The are many a horror story of Canada and waiting lists
My friend Amy had a bad tooth last August. She drives a taxi and has no insurance.
She was finally able to get it fixed in February. The Canadians got nothing on us!
Not all the grass on the other side of the fence is greener
They have lower health care costs per capita, lower infant mortality, and longer life spans. Sometimes the grass IS greener. You realize who's paying the billion dollar health insurance company profits, don't you? What, exactly, do those companies do for that money?
When I first got XP (because I lost the driver disk for my video card and my daughter innocently ran XCP, trusting Sony, and they didn't have win98 video drivers on the web), it worked flawlessly until the first Windows auto-update.
Coincidentally, the same night the cat got on the computer desk and knocked the cablemodem off. The internet stopped working. I thought perhaps the modem was broken, and called Insight (my provider at the time). The guy on the phone could see my modem just fine, and thought my ethernet card was shot. I figured it was a bad cable, considering the cat and all.
I tried different cables, but when it wouldn't come back to life admitted the Insight guy was probably right. I was all ready to spend the ten bucks on a new card, but XP was annoying me - I had installed the software for the CD burner, and Windows had disabled its drivers. Uninstalling its software wouldn't help, Windows insisted on telling me it had disabled those drivers every time it booted. I couldn't remove the drivers manually either (Windows wouldn't let me!), so I just reinstalled Windows.
Magically I got the internet back. Windows had overwritten good ethernet drivers with bad ones.
No, it doesn't. By "open source" I only mean that to obtain copyright on a binary, its source must be disclosed. The source is, after all, the true "work of art", the "intellectual" part. Nobody produced the binary; it was compiled from the source.
By "offer any licence (s)he wishes" I mean in accordance to law. Which I agree, today's corporations don't give a rat's ass about the law, except to buy it and beat you over the head with it.
unless we increased Medicare taxes by a factor of six or so. So, you're talking about increasing payroll taxes from 1.45% (each, from you, and from your employer) to about 9%
And not having to pay medical insurance premiums. Factor that and whet your employer pays for your insurance in. The only losers would be the insurance companies, their stockholders, and employees. The health insurance employees are surley on The Golgafrinchans "third ark"
He's not enjoying nearly as many tax dollars as Haliburton's shareholders, Boeing's shareholders, etc, and he's not enjoying nearly as many tax dollars as he paid in during his forty years of building America's infrastructure with his hands; he was in electrical construction. The electricity coming into your home is likely carried over a 30KV high tension line he built.
We don't have to be "like" every other country, I would prefer we'd be BETTER, but we damned sure shouldn't be INFERIOR. When it comes to health care, we are. Our lifespan is shorter, our infant mortality is higher, and we pay more per capita for our health care.
Water is a basic need, but people lived without electricity for hundreds of thousands of years. None of my grandparents had electricity when they were young.
I worry that the taxation on stock transactions, while on some levels satisfying, would cripple the liquidity of American markets
I think that would be a GOOD thing. Profits on stock sales should be at least, if not more, than taxes on an equal amount of money earned by actually WORKING. The guy on the factory floor, in the programmer's cube, behind the McDonald's grill, they are the people who create wealth. The stock traders just aggregate and control it.
There doesn't seem to be any incentive to reduce cost
That's the thing about health care - there's no way the free market can work. Right now I'm facing a vitrectomy because of a retinal detachment. I have two choices: get the procedure done, or go blind in my left eye.
For the poorest Americans, school lunches are the only real meal they get.
Food is the one thing the poor don't lack in the US. There is the LINK program, formerly called "food stamps", and there are food pantries galore. I have a lot of poor friends; hell, four homeless people have their belonbgings stored in my basement right now. I have a decent job and do what I can to help my less fortunate friends, and they bring ME food!
OTOH, their health care is abysmal when they can get it at all. Most doctors won't even take medicaid because it doesn't pay enough. I have good insurance, but if I were indigent I would go blind in my left eye; I suffered a detached retina and will be undergoing a Vitrectomy, probably nnext week (I have an appointment with Dr. Odin Monday) and maybe on my birthday =(
Yes, because of the obvious problems in PAYING for it.
