Time and again, I am amazed at how quickly we, as a society are distracted from serious issues facing us all. I am cognizant that transgender issues are out there. And I further understand that some feel it is a priority. Let me say that I firmly believe that everyone, no matter gender, race, religion, creed, should ever be treated as lesser under the law. The law should be to protect us and nurture us equally. I am also cognizant that the media has been hijacked. More concerned with page clicks and 'reporting it first' even if there's no facts to actually report, we have lost the watchdog that we sorely need. Which brings me to Larry Lessig. I first saw him on Bill Maher. I have to say I like what this guy is saying. Bernie Sanders was on the same show and Lessig said that he liked Bernie's positions, but ultimately, until we get the money out of politics, we will remain unrepresented. Since the Reagan years, we have developed this slavish view that money is the end all be all, it is the only marker of success in this country. It has infected every facet of our democracy and needs to be reigned in. Since much of the wealth in this country is inherited, we have set up a system where winners of a genetic lottery, regardless of their ability or competence, get to tell the rest of us how to live. Until we get a handle on our reverence for cash, we will continue to live in a country where your say is directly tied to your bank balance. No true reckoning of democracy would include such an insupportable proposition.
That was a clean and fair response, I'd say. As far as the kid who made actual threats? Well he's an idiot and needs to go to trial, but I'm pretty sure he was just bullshit trolling. Either way, threats are threats-- not cool, not legal. He no doubt incited a lot of panic so fuck him.
Colorado might put Universal Healthcare on 2016 ballot. So, basically they want to kill the insurance companies. Which is a double edged sword. On one hand they're predatory mongrels destroying lives, on the other hand those are a lot of jobs suddenly vanishing. The funding seems solid, IF they can convince hospitals and pharmaceuticals to eventually lower prices. Which, if everyone is covered, would be a windfall for both of those sectors. If a state were to try this, CO seems like a good fit. Plenty of weed and booze tax to play with and only 5 million in the population.
10% tax on payroll per employee? Is that paid by the company or the employee? Cause I can't see people being happy about that. I currently pay roughly 3%, pre-tax, and its the highest individual contribution Ive paid in my career, despite working for a F100 company. EDIT: Found an article, it would be 7% by the employers, 3% by the employees. So depending on your current monthly costs, may be a wash.
It seems to me like a lot of those jobs, at least the bulk of the entry-to-mid-level jobs, would have to eventually transition to government payroll. There's some overhead in running individual companies, of course, but most of the processing/buying/infrastructure/development jobs are just work that needs to be done as part of being an intermediary between the healthcare providers and the customers.
3% of my income to never have to deal with a deductible, insurance bullshit or worry about going bankrupt from cancer or a motorcycle wreck? Fucking sold. I already spend more than that on asthma and counselling. Never mind the stupid lawsuits that would evaporate when no one was on the hook for thousands in medical expenses. Yes those are jobs. But they don't add value...honestly, how much worse off would a state be if all the insurance people did something else. It's not like it was a childhood dream to work at Allstate. Fucking silly argument. There will still be cars, homes and businesses that need insuring...just not bodies. Good.
Easy to say when its not your job on the chopping block. At least 2.5 million people work in the insurance industry. States like Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, and parts of New York where many of those insurance companies are headquartered would be economically devastated by it. And if you think 3% of your income that would be going to insurance is not going to be supplanted by a equal or greater tax hike youre dreaming.
I guess now we're supposed to stop everything because the students of America are demanding a tuition-free, debt-free world where working part-time on campus should magically make you more money than everyone else who does the same job. The Million Student March. Let's all take second to realize that this is actually a thing.
It's cute. One day, if they find a job, they will get their first paycheck, their jaws will hit the floor when they see what they ACTUALLY take home, and hopefully they will realize what they were asking for all along.
