You are so misinformed it's not even funny. I guess that's understandable, your education over there I hear's about as good as your health care is. Apparently in some places you can't even afford to send kids to school on fridays anymore haha or have street lights on at night, or put out a family's house that's burning down. I hear NYC had 120,000 people go through homeless shelters last year alone, and that's not including all those on the streets who don't spend a night in a shelter. I hear Jefferson County's doing *really* well out of capitalism too, yeah, JP Morgan paying Goldman Sachs $3Mil to stand aside and not compete so they could rip off the government to the tune of over $3Bln, yeah, you guys a a shining beacon of success.
Quickly, more sand! A little bit of somebody's head's starting to appear, we need more sand!!!
Hey guess what, nobody's forced to shop anywhere here if they don't want to either, and you can't get paid just to sit around on your ass all day drinking beer. Nice try though. I guess your "solution" does look like it's the best when you just make shit up about the rest of the world though, huh. It speaks volumes about how great it must be if that's the only way you can justify it.
Socialism doesn't suck at all. What you're talking about is abuse and mismanagement that comes from not being allowed to do it properly because anti-social people like you complain too much. I can see why you'd confuse the two; it is convenient to after all.
Err, no, you're wrong, so consider your post irrefudified! I'm not sure why exactly off the top of my head, but I'll post the answer on my website, promise.
Dental work here in the UK used to look like that, except it was more that the government refused to be ripped off for dental work and charged five times more than it reasonably should cost, so dentists did just have two prices for things, one which they charged the government, and one which they charged private which was many times higher. This meant that private patients were being favoured over state, so if you needed treatment, you had the choice of waiting for months, or going private.
Anyway I'm not sure exactly what our last government changed, I remember them saying something about wanting to fix the dentist situation, but didn't really pay much attention to what they were saying (you know what it's like when politicians say something, and then come back later with some stats that prove technically that it's better, but you'll be damned if you noticed anything). But from my recent experiences, and experiences of family 'n friends, they really do seem to have fixed it. They've even gone what I would consider to be beyond the call of duty, and employed a load of cute girl dentists, which I tell ya, can really take the edge off;-)
"So what exactly am I missing out on, when compared to USA?"
The FEAR!!!! Hahaha yeah I'm here in the UK, we have private health care available to anyone, and public health care available to everyone, and it's been amazing me to hear all the fear speak coming out of USA, about people dying here in the UK because we can't [something that we actually can]. I've just been completely dumbfounded, hearing people thousands of miles away crapping their pants thinking that England's made up of castles and dragons and that's what Obama's importing. It's funny how ignorant people can really be.
I've been paying attention to some of the stem cell trials happening here in the UK, my mother's applying for a place in one of them that will allow her to walk without pain in a couple of weeks, rather than the several month alternative treatment which requires fracturing and resetting bones in her knee which will give her most of its use back. It's exciting stuff, that will drastically improve the quality of life of so many people. Meanwhile we have this group of Americans running around like headless chickens, screaming and crapping their pants, because they think that dragons are real. The poor, poor country.
Good for you. I'm sure you'll be received well wherever you choose to move to. I would say more but I know how touchy the extremists you mention are and I just won't be able to resist getting sucked into a flaming haha anyway, yeah, come join us in this little place we like to call, "the rest of the world", the more the merrier:-)
Well if their reaction to seeing Katy Perry's cleavage on TV is to cry 'n crap their pants, I guess there's not much hope for them to not be complete pussies about everything else huh.
This story's just another example of people crapping their pants over nothing. None of them were "close calls", because nukes aren't 'explosions' in the classical case, they *require* triggering, if anything, all these examples of accidents show how safe they are. It's like complaining how unsafe it was to leave a gun lying around, cuz a baby picked it up, pointed it at someone, and pulled the trigger, while completely ignoring the fact that it was a water pistol. WELL IT WAS NEVER GONNA ACTUALLY KILL ANYONE THEN WAS IT?!!! Some people are just obsessed with fear, they have to actually make shit up to be scared of. They must have real empty lives.