I see the problem as paying the salaries and dividends of the people who work for and own stock in MY INSURANCE COMPANY. Take themout of the loop and my health care will be a lot less expensive.
The Europeans, Canadians, and the rest of the civilized world don't seem to have a problem with paying for it.
Medicare negotiating lower drug prices causes INCREASED prices for those not on Medicare
What if Medicare covered everyone, young and old, rich and poor? You do realise that Americans pay more for our drugs than citizens of any other country, don't you?
patent terms should be tailored to provide the MINIMUM rights necessary to accomplish that goal.
Twenty years isn't that long a time. I only wish copyrights were as short.
I couldn't agree more with you on subsidies (as well as about everything else in your post I didn't argue with). If the government subsidizes a drug, that drug should not have a patent. And we shouldn't subsidise farmers. I say that as a citizen of a farming state, too!
I wouldn't call this news, a more accurate term would be gossip.
And that's different from the mainstream media how, exactly? I mean, the Google News page I linked has 111 different mainstream media articles about it. How is a shooting in Virginia in any way relevant to me, who lives in Illinois? It's gossip!
Think back when you were a stupid ass kid. Did it matter to anyone outside your fucking circle of friends what you thought, what you heard, or what you fucking took ??
I don't WANT the mainstream media to "get it". They are run by the multinational corporations and uber-rich people who have no clue nor care about me whatever. Their main purpose is propaganda, secondary purpose is profit.
For instance, in 2000 Ralph Nader wasn't on the ballot in enough states to win the election even if he carried every single state. OTOH the Libertarians were on the ballot in 49 states. The mainstream media slobbered all over Nader but had nary a word to say about the Libertarian.
Had the roles been reversed I'm convinced it would have been Nader who would have been ignored and the Libertarian trumpeted. In a truly democratic republic, all viable candidates (candidates on the ballot in enough states to win should they garner the votes) should have their views aired and be included in debates.
But the people who own the mainstream media are the same people who finance the elections in our pseudodemocratic plutocratic republic. With only two candidates to bribe with campaign cash, no matter who loses they win and you lose.
BTW, I don't give a rat's ass about Britney's drug and child support problems. Why is this meaningless nonsense trumping science, politics, and stuff that truly matters?
They were gioving away copies of the State Journal-Register (Warning - the first item in that link is hilarious) at the store the other day. The man giving them away asked if I ever bought copies. "Nope", I said. "I read it on the internet".
He looked really crestfallen at that, probably more so because of my white goatee.
I would have said "I get my news from links from slashdot" but he wouldn't have had a clue what I was talking about.
You guys have way too much money! Gees, that's more then Elliot Spitzer pays!
My friends only charge $20-$50 (more, of course, if you're stupid. One young lady that charges me $20 gets ten times that much from rich politicians here in Springfield).
major portions of it (such as a requirement that all employers contribute toward their employees' health care) were blocked by the Republican-controlled legislature.
Why can't we do as all the other industrialized countries have done? Why should the employer provide health care?
My dad (and indeed, all the other retired folks I know) are quite happy with Medicare. OTOH the poor people I know (and I know a lot of poor folks) absolutely HATE Medicaid, which is a symptom of our country's unaddressed scourge, classism.
I'd like to see the health insurance companies go out of business completely and find honest work. Why not just extend Medicare to everyone - old, young, rich, and poor? It works for the rest of the world!
I think its silly to argue that broadband penetration in a country the size of one of our states is the same sort of engineering feet as solving the problem on a continental basis
Your feet are engineered?;)
Seriously though, I don't see any difference between giving Denmark universal broadband penetration and giving Illinois universal broadband penetration.
Why are our cities cash-strapped while Denmark's aren't? Why do you make excuses for government's abysmal failures?
One more nit: we're only about a third of the continent. Mexico and Canada are part of North America as well, and Canada has a comparable land mass, although I don't know how many Canadians have access to broadband.
The US's real problem when it comes to our governments (local, state, and federal) is our method of financing political campaigns. Has there ever been a plutocracy that was just or efficient?
