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I do not think there is a future in Bitcoin as any form of mainstream currency. I do think it will survive, but it will always be a niche for speculators and misfits.
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A mob looted an "Ebola center" stealing "contaminated" items? Several infected people fled? Now, why on earth would anyone want to steal contaminated materials? And, our Southern border is still not secure. Ebola Outbreak Worsens With Missing Patients, US Scare The Ebola outbreak continues to spiral out of control amid reports of looting at a Liberian health center and the isolation of a traveler from Sierra Leone here in the U.S. The virus has killed at least 1,145 and sickened 982 more, according to numbers released Friday by the World Health Organization. An updated outbreak toll is expected soon. The outbreak is already the deadliest on record and has shown no signs of slowing. About 42.5 percent of all Ebola deaths since the virus was discovered in 1976 have occurred since March 2014, according to WHO data. Here are nine things you should know about the outbreak as fears continue to mount in Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and beyond. http://abcnews.go.com/Health/ebola-outbreak-worsens-missing-patients-us-scare/story?id=25024218On the news this morning, 2200 have now died. That is the official number but there are likely many more. |
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Isn't this possibly impacted by states who don't have medicaid/medicare expansions?
It's just Medicaid that has an effect, but it's a very small piece of the total. #13 is awesome, no.accountability just someone that feels the cost is too much. Hardship exemptions
If you have any of the circumstances below that affect your ability to purchase health insurance coverage, you may qualify for a “hardship” exemption:
1. You were homeless.
2. You were evicted in the past 6 months or were facing eviction or foreclosure.
3. You received a shut-off notice from a utility company.
4. You recently experienced domestic violence.
5. You recently experienced the death of a close family member.
6. You experienced a fire, flood, or other natural or human-caused disaster that caused substantial damage to your property.
7. You filed for bankruptcy in the last 6 months.
8. You had medical expenses you couldn’t pay in the last 24 months which resulted in substantial debt.
9. You experienced unexpected increases in necessary expenses due to caring for an ill, disabled, or aging family member.
10. You expect to claim a child as a tax dependuh ent who’s been denied coverage in Medicaid and CHIP, and another person is required by court order to give medical support to the child. In this case, you do not have the pay the penalty for the child.
11. As a result of an eligibility appeals decision, you’re eligible for enrollment in a qualified health plan (QHP) through the Marketplace, lower costs on your monthly premiums, or cost-sharing reductions for a time period when you weren’t enrolled in a QHP through the Marketplace.
12. You were determined ineligible for Medicaid because your state didn’t expand eligibility for Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.
13. Your individual insurance plan was cancelled and you believe other Marketplace plans are unaffordable.
14. You experienced another hardship in obtaining health insurance. #3 is really good, too. You can get out of a federal tax penalty by not paying your utilities for a couple of months until they send you a shut-off notice. In almost every state, you get 10-30 days' notice to cure your nonpayment. So, take the notice and apply for the exemption; meanwhile, pay your past due balance. To my understanding, people generally want to be insured. Risking the termination of utility services in order to avoid having to get insurance seems like the sort of tactically bad, lazy-at-all-costs thing that poor people do all the time in the minds of conservative dipshits, and incredibly rarely in real life. (See also the results of drug tests for welfare recipients.) No they don't. People generally want to be healthy. Beyond that (when they're sick or busted) they want to be fixed. Once healthy again, they don't want to be indentured servants for the remainder of their days to pay the bills. But there is no risk. Once you get the late notice, it's the free-ride ticket, and then you pay the bill, and everything is fine with the utility again. Nonsense. These are unsubstantiated right-wing talking points, empty rhetoric about "free-stuffers" - where is your evidence of this rampant abuse of the system? Never mind you evidently haven't looked into how the hardship waiver actually works. You realize that under the waiver you still have to buy a plan, it's just cheaper and it's temporary by design. While the talking points are just that, I'm not sure why you bother to defend a law that in the aggregate is garbage. I'm not, of course, saying your points are wrong. I just don't see the value in defending a law that was bad when originally thought up in the 90s, and bad when it became law. But to each their own. I try to ignore it as much as possible. |
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All Israel lovers should read this.But of course, none of them will.well if they started off Israel lovers this would disabuse them.
