Not sure about Cali but in my neck of the woods, low income housing gets to side step a lot of local authority BS. It's meant to combat the local authorities trying to keep out the "unwanted element". The funny thing is that some of the people in that area have probably taken up "the poor" as a celebrity cause and are now going to be in the unpleasant position of either having to fight it, deal with it, or leave.

The rich kids go to private school.

I don't plan on working in the historical time before unions. I also don't agree with using dues to push political agendas. It's no wonder they're losing members and money. The teamsters hit this head on when they tried to unionize the southern auto workers. The workers didn't see any value in unionizing and instead felt that it would be a bad thing for themselves and the company.

You believe that people who can't do the work they were hired to do deserve just as much money as the company's competent employees earn?

We're all equal under law, therefore there's only the statistical meaning.

I was a member of the AFL-CIO, so, yes.. I have belonged to a union. I had no choice since to work at that company you had to join the union. Although we could opt out, we would still have had to pay dues, which is part of my reasoning that they really care a lot about dues and not much else. In fact, the only time we ever heard from them was when they were announcing that dues were rising. The only people in tech that I have ever heard talking about unions are those that barely hanging onto their jobs. The talented folks that can do the work can do a fine job negotiating wages and benefits and workplace safety and such all on their own.

The courts haven't always upheld that type of thinking. I forget the details, but there was a case in the mid-west US where caucasians had become the minority in an area and tried to make use of a "school choice" law to choose their children's school that was intended to send kids in poverty stricken areas to the "better" schools in more affluent areas. The court basically told them they couldn't claim to be minorities even though they were the actual minority in their district.

Unions stand up for union dues. They don't give a shit about you beyond that.

There's a lot of stuff hidden in the archives at the Vatican that very few will ever see. Secrecy is just as common within a religion as it is anywhere else.

Not ahead of a trial, they wouldn't.

Depends which prices you're quoting. At many health care facilities, the amount charged to insurers is way higher than the amount charged to individuals if they don't have coverage. It's very difficult to say whether or not care is expensive because so many of the figures are bogus.

The waiting lists aren't BS. The article you linked even says as much. General care you'll probably be fine with but many specialties do have long wait lists. My point is bigger than that though. If you nationalize it, you're stuck with the official waiting list. Right now, you can at least "shop around".

Our system really isn't that bad. There are things that could be done to improve it, things that should have been done instead of the AHA. Making it all the domain of the feds is the last thing you want to do. They couldn't even launch a website with years of preparation. They can't even keep the Veterans Administration out of the news for any length of time. They'd have to prove competency in something before a majority of Americans are going to want more federal intrusion in their lives.

My healthcare is between me and my doctor. Not the government.

You could always choose another insurer, you could choose to pay out of pocket.. you at least have some options. In a nationalized system that's rationing care, you have no options. I'll take having a choice to not having a choice, thanks.

Besides which, I don't know what kind of crap insurance you have, but I don't tend to have problems with claims. I can see a specialist within weeks whereas my not-so-far-away neighbors in Canada wait years depending on the specialist. I don't want that. You shouldn't either.

I get calls and emails from companies like that quite frequently, and even despite all the "perks", I still don't want to relocate to that part of the country. If tech companies want to improve their odds of recruiting talent, they need to spread out a bit. Not everyone wants to live in the big city and take the hit to cost of living and quality of life that it imposes. Not to mention CA's looming bankruptcy, the drought, and all the other nonsense going on.

A nationalized system isn't the paradise you think it is. Just wait until you end up on a two year waiting list because your system is nationalized and there's no incentive for them to do any better, and you have no other options.

Considering that bitcoins were new and so were the companies involved with them, how would the average individual have determined which companies were trustworthy and which weren't?