If you can't add without a calculator 33 and 84 in your head and get an answer instantly, then you are fucked up.

If you have to think about it at all, then your education has been wrong.

There is value to pages and pages of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division work. And in not being able to access a calculator to do it.

Some of us grew up in between the end of the 'OMG Communists!' era and the start of the 'OMG terr'rists!' era. The rest of you probably shouldn't be allowed to vote.

Presumably people did notice. The telephone connection to both of my last two houses comes in at the front, but there was a telegraph pole in the back of both with a wire going into the back (and then terminating). In both houses, the wire eventually fell off the back. I presume that the previous owners did notice when they re-did their telephone wiring...

our healthcare system sucks because we tolerate these parasites on our system that have to "profit" for some reason. there's no competition. so they just siphon profit and buy off our legislators and regulators to keep the money train flowing

they are natural monopolies

they are monopolies alone, no government needed to make them

you don't spend billions to build a hospital across the street from another. there's no free market. we're not talking about nail salons

you don't go shopping for an oncologist based on cost. you don't shop around for hospitals while you are having a heart attack. there's no capitalism here

so we need government control, rather than make believing a magic free market fairy fixes things

i'm not a socialist or a statist. specifically on the topic of natural monopolies *alone*, universal payer is the least worst option

citation: all of our social and economic peers: uk, canada, japan, germany, australia, etc: they spend far less on healthcare, and have higher quality healthcare. and it's all government controlled

our bullshit system persists because our government is corrupted. we need to fix the corruption, then kick out the parasites

As I said above, just because the poles are there doesn't mean that they're carrying anything. When they run the underground cabling, they generally don't bother properly disposing of the telegraph poles: they just let them fall down.

I have a house on a street lined with telegraph poles in the UK too. The poles run wires to everyone's house. The same was true of the place I lived before moving there. In both cases, the wire fell off my house while I was living there. It hadn't been connected to anything inside the house for a very long time - telephone service came in on the other side of the house, underground. They just never got around to removing the poles and the above-ground wires that didn't have a signal going through them.

My favourite book that he's written was Tuf Voyaging. Far lighter than the Song of Fire and Ice and the endings did make me happy...

the lawyer seeks out the victim

if you ever are the victim of a newsworthy accident/ crime, you will get cold called by a number of lawyers, who want to represent you pro bono

because such cases gild their CV, get their name out there. free advertising

some lawyers, they seek out interesting strange and noteworthy cases only. out of ego, fame, crank cause, adrenaline, hero complex, whatever:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

etc.

you mean you're a hopeless idealist who think things have to be perfect?

i'm glad you agree we need to get rid of corruption

but i'm mystified how you think the country's obvious success has nothing to do with democracy, however imperfectly implemented

i've been commenting on slashdot for years. there's always this steady drip of comments from grammar (punctuation?) nazis like yourself. do you see me changing or caring?

if you don't like the formatting of my comment, don't read it. i don't owe you anything. you're not paying me

this is an informal comment board, not a doctoral thesis. get over yourself

yes, exactly

and that's exactly the next step with a weakened government: corporation owned armies abusing you with no recourse for your rights

oh, i'm making that up? it's science fiction?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

By the early 1890s, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency employed more agents than there were members of the standing army of the United States of America.

During the labor strikes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, businessmen hired the Pinkerton Agency to infiltrate unions, supply guards, keep strikers and suspected unionists out of factories, as well as recruiting goon squads to intimidate workers. One such confrontation was the Homestead Strike of 1892, in which Pinkerton agents were called in to reinforce the strikebreaking measures of industrialist Henry Clay Frick, acting on behalf of Andrew Carnegie.[citation needed] The ensuing battle between Pinkerton agents and striking workers led to the deaths of seven Pinkerton agents and nine steelworkers.[4] The Pinkertons were also used as guards in coal, iron, and lumber disputes in Illinois, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia as well as the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 and the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921. The organization was pejoratively called the "Pinks" by its opponents.

now remember dick cheney and his adventure with blackwater

weaken the government and blackwater expands exponentially, and corporate goons are now stepping on your throat: "get back to work slave, i mean citizen. if you have a problem with our enforcement activities, please see the corporation owned courts, or attempt to fight our legion of well-funded lawyers when you can barely get enough to eat, because we've let 'the market decide' your salary"

you look around the world at kleptocracies, warlords, mafias... you really fucking believe government has a monopoly on force?

if there is no government army, it's not suddenly peace and happiness, it's fucking hell

where do you morons come from with your bullshit unexamined beliefs?

we have competing ambulance services here in the usa too

but they will take you to a further away hospital they have financial agreements with (fuck your actual health emergency)

and if you don't have insurance you get a life destroying huge bill (because health insurance is a "choice")

agreed (with the european part, fuck your grammar demands)

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

you really can't conceive of the simple obvious fact that running all that fiber is fucking expensive?