We pay more in healthcare and education than anywhere else in the world, neither comparable with price to quality. $1.2 trillion in college loans. That number is unacceptable. So, yeah, I can see why they're pissy about that. I' d love to see price reform for higher education, and a rollback on interest rates. 1 year in America is the same as a full ride in Canada. Fuck that shit. This nonsense will come to a head like the housing bubble. Crappy/expensive education will be a net deficit financially and qualitatively for us in the near future. However, I'm more concerned with our woefully underfunded, broken public school system. Everything else these kids yacked about this week? They can get fucked with a spike. Limiting speech and dialogue does nothing but perpetuate that they are clueless, spoiled, whiny, uninformed little shits. Which they are. They're asking to make their degree worthless. Nevermind how to even pay for it. I don't see eye to eye with Bernie and Obama on this. Partial government assistance via more grants and scholarships, yes, not complete. Free community and junior college, yes. There still needs to be an incentive, whether it be price prohibition or studies difficulty. Whoever the first asshole was to expect a 4 year degree and 2 year experience for an entry level position as a typist should be set on fire in the public square. Not everybody needs a degree. Now upward mobility demands it unnecessarily. Christ, go be a techie, carpenter, plumber, or get into A/C. I know a couple who desperately need viable help. Refrigeration technician certifications are somewhere around 2k. Starting at a lot of companies is $15-20 an hour.
My simple - and admittedly, not extensively thought out, so I'm sure there're lots of drawbacks - idea to stem college tuition hikes is to make student loans dischargeable via bankruptcy proceedings. Obviously that will really dry the well up a great deal, but I really wonder if that's such a bad thing. As it stands, banks really don't have anything to lose loaning out hundreds of thousands of dollars, and consequently universities won't be able to correspondingly keep raising tuition.
Piling on, there's the fucking idiot (student VP) below who I swear to god said that the "First amendment creates a hostile and and unsafe learning environment". ...to echo a board member's previous post, this is what happens when you never tell an entire generation that they're wrong about anything. They haven't even experienced real life but they think they should get to control real life.
Pssshaw. It's easy to complain about young kids being dumb. People have been doing it forever. Take a good long look at 18-22 year old you. Do you think you were dumb as hell? Odds are you should. I work with teenagers all day. Are they lazy, entitled, whiny, blah blah blah? Absolutely. Was I those same things as a teenager/younger adult? For the most part, yes. Most people were. Are they going to fuck up and say and do dumb shit? Yes. Does that mean that their concerns should be written off wholesale? Not at all. Stop going for the low-hanging fruit of generational ad-hominem. The issues at hand provide more than enough fodder for debate/conversation/bitching/what have you.
I mean if states want to try out their own college funding programs for their citizens I have no beef. Let them pay for it by what ever state taxing means they think works for them locally. Having the federal government start another money pit entitlement program or fully nationalizing student debt is setting things up for another eventual debt disaster.
I'm just at a loss as to why this very simple concept resonates with only a minority of Americans. We pay nearly double relative to the most of the first world. For less coverage. We're supposed to be the kings of credit card debt, consumer spending, and impossibly unrealistic mortgage deals, but the #1 cause of bankruptcy in this country? Medical bills. From people who already have health insurance. The way people cling to the free market in disastrous scenarios has become almost religious. Except it's not even a free market, as VI pointed out many pages back in this thread.
These quotes came from the WDT - instead of clogging that up with a heavy response, I'll put this here. Although, it could be a separate thread on assisted suicide or taking your own life after a terminal diagnosis or whatever. My father died 10 years after being diagnosed. I agree with toytoy - it is a mean, mean disease. My father lived in the same town, so it was incredibly difficult to watch his mind rot away. I have two sisters, and, from what I understand, odds are pretty high that one of us will have it. Yay. He went from having to retire, to give up driving and independence, to living at home, to a memory care facility, to a full nursing home. But, you guys say you'd off yourself, and I have said the exact same thing. The last couple years, and especially the last 4 weeks of his life were absolutely brutal. But, the first couple, I'm glad he was still around, and he was, too. But, when do you throw the switch on yourself? Maybe this should go in the confessions thread, but my dad had no food or water or any type of life support for the last 6 weeks. Once we decided to stop, the doctors told us it would probably be a week to 10 days. It was 4 weeks. Human life is precious to me; but, I was alone in the room with him several times, and the thought of putting a pillow over his face popped in my head more than once. I didn't do it or even come close. But, this was my father, whom I loved, who was a kind and good man, that never showed me anything but love, by any measure was a great person and father - yet, this disease made me have thoughts of putting a pillow over his face. Alzheimer's doesn't kill you. It just allows your organs to fail, or you can't fight off pneumonia or something else equally suck ass.
Good for him, and of course I don't have much sympathy for the philosophy/art history double major crying that he's in debt and can't find a job. But it's pretty fucked up if you have to join the army to afford college/university. Education shouldn't be that unattainable in a country like America.