US Politics Mega-thread - Page 954

On March 25 2014 04:12 GreenHorizons wrote:


That your way of saying "Yes, the government should reduce it's contractual commitments to military retirees because it can't afford the ridiculous commitments it has made. The veterans should of known that a government in ever increasing debt would never be able to fulfill those ridiculous obligations and should just expect to have their retirements cut down or removed all together because they simply aren't sustainable."?

On March 24 2014 15:25 IgnE wrote:


"If the promise was improperly made it is invalid." What does that even mean? Improperly made according to whom? You are just repeating this to subtly undermine the validity of pensions that weren't questioned for decades. It just so happens that people want to stop paying them when the bill comes due.



It's not viable if your only concern is how well the corporations are going to do. If your concern is to pay what you owe the workers, and redistribute some of the vast wealth accumulated by the richest in this country then it is viable. The reneging on pensions is just another way that the wealthiest people are fucking over the rest. You for one are always talking about how even if wages haven't gone up for the working class in this country, other benefits have. Well these are the other benefits, and you are arguing that they should be taken away as well because they aren't "economically viable." Think about the stock prices! Wages haven't gone up for decades, almost all the gains since 2008 have gone to the richest, and it's not going to change anytime soon. The businesses know. You have Walmart for the poor and you have high-end stores for the rich minority. The middle-class merchandise distributors are being shut down and replaced with luxury goods peddlers all over this country, while a Walmart opens up across town to soak up the demand of the formerly middle class.

On March 25 2014 10:26 IgnE wrote:
What are you talking about jonny? Who said anything about pushing schools and roads aside?

On March 08 2014 07:06 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

Wow, great argument

On March 25 2014 04:12 GreenHorizons wrote:


That your way of saying "Yes, the government should reduce it's contractual commitments to military retirees because it can't afford the ridiculous commitments it has made. The veterans should of known that a government in ever increasing debt would never be able to fulfill those ridiculous obligations and should just expect to have their retirements cut down or removed all together because they simply aren't sustainable."?

On March 25 2014 08:47 IgnE wrote:


You are forgetting the most critical element of your story: the politicians, including Obama, brazenly lie to the unions over and over again. Inequality has only gotten worse in the 6 years since Obama was elected, and pensions are being cut left and right.

On March 25 2014 10:39 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

I'm talking about real life, IgnE. If you don't understand that a budget pressure in one area affects others...

North Carolina regulators said Friday that they have asked a judge to withdraw a proposed settlement that would have allowed Duke Energy to resolve multiple cases of environmental abuse by paying a $99,000 fine with no requirement that the $50 billion company clean up its pollution.

The consent order that the state's Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) scuttled had been meant to settle violations for groundwater contamination leeching from coal ash dumps near Charlotte and Asheville, N.C. Critics had called the deal too lenient.

The order had been reached in July 2013, well before a massive February 2014 spill in Eden, N.C., coated 70 miles of the Dan River in toxic sludge and focused attention on Duke's long history of polluting groundwater with its leaky, unlined, open air coal ash ponds.

The state only took legal action against Duke after a coalition of environmental groups represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) filed notice that they planned to sue Duke under the Clean Water Act for its pollution. The administration of North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory — who himself spent 29 years in the employ of Duke Energy and has benefited from hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the company, its employees and their spouses — used its authority under the act to file state violations against Duke and then quickly negotiated the consent order, a move environmentalists say was intended to shield the company from far-harsher penalties it might have faced in federal court.

But now the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the DENR and the SELC, which had brought the original Clean Water Act suit against Duke last year, are joining a suit against the energy giant to get it to clean up some of its coal ash contamination.

On March 25 2014 14:52 Sub40APM wrote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/25/us/amid-wave-of-pro-gun-legislation-georgia-proposes-sweeping-law.html

Ah yes, nothing like allowing guns into the Atlanta airport to make me feel safer.

“I don’t think it will backfire,” said Jerry Henry, director of Georgia Carry, one of the main local groups that promoted the bill. “You can bet those politicians who voted for it knew what their constituents wanted.”[...]

“This is a private property issue,” said State Representative Rick Jasperse, the bill’s original sponsor. “We’re not going to decide what goes on inside a bar. Let the bar owner decide.”[...]

“The people you have to worry about are not the ones who have gone to the trouble to have applied for a license and gotten a background check,” said Mr. Henry of Georgia Carry. “The ones you have to worry about are the criminals who are not going to abide by the law anyway.”

On March 25 2014 10:55 Danglars wrote:
Let's separate disparate problems. A state or local government dealing with pensions, and a federal government with a paid military. The former cannot print money to monetize the debt; the latter can. Secondly, public employee unions already earn equal or great pay than their private sector counterparts. I'm sorry if new employees have to get the shaft, but their pensions in sane decision making must be less lavish. It remains a political problem to renegotiate union pensions, which is exactly what I'm saying and what you're avoiding.

But [the ambulatory surgery center] model demanded different sorts of skills. Management experts Clayton Christensen, Jerome Grossman and Jason Hwang label the transition from the hospital to outpatient surgery as an instance of a more general transition from “intuitive medicine” to “precision medicine.” Hospitals treat all sorts of patients with all sorts of symptoms. Many diseases, however, are difficult to diagnose with certainty, and once a diagnosis is made, not all therapies work for all patients. Medical professionals often have to make a tentative initial diagnosis, start a therapy, and then possibly modify both the therapy and the diagnosis depending on how the patient responds. This is “intuitive” medicine, and it requires highly trained professionals to make complex judgments about the patient’s condition. In this situation, LPNs can assist the medical professionals by performing routine tasks monitoring and caring for patients, but there is little the LPN can learn because the patients differ so much from one to the next.

The ambulatory surgery centers, by contrast, work in specialized areas where diagnoses are well identified, patients are screened for complications, therapies are well known and medical outcomes are predictable, if not always successful. Physicians can reliably diagnose nearsightedness or carpal tunnel syndrome, and treat these ailments with laser eye surgery or endoscopic hand surgery, respectively. The procedures are standardized and the outcomes are predictable.

This is precision medicine and LPNs play a different role. Because the procedures are standardized, an LPN learns valuable skills on the job. Because specialization limits the range of circumstances they encounter, LPNs can learn faster and better, acquiring skills that, though narrow, are more valuable. Through experience, an LPN can better anticipate the needs of the medical professionals, can monitor and care for the patients more effectively, and can identify signs of impending problems and alert the medical professionals.

On March 25 2014 22:49 aksfjh wrote:

Citation needed. (But don't go comparing public worker pay in San Francisco with private worker pay in Trent, Texas.)

Overall, the federal government paid 16 percent more in total compensation than it would have if average compensation had been comparable with that in the private sector, after accounting for certain observable characteristics of workers.