The first dirty truth is that Israel does everything possible to limit civilian collateral damage, while the Pals and their Islamic movement, Hamas, do everything to increase civilian collateral damage. The second dirty truth is that you defend it. You really want to believe this and won't listen to any evidence to the contrary. Israel says missing soldier killed in battle, body still missing: Israel had previously said the soldier had been captured in battle, and in the wake of the announcement launched the deadliest 24-hour assault on Gaza since the beginning of the 27-day attack http://maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=717729Palestinians struggle to 'dig out bodies': Dozens of dead bodies remain under the rubble in Rafah, as Israel's assault on southern Gaza kills scores of civilians. http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/08/palestinian-bodies-gaza-israel-20148292146208272.htmlFresh Israeli attack kills 10 refuges in UN shelter for displaced in Rafah: UNRWA school struck for the 7th time The strikes brought Sunday morning's death toll in Gaza to 47. More than 1,749 Palestinians have been killed and nearly 10,000 injured since Israel launched its attack on Gaza. http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=717781This last thread rather tells me that Israel actually went out of their was to kill as many women and children that they could. They don't respect any international agreements. But, given the origins of their war, how can anyone believe otherwise? |
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The domestic violence one is puzzling as well. No doubt, domestic violence is a serious issue and its victims deserve the utmost protection and the best help available, but I am struggling to see why that qualifies you for a federal tax exemption.
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Isn't this possibly impacted by states who don't have medicaid/medicare expansions?
It's just Medicaid that has an effect, but it's a very small piece of the total. #13 is awesome, no.accountability just someone that feels the cost is too much. Hardship exemptions
If you have any of the circumstances below that affect your ability to purchase health insurance coverage, you may qualify for a “hardship” exemption:
1. You were homeless.
2. You were evicted in the past 6 months or were facing eviction or foreclosure.
3. You received a shut-off notice from a utility company.
4. You recently experienced domestic violence.
5. You recently experienced the death of a close family member.
6. You experienced a fire, flood, or other natural or human-caused disaster that caused substantial damage to your property.
7. You filed for bankruptcy in the last 6 months.
8. You had medical expenses you couldn’t pay in the last 24 months which resulted in substantial debt.
9. You experienced unexpected increases in necessary expenses due to caring for an ill, disabled, or aging family member.
10. You expect to claim a child as a tax dependuh ent who’s been denied coverage in Medicaid and CHIP, and another person is required by court order to give medical support to the child. In this case, you do not have the pay the penalty for the child.
11. As a result of an eligibility appeals decision, you’re eligible for enrollment in a qualified health plan (QHP) through the Marketplace, lower costs on your monthly premiums, or cost-sharing reductions for a time period when you weren’t enrolled in a QHP through the Marketplace.
12. You were determined ineligible for Medicaid because your state didn’t expand eligibility for Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.
13. Your individual insurance plan was cancelled and you believe other Marketplace plans are unaffordable.
14. You experienced another hardship in obtaining health insurance. #3 is really good, too. You can get out of a federal tax penalty by not paying your utilities for a couple of months until they send you a shut-off notice. In almost every state, you get 10-30 days' notice to cure your nonpayment. So, take the notice and apply for the exemption; meanwhile, pay your past due balance. |
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Isn't this possibly impacted by states who don't have medicaid/medicare expansions?
It's just Medicaid that has an effect, but it's a very small piece of the total. |
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Nearly 90% of the 30 million uninsured will not pay the penalty required by the law because of expanding exemptions. With one of the crucial pieces of the law being the individual mandate, enforced through these penalties, this is just another crack in the hull of the sinking ship that is PPACA.
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I think you are making my point. There is no substitute for "being there," whether at work or on the home front. That's why people who have breaks in their careers, for whatever reason, have a harder time advancing and make less money. Think of it like Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours requirement. If you miss a substantial amount of work, which is roughly equated with experience, you are worth less to most employers.