"but to place Christians among people who believe Obama is a terrorist and racists I think is condescending and unjustified"
What, cuz "correlation does not equal causation"? You're probably right, in that being a Christian isn't the cause of believing that Obama is a terrorist or a racist or a muslim or whatever. But on the other hand, they are both symptoms of the same mental deficiency: having very lax standards on what one considers a "reason" to believe that something is true. It's just foolish to deny that being so ready to accept something as true would have effects limited only to one's religious persuasion.
Absolutely. People think that facebook's customers are its users, that it's providing a service to "us". Nope, it provides a service to its advertisers, we are the resource which it offers them.
What are you suggesting here??? That people take personal responsibility??! Are you mad?!! I think you need to learn a thing or two about creating public fear!!! Personal responsibility is somewhat incompatible with public fear, as it is with public opinion injection. It's no secret that both "old media" and the EFF dislike social networking sites, amusingly, for oposite reasons: "old media" have become too used to being the gatekeepers of information, and don't like that being challenged by something as open as social networking sites. To the EFF on the other hand, Facebook is not open enough, because it still "owns" people's information ala surfing habits, things that make it an advertisers wet dream. It's in both of their interests to spread fear stories like this one. That's not to say it isn't true, but heavily spun. If a government employee came and sat next to you in the park, became friends with you and found out loads of information from you, would you blame the park? Do you blame the bench you were sitting on? Of course not. Why not? Because it's in nobody's interest to have people fear benches in at the park.
Err, no, if he was DoD he would have just missed the first post to an American First Post!!(tm) who would've got in there first by not telling its allies that it was about to unilaterally submit the article.
You're mostly right, except for the "owning" the money bit, as you can't really own something that doesn't really exist. It's like when Google first rolled out Gmail with the 1GB space for emails... they could offer 1GB, and you could use 1GB no problem, but only because most people won't. If everybody tried to at the same time it would've hit problems. Everybody can have 1GB of free space, but that's not the same as everybody having 1GB of data stored on it. This is of course what so many people don't get about money, it's backed by confidence, the word "credit" comes from the latin for "belief". We could afford to lose the banks if we could lose them without losing confidence, but people would lose confidence (more than than already) which means the money would no longer have its backing, which is why, as you quite rightly say, the trouble we'd be in would be a tad more serious than many make out.
"I am far from convinced that the government did the right thing"
but according to da nooz, da banks n da govment is da evil un junk... you know on top of what you said, I actually quite like the idea of bank shares being held by the state, because money is their business, they will find ways of extracting or even just inventing it any chance they can get. I think I'd rather the populous not be soley on the losing side of those transactions the whole time, even if the shares aren't paying massive dividends, anything's more than a bank where only private investors get it.
"Sorry folks, I have a family to support and they are my priority"
You put some time into something worth while, and if you were good at it, what you did won't simply be undone, but be a foundation for more to be build on top of that will no doubt out live your web work (as a software developer myself who's done a lot of web stuff, I know how transitory it can be). It's more than a lot of people do. A couple years back, my gf at the time's dad got throat cancer, which is what took my dad when I was a child. She didn't have to go through that, because of the work people like yourself have put into trying to make sure that people don't have to, so I don't think you need to be saying your sorries to people.
I generally find that with people who refer to "scientists" as if they are a single coherent group, there's usually at least a little of that going on.
You know that writing it in capitals doesn't actually make it a bigger number? Spending 2% of GDP on defence isn't quite the big deal I think you think it is, I think it's pretty modest, although I am happy with the cuts (but must admit that's partly because America has warned us that if we do, it may harm our "special relationship" with them... it's worth making the cuts just for that!)
"where the government would cut back science research and development spending and "target" what was left at things that would be or might be immediately useful to industry"
Like the large hadron collider (I believe British contributions were granted by Thatcher). Sure, that's only one thing, but still, I felt worth noting.
"The issue that got Europe (and the rest of the world) into this mess was too much financial freedom in America"
It was the straw that broke the camels back (okay, perhaps quite a few straws, but you know what I mean) but it wasn't the whole story. We were making risky mortgages here too that we should've been doing, and so our housing market was elevated too (not as bad though I wouldn't think, but I can't be certain without looking at figures). National debt's also been climbing, which is something that couldn't continue indefinitely anyway. And much of the money that went to bailing out the banks will come back to us as loans are repayed or shared are bought back. I think the longer we would've carried on overspending the harder it would've been to reel it back in too, so perhaps a slight positive there, although obviously that's just conjecture at best.
