This has what to do with what we were discussing? The Sound of Freedom is fiction filled with unrealistic premises. It's not any more realistic than, for example, Taken. None of that means that sex trafficking isn't real, it means that it's an unrealistic portrayal of the problem that promotes a poor understanding which, in turn, makes it difficult to address the real issues.

Sorry, but a rich person going to a rich person's clinic 33 years ago didn't even prove a point 33 years ago, it's hardly going to prove a point now. People have to wait for care all the time. There are plenty of anecdotes about people having to wait for care in both socialized medical systems and capitalist health insurance scenarios. Turns out that rich and influential people can use their wealth and influence to get faster care. That's not some indictment of either private insurance or socialized medicine, it's just more evidence that money and power are money and power.

Back when the first President Bush threw up in the lap of the Japanese Prime Minister there was an attending doctor at his side immediately. That was 31 years ago and the healthcare debate was going on even back then. I remember a late night comedian commenting "That's the healthcare plan I want" about Bush immediately having a doctor at his side. It was just a joke because, obviously, no healthcare plan can give everyone a personal attending doctor to travel with them everywhere. When you use the rich and powerful travelling to get fast healthcare from the physician of their choice as your example for the problems with socialized medicine, it seems like maybe you have a problem with that.

The simple fact is that, if what you suggest is true, and socialized healthcare has catastrophic wait times that make conditions worse relative to the system in the US, then what is your explanation for why the outcomes are better under socialized healthcare? If socialized healthcare has so much worse wait times that make conditions worse, there must be some other factor that does an amazing job counteracting that glaring problem. So, I assume you must have some idea what that is?

The real problem is that people die on waiting lists in healthcare all the time regardless of the insurance system. Consider organ transplant lists. Doesn't matter if it's heavily socialized medicine or capitalist insurance, there simply are not enough transplant organs to give one to every person that needs one, so people die waiting on lists. The only exception are places where the rich and powerful can buy organs or, possibly in some cases, have people murdered to supply them with organs. That model obviously only "works" for a small percentage of people.

For those who are unfamiliar with what the parent is saying, Robert Bourassa was a Canadian politician who went to the US for treatment for melanoma 33 years ago! Note that this was for surgery that can be performed by surgeons the world over. Hip surgery is also available all over the world. Certainly people do travel from all over the world to get medical procedures in the US, but some people don't seem to realize that people all over the world travel to other destinations all over the world for medical procedures all the time. That includes people from the US travelling to other countries for procedures.

I would say that's not specifically a problem of the ACA, it's clearly a problem with the concept of for-profit health insurance as a substitute for a proper medical safety net in the first place. I've always thought that the ACA was not a very good solution and no wonder. It was the compromise solution that was acceptable to the Republicans so it could get passed... up until it actually happened, then they complained to high heaven about it. There are a few good things that survived in it like preventing insurance companies from rejecting people for pre-existing conditions but, as you say, it's a half-measure. For example, ACA plans still have enrollment periods. Why? It does not really make a lot of sense to have one short period a year of intensive paperwork processing. Logically, it should be spread across the year. As far as I can tell, "enrollment periods" serve a similar function to pre-existing condition restrictions, they're just a barrier to entry for people more likely to need care.

Sorry, are you talking about Sound of Freedom? A highly fictionalized account of Tim Ballard, who was kicked out of his own anti-trafficking organization amidst allegations that he was using their "sting" operations to exploit women for sex? Also excommunicated by his own church? Who was paying himself over half a million per year as CEO of his ostensibly charitable organization. The organization with numerous allegations from former members of misrepresenting its work to donors. That one?

I wasn't in a particular rush. I guess I was curious if it was ever going to change. Eventually got sick of it though.

There's a concept of "piercing the veil" for corporate crimes or serious civil violations. There needs to be a similar concept for the immunity government officials get while performing their official duties when they act completely contrary to their mandate so they can individually face civil or criminal action. Maybe there is, but it never seems to work out that way.

I wasn't really in any great rush. I managed to kill the time somehow, although I did eventually get frustrated.

It's an interesting theory, but you can just swallow mucus into your stomach and, in fact, even if your nose is running like crazy and you are sneezing frequently, you will still swallow a lot more mucus than comes out of your nose. You might be able to excrete contaminated fecal matter, but you simply can not sneeze out an infection. If your mucus is infected, the pathogen is already deep in your body.

Tend to agree here. Had quite a few close calls at roundabouts with entering cars who seem to be a bit unclear on the concept of right of way. I've had a number of them lay on their horns, apparently annoyed that I "cut them off" when they were supposed to be yielding to me. Then there's the numerous people who, shortly after they put in some new roundabouts near me, drove straight across the center of the roundabout.

It could work in both directions if you eliminated intersections, but that would mean a lot of bridges and/or tunnels.

My favorite is sensor-based lights that make absolutely no accommodation for the possibility that the sensor or the connection of the sensor to the light might be broken, leading to a red light that never changes. Obviously an intelligent design would give it at least a brief green every five minutes or so. I once waited at one like that for a whole half an hour at 3 AM with absolutely no traffic passing by the other way. I eventually just ran the light because what else was I supposed to do. I also just love really broad intersections where the light doesn't turn green long enough for a single car to actually accelerate from a stop and cross the intersection before the light changes. Especially since the baffling concept of getting a ticket for "running" a yellow light exists in states where I've seen this. So, yeah, there are definitely some traffic engineers who have no idea what they're doing (unless they do and the whole point is to drive up ticket revenue).

Actually, the plot Thanos came up with was idiotic in the MCU. The comic book Thanos was literally in love with death and killed half the universe as an act of devotion sort of like buying a girl chocolates and flowers. Honestly, that made a lot more sense. The realistic outcome of killing off half the population of a planet, or the universe, would be a period of economic and social chaos, followed by rapid repopulation. Maybe in some specific situations it could actually head off greater problems in some specific location, but highly unlikely.

Ok. Maybe you should actually lean how evolution and real science work before spouting off like this. Evolution does, indeed select for traits that helped individuals survive under particular circumstances, and those traits are passed on. You got that right. What you're missing is that just about everything in evolution is a tradeoff. There's almost always some sort of cost, whether it's just a mild metabolic cost or a biological disadvantage. For example, a propensity for sickle cell anemia goes hand in hand with a form of malaria resistance. So, due to that, if a pathogen that almost drove humans to extinction vanishes, there is tendency for whatever genetic adaptation saved the survivors to end up vanishing, or at least being diluted over many generations because no-one needs it any more and chances are that it also provides some disadvantage. This can all vary depending on the specifics, but your understanding is flawed, so I would not be so confident if I were you.