When I was a student in London, c. 1991-1994, I had a friend, older than I of course, who had been a schoolteacher in Allende's Chile, and fled in fear of her life after the coup. She described almost being shot by soldiers, and detention, and there was probably worse. Life in the UK as an asylum-seeker speaking no English (at the time) and working as a cleaner was better than staying there.
I think unions get a bit too much blame for workplace inflexibility, when the fact is that when things were codified in that way in such places as US automakers, rigid, exhaustive job descriptions were in vogue with management. Defining people as strictly replaceable cogs in the big machine was a big thing before more recent management fads, and that's the context in which these things need to be viewed.
And this effect of healthcare hits right in the middle of groups that tend to be quite conservative; small businessmen, entrepreneurs, consultants, people trying to better themselves. The current system gives a huge advantage to the big corporation over the individual or the small organization; you'd think that conservatives would hate it. (Some do).
Part of it, from what I've seen, is that government in the small, meaningful, touching-on-our-lives ways that regular folks encounter it is MUCH WORSE in the US than other places. My experience with American local government is that it is shockingly, nakedly corrupt and unjust to a degree that is very distasteful. Perhaps it is this that makes conservatives dislike government so much?
And for all that Americans make fun of European Union bureaucracy, federal and state bureaucracy here is utterly insane.
Another point I've pondered before is how much of the litigous culture that many conservatives decry, with some rightness, is encouraged by our lack of healthcare and safety net? Certainly people are often forced to play the lawsuit lottery because the alternative is financial ruin.
What always gets me is that the current system is so BAD for exactly the kind of person the Republican Party makes a big deal of being "for" -- the independent, self-made American, the small businessman, the inventor, the entrepreneur.
All of these people get shitty healthcare in the American system.
Worse, entrepreneurship and innovation are actively squelched by a system in which only those with no health-care worries can strike out on their own, leaving everyone else tied to big monolithic employers because they need the coverage.
Fact is, socialized healthcare would be great for small business. It'd allow them to compete on more even terms with big business, which currently can afford to compensate its employees better through economies of scale.
And then there's the cost of all the employees who are not dealing with their serious health problems because they can't afford it -- who are thus much less productive, and who eventually may end up in a much worse state, more costly for their employers in terms of absence.
It's worth noting that the Hindenburg disaster had a lower death toll than might be supposed; approximately two-thirds of passengers and crew survived. That's partly because hydrogen rises so rapidly; most of the burning happened above the craft itself (it obviously couldn't burn until mixed with enough air, for one thing).
Most of the people aboard stayed aboard till it hit the ground then escaped. Many of the dead were either trapped inside the ship after it crashed and died in the subsequent fire or were caught in the nose, which being uppermost as the craft burned was essentially above a lot of the burning material. Some died from jumping.
I believe most of the flames we see in the pictures are from the skin burning, not the hydrogen, since hydrogen burns pretty clear.
But Teresa held up specific examples too.
Of ones that the original submitter had placed on the Internet, and thus in the public eye, themselves. That is a difference, I think.
Agent criticism is a lot more justified if the agent's actually taken on the author as a client and then behaves unprofessionally. Some of those criticisms I thought were quite valid. Not all, of course. It's a different relationship than that of the slush pile.
Part of the issue with the media, of course, is that real estate ads put a lot of advertising dollars in newspapers, and companies dependent on a strong real estate and remodelling economy are big advertisers in magazines and (to a lesser degree) TV.
Although it does sometimes feel that Bush read the Onion to work out what he should be doing next.
It's sickening to me that Congress effectively was unwilling to say anything about this until nothing could be done about the Bush administration, because it's effectively over.
There was a lot of wilful blindness going on all over, that I'm sure, but I do very much agree with the point that it's one thing for a regular person to be wrong about financial matters, quite another for someone whose job it is to be more knowledgable about these things to be so wrong and blinkered about it.