If someone chooses to take parental leave--paid or unpaid--and loses out on experience, there is always a penalty. If you leave work early on a regular basis or are otherwise not available because of family obligations, there is a penalty, just the same as if you work too much, there is a penalty with your family. Society makes women more likely to incur the penalties because of expectations for women. But it's not a particular institution that is creating the problem. There are women who forego families or at least the majority of the day to day of family life and, I'm willing to bet, their careers and salaries end up comparable to men with like experience.
Short of employers or the law treating men and women differently, there is no way to correct this other than a remodeling of societal expectations, which are hard-coded into our culture, if not our DNA. I, for one, do not want to see the law treat people differently based on race or gender or any other immutable characteristic, so I am opposed to anything that would attempt to level the playing field, especially since negative side effects are very tough to gauge.
As to your last point, I would just say that men and women are and should be equal, but they are not interchangeable. There are certain tasks and jobs that men are better suited to, just as there are some that women are better suited to. That said, I am opposed to any discrimination that does not have a basis in merit.
I don't see how that is "making your point" when your attempted point was that perceptions of discrimination are more damaging than discrimination. The example you gave has nothing to do with what your attempted point was. The scenario you painted isn't the result of direct discrimination from the employer, nor from perceptions of discrimination from the employee. But it absolutely is unfair, and is the type of thing that one would naturally and justifiably complain about. There are a lot of other factors though outside of mere maternal leave, ways in which our work institutions are set up that are harder on women than on men and ways our cultural perceptions of what women should do is also a contributing factor (and one easily observable across cultures). I agree that we can and should change the culture, but I do not agree that it should be done through positive law. Further, I am not concerned with absolute fairness, which is merely a synonym for equality. I am not sure you are advancing it, but the type of equality that flows from trying to correct unfairness is legislative equality and it is a very poor substitute for actual equality. |
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In many institutions, the actual practice is not especially damaging compared to the perception. It's tough to make much of anecdotal evidence, but I offer a recent one. A close colleague of mine recently had a baby. That is, his wife had a baby. Our firm offers equal paid parental leave for men and women, up to 18 weeks. As the delivery date approached, he was advised by one of our superiors to not take more than 2 or 3 days. He ended up taking just the delivery date because it fell on a Friday, and was back to work Monday morning.
Putting aside whether this is fair for right, it raises several interesting questions. Would the male supervisor have advised a woman the same? How would the woman have reacted compared to my friend (who had planned to take 2 or 3 days in any event)? Putting aside the advice, if the woman took several weeks of leave and it affected promotions, salary or bonuses, what would she attribute it to? What would a male in a similar situation?
then dont have a baby if you cant afford it but dont want to miss out on career, god damn it. giving in to peer pressure and then bitching and blaming instead of taking responsibility for your action. almost every woman i know wants to have babies just because other women do, although she has no fucking career or any idea what she would do to provide a decent life for them. worse, some of them were still in the ages where they haven't finished being children themselves (16-24), still living at home, yet they keep talking about having baby NOW as if it was like getting a doll from the store. Says the person who doesn't have to choose between having a career and having a family. The entire point here is that women have these costs to their ability to be successful in their career and are forced to make these expensive tradeoffs that many men don't have to. It represents a mathematical disadvantage to women in the work place, compounded by our cultural perceptions that it should be women who handle the bulk of unpaid domestic work as well. you think men don't have to choose between having a career and family? yes, women have just as many choices as men do. or are you telling me the same women who can choose to have sex and then scream rape the next day can't choose to not get knocked up? No one forces you to have baby. no one forces you to do unpaid housework. many of you want to have baby only to be "in the club", to remain in your social circle. matter of fact, many women these days have wise up to that fact and decided to make the same choice men did, which is not to have baby, at least until both of them together can afford it. many couples i know share the house work. the wife cooks, the husband washes the dishes. the wife does the laundry, the husband takes out the trash. the wife cleans the house, the husband mows the lawn Mathematically not nearly in the same way. They can, but due to cultural gender norms and I think also motherly biology, it, on average does not. We actually have mathematical proof of this in (drum-roll please) our wage gap. You realize that it is the woman, and not the man that has to get "knocked up" yeah? Can you choose to give birth? I'm pretty sure abortion is still legal in the United States, as are Plan B, female condoms, and IUDs. To act like pregnancy is something that men do to women is absurd. The "blame" (for lack of a better word) goes both ways. |
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Does Individual honesty and or Personal Intellectual Integrity play any part in your Religious belief System?
