Let's flip it around.

When you break a bone, should you be able to have that treated without it bankrupting you? I say yes.

When you get cancer, should you get treatment without it bankrupting your family? I say yes.

When you get a heart attack, should you be able to go to a hospital instead of telling the EMT to just leave you because you can't afford it? I say yes.

We're talking about insuring medical need. No health insurance covers plastic surgery unless it's to fix an actual disfigurement, and that wouldn't change. Yes, there must be limits. Anything that goes beyond that limits that you might want to insure can go in an additional insurance package, as unregulated as all American insurance is today, at whatever cost the company want to charge.

You claim universal health care is about money, I say it's about health care.

Why? I certainly start out safe even if I'm quite enthusiastic about the future.

It IS pink, it just has an alpha value of 0.0

Liberalism is the fear of a fire, and a desire to put it out.
Conservatism is the fear of toasters, for they may catch fire.

$1.50 a litre you say? We pay €1,74 a litre in the Netherlands. The coffee is ridiculously expensive, and we pay your price in euro's for a subway sub, although as in most things, ours are longer.

While I don't know about software, hardware is often produced for the US and imported to the Netherlands from there.

I recently pre-ordered a Leap Motion. It's presale price is $69.99. If you order it from the Netherlands, they take care of any import duties since they ship it from a European warehouse. This hikes the price, including $12 shipping, up to about $96, which boils down to about €70.

If I were the importer from the US, I'd have to pay duties myself, but only if they intercepted the package. Sadly, I don't get the choice to try and stiff my government. But that is the reason why people tend to order from the US rather than locally.

I thought it a rather appropriate metaphor. Neither software patents nor circumcision are intrinsically desirable, yet huge support for them exists.

And you can improve them, but really, that's not the discussion you should be having.

Yes, they have. Because they've shoved more different products out the door in a year than they've done in any year before this one, and they have a loyal following that buys whatever they put out. For now.

I'm not saying that they're going to run out of money soon. They'll be around in ten to fifteen years, sure, but not as a market leader, if they keep this shit up.

Apple is dying. They've got three phones on offer now (the ideas used to be that you'd go buy "The iPhone") and four tablets, of which one is in a format that just doesn't fill an apple niche and two of them were released without much fanfare VERY shortly after "The New iPad".

I think they're flooding the market with products in order to do as big a cash grab as possible and then bunker down in the coming lean years until they can find a new Steve Jobs.

So in exchange for shutting up about it, they'll probably get it officiously, thanks to nations who also want full control but didn't formally ask for it (ie, all of them?).

Or am I being paranoid?

You know, the Germans once owned my own fair nation in much the same way.

We had people who killed Germans where and how they could. We call them 'heroes of the resistance'.

With an attitude like yours, it's not surprising that people keep firing rockets at you. With an attitude like yours, don't be surprised when your support falls away.

Because the people living in Israel are somehow Egypt's problem? No, if the people in Gaza aren't able to flee, it's because they're living in a prison. And, technically, by their own government. The parallel to ghetto's, specifically the Warsaw Ghetto, is not exactly fiction. The suffering in the Warsaw Ghetto was much, much greater, but the people inside it are in a very similar situation.

They fire rockets at you and your family and blow up buses, and you fire tanks and bombs into fully built-up and barricaded (by you) residential areas (effectively an open-air prison or, if you will, a ghetto) without letting people flee. In my outsiders' view, that makes you both pretty much equally shitty.

I'm wondering what an Israeli perspective on this is. Do you see a separation between Palestinians and Hamas? Are Israeli actually still striving for actual peace (rather than defeat of Palestinians) or is it a matter of time until the ethnic cleansing starts, or... what?

Because as I said, from here, both parties look equally and homogeneously shitty, with the Palestinians being the underdogs. Usually in such a situation, I'm very wrong, and I'd like to know if I am, and how so.

For the series Space: Above and Beyond, they were loading the Hammerhead full-scale models onto a ship, when a Russian spy was caught taking pictures of them. Since they were stamped USMC, he thought they were the US' next generation bomber or some such.

Ah yes, the way taxes on cigarettes and gasoline work in the Netherlands. Make it more expensive, and people won't use it.

Except it doesn't work. Even at >$8.50 per gallon.