid system, still allowing private health care in a limited form. Look to Germany, which has a universal system and manages it very well.
And as to standards of care, well the problem in the US is that the standard of care is directly proportional to the kind of insurance you can afford. If you don't have good health insurance, or even health insurance at all, and you have a major medical crisis, you're in real trouble.
I'm a Canadian, and while our system has its flaws, my experience with it has been very good. In 2006, my wife was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, had to have two surgeries, the lost one being a total thyroidectomy. My income was limited, we had two kids in grade school, and by the time of her second surgery the business I worked for had went under. We were able to keep our house (though finances were very stretched as I was on unemployment) and our credit rating and thus within a year or two, with a new job, we were able to deal with remaining debts incurred. In other words, a disease that may very well have proven ruinous in the United States was, in the Canadian universal system, not only survivable from a health point of view, but also a financial point of view.
I make a lot more money now than I did seven years ago, and I suppose on a purely short-sighted selfish level I can grump about the amount of my taxes on top of premiums that I pay for health coverage, but having come out of a major medical crisis with my finances intact and without being saddled with a vast mortgage just to pay the bills, I can safely say even if the system cost me twice as much a month as it does now, I'd stick with the universal system any day of the week.
The reason it's a steaming pile of shit is because you Americans are so afraid of the word "socialism" that you will implement the most ghastly, awkard and expensive medical systems simply because you're afraid that Jesus will puke in his cornflakes if you simply go to a universal system.
I loved Win2k; one of the most stable OSs Redmond ever put out. But yeah, the joke around the office when Win2k machines were put into our production environment was it was "the day the scanners died". We had a bunch of Umax scanners that wouldn't work due to a lack of drivers. We did get some machines to work with the NT 4 drivers, but it was very unstable.
I love Golden Age scifi, but it's obsession with atomic power is sometimes jarring. I reread Asimov's Foundation trilogy and while it's still really damned good storytelling, you do have to get over the atom obsession of the period.
I think a lot of it depends on your definition of "dated". Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Shakespeare are dated in that the language and some of the situations are anachronistic, and yet either because they're ripping good stories (like many of Doyle's Holmes stories are) or deal with universal themes (as Shakespeare's greatest plays do), the anachronisms almost fade away.
At the same time, it's true that there are no lack of out and out dated works. I watched some old Spitting Image episodes from the 1980s, and while I had a good laugh at Margaret Thatcher and Jeffrey Archer being brutally mocked, I realized that my 20 year old daughter wouldn't find it very funny at all. The humor was firmly planted in that period, so that even 25 years later, at best it's funny in a manic and nostalgic way.
There is a lot of unreadable Victorian pulp, to be sure. It was the first great age of mass market consumer publishing, when literacy levels in Europe and the Americas reached the level that one could make a living publishing trash. At the same time, once I get over the jarring hump of 19th century idiosyncrasies, I can still enjoy Austen or Dickens, and even see in their marvelous and often excruciating characters people I know today. Thus they transcend the period in which they are written and set, and become universal works.
Whether you like it or not, Mexicans and descendants of Mexicans are one helluva fast growing demographic in all those border states. I'm just pointing out a bit of karma.
Look at this way. The US stole a huge chunk of Mexico in a blatant imperialistic war. and now the Mexicans are taking it back through immigration (illegal and legal) and outbreeding all them God-fearing white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. So politically powerful are Latinos now that they had a pretty substantial influence on the last election.
The Tea Partiers are going to have to deal with it, just like previous Populist anti-Catholic immigrant movements had to deal with the Irish and the Italians.
About the only legitimate scientific theories that I can think of that were overthrown were some pre-tectonic theories of continental formation and, providing you loosen up there definition of science a little bit; notions like phlogiston and the ether. As you say, in almost all cases, new theories didn't so much supplant older theories as incorporate them. Even steady state cosmology played into the Big Bang theory via Einstein's cosmological constant, so while it was falsified, at least one notion based on it survived into modern cosmology.
Superman II is, to my mind, still the best of all the comic book films, and General Zod, as played by Terence Stamp, is right up there with Khan in the list of the great science fiction villains.
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Yes, heaven forbid that everyone get a base level of health care. The next step is sure to be Communism.
The US already has plenty of socialist aspects; social security, unemployment and segments of your health care system are socialized. You seem to have little problem implementing socialized aspects to your safety net, but the word makes half of you act like you've just eaten frog's blood.
The NHS is a wreck for a lot of reasons. And really, it's a hybrid system, still allowing private health care in a limited form. Look to Germany, which has a universal system and manages it very well.
And as to standards of care, well the problem in the US is that the standard of care is directly proportional to the kind of insurance you can afford. If you don't have good health insurance, or even health insurance at all, and you have a major medical crisis, you're in real trouble.