I'm reminded of the adage (whose provenance I forget) that it's amazing how hard it is for someone to see the truth of something when their job depends on their not acknowleding it.
The ability of an average person to buy a house is fundamentally limited by their income and thus the dollar amount they can reasonably afford monthly. That fact is fundamentally unchanged, and this payment amount can only really go up, across the economy, if people become fundamentally better off.
Now there's a degree to which people can be persuaded to spend a greater proportion of their income than is really sensible on their mortgage, and this is sometimes a rational tradeoff; if you are pretty sure that your income will go up substantially in a few years, for instance. However, lending standards are supposed to minimize this; lenders have historically known that the risks of default increase as the proportion of someone's income being spent on their mortgage increases, since it takes a smaller degree of hard times to push someone's finances beyond their abilities.
But still, there's a hard limit on the amount of real cash people can pay monthly for a house, and it doesn't really go up. So how can house prices go up, long-term, faster than wages do? Only in markets where the demand is increasing and the supply isn't, and only to the degree that that lasts. This means that certain in-demand markets can do so, to a degree, but only to the degree that makes demand (at that price) equal to supply.
So why did house prices suddenly soar? Well, for one thing, the cheaper it gets to borrow money, the bigger a loan you can service with the same monthly payment. This is why, when interest rates got so low after the end of the tech bubble (i.e. very early 2000s), house prices began a sharp rise. People had more effective money available for the same monthly outlay, so house prices could go up.
However, the interest rate didn't keep getting lower; in fact, it began to slowly rise. House prices should have levelled off. They didn't. How come? Because everyone who depended on continued high house prices pushed hard to keep it going. This included the government; the housing boom had powered us out of what could have been a bad recession in the early 2000s. The low interest rates had worked their magic there, keeping the economy going - or at least, by pushing the consequences out into the future through the creation of an asset price bubble.
It struck me then and it still does that there were many similarities between the way the economy and the Iraq war were treated. In both cases, the Government and Republican line was that the only possible cause for anything to go wrong was lack of confidence; if we remained upbeat, then the war and the economy would do well, and the only reason things could go badly is if The Enemy At Home torpedoed American confidence by asking questions and being skeptical.
Questioning the health of the economy became, it felt to me, as "treasonous" as questioning the Iraq war. Both became matters, the Republicans insisted, of faith, not of reason.
And in the financial industry, too much of peoples' individual jobs, incomes and livelihood depended on their keeping alive the fiction of this going on forever. Investors, after all, never seemed to ask about how much risk was being taken - all that mattered was this quarter's results and next. One's bonus depended on keeping things rolling, and lower numbers could only be a result of personal failing, not because a boom couldn't go on forever.
So when there was no more room for house prices to go up based on cheap interest rates, other means of increasing purchasing power were tried, abandoning historical caution about using them. Realtors, appraisers, and loan officers had no interest in asking questions about whether these new loans were really safe for anyone; too much of their income was at stake. The institutions that bought these loans didn't want to ask too many questions either; they needed the continued growth too. The government didn't ask the hard questions either; they had too much invested, policy-wise and philosophy-wise, in keeping the fiction going.
Note in the latter case it wasn't JUST the republicans, either; politicians have a vested interest in keeping the good times rolling, because it keeps the money rolling for their projects and their fundraisers. The financial industry were big campaign donors for everyone, and nobody wanted to kill the golden goose by looking at it too closely.
It always strikes me that the American health "system" is so inimical to the very kind of people Republicans claim to be on the side of: the self-reliant, the independent, the entrepreneur, the small businessman, the self-made man.
Because of the American healthcare system, only people in the absolute best of health can *afford* to strike out on their own and start their own business - where 'best of health' means absolutely NO medical conditions whatsoever, even those which are wholly or largely mitigated by medication and which do not prevent working at full capacity.
Quite apart from the other things it damages, it effectively turns the nation into one dependent on big organizations, because only working for one gets you decent healthcare, whether it's big business or big government.