"Cutting healthcare results in less healthy population, which - apart from forgetting why economy exists in the first place - results in less productive workforce"
Does amaze me how this fact is completely invisible to so many people (mostly people called "Americans", but not uniquely). "Why should I (hard working person) have to pay for somebody elses healthcare/education/etc", I don't understand how people can not realise that they can't make money on their own, and if they had money and were on their own, it'd be worthless because they couldn't use it for anything. I try to explain that to make money, you need to have a functioning society, which means that anything you get, you partly owe to the existence of that functioning society and everything that makes it something that you can benefit from. I guess it's a combination of people wanting to take and not give back, and a sense of entitlement that makes them think that it's right to want to take and not give back.
Nothing will solve the problem on it's own, that's why it needs to be across the board.
I actually think I'm on to something here... if we pick 100 departments and cut 1% off the budget of each, that's like... 100%!! That means we won't be spending anything! So if we cut 2% of each one, that means we'll be making money! Am I a freakin genius or what?!
It's amazed me hearing all the arguments coming up against making cuts, especially after the fact that they were voted for (two parties said "we need to make drastic cuts now", and the other party said "their cuts will ruin the country, don't vote them in", this was not kept a secret!). I didn't even realise you could get child benefit just for having a child, I assumed it was just for low incomes, as plans are to make it now. The bit that gets me is the extreme whining about it, saying "you're punishing families". Punishing families??! Punishing families would be taking something off them, this is just a case of not giving them something they don't need that we can't afford to give them. It only feels like a punishment if you feel like it's already yours, that you are in fact entitled to it, people are so delusional. Probably not the majority of people, granted, but with that whole "the less people know, the louder they know it", it's easy to think it is a majority.
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You are so misinformed it's not even funny. I guess that's understandable, your education over there I hear's about as good as your health care is. Apparently in some places you can't even afford to send kids to school on fridays anymore haha or have street lights on at night, or put out a family's house that's burning down. I hear NYC had 120,000 people go through homeless shelters last year alone, and that's not including all those on the streets who don't spend a night in a shelter. I hear Jefferson County's doing *really* well out of capitalism too, yeah, JP Morgan paying Goldman Sachs $3Mil to stand aside and not compete so they could rip off the government to the tune of over $3Bln, yeah, you guys a a shining beacon of success.
Quickly, more sand! A little bit of somebody's head's starting to appear, we need more sand!!!
Hey guess what, nobody's forced to shop anywhere here if they don't want to either, and you can't get paid just to sit around on your ass all day drinking beer. Nice try though. I guess your "solution" does look like it's the best when you just make shit up about the rest of the world though, huh. It speaks volumes about how great it must be if that's the only way you can justify it.
Socialism doesn't suck at all. What you're talking about is abuse and mismanagement that comes from not being allowed to do it properly because anti-social people like you complain too much. I can see why you'd confuse the two; it is convenient to after all.
Err, no, you're wrong, so consider your post irrefudified! I'm not sure why exactly off the top of my head, but I'll post the answer on my website, promise.
I'm not a mac. And I'm not a PC. I'm none of the things you've heard about me. I'm you. And I approve this message.
Taco's rule!
Dental work here in the UK used to look like that, except it was more that the government refused to be ripped off for dental work and charged five times more than it reasonably should cost, so dentists did just have two prices for things, one which they charged the government, and one which they charged private which was many times higher. This meant that private patients were being favoured over state, so if you needed treatment, you had the choice of waiting for months, or going private.
Anyway I'm not sure exactly what our last government changed, I remember them saying something about wanting to fix the dentist situation, but didn't really pay much attention to what they were saying (you know what it's like when politicians say something, and then come back later with some stats that prove technically that it's better, but you'll be damned if you noticed anything). But from my recent experiences, and experiences of family 'n friends, they really do seem to have fixed it. They've even gone what I would consider to be beyond the call of duty, and employed a load of cute girl dentists, which I tell ya, can really take the edge off ;-)
"So what exactly am I missing out on, when compared to USA?"