I'm a Canadian, and while our system has its flaws, my experience with it has been very good. In 2006, my wife was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, had to have two surgeries, the lost one being a total thyroidectomy. My income was limited, we had two kids in grade school, and by the time of her second surgery the business I worked for had went under. We were able to keep our house (though finances were very stretched as I was on unemployment) and our credit rating and thus within a year or two, with a new job, we were able to deal with remaining debts incurred. In other words, a disease that may very well have proven ruinous in the United States was, in the Canadian universal system, not only survivable from a health point of view, but also a financial point of view.
I make a lot more money now than I did seven years ago, and I suppose on a purely short-sighted selfish level I can grump about the amount of my taxes on top of premiums that I pay for health coverage, but having come out of a major medical crisis with my finances intact and without being saddled with a vast mortgage just to pay the bills, I can safely say even if the system cost me twice as much a month as it does now, I'd stick with the universal system any day of the week.
The reason it's a steaming pile of shit is because you Americans are so afraid of the word "socialism" that you will implement the most ghastly, awkard and expensive medical systems simply because you're afraid that Jesus will puke in his cornflakes if you simply go to a universal system.
How would it create eternal life? Unless there's a way to cure degenerative brain diseases, this wouldn't really buy a person that much more time.
When the overwhelming majority of scientists in a given field state "we believe
to be true", I think the first response shouldn't be "scientists are stupid bad doody heads, and here's a denialist site to prove it!"
After all, do you think Answers in Genesis and Jack Chick are good biology references?
I loved Win2k; one of the most stable OSs Redmond ever put out. But yeah, the joke around the office when Win2k machines were put into our production environment was it was "the day the scanners died". We had a bunch of Umax scanners that wouldn't work due to a lack of drivers. We did get some machines to work with the NT 4 drivers, but it was very unstable.
Let me guess. You also support Ron Paul.
I love Golden Age scifi, but it's obsession with atomic power is sometimes jarring. I reread Asimov's Foundation trilogy and while it's still really damned good storytelling, you do have to get over the atom obsession of the period.
I think a lot of it depends on your definition of "dated". Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Shakespeare are dated in that the language and some of the situations are anachronistic, and yet either because they're ripping good stories (like many of Doyle's Holmes stories are) or deal with universal themes (as Shakespeare's greatest plays do), the anachronisms almost fade away.
At the same time, it's true that there are no lack of out and out dated works. I watched some old Spitting Image episodes from the 1980s, and while I had a good laugh at Margaret Thatcher and Jeffrey Archer being brutally mocked, I realized that my 20 year old daughter wouldn't find it very funny at all. The humor was firmly planted in that period, so that even 25 years later, at best it's funny in a manic and nostalgic way.
There is a lot of unreadable Victorian pulp, to be sure. It was the first great age of mass market consumer publishing, when literacy levels in Europe and the Americas reached the level that one could make a living publishing trash. At the same time, once I get over the jarring hump of 19th century idiosyncrasies, I can still enjoy Austen or Dickens, and even see in their marvelous and often excruciating characters people I know today. Thus they transcend the period in which they are written and set, and become universal works.
When Intel makes a chipset, Microsoft approves it, period.
I've heard Larry Page eats babies and drinks the blood of castrated goats. It must be true because Google lies so much.
How's Rachel doing?
Perhaps if people took better care of private keys, this wouldn't bloody happen at all.
I think soon enougnt the full question of equal protection and gay marriage will come to the court's attention.
You're side lost the Civil War. High time to deal with it.
Nooks run Android. Wouldn't this just carve up MS's app offerings? Unless the next gen Nooks are going to run RT.
Whether you like it or not, Mexicans and descendants of Mexicans are one helluva fast growing demographic in all those border states. I'm just pointing out a bit of karma.
Not to mention magic uteruses.
Look at this way. The US stole a huge chunk of Mexico in a blatant imperialistic war. and now the Mexicans are taking it back through immigration (illegal and legal) and outbreeding all them God-fearing white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. So politically powerful are Latinos now that they had a pretty substantial influence on the last election.
The Tea Partiers are going to have to deal with it, just like previous Populist anti-Catholic immigrant movements had to deal with the Irish and the Italians.
Which is why you send out some sort of regular rebate to lower income earners to make up for the more regressive aspects of a consumption tax.
I wasn't aware open source was inherently against Mexican immigrants or black presidents.
Along with the furnaces and the iron ore deposits?
No, I'm afraid it was East Africans who first actually smelted iron.
About the only legitimate scientific theories that I can think of that were overthrown were some pre-tectonic theories of continental formation and, providing you loosen up there definition of science a little bit; notions like phlogiston and the ether. As you say, in almost all cases, new theories didn't so much supplant older theories as incorporate them. Even steady state cosmology played into the Big Bang theory via Einstein's cosmological constant, so while it was falsified, at least one notion based on it survived into modern cosmology.
The first smelted iron in the history of our species was found in East Africa
Put that in your pipe, you waste of oxygen, and smoke it.
Superman II is, to my mind, still the best of all the comic book films, and General Zod, as played by Terence Stamp, is right up there with Khan in the list of the great science fiction villains.