I didn't know the technicians working for Lockheed and Boeing were civil servants. I stand corrected.
I didn't know that any of our health care proposals involved hiring doctors, lab technicians, and pharmacists all as civil servants, either.
If you have no income, they can't charge against your taxes.
If you have an income, you can pay out-of-pocket for private coverage, or you can pay (a lot less) for public coverage.
Sounds like people have choices to me.
Oh, really? This is a government bureaucracy we're talking about.
THIS is what we'd ALL get if Obama and the Dems win their attempt to have a government takeover of health care.
Well, everyone who chose the public option. Which, at least to begin with, would mostly be people who have no healthcare at all right now. Healthcare with occasional administrative errors is probably going to save more lives than no care AT ALL.
Besides which, I've had bad lab results and mistaken reports from private healthcare, too. Even large-scale errors. And it's certainly not simply healthcare that has this happen...I've gotten notices from utilities that my service was going to be cut off when I'd paid my bill, or that my credit card was stolen when it wasn't, or that I was denied for something when I was approved. It does happen, and it happens at least as often in private business as in government.
The vending machines are cheaper than the people. That's the whole point.
(Or at least, that's what the marketing materials say. They probably don't have sufficient personnel to do a proper cost-benefit analysis, or evaluate the product for suitability.)
it's the prison administration flushing the meds, not the prisoners.
Why should they make sure? This is a prison, not a mental institution. If a diabetic prisoner does not want to take his insulin, that's his problem.
An awful lot of prison inmates are on drugs to control mental health issues. You really don't want a guy deciding not to take his meds for schizophrenia and having a psychotic break in the middle of the cafeteria.
Also, if a diabetic doesn't take his Glyburide (insulin is injected, so probably can't be administered by the machine... I don't imagine prisoners are given unsupervised access to needles), and goes into a diabetic coma, he's then admitted to the hospital on the public dime. We *still* have to take care of their health problems, even if they create them themselves. Ensuring medication compliance saves public money.
As a famous cat put it: THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS.
I'm pretty sure it was Satchel's owner who said that...
Isn't that the kind of thinking/stats that kept the flawed Ford Pinto or the road despite being a time ticking bomb ?
No, not at all.
The Pinto *did* have a flaw that made it significantly more dangerous if it was in a typical rear-end collision. The reasoning was economical: Ford saved money by paying out enormous settlements when the flaw happened to cause greater injury or death than would normally be expected in an accident, rather than recalling and repairing ALL flawed Pintos.
The analogy, in this case, would be if the risk was already proven (which it's not; there has NEVER been a comprehensive analysis of how actual driver behavior or accident rates is affected by cell phone use), and I was suggesting that the COST of the accidents was lower than the COST of passing and enforcing legislation.
I am not suggesting anything of the kind. If we do the analysis, and find that, yes, cell phone use HAS increased the danger on the road, we absolutely *should* ban use of phones while driving (and should also look at other factors involved, as ceoyoyo mentions below). But until we've actually examined what *really* happens, rather than using inappropriate proxies in controlled conditions, we should stop assuming we know how everything works.
...or perhaps you're too focused on the single-minded task of reinforcing your male superiority to notice when men multitask to the detriment of their performance.
You talk about the national health insurance plan as if it is some clearly laid out plan. Why do you think they tried to rush it through Congress before anyone could have time to read it?
You mean like the PATRIOT Act?
Multitasking in humans is a myth. You might be able to rapidly switch between tasks, but processing more than one thing simultaneously can't be done.
Glad to hear you've got the human brain all figured out, because no one else does. I think you might have some errors there, though, because there are any number of tasks humans can definitely do at the same time
1) I can see and hear at the same time. Both these tasks are very processing-intensive, and go on during most of my waking hours, along with other tasks I may be accomplishing.
But I do find that blocking out sensory input from other channels can help me focus harder on a particular channel. Most commonly, I find this when I'm doing something by touch, such as finding an object in my purse, or fastening something behind me. I can do it a lot easier if I close my eyes.
I cannot read and listen to speech at the same time at all. I've previously read that this is a very rare skill in men but not that uncommon in women (Unfortunately I cannot find anything relevant when googling so I might be misremembering something else).
I can't listen in realtime while reading... but frequently, if someone says something to me while I'm reading, if I STOP reading, I can then play back what they said from the buffer and respond. But I literally don't understand the content of what they said until after I stop reading and take about half as long as it took them to say it to remember hearing it and interpret it into meaning.
And, FWIW, I'm female. Maybe women have bigger buffers? (Oh, git yer mind out o' the gutter!)
I tell someone x is followed by y and z. They hear x and immediately ask about c. Well, c could be related in some instances but I already told you in this instance it's x, then y, then z. But wait, why is y there? That's the sequence. And then after several more rounds the person will exclaim with a sudden revelation "Why, this is x, then y, then z!" Of course, you numpty pillock.
You've been eavesdropping on my conversations with my husband, haven't you?
Thing is, he's NOT much of a multi-tasker. We have those conversations when all he's doing is talking to me (and I'M doing the cooking). But I tell him something, and immediately a question pops into his head, and apparently, he's INCAPABLE of letting me finish what I'm saying and finding out whether or not his question is relevant, much less addressed by the rest of the sentence.
Yes. Essentially, what he showed was that multi-taskers were worse at concentrating on an externally-identified stream than single-taskers were. He didn't actually find out how ANYBODY did at multi-tasking.
A better way, even without changing the experimental setup, would be to, for example, ask everyone after the first experiment how many blue rectangles there were. The multi-taskers are probably more likely to get that right than the single-taskers, since they aren't blocking the blue rectangles as effectively. With the N-back test, they could have asked all the participants to list all the letters they could remember hearing, and probably the multi-taskers would remember a larger number of them, while the single-taskers would mostly just remember the ones that they flagged during the experiment.
In fact, I cannot understand folks that listen to music and work
I think you're confusing listening with having music on as background noise.
I have the same issue as the GP. The only music that I can use as "background noise" is classical. No lyrics, not even very interesting. I don't particularly like classical music, but it doesn't overtly bother me like jazz does.
If it's music I actually *like*, I'll get distracted from the task at hand and listen to it.
But, different strokes for different folks. I remember one time, my ex walked into the living room to ask me a question while I was sitting and reading a book. While talking, he picked up the TV remote, hit the Power button, surfed to a channel showing something vaguely interesting, put down the remote, concluded the exchange, and left the room. With the TV on. While I, on the other hand, don't turn on the TV unless I intend to watch it, because if it's on, I *will* pay attention to it.
Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.
