Actually I think the opposite will happen with nationalized healthcare. Since a nationalized system exists to provide care for constituents, and not profit to shareholders, I believe that taking insurance companies out of the loop will fix this problem.
The US is the ONLY major industrialized nation to not have nationalized healthcare. And the quality of our care is abysmal. Your scaremongering about "socialized" medicine is hysterical, unfounded nonsense.
Eventually after they've pushed out a few wobbly iterations they'll usually end up with a version which mostly works. Then they may abandon it for a new idea.;-)
Sounds like an ADD-afflicted adolescent who sniffs markers in between attempts.
A national sales tax is a highly regressive tax plan that penalizes those who have essentially no savings
and I could care less if the wealthy move out of the US. The hoarders of wealth aren't providing any value to the nation shipping their cash off to the caymans anyway. We don't need them. We need people who participate in the economy and contribute their fair share. So high taxes work regardless of the result.
you reference the body count of communism, but you haven't counted the external horrors US capitalism has wrought on an unprepared World.
proxy wars, exploitation, starvation, environmental devestation . . . the body count of capitalism is high enough, thank you very much. It's just that as Americans we are safely shielded from the consequences of it most of the time -- we're not ignorant, that's for sure. We know that to have oil we must prop up grotesque dictators in the middle east.
So don't get too cocky about Communism's "body count." You're standing on a thin scrim of ice over a fiery hell of consequence.
Companies that post upper limits usually have serious problems (either they don't want to pay for more experience, or management has so little clue they fear for their own jobs).
Not exactly. Upper limits are often placed to prevent over qualified people from applying for the job for the exact reason that they are more likely to jump ship as soon as a better paying job comes along. Hiring employees costs money...all departments of a business are involved, finance, hr, it, management, etc.
Isn't that too fucking bad? I would simply whittle off the bottom of my resume if it came down to that. A company that expects employees to be disposable units, but then in return thinks it's uncouth to use them as a stepping stone to a better job, doesn't have a clue what the concept of a "market" is, and deserves to get used like a street-corner whore.
Sorry, who the fuck in IT is going to create a position for $8 an hour? I've seen interns get paid more than that, for fuck's sake. Any dolt can flip burgers for better pay.
Freetrade capitalism is all about improving everyone's life
LOL. Is that what you believe? Here's the truth of the matter: Free-trade capitalism serves one valid purpose in our society, and that is to make money for the shareholders of corporations. It has exactly dick to do with improving life, and if success in capitalism comes at the cost of someone else's quality of life or long term wellbeing, there is nothing free-trade capitalism will do about it.
The long-term ratchet effect of unfettered freetrade capitalism in the last two or three decades has been to fuck over the quality of life of just enough of the participants in any given market (namely, the workers) in order to improve the bottom line for the shareholders without increasing the prices so much that the consumers ran away. Companies that succeeded at this were able to buy up smaller companies that didn't and proceed to fuck them over as well. But a funny thing happened on the way to freemarketdroid bliss -- the overlapping populations of employees and consumers grew to be so large that virtually everyone cottoned to the game. If you aren't immediately suspcious of a large corporation's intentions when they take over your employer, or your supplier, you aren't paying any attention.
You must be one of those pinheads who has been successfully deluded into thinking that Democracy and Capitalism are two sides of some mythical coin, and that more of your quality of life comes from the Capitalism side than the Democracy side.
Thankfully, not everyone in America is such a twit.
You should have, instead of arguing with the bean-counters, pointed out to the company auditors the depth of horrifying risk these morons were taking. Especially the entrusting of backup duties to the office cleaning crew.
Yeah. I have long noted that the really large software houses that I deal with (mainly HP and of course Microsoft) have progressively deteriorating levels of quality and service. I recently spent about 3 months trying to get a Microsoft product to function as it was advertised. It's not one of their mainstream apps, but it nonetheless cost my company money. Well point blank the fucking thing didn't work. It wasn't buggy. It wasn't that it quirked at some acceptable error rate. Virtually every use of the product failed outright. I got sucked into a service call with their outsourced engineers, talked back and forth and up and down and sideways. At one point the engineers for Component A stated firmly that the product was doing what it was supposed to. The engineers of Component B tried to log and reproduce the failure and pointed back at the engineers for Component A. Finally I called my TAM and said: "listen, bub. This shit isn't working. No two ways about it. Stop sending me on a runaround."
