General office WTF-ery
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@ogilmor said:
Be glad you gave her such a thril. Fedoras are pretty rare these days, as are hats in general.
i wouldn't say they are rare ... redhat is pretty common on servers and a friend of mine has a fedora 12 on his home server ...
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@ogilmor said:
It was a line manager's cube, not one of the director's offices. Mind you, this is the same place that apologized to the obnoxious sneezing bitch after a manager told her to stop being obnoxious. As I stated previously, this place makes me fucking sick. The money sure is good though. :(I call bullshit. NO way anybody is allowed to get away with ripping farts in a supervisor's office.
Especially no way does it get an apology from HR for somebody saying something about it.
Sorry, I don't believe you.
Good story though!
Fixed your link to point to the post in question and cleaned up some of the tag soup in your post. --Ling
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@Aaron said:
Just because you asked, I'm from the Netherlands (see also dhromed's post).@Iago said:
I live in a country with socialised healthcare. The only information the government has on my health is the data stored in the confidential records that my doctor necessarily keeps, and there is no way the information in those records can possibly be used to affect the taxes I personally pay. And people with poor health retain exactly the same right to free healthcare as healthy people; if a treatment is available to one person, it is available to everyone.
Of course, this is real socialised healthcare, not the watered-down semi-private version that the industry lobbyists have forced Obama's administration to propose. Maybe the American system will be a disaster. But if so, it will be because the wonderful US capitalist healthcare industry has a vested interest in restricting access to treatment, not because socialised systems are inherently unworkable.
I don't know what fairy-tale country you're from, but here in Canada we have real socialized healthcare (private care is actually banned), and the reality of the situation is more like the concept of healthcare is available to everyone. You can't get actual care because there are 10,000 people ahead of you on the waiting list. And good luck finding a doctor, most of the good ones leave the country so they can actually make money, or they're swamped with 500 people coming in every day to complain about their colds and can't take on new patients.
The reality of socialized health care is actually a completely unsustainable one. Health care costs an enormous amount of cash and is still growing very fast as an industry as the science and technology improves; governments can only throw so much taxpayer money at it before they run out. If it doesn't generate enough revenue to cover costs (due to price caps) then one of three things happen: (1) people are denied care, (2) the government starts printing money and you end up with obscene taxation rates and inflation on the scale of Zimbabwe, or (3) the program goes bankrupt and ends up being privatized anyway.
We have a few waiting lists, but those are mainly for organ transplants, because of a lack of donors mainly due to the religion based ideas of the gevernment's parties. Nearly all treatment is on demand.
Sure, prices for health care are rising as people live longer and the medical technology gets better. Currently however it is affordable, and I'd argue that it's cheaper than a non socialized system like the USA's system, based on the following numbers: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_hea_car_fun_tot_per_cap-care-funding-total-per-capita
And as dhromed tries to explain, despite having mandatory health care for everyone, we do have a lot of competition. It works like this: There is a mandatory package of health care that has to be provided to everyone, the catch is that insurance companies can compete on the price and service at which they offer this mandatory basic package. Next to that you can get additional "non essential" care, like dental care and plastic surgery. It's often relatively cheap if you get it in a bundle with the mandatory basic package, and you can be refused by the insurance company if you apply for it.
Most things you'll usually want, except for dental care are provided by the basic package. There is currently a discussion about contraceptics, the pill is currently part of the basic package, but some, especially in the more religious parties would like that to change.
The system makes no distinction between how healthy you live, chronical illnesses you might have, genetical disposition or any other discerning factors. There is some discussion if pricing should be allowed to vary depending on which part of the country you live in. Even those that are not insured, for example because they are living on the street, are illegal aliens, tourists, will get cared for. Part of the reason is patient confidentiality and because it saves truckloads of expensive bureaucracy.
As for patient records: Only the insurance companies and medical staff and such have access, the government does not. There is however a push going on to make patient information more easily exchangable, with the main reason being easy access to your records in case of an emergency, but privacy issues are currently slowing it down.I am wary of this developement, even though I understand the benefits and lives that could be saved.
Competition on services would be for things like if you can phone them or need to use an internet site, if you get a TV if you are in the hospital, etc.
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@RogerWilco said:
A similar scheme (NHS 'SCR', Summary Care Records) is currently being pushed heavily in the UK. I decided I'd live with the slightly-higher-but-still-mostly-theoretical-risk and opted out; I'm no worse off than I've always been all my life in that regard. It's perhaps easier for me to make that call than someone who e.g. had life-threatening penicillin allergy or something like that, but holy crap, if that's the case you don't want to rely on a computer database to save your life, you want to wear a bloody medicalert bracelet and never ever take it off for the rest of your life.)As for patient records: Only the insurance companies and medical staff and such have access, the government does not. There is however a push going on to make patient information more easily exchangable, with the main reason being easy access to your records in case of an emergency, but privacy issues are currently slowing it down.I am wary of this developement, even though I understand the benefits and lives that could be saved.
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@RogerWilco said:
..snip.. dutch healthcare ...snip...
The extreemly short version. What we have is mixed privitised healthcare with laws that enforce universal coverage in a broad sense (also contains some price agreements for instance). Current long-term roadmap for as far as I know is to increase privitisation of the healthcare sector, I believe the current idea is to make a distinction between immediate care and planned care. Because with planned care market forces can work (what is the best price/quality treatment), while with emergency help you just want the closest hospital/doctor so marketforce does jack shit for quality.
However, as someone (dhromed?) already pointed out somewhat, there is a culture difference. Here in the old world, we have something called solidarity. It is actually important here. While opinions will of course always be a broad range, most people will take the stance that it is better to level out the differences by everyone paying to support everyone who might need it. This in stark contrast of the individualistic approach we often hear from US people that everyone should be self sufficient and that there should be no reason for me to pay for my neighbour.