I agree. A lot of people are sure that anything any government runs will be run badly, but health care in other countries belies that. All the retired people I know are happy as clams with their medicare, yet the youngsters don't want it. I think they're brainwashed fools who refuse to look at facts.
Here in Springfield the power company is owned and run by the city government. We have the lowest electric rates in Illinois.
When the tornados tore through here in 2006, they destroyed a very large portion of the electrical infrastructure here. Power was restored to everyone city-wide in a week.
In contrast, later that summer St Louis was hit by a single tornado. Its corporate owned power company, Ameren (IINM) took a month to get everyone affected back on line.
I would love to see CWLP take over broadband and cable.
So explain to me again how it's Bush's fault that we don't all have free gigabit Internet in our houses?
Bush != government. He only is in charge of the executive branch. The legislature is the branch charged with writing laws (although Bush oversees those writing regulations).
If you want free gigabit ethernet in your home, write your congresscritter.
(disclaimer: not only am I not a fan of Bush, well, I'm not going to get into what I think of him as the other day when I dared give my opinion of him the comment was modded up to +4 before it wound up as "0 flamebait". Some people equate bad opinions of Bush to bad opinions of the country.)
Schizophrenia, from the Greek roots schizein (, "to split") and phrn, phren- (, -, "mind"), is a psychiatric diagnosis that describes a mental illness characterized by impairments in the perception or expression of reality, most commonly manifesting as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions or disorganized speech and thinking in the context of significant social or occupational dysfunction.
Emphasis mine.
I've known a few schitzophrenics. I seem to be a "nut magnet", as you know if you've read any of my journals here or old diaries when I was at K5.
I'm at work. But you know, my monitor at home is a tube, too. So is my TV screen, a forty two inch trinitron, 214 pounds. Has the added benefit of being hard to steal.
OT but I'm curious, where did your username come from?
Thank you for that. The class was in the late 1970s, the gentleman teaching it was afraid the craft was dying and was teaching as many people as possible. Perhaps it means he succeeded?
Slashdot Mirror
The are many a horror story of Canada and waiting lists
My friend Amy had a bad tooth last August. She drives a taxi and has no insurance.
She was finally able to get it fixed in February. The Canadians got nothing on us!
Not all the grass on the other side of the fence is greener
They have lower health care costs per capita, lower infant mortality, and longer life spans. Sometimes the grass IS greener. You realize who's paying the billion dollar health insurance company profits, don't you? What, exactly, do those companies do for that money?
due to a faulty ethernet card
When I first got XP (because I lost the driver disk for my video card and my daughter innocently ran XCP, trusting Sony, and they didn't have win98 video drivers on the web), it worked flawlessly until the first Windows auto-update.
Coincidentally, the same night the cat got on the computer desk and knocked the cablemodem off. The internet stopped working. I thought perhaps the modem was broken, and called Insight (my provider at the time). The guy on the phone could see my modem just fine, and thought my ethernet card was shot. I figured it was a bad cable, considering the cat and all.
I tried different cables, but when it wouldn't come back to life admitted the Insight guy was probably right. I was all ready to spend the ten bucks on a new card, but XP was annoying me - I had installed the software for the CD burner, and Windows had disabled its drivers. Uninstalling its software wouldn't help, Windows insisted on telling me it had disabled those drivers every time it booted. I couldn't remove the drivers manually either (Windows wouldn't let me!), so I just reinstalled Windows.
Magically I got the internet back. Windows had overwritten good ethernet drivers with bad ones.
No, it doesn't. By "open source" I only mean that to obtain copyright on a binary, its source must be disclosed. The source is, after all, the true "work of art", the "intellectual" part. Nobody produced the binary; it was compiled from the source.
By "offer any licence (s)he wishes" I mean in accordance to law. Which I agree, today's corporations don't give a rat's ass about the law, except to buy it and beat you over the head with it.
unless we increased Medicare taxes by a factor of six or so. So, you're talking about increasing payroll taxes from 1.45% (each, from you, and from your employer) to about 9%
And not having to pay medical insurance premiums. Factor that and whet your employer pays for your insurance in. The only losers would be the insurance companies, their stockholders, and employees. The health insurance employees are surley on The Golgafrinchans "third ark"
You realise that countries where everyone has the equivalent of Medicare have lower per capita costs, lower infant mortality, and longer life spans?
