> Or is it the leader class in most western countries have no sense of duty , are effectively cowards, and are in it just to have a profitable, white-collar career ?
They are cowards who are just in it to enrich themselves by bribery, theft, and extortion.
You are looking in the right direction and not seeing just how far our society has gone.
And they may even find it comforting that it's OK to bomb innocent civilians for years because that's the only solution they can think of to deal with their own dissatisfied populace ultimately, when things will predictably get worse in Europe as well...?
was it that in prior years a reader could usually distinguish 1 from l by context. Even today, very few things cause me to need to te11 a 1 from a l.
(typo 0n purpose)
it matters when reading code and random string (what we now call passwords, though back then passwords were things you could pronounce, unlike say ywtr466Nh%vX).
It doesn't matter for much else.
Though it did make an interesting plot twist in the Mioscene Arrow
> US outspends all the other developed nations at healthcare, education, childcare and yet is behind them all in actual results with poor education, high infant motility and lower life expectancy
US healthcare and childcare are private, not government. Likewise I suspect much of the education cost is private colleges/schools, not government.
You seem to be arguing that the private sector is less efficient and more corrupt than the public sector.
“ the private sector is less efficient and more corrupt than the public sector”
That is easily the case if you aren’t careful. Private health insurance has a big incentive to drive up cost of the medical sector so they can take a few percent as profit. Defense contractors have almost no incentive to reduce costs, quite the opposite.
I guess it depends on what you call efficiency. If you define efficiency as extracting maximum profit then modern corporations are very efficient. If you define it as providing products and services at low cost, then they are inefficient.
What's Medicare and Medicaid and why do they cost the government over 2 trillion?
On a per capital basis, even if you don't include private healthcare spending, the US stil spends more per capita on healthcare than the other developed countries.
Medicare and Medicaid exist because, as a society, we decided it was better to not let the old, the disabled, and the poor have zero access to health care.
Medicare and Medicaid are expensive because we incorrectly apply market economics to healthcare.
None of that requires corruption. It's a mixture of over-commitment to market-based solutions and a bare minimum of empathy enshrined into law.
You keep talking around the point and moving the goalposts. I never criticized Medicare and Medicaid. I criticized the US system which outspends all other developed nations, while obtaining poorer results. A lot more money is being spent but looking at the end results it's clearly not going to the right places. So where is the money going? That's the very definition of mismanagement and corruption.
> blindness caused by drinking improperly distilled alcohol.
This isn't actually a thing. You will die of normal ethanol poisoning well before consuming enough methanol to cause blindness when drinking alcohol you made from distilling something you fermented.
The blindness thing is some nicely placed Prohibition-era propaganda combined with the addition of methanol to alcohol-containing products that managed to make its way into the public psyche.
agreeing (strongly) that uber is better than taxi, and yet again on price it is because uber skirts the law-- drivers typically do not have commercial insurance etc and also uber subsidized rides for a long time with VC money.
>When you earn with a transportation network company (TNC), referred to here as ridesharing, most states require extra—and costly—insurance.
>Uber maintains this commercial insurance on your behalf. What’s covered depends on factors such as who was at fault; whether you were offline, online, en route, or on-trip; and your personal insurance policy. Learn more about the commercial insurance coverage Uber maintains on your behalf below.
I'm curious who is tracking the costs which have been incurred by DOGE. Say, for example, they claim a savings of X from firing a bunch of people, what is the cost Y from the hiring of contractors to fulfill the obligations those X people filled?
By far the largest cost of DOGE has been destroying the credibility of the United States. Investors are fleeing US bonds, driving up the rates, and the amount we're spending on extra interest that we wouldn't have paid otherwise is multiples of even what DOGE claims to have "saved", likely 1000s of times higher than actual "savings".
DOGE is eliminating American soft power, but ultimately that should come up as neutral or even a positive depending on a country’s relationship with the USA. Iran, China, Russia would think of them as a positive, for example.
a federal agency that doesn't follow the law should lose the protection of the law. Charge the ICE agents with attempted kidnapping of the immigrant and actual kidnapping of the judge.
I imagine they'll soon be putting a spin on George W Bush-era legal arguments about the applicability of Geneva Conventions on "non-uniformed combatants". In this case, if the ICE agents weren't uniformed at the time of arrest, they can't be considered agents of the federal government, and thus can't be subject to legal redress.
That statement isn't even close or applicable to any hypothetical actions the judge could have taken here. If the judge did something unlawful there are already lawful mechanisms for dealing with that and NONE of those mechanisms involve ICE detaining the judge.
> If the judge did something unlawful there are already lawful mechanisms for dealing with that and NONE of those mechanisms involve ICE detaining the judge.
ICE is not detaining the judge.
> But Brady McCarron, spokesman for U.S. Marshals Service in Washington, D.C., said Dugan is being charged with two federal felony counts: obstruction and concealing an individual. McCarron also confirmed Dugan was arrested at about 8 a.m. at the Milwaukee County Courthouse.
> U.S. Attorney Pam Bondi posted on X: "I can confirm that our @FBI agents just arrested Hannah Dugan – a county judge in Milwaukee – for allegedly helping an illegal alien avoid an arrest by @ICEgov."
Arrested by the FBI on behalf of claims from ICE. For not detaining someone extra-judicially in her own court room. There was no need to arrest someone here, especially a judge.
a judge doesnt enforce law, they are tasked with providing a neutral recourse to the overarching principal of justice, during the proceedings of the court.
They are cowards who are just in it to enrich themselves by bribery, theft, and extortion.
You are looking in the right direction and not seeing just how far our society has gone.