A fact which absolutely torpedoes any claim the Republican party has on being the party of small business and the can-do American spirit, and exposes them as the tool for big business that they are.
However, they successfully encourage small business owners to fight universal healthcare, by making them terrified of higher taxes. Despite the fact that small businesses would be, in reality, beneficiaries of universal healthcare - because then they'd be able to compete equally with big business for employees. There are an awfully large number of people who'd enthusiastically work for small companies and do wonders there - if they didn't have the healthcare worries.
I find Inconsolata a great monospaced font, although I've heard it only really works if you have a Mac (Windows tends not to smooth fonts in smaller sizes, leading to different fonts being readable).
Ah, found where I got it from: the page on fixed-width fonts at the TextMate Wiki.
Some people are intending to use the "flagged revisions" feature that's forthcoming in MediaWiki (Wikipedia's underlying software) to do such a thing, but I don't have much hope for it.
I wholly agree with albatross; there's an average quality Wikipedia tends towards. If an article's worse than that (and many are), it will on average trend towards the average. However, if an article's better than average, chances are that future edits will trend it towards the average as well.
Articles only stay better than that if they're strongly curated by someone or someones who care. However, Wikipedia's nature is that the most persistent person or group at an article gets their way, eventually – not necessarily the most knowledgable or the best writer.
This kind of thing happens a bit too much. Writing with personality and flow gets killed off because it's "over-familiar" and "unencyclopedic in tone" and is replaced by writing of unimpeded dreariness.
Too often, Wikipedia is a living demonstration of the fact that someone who thinks they know better doesn't always, and it's persistence, not knowledge, that pays off.
And I say this as a fan and enthusiastic contributor to the project.
Personally, two spaces after an end-of-sentence period is an EMACS-ism; many of the EMACS modes for text allow you to jump sentence-by-sentence and use dot-space-space (or dot-whitespace?-newline) as the delimiter.
Even though I don't use EMACS anymore, it's now hardwired into my brain. I could take it out, but see no point; either (a) I'm typing in a fixed-width font and it is actually useful, or (b) I'm typing in something that will do the intelligent thing (e.g. HTML).
All this reminds me of growing up in Scotland between the ages of 6 and 9, approximately; we lived in the gatehouse of a local Lord's estate (my dad was part-time head gardener for him while he went to college to get his horticulture diploma). The road in front (the A77) was a serious accident black-spot and we had at least one fatality a year there.
(Damn, Google Maps has satellite at high resolution; here. Our house was the one just above center.)
The bend just south of the house was also at a dip in the land and as well as being a deceptively sharp turn, the true radius hidden by trees, it also flooded regularly during heavy rains, which are a constant thing in western Scotland. It rains pretty much all Autumn.
I think they actually corrected the road alignment sometime during the late 1980s to help this, reducing the dip and making the curve smoother and shallower.
It got to the point that we knew exactly what a crash sounded like and called 999 (British emergency number) immediately, before we even left the house to go and see.
Obviously being young my parents didn't let us see the gory ones, though. Probably a good thing.
Crashes don't sound like they do on TV or in the movies. Partly because they always slow-mo them, I guess, and because they over-do the broken glass sounds which are much quieter than the dull metallic THUD of steel impacting steel.
The common English spirit measure as served in a bar was one-sixth of a gill, while the amount in Scotland was one-fifth, so a UK fluid ounce or a little less. Pre forced metrication, of course.
(The idea of legally enforced alcohol measures is one alien to most of the US, it seems)
On the other hand, Zirtec is the medication that allows my mother to function during the pollen-laden months, and she's sharp as the proverbial tack.
Drug reactions are very individual; multiple drug interaction reactions even more so, it seems. I suspect one of the things that makes a doctor's job harder these days, with people on so many different permanent medications, is distinguishing the drug side-effects from real problems not caused by the drugs. This has to be especially hard when treating older people who are on more drugs.
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