Thought not. Stop drinking the corporate koolaid.
He's not enjoying nearly as many tax dollars as Haliburton's shareholders, Boeing's shareholders, etc, and he's not enjoying nearly as many tax dollars as he paid in during his forty years of building America's infrastructure with his hands; he was in electrical construction. The electricity coming into your home is likely carried over a 30KV high tension line he built.
We don't have to be "like" every other country, I would prefer we'd be BETTER, but we damned sure shouldn't be INFERIOR. When it comes to health care, we are. Our lifespan is shorter, our infant mortality is higher, and we pay more per capita for our health care.
Electricity and Water are basic needs
Water is a basic need, but people lived without electricity for hundreds of thousands of years. None of my grandparents had electricity when they were young.
I can't argue with a single word.
I worry that the taxation on stock transactions, while on some levels satisfying, would cripple the liquidity of American markets
I think that would be a GOOD thing. Profits on stock sales should be at least, if not more, than taxes on an equal amount of money earned by actually WORKING. The guy on the factory floor, in the programmer's cube, behind the McDonald's grill, they are the people who create wealth. The stock traders just aggregate and control it.
There doesn't seem to be any incentive to reduce cost
That's the thing about health care - there's no way the free market can work. Right now I'm facing a vitrectomy because of a retinal detachment. I have two choices: get the procedure done, or go blind in my left eye.
For the poorest Americans, school lunches are the only real meal they get.
Food is the one thing the poor don't lack in the US. There is the LINK program, formerly called "food stamps", and there are food pantries galore. I have a lot of poor friends; hell, four homeless people have their belonbgings stored in my basement right now. I have a decent job and do what I can to help my less fortunate friends, and they bring ME food!
OTOH, their health care is abysmal when they can get it at all. Most doctors won't even take medicaid because it doesn't pay enough. I have good insurance, but if I were indigent I would go blind in my left eye; I suffered a detached retina and will be undergoing a Vitrectomy, probably nnext week (I have an appointment with Dr. Odin Monday) and maybe on my birthday =(
Yes, because of the obvious problems in PAYING for it.
I see the problem as paying the salaries and dividends of the people who work for and own stock in MY INSURANCE COMPANY. Take themout of the loop and my health care will be a lot less expensive.
The Europeans, Canadians, and the rest of the civilized world don't seem to have a problem with paying for it.
Medicare negotiating lower drug prices causes INCREASED prices for those not on Medicare
What if Medicare covered everyone, young and old, rich and poor? You do realise that Americans pay more for our drugs than citizens of any other country, don't you?
patent terms should be tailored to provide the MINIMUM rights necessary to accomplish that goal.
Twenty years isn't that long a time. I only wish copyrights were as short.
I couldn't agree more with you on subsidies (as well as about everything else in your post I didn't argue with). If the government subsidizes a drug, that drug should not have a patent. And we shouldn't subsidise farmers. I say that as a citizen of a farming state, too!
I wouldn't call this news, a more accurate term would be gossip.
And that's different from the mainstream media how, exactly? I mean, the Google News page I linked has 111 different mainstream media articles about it. How is a shooting in Virginia in any way relevant to me, who lives in Illinois? It's gossip!
the "news" may be utterly uninformed and outright incorrect.
Which is different from the mainstream media how, exactly?
Think back when you were a stupid ass kid. Did it matter to anyone outside your fucking circle of friends what you thought, what you heard, or what you fucking took ??
;P
I'll be 56 next week and I'm still like that
-mcgrew
I don't WANT the mainstream media to "get it". They are run by the multinational corporations and uber-rich people who have no clue nor care about me whatever. Their main purpose is propaganda, secondary purpose is profit.
For instance, in 2000 Ralph Nader wasn't on the ballot in enough states to win the election even if he carried every single state. OTOH the Libertarians were on the ballot in 49 states. The mainstream media slobbered all over Nader but had nary a word to say about the Libertarian.