I got higher-level assistance from the engineers on Component A who finally admitted that even though this particular product has been out for over 10 years and is in its third major revision (about to be its fourth) it doesn't appear to actually work outside a sterile lab environment. They promised to put in an enhancement request to make the product work correctly.
We went with a product from a much smaller company that advertises the same functionality and costs twice as much, but has the added advantage of actually working more than 99% of the time.
HP is no better. As they have bought smaller software and hardware companies, their support and service from those companies has been ritually destroyed. The website of one small outfit bought by HP, which used to contain an excellent self-serve knowledgebase for product issues is now scrapped and replaced with their all-in-one/none-at-all website which doesn't do jack shit.
Outsourcing is of course a big favorite of huge software companies and I think it fits in their extremely fucked mentality of consuming all of the marketshare of a particular product and cutting costs (quality) in order to "unlock the profits."
The bigger these companies get, the more catastrophic their failures will be when the real market forces kick in and people get tired of trying to use absolute shit product.
The Democrats and the Republicans are two sides of the same face of the coin -- the left side and the right side of authoritarianism or Statism. The opposite side is freedom, something no political party (not even the Greens nor the Libertarians) are about.
Forgive me: where the hell have you been for the last six years? In a spider hole? I can definitely tell the difference between having Democrats and Republicans in charge.
Also, please note that many of the new Democrats elected are not from the mold of Joe Lieberman (though we unfortunately failed to replace his ass) but rather were endorsed (and WON on the basis of that endorsement) -- from the netroots. Micro-donations from actual citizens. So their campaign contributors are all a bunch of ordinary folk, and they're not going to be allowed to forget that.
So, -1 for ignorance, and -2 for intentional ignorance. Try again!
Problem with your analysis: Hurricane Pam. This fictionalized exercise was basically the current plan for dealing with a hurricane. Most indications are that New Orleans followed it, but the feds, aided by Heckofa Job Brownie, sat there and emailed each other about whether they looked good in their outfits. And of course you can't forget those classic photos of Bush playing guitar and cutting cake.
In short, bullshit. There is a wealth of evidence to indicate that FEMA, DHS, and Bush himself simply sat on their hands and did jack shit while the water poured into the city.
Actually I had a highly competent co-worker who consistently referred to them as virii, as well as referring to multiple instances as instii. And he was anything but quiet vocally.
Much of what people teach as "proper" English (or Latin, for that matter) was codified by royalty as a shibboleth -- exotic rules that took plenty of spare time to memorize (time that commoners didn't have), in order to offset the increasing literacy of the public in the era of the printing press.
Usage is defined by those who use a language, and there is no such thing as better or worse usage. What matters is whether it's comprehensible. In that context virii may not be "correct" Latin but only a doofus or someone with very poor language skills indeed is going to miss that it means more than one virus. Furthermore, since we are speaking English, not Latin, we don't need to concern ourselves with using proper Latin declension of nouns, do we?
English is not even derived from Latin, and so since we're borrowing a word into English, we are more or less free to mangle it as we wish.
Why don't you look up the endorsements of, say, Cato over the last three or four election cycles? Heavily Republican. And most of the Libertarian positions that have actually been made into legislation in the last ten or so years have been the Libertarian ones -- cutting taxes and strangling government services.
Those of Glenn Beck, for starters. Often it may not be open espousal, so much as complete failure of the entire journalistic process by rebroadcasting right-wing talking points without any attempt at follow up. Wolf Blitzer failing to correct Condoleeza's phony and long-debunked justifications for the Iraq war. Here's Right-Wing blowhard Glenn Beck using bogus assertions to project left-wing media bias. CNN has also joined Faux News in misreporting scandal-plagued and unpopular Republicans' party affiliations as Democratic. Wolf Blitzer is a good softball player but seems to consistently have trouble challenging his interviewee's talking points. Howard Kurtz accusing Democrats of orchestrating the Foley meltdown in quite flagrant contradiction of all known facts regarding how Foley was "outed" by the pages he'd harrassed (and btw by the network that had just two weeks before broadcast the openly Republican Path to 9/11, suggesting that in fact the Republican Party is starting to eat its own). These are just a few examples of CNN's passive-aggressive bias.
My party is already formed. It is the libertarian party. The American people have determined that they are not interested in liberty, nor even particularly in the constitution; they want a mommy government that controls everything they do without thoughtful guiding principle, underlying legitimate constitutional authority, or any semblance of honor
Unfortunately, most libertarians appear to have followed the Republican Party's lead over the last six years and they've gotten exactly what they deserved: a daddy government that tramples all over their rights and liberties under the guise of protecting them from terrists. I can't say I'm feeling particularly warm towards the libertarian movement for that.