The FEAR!!!! Hahaha yeah I'm here in the UK, we have private health care available to anyone, and public health care available to everyone, and it's been amazing me to hear all the fear speak coming out of USA, about people dying here in the UK because we can't [something that we actually can]. I've just been completely dumbfounded, hearing people thousands of miles away crapping their pants thinking that England's made up of castles and dragons and that's what Obama's importing. It's funny how ignorant people can really be.
I've been paying attention to some of the stem cell trials happening here in the UK, my mother's applying for a place in one of them that will allow her to walk without pain in a couple of weeks, rather than the several month alternative treatment which requires fracturing and resetting bones in her knee which will give her most of its use back. It's exciting stuff, that will drastically improve the quality of life of so many people. Meanwhile we have this group of Americans running around like headless chickens, screaming and crapping their pants, because they think that dragons are real. The poor, poor country.
Good for you. I'm sure you'll be received well wherever you choose to move to. I would say more but I know how touchy the extremists you mention are and I just won't be able to resist getting sucked into a flaming haha anyway, yeah, come join us in this little place we like to call, "the rest of the world", the more the merrier :-)
"Are you that lazy to look for an example yourself?"
I think it takes real effort to miss something like that, so I don't think it can really be attributed to laziness.
Well if their reaction to seeing Katy Perry's cleavage on TV is to cry 'n crap their pants, I guess there's not much hope for them to not be complete pussies about everything else huh.
This story's just another example of people crapping their pants over nothing. None of them were "close calls", because nukes aren't 'explosions' in the classical case, they *require* triggering, if anything, all these examples of accidents show how safe they are. It's like complaining how unsafe it was to leave a gun lying around, cuz a baby picked it up, pointed it at someone, and pulled the trigger, while completely ignoring the fact that it was a water pistol. WELL IT WAS NEVER GONNA ACTUALLY KILL ANYONE THEN WAS IT?!!! Some people are just obsessed with fear, they have to actually make shit up to be scared of. They must have real empty lives.
"but to place Christians among people who believe Obama is a terrorist and racists I think is condescending and unjustified"
What, cuz "correlation does not equal causation"? You're probably right, in that being a Christian isn't the cause of believing that Obama is a terrorist or a racist or a muslim or whatever. But on the other hand, they are both symptoms of the same mental deficiency: having very lax standards on what one considers a "reason" to believe that something is true. It's just foolish to deny that being so ready to accept something as true would have effects limited only to one's religious persuasion.
Absolutely. People think that facebook's customers are its users, that it's providing a service to "us". Nope, it provides a service to its advertisers, we are the resource which it offers them.
What are you suggesting here??? That people take personal responsibility??! Are you mad?!! I think you need to learn a thing or two about creating public fear!!! Personal responsibility is somewhat incompatible with public fear, as it is with public opinion injection. It's no secret that both "old media" and the EFF dislike social networking sites, amusingly, for oposite reasons: "old media" have become too used to being the gatekeepers of information, and don't like that being challenged by something as open as social networking sites. To the EFF on the other hand, Facebook is not open enough, because it still "owns" people's information ala surfing habits, things that make it an advertisers wet dream. It's in both of their interests to spread fear stories like this one. That's not to say it isn't true, but heavily spun. If a government employee came and sat next to you in the park, became friends with you and found out loads of information from you, would you blame the park? Do you blame the bench you were sitting on? Of course not. Why not? Because it's in nobody's interest to have people fear benches in at the park.
"I don't think that they are here by the way. They're probably too busy doing alien stuff"
Rectal probing rednecks?!! Eeek, that means that they are here!! That's like, proof or something!
Err, no, if he was DoD he would have just missed the first post to an American First Post!!(tm) who would've got in there first by not telling its allies that it was about to unilaterally submit the article.
"the people that "own" the money"
You're mostly right, except for the "owning" the money bit, as you can't really own something that doesn't really exist. It's like when Google first rolled out Gmail with the 1GB space for emails... they could offer 1GB, and you could use 1GB no problem, but only because most people won't. If everybody tried to at the same time it would've hit problems. Everybody can have 1GB of free space, but that's not the same as everybody having 1GB of data stored on it. This is of course what so many people don't get about money, it's backed by confidence, the word "credit" comes from the latin for "belief". We could afford to lose the banks if we could lose them without losing confidence, but people would lose confidence (more than than already) which means the money would no longer have its backing, which is why, as you quite rightly say, the trouble we'd be in would be a tad more serious than many make out.