Had the roles been reversed I'm convinced it would have been Nader who would have been ignored and the Libertarian trumpeted. In a truly democratic republic, all viable candidates (candidates on the ballot in enough states to win should they garner the votes) should have their views aired and be included in debates.
But the people who own the mainstream media are the same people who finance the elections in our pseudodemocratic plutocratic republic. With only two candidates to bribe with campaign cash, no matter who loses they win and you lose.
BTW, I don't give a rat's ass about Britney's drug and child support problems. Why is this meaningless nonsense trumping science, politics, and stuff that truly matters?
They were gioving away copies of the State Journal-Register (Warning - the first item in that link is hilarious) at the store the other day. The man giving them away asked if I ever bought copies. "Nope", I said. "I read it on the internet".
He looked really crestfallen at that, probably more so because of my white goatee.
I would have said "I get my news from links from slashdot" but he wouldn't have had a clue what I was talking about.
-mcgrew
You guys have way too much money! Gees, that's more then Elliot Spitzer pays!
My friends only charge $20-$50 (more, of course, if you're stupid. One young lady that charges me $20 gets ten times that much from rich politicians here in Springfield).
major portions of it (such as a requirement that all employers contribute toward their employees' health care) were blocked by the Republican-controlled legislature.
Why can't we do as all the other industrialized countries have done? Why should the employer provide health care?
My dad (and indeed, all the other retired folks I know) are quite happy with Medicare. OTOH the poor people I know (and I know a lot of poor folks) absolutely HATE Medicaid, which is a symptom of our country's unaddressed scourge, classism.
I'd like to see the health insurance companies go out of business completely and find honest work. Why not just extend Medicare to everyone - old, young, rich, and poor? It works for the rest of the world!
-mcgrew
I think its silly to argue that broadband penetration in a country the size of one of our states is the same sort of engineering feet as solving the problem on a continental basis
;)
Your feet are engineered?
Seriously though, I don't see any difference between giving Denmark universal broadband penetration and giving Illinois universal broadband penetration.
Why are our cities cash-strapped while Denmark's aren't? Why do you make excuses for government's abysmal failures?
One more nit: we're only about a third of the continent. Mexico and Canada are part of North America as well, and Canada has a comparable land mass, although I don't know how many Canadians have access to broadband.
The US's real problem when it comes to our governments (local, state, and federal) is our method of financing political campaigns. Has there ever been a plutocracy that was just or efficient?
I agree. A lot of people are sure that anything any government runs will be run badly, but health care in other countries belies that. All the retired people I know are happy as clams with their medicare, yet the youngsters don't want it. I think they're brainwashed fools who refuse to look at facts.
Here in Springfield the power company is owned and run by the city government. We have the lowest electric rates in Illinois.
When the tornados tore through here in 2006, they destroyed a very large portion of the electrical infrastructure here. Power was restored to everyone city-wide in a week.
In contrast, later that summer St Louis was hit by a single tornado. Its corporate owned power company, Ameren (IINM) took a month to get everyone affected back on line.
I would love to see CWLP take over broadband and cable.
-mcgrew
So explain to me again how it's Bush's fault that we don't all have free gigabit Internet in our houses?
Bush != government. He only is in charge of the executive branch. The legislature is the branch charged with writing laws (although Bush oversees those writing regulations).
If you want free gigabit ethernet in your home, write your congresscritter.
(disclaimer: not only am I not a fan of Bush, well, I'm not going to get into what I think of him as the other day when I dared give my opinion of him the comment was modded up to +4 before it wound up as "0 flamebait". Some people equate bad opinions of Bush to bad opinions of the country.)
-mcgrew
What is this administration smoking?
Corporate poles, of course.
I've known a few schitzophrenics. I seem to be a "nut magnet", as you know if you've read any of my journals here or old diaries when I was at K5.
-mcgrew
I'm at work. But you know, my monitor at home is a tube, too. So is my TV screen, a forty two inch trinitron, 214 pounds. Has the added benefit of being hard to steal.
OT but I'm curious, where did your username come from?
Thank you for that. The class was in the late 1970s, the gentleman teaching it was afraid the craft was dying and was teaching as many people as possible. Perhaps it means he succeeded?