Where was it? How much did it cost? How easy was it for people to find out about it?
DragonCon has been running in the same place at the same time every year for a couple of decades. So I'd put a little more stock in the attendance there, which was in the thousands easily.
Rocketbelt developers are out there on the edges with the ufologists, perpetual motion researchers, and free energy salesman,
I'd have to disagree there. Rocketbelt developers are in a completely different class of being than ufologists. Believing in something that's categorically silly and repeatedly fails the test of evidence is a whole different ballgame than doing something that's very difficult and dangerous.
As to your last part, I'm tired of that damned argument. These kids willingly joined the army, yes to pay for college, but they were told repeatedly and voluntarily swore an oath (no fucking fine print) that when the U.S. goes to war, they will probably have to ship off and if that is the case, there is nothing they can do about it.
Problem being: they also assumed when they signed up that any war would be fought for the United States and not for the political ambitions of an otherwise lightweight President. Bush has abused these kids' commitment to their nation and acted in extraordinarily bad faith. The fact that the ruling elite to a man apparently have no flesh invested in this war is highly revealing.
Why didn't you go for the National Guard, hmm? Your chances of being deployed over seas to hostile combat zone are dramatically reduced in that organization.
You've now downgraded yourself to the status of very poorly-informed. The National Guard are being deployed into this cluster-fuck. It's all over the news. Your opinion becomes less important by the word.
And then Joss pulled the dirtiest storytelling trick he's ever pulled, and half of us shouted out how badly it was.
If you didn't think something like that was vintage Joss, you don't really know his style. It is part and parcel of Whedon to make you thoroughly love a character and strive fully alongside them for their hopes and desires, and then snatch it away from you with their death. These characters were risking everything for their dearly-held beliefs and it was only right and true that some of them paid with everything. When I was younger I wrote scifi stories with lots of lasers and danger, but for some reason I just couldn't cause much harm to my characters. The most that would happen was someone's arm would be hurt. Big fucking deal. As I grew into the thing I realized that all that passion means nothing without sacrifice. Joss kills off important characters to get your attention and make you believe that anything could happen. He's been doing it since the early days of Buffy -- he makes it very clear in some of the 1st season commentary that he wanted to start the series off by putting a character in the title sequence and killing them off in the second or third episode. He went ahead and killed the character, but he didn't have the money for the extra titles.
And he came back and went ahead and did it titles and all with Tara later on -- just to accentuate that the business of life in danger is a serious one.
I don't think that Wash's death was why Serenity didn't make that much money. I think it slept hard at the box office because it was under-publicized and under-promoted by the studios and given the kind of shit treatment that the series was given because they didn't fucking believe it could succeed. They couldn't give it the credit for being the great piece of work, and in today's box office environment if something doesn't literally explode out of the theatres in less than two weeks they yank it and send it to DVD. Serenity would have wiped the floor with every other piece of shit movie that came out that year if we weren't in the era of saltine-box multiplexes. It would have started quiet in the tiny distro it was originally given, and just kept on bringing people in, and bringin them in, and bringing them in. It's a gorram good movie, and I could watch it eight or ten times in a row (and I actually did) without getting sick of it.
You're pouty because a character got killed and the movie didn't go the way you wanted it to. But Joss knows very well that producing one bland "the gang's all here" sequel after another (like George Lucas started to do after Empire) will ultimately force you to churn out pablum oriented towards seven-year-olds that your adult audience can just barely stomach. And Whedon isn't quite ready to be a whore like George Lucas. So he takes risks with his characters, and allows their situations to evolve.
He's young yet. I don't think we've seen the last of what he's got to offer. The current film culture of Hollywood is so stagnant and predictable that I think it's highly at risk of being completely blown away by some new emerging dynamic. And I think Joss is part of that.
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Actually I think the opposite will happen with nationalized healthcare. Since a nationalized system exists to provide care for constituents, and not profit to shareholders, I believe that taking insurance companies out of the loop will fix this problem. The US is the ONLY major industrialized nation to not have nationalized healthcare. And the quality of our care is abysmal. Your scaremongering about "socialized" medicine is hysterical, unfounded nonsense.
