Nicotine is not a disease, and this is not a vaccine. The only reason I can think of for calling a drug a "vaccine" is to be able to use the blanket immunitiy from law suits and prosecution that pharmaceutical companies get for vaccines.

... Sick time is treated pretty similarly in the US. The big difference is the (enforced by law) mandatory vacation (holiday) time which the US doesn't have, and differences in the way part-time workers are treated as far as benefits (they usually don't get any).

Why do statist always think that when someone objects to elevating the rights of the state to impose its will on people, they always assume that the person objecting must be some crazy anarchist or something?

Individual rights always result in better outcomes than collectivist rights. You seem to think the latter is preferred, even when I pointed out where using such a principle can lead.

I think the United Nations' "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" has some excellent stuff in it - except near the bottom the invalidating disclaimer: "(3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations."

I doubt you live in this one.

Yea, I wish that were the case. I've been looking for a Galaxy Tab 4 10 inch to replace my aging 9 inch android tablet the price on those things has been going up for the past few months.

Smaller tablet prices may be coming down, but that's because they're just the wrong size for anything. Too big for your pocket, but too little screen real estate for anything I can't do with my phone.

I use Office 2007 on Windows and Office for OSX on the Mac (Maverick). I write technical documents, using plenty of advanced formatting features, for publication using Word, and they render exactly the same in the office and Mac version. That's using the .docx format. So that seems to work well, anyway.

As far as Linux, there is no MS Office version, and Libre and related systems have formatting issues in both directions.

Who is this "society" that "gives" rights to people? Hmm? How is that handled? What rights can "society" take away? What if "society" is threatened by some individual because of what he does? What about what he says? Maybe he his spreading dangerous ideas. Maybe because of that he should be eliminated.

I think you are smart enough to see where this leads. "Society" needs to be protected - from dangerous ideas spread by some individual. So "society" implements a change to the "contract" (that nobody signed) and now "dangerous" speech is a death sentence.

Because most of our immigrants are Mexican and Hondoran Christians, not Middle Eastern Muslims, and most of those are not documented, so employers can just pay them under the table for cheap instead of cow-towing to privilege-seeking employees.

Or 90%, or 80% or 70% or ... well, this year, it's actually hardly effective at all.

You know what the most reliable outcome of the annual distribution of flu vaccines actually is? Pharmaceutical company profits. For companies with total blanket immunity from law suits or prosecution for ANY ill effects from those vaccines.

"Society" is not a thing, it does not have rights. Individual people have rights, including the right to associate (or not) with other people. When you create some arbitrary definition of a collective and give it rights over individuals, you are on the road to tyranny. You split people into collectives, create nationalism, start wars over it, etc.

Actually, it's only for criminal trials. Civil trials are decided on the basis of "the preponderance of evidence."

Just imagine the same discussion 100 years ago: "But real horse enthusiasts think that the smell of horse manure is an integral part of the 'horse experience' and the attempts to emulate it by piling bullshit on the passenger seat are inferior to having a real live horse attached to your car".

Get over it. Engine noise is a noxious emission, sign of imperfect design.

Well, first, you're responding to the wrong person. I assumed you were trying to say something insightful about the law. Unfortunately it's just more of the same partisan drivel.

I get there are many people happy about the ACA, and they like justifying all the bad things that have been done in the past six years with deflection about how it "Not as bad as the Iraq war", etc. Hard to argue with that, which I guess is why it's used, but of course the ACA is bad law, for many reasons, but most compelling is that the costs are far greater than the benefits. But that's what happens when the "leaders" have clearly stopped representing the people, and the only goal is power, through whatever means possible.

You can dismiss the Constitution by looking at the founders through the lens of modern culture if you like, but frankly considering the way countries were run in the rest of the world at the time, it was a vast improvement. And it's still law. If somethings wrong with it, there are provisions for changing it. But frankly the biggest problem is that Congress puts a lot of effort into getting around it, not following it. ACA and bi-annual NDAA are no different in that regard.

Excellent point. To sound like a professional, you have to say "That's not in our wheelhouse."

So, what, you're fixing it for free? Or just laughing and saying "Yea, that sucks for you!" and walking away?