The reasons behind it a a bit less complex then one would think, after WWII being right wing was considered bad. Getting your country invaded and bombed apparently does that to its people and makes them more prone to social solidarity. Although it is somewhat ironic that our (dutch) healthcare system was actually socialised by the germans during WWII. But I believe the nazi's did some bad stuff too, so they have a bit of a bad PR problem. All the WWII movies that keep coming out aren't helping either.
I personally think that the principle of solidarity is a great thing, but then again, seeing as I am dutch and thus automatically biased in this doesn't really give for a good objective opinion.
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@stratos said:
after WWII being right wing was considered bad
Given the dichotomies (false or not) of progessive/conservative and liberal/social, then even Democrats can beconsidered VVD-ish right-wing when viewed in Dutch terms. There's no (siginificant) equivalent of PvdA or SP in America, as far as I understand it.
I'm reluctant to make more claims about American culture, because I haven't been there to sample it myself. :)
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@dhromed said:
Heh, yeh, America is so far to the right that even the left-wingers are actually conservatives. And every time I read someone describing the UK's "Labour" party as "socialist", I fall off my chair laughing. Those people have no idea what the word even means. I'd love to send Arthur Scargill over to let them see what real scary socialism looks like! Heh, and Galloway may be a twat 99% of the time, but he sure kicked ass in congress. LOL :-)@stratos said:
after WWII being right wing was considered bad
Given the dichotomies (false or not) of progessive/conservative and liberal/social, then even Democrats can beconsidered VVD-ish right-wing when viewed in Dutch terms. There's no (siginificant) equivalent of PvdA or SP in America, as far as I understand it.
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@DaveK said:
even the left-wingers are actually conservatives.
Being a conservative lefty doesn't make you right-wing.
It makes you a communist.
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@dhromed said:
Now there's a word that isn't often used to mean "one who supports Karl Marx's doctrine that the workers should control the means of production"!@DaveK said:
even the left-wingers are actually conservatives.
Being a conservative lefty doesn't make you right-wing.
It makes you a communist.
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@snover said:
You fluffed that response slightly! Here's how it should have been, demonstrated by an expert on the subject of wit:@cfgauss said:
But hey, at least we have your years of expertise of that one time you were at the hospital.
Ooh, sarcastic ad hominems. Aren’t you an expert debater.
@Oscar Wilde said:
@cfgauss said:
But hey, at least we have your years of expertise of that one time you were at the hospital.
Ooh, sarcastic ad hominems. Aren’t you a master debater.
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I've drawn up a nice infographic. It's a verison 0.1.
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@stratos said:
The reasons behind it a a bit less complex then one would think, after WWII being right wing was considered bad. Getting your country invaded and bombed apparently does that to its people and makes them more prone to social solidarity. Although it is somewhat ironic that our (dutch) healthcare system was actually socialised by the germans during WWII. But I believe the nazi's did some bad stuff too, so they have a bit of a bad PR problem. All the WWII movies that keep coming out aren't helping either.
Oh please, not this shit again. National Socialist party - that's not right-wing. Authoritarianism does not make a party right-wing, it just makes them authoritarian. You might as well have just said "the reasons behind it are that we have the collective political and economic intelligence of a jar of olives and label everything we don't like as right-wing."
"Solidarity" my ass. Nobody in your country is walking around thinking to himself, "hmm, I would really like to pay for other people's health care, except instead of helping them directly or through a charity I would like my money to get sucked through 46 layers of government bureaucracy so that only 12 cents of the 20,000 euro I coughed up are actually going to someone who really needs it." No, what they are really thinking is "that shit sounds expensive, I think that the people who have more money than I do should pay for most of it." The super-rich know how to shelter their income so it's never taxed, and the upper-middle-class are too lazy to sit down and do the math and realize that they're really the ones doing the subsidizing, not being subsidized.
Then this dire state of ignorance, laziness and general cheapness is rationalized away with rhetoric like "solidarity" so it's an easier pill for people to swallow.
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@dhromed said:
Given the dichotomies (false or not) of progessive/conservative and liberal/social, then even Democrats can beconsidered VVD-ish right-wing when viewed in Dutch terms. There's no (siginificant) equivalent of PvdA or SP in America, as far as I understand it.
I'm aware that you have a different definition of the word "Liberal" in most of Europe, using the term to mean roughly the same thing as "fiscally conservative", but pitting "Conservative" against "Progressive" on the other axis is bizarre, to say the least. Those aren't meaningful ends of any political spectrum, they're buzzwords used by the self-styled "progressives".
If you're trying to produce a political "grid" then the two axes are supposed to be fiscal policy and social policy. Fiscal left is socialism, fiscal right is low taxes and minimal redistribution. Social top is authoritarian, social bottom is anarchy. FOSStards are "anarcho-socialist", bottom-left, believing that there should be no government interference but that everyone should still share wealth. The Nazis were authoritarian socialists, at the top left. Hard-liner Republicans and the stereotypical "conservatives" are at the top right (police state). Libertarians are at the bottom right.
Most of mainstream America is slightly north on the social axis and to the right on the fiscal axis. Most of Europe is a little south on the social axis and way, way to the left on the fiscal axis. In the USA (and in Canada), all mainstream parties are near the centre of the social axis and really only differ on fiscal policy - hence the primary distinction being just left- or right-wing. It's just that in the USA you also have the bible thumpers, a relative minority which Europeans and a lot of Democrats frequently and mistakenly associate with the entire Republican voting base AKA half of the American population.
It really makes a lot more sense when you define the scale properly. It's unfortunate that the political term socialist actually refers to fiscal policy, but that was very much intentional, as the equivalent term communist was starting to fall out of favour at the same time.