A national sales tax is a highly regressive tax plan that penalizes those who have essentially no savings and I could care less if the wealthy move out of the US. The hoarders of wealth aren't providing any value to the nation shipping their cash off to the caymans anyway. We don't need them. We need people who participate in the economy and contribute their fair share. So high taxes work regardless of the result.
you reference the body count of communism, but you haven't counted the external horrors US capitalism has wrought on an unprepared World.
proxy wars, exploitation, starvation, environmental devestation . . . the body count of capitalism is high enough, thank you very much. It's just that as Americans we are safely shielded from the consequences of it most of the time -- we're not ignorant, that's for sure. We know that to have oil we must prop up grotesque dictators in the middle east.
So don't get too cocky about Communism's "body count." You're standing on a thin scrim of ice over a fiery hell of consequence.
Not exactly. Upper limits are often placed to prevent over qualified people from applying for the job for the exact reason that they are more likely to jump ship as soon as a better paying job comes along. Hiring employees costs money...all departments of a business are involved, finance, hr, it, management, etc.
Isn't that too fucking bad? I would simply whittle off the bottom of my resume if it came down to that. A company that expects employees to be disposable units, but then in return thinks it's uncouth to use them as a stepping stone to a better job, doesn't have a clue what the concept of a "market" is, and deserves to get used like a street-corner whore.Sorry, who the fuck in IT is going to create a position for $8 an hour? I've seen interns get paid more than that, for fuck's sake. Any dolt can flip burgers for better pay.
LOL. Is that what you believe? Here's the truth of the matter: Free-trade capitalism serves one valid purpose in our society, and that is to make money for the shareholders of corporations. It has exactly dick to do with improving life, and if success in capitalism comes at the cost of someone else's quality of life or long term wellbeing, there is nothing free-trade capitalism will do about it.
The long-term ratchet effect of unfettered freetrade capitalism in the last two or three decades has been to fuck over the quality of life of just enough of the participants in any given market (namely, the workers) in order to improve the bottom line for the shareholders without increasing the prices so much that the consumers ran away. Companies that succeeded at this were able to buy up smaller companies that didn't and proceed to fuck them over as well. But a funny thing happened on the way to freemarketdroid bliss -- the overlapping populations of employees and consumers grew to be so large that virtually everyone cottoned to the game. If you aren't immediately suspcious of a large corporation's intentions when they take over your employer, or your supplier, you aren't paying any attention.
You must be one of those pinheads who has been successfully deluded into thinking that Democracy and Capitalism are two sides of some mythical coin, and that more of your quality of life comes from the Capitalism side than the Democracy side.
Thankfully, not everyone in America is such a twit.
You should have, instead of arguing with the bean-counters, pointed out to the company auditors the depth of horrifying risk these morons were taking. Especially the entrusting of backup duties to the office cleaning crew.
I got higher-level assistance from the engineers on Component A who finally admitted that even though this particular product has been out for over 10 years and is in its third major revision (about to be its fourth) it doesn't appear to actually work outside a sterile lab environment. They promised to put in an enhancement request to make the product work correctly.
We went with a product from a much smaller company that advertises the same functionality and costs twice as much, but has the added advantage of actually working more than 99% of the time.
HP is no better. As they have bought smaller software and hardware companies, their support and service from those companies has been ritually destroyed. The website of one small outfit bought by HP, which used to contain an excellent self-serve knowledgebase for product issues is now scrapped and replaced with their all-in-one/none-at-all website which doesn't do jack shit.
Outsourcing is of course a big favorite of huge software companies and I think it fits in their extremely fucked mentality of consuming all of the marketshare of a particular product and cutting costs (quality) in order to "unlock the profits."
The bigger these companies get, the more catastrophic their failures will be when the real market forces kick in and people get tired of trying to use absolute shit product.
His sorry ass? That's what I want to know.
Also, please note that many of the new Democrats elected are not from the mold of Joe Lieberman (though we unfortunately failed to replace his ass) but rather were endorsed (and WON on the basis of that endorsement) -- from the netroots. Micro-donations from actual citizens. So their campaign contributors are all a bunch of ordinary folk, and they're not going to be allowed to forget that.
So, -1 for ignorance, and -2 for intentional ignorance. Try again!
Uh, yeah. If Ronnie said "it," I'm not sure it really needed to be said. All that much. I think that fucker still owes me and my kids $2.5 trillion.
Yeah, except if you have to work with MFC. Then you might as well lick feces for all the dignity you're going to end up with.
In short, bullshit. There is a wealth of evidence to indicate that FEMA, DHS, and Bush himself simply sat on their hands and did jack shit while the water poured into the city.