"I am far from convinced that the government did the right thing"
but according to da nooz, da banks n da govment is da evil un junk... you know on top of what you said, I actually quite like the idea of bank shares being held by the state, because money is their business, they will find ways of extracting or even just inventing it any chance they can get. I think I'd rather the populous not be soley on the losing side of those transactions the whole time, even if the shares aren't paying massive dividends, anything's more than a bank where only private investors get it.
"Sorry folks, I have a family to support and they are my priority"
You put some time into something worth while, and if you were good at it, what you did won't simply be undone, but be a foundation for more to be build on top of that will no doubt out live your web work (as a software developer myself who's done a lot of web stuff, I know how transitory it can be). It's more than a lot of people do. A couple years back, my gf at the time's dad got throat cancer, which is what took my dad when I was a child. She didn't have to go through that, because of the work people like yourself have put into trying to make sure that people don't have to, so I don't think you need to be saying your sorries to people.
"...or are you talking out of our ass?"
I generally find that with people who refer to "scientists" as if they are a single coherent group, there's usually at least a little of that going on.
"The UK wastes 36 BILLION POUNDS a year for that"
You know that writing it in capitals doesn't actually make it a bigger number? Spending 2% of GDP on defence isn't quite the big deal I think you think it is, I think it's pretty modest, although I am happy with the cuts (but must admit that's partly because America has warned us that if we do, it may harm our "special relationship" with them... it's worth making the cuts just for that!)
"where the government would cut back science research and development spending and "target" what was left at things that would be or might be immediately useful to industry"
Like the large hadron collider (I believe British contributions were granted by Thatcher). Sure, that's only one thing, but still, I felt worth noting.
"The issue that got Europe (and the rest of the world) into this mess was too much financial freedom in America"
It was the straw that broke the camels back (okay, perhaps quite a few straws, but you know what I mean) but it wasn't the whole story. We were making risky mortgages here too that we should've been doing, and so our housing market was elevated too (not as bad though I wouldn't think, but I can't be certain without looking at figures). National debt's also been climbing, which is something that couldn't continue indefinitely anyway. And much of the money that went to bailing out the banks will come back to us as loans are repayed or shared are bought back. I think the longer we would've carried on overspending the harder it would've been to reel it back in too, so perhaps a slight positive there, although obviously that's just conjecture at best.
"Cutting healthcare results in less healthy population, which - apart from forgetting why economy exists in the first place - results in less productive workforce"
Does amaze me how this fact is completely invisible to so many people (mostly people called "Americans", but not uniquely). "Why should I (hard working person) have to pay for somebody elses healthcare/education/etc", I don't understand how people can not realise that they can't make money on their own, and if they had money and were on their own, it'd be worthless because they couldn't use it for anything. I try to explain that to make money, you need to have a functioning society, which means that anything you get, you partly owe to the existence of that functioning society and everything that makes it something that you can benefit from. I guess it's a combination of people wanting to take and not give back, and a sense of entitlement that makes them think that it's right to want to take and not give back.
Nothing will solve the problem on it's own, that's why it needs to be across the board.
I actually think I'm on to something here... if we pick 100 departments and cut 1% off the budget of each, that's like... 100%!! That means we won't be spending anything! So if we cut 2% of each one, that means we'll be making money! Am I a freakin genius or what?!
Stop that, we can't afford first posts anymore.
Oh quit being so melodramatic, we'll be fine... ...we're China, right?
"the UK suffers from an entitlement society"
It's amazed me hearing all the arguments coming up against making cuts, especially after the fact that they were voted for (two parties said "we need to make drastic cuts now", and the other party said "their cuts will ruin the country, don't vote them in", this was not kept a secret!). I didn't even realise you could get child benefit just for having a child, I assumed it was just for low incomes, as plans are to make it now. The bit that gets me is the extreme whining about it, saying "you're punishing families". Punishing families??! Punishing families would be taking something off them, this is just a case of not giving them something they don't need that we can't afford to give them. It only feels like a punishment if you feel like it's already yours, that you are in fact entitled to it, people are so delusional. Probably not the majority of people, granted, but with that whole "the less people know, the louder they know it", it's easy to think it is a majority.