Actually I had a highly competent co-worker who consistently referred to them as virii, as well as referring to multiple instances as instii. And he was anything but quiet vocally.
Usage is defined by those who use a language, and there is no such thing as better or worse usage. What matters is whether it's comprehensible. In that context virii may not be "correct" Latin but only a doofus or someone with very poor language skills indeed is going to miss that it means more than one virus. Furthermore, since we are speaking English, not Latin, we don't need to concern ourselves with using proper Latin declension of nouns, do we?
English is not even derived from Latin, and so since we're borrowing a word into English, we are more or less free to mangle it as we wish.
Why don't you look up the endorsements of, say, Cato over the last three or four election cycles? Heavily Republican. And most of the Libertarian positions that have actually been made into legislation in the last ten or so years have been the Libertarian ones -- cutting taxes and strangling government services.
Those of Glenn Beck, for starters. Often it may not be open espousal, so much as complete failure of the entire journalistic process by rebroadcasting right-wing talking points without any attempt at follow up. Wolf Blitzer failing to correct Condoleeza's phony and long-debunked justifications for the Iraq war. Here's Right-Wing blowhard Glenn Beck using bogus assertions to project left-wing media bias. CNN has also joined Faux News in misreporting scandal-plagued and unpopular Republicans' party affiliations as Democratic. Wolf Blitzer is a good softball player but seems to consistently have trouble challenging his interviewee's talking points. Howard Kurtz accusing Democrats of orchestrating the Foley meltdown in quite flagrant contradiction of all known facts regarding how Foley was "outed" by the pages he'd harrassed (and btw by the network that had just two weeks before broadcast the openly Republican Path to 9/11, suggesting that in fact the Republican Party is starting to eat its own). These are just a few examples of CNN's passive-aggressive bias.
Uh, I think people sue the government all the time. In fact, I'm sure of it. It's called redress of grievances.
DragonCon has been running in the same place at the same time every year for a couple of decades. So I'd put a little more stock in the attendance there, which was in the thousands easily.
I'd have to disagree there. Rocketbelt developers are in a completely different class of being than ufologists. Believing in something that's categorically silly and repeatedly fails the test of evidence is a whole different ballgame than doing something that's very difficult and dangerous.
If you didn't think something like that was vintage Joss, you don't really know his style. It is part and parcel of Whedon to make you thoroughly love a character and strive fully alongside them for their hopes and desires, and then snatch it away from you with their death. These characters were risking everything for their dearly-held beliefs and it was only right and true that some of them paid with everything. When I was younger I wrote scifi stories with lots of lasers and danger, but for some reason I just couldn't cause much harm to my characters. The most that would happen was someone's arm would be hurt. Big fucking deal. As I grew into the thing I realized that all that passion means nothing without sacrifice. Joss kills off important characters to get your attention and make you believe that anything could happen. He's been doing it since the early days of Buffy -- he makes it very clear in some of the 1st season commentary that he wanted to start the series off by putting a character in the title sequence and killing them off in the second or third episode. He went ahead and killed the character, but he didn't have the money for the extra titles.
And he came back and went ahead and did it titles and all with Tara later on -- just to accentuate that the business of life in danger is a serious one.
I don't think that Wash's death was why Serenity didn't make that much money. I think it slept hard at the box office because it was under-publicized and under-promoted by the studios and given the kind of shit treatment that the series was given because they didn't fucking believe it could succeed. They couldn't give it the credit for being the great piece of work, and in today's box office environment if something doesn't literally explode out of the theatres in less than two weeks they yank it and send it to DVD. Serenity would have wiped the floor with every other piece of shit movie that came out that year if we weren't in the era of saltine-box multiplexes. It would have started quiet in the tiny distro it was originally given, and just kept on bringing people in, and bringin them in, and bringing them in. It's a gorram good movie, and I could watch it eight or ten times in a row (and I actually did) without getting sick of it.
You're pouty because a character got killed and the movie didn't go the way you wanted it to. But Joss knows very well that producing one bland "the gang's all here" sequel after another (like George Lucas started to do after Empire) will ultimately force you to churn out pablum oriented towards seven-year-olds that your adult audience can just barely stomach. And Whedon isn't quite ready to be a whore like George Lucas. So he takes risks with his characters, and allows their situations to evolve.
He's young yet. I don't think we've seen the last of what he's got to offer. The current film culture of Hollywood is so stagnant and predictable that I think it's highly at risk of being completely blown away by some new emerging dynamic. And I think Joss is part of that.