Well? Is the question all that difficult to comprehend? Being a non-Christian I can state with certainty that without honesty and integrity a person has nothing. If you can't be honest, why would you bother participating in a discussion at all, unless your intentions are to knowingly post lies; to deliberately be dishonest?
Why do you Christians have a problem with an honest question? It's not 'flame-bait".
Tolerance isn't enough: Max Shulman's essay. Engaging the idea is the only way to arrive at some range of truth. Truth is a moving target. Lies, when one believes, are not much easier to hit. What I love about online discussions with you good people is the opportunity to speak freely without the consequences involved in discussing issues with family and friends. So, I enjoy the honesty. Now, some enjoy the lies. That's fine. Either way, the ideas are engaged and the possibility remains that truth will inevitably surface. Frustrating, but not necessarily a waste of time. |
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Because in many institutions, the actual practice is not especially damaging compared to the perception. Hmm. So given the option of me punching you in the face, or me not punching you but giving everyone the perception that I did, which would you pick? You are not framing the issue correctly. It should be phrased "given the option of me punching you in the face, or me not punching you but giving you the perception that I did, which would you pick?" And you're not Hobson and this isn't a horse we are talking about. |
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I think you are making my point. There is no substitute for "being there," whether at work or on the home front. That's why people who have breaks in their careers, for whatever reason, have a harder time advancing and make less money. Think of it like Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours requirement. If you miss a substantial amount of work, which is roughly equated with experience, you are worth less to most employers.
If someone chooses to take parental leave--paid or unpaid--and loses out on experience, there is always a penalty. If you leave work early on a regular basis or are otherwise not available because of family obligations, there is a penalty, just the same as if you work too much, there is a penalty with your family. Society makes women more likely to incur the penalties because of expectations for women. But it's not a particular institution that is creating the problem. There are women who forego families or at least the majority of the day to day of family life and, I'm willing to bet, their careers and salaries end up comparable to men with like experience.
Short of employers or the law treating men and women differently, there is no way to correct this other than a remodeling of societal expectations, which are hard-coded into our culture, if not our DNA. I, for one, do not want to see the law treat people differently based on race or gender or any other immutable characteristic, so I am opposed to anything that would attempt to level the playing field, especially since negative side effects are very tough to gauge.
As to your last point, I would just say that men and women are and should be equal, but they are not interchangeable. There are certain tasks and jobs that men are better suited to, just as there are some that women are better suited to. That said, I am opposed to any discrimination that does not have a basis in merit.
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In many institutions, the actual practice is not especially damaging compared to the perception. It's tough to make much of anecdotal evidence, but I offer a recent one. A close colleague of mine recently had a baby. That is, his wife had a baby. Our firm offers equal paid parental leave for men and women, up to 18 weeks. As the delivery date approached, he was advised by one of our superiors to not take more than 2 or 3 days. He ended up taking just the delivery date because it fell on a Friday, and was back to work Monday morning.
Putting aside whether this is fair for right, it raises several interesting questions. Would the male supervisor have advised a woman the same? How would the woman have reacted compared to my friend (who had planned to take 2 or 3 days in any event)? Putting aside the advice, if the woman took several weeks of leave and it affected promotions, salary or bonuses, what would she attribute it to? What would a male in a similar situation?
Those aren't equivalent scenarios. The man is expected to come back into work pretty much ASAP and he has significant freedom of choice to do so (generally speaking). The woman in your scenario on the other hand essentially has to choose between both her health and the health of her child / having a family vs getting ahead at work. While males can face those choices too, they are MUCH more common and on average MUCH more impactful (negatively in the work sphere) on females. The cost of going into work is far different for each of your two examples as is the cost of staying home. I'd also argue that simple blatant discrimination would also be worse than the costs of those choices that you presented. Your scenario with blatant discrimination wouldn't even exist because the woman wouldn't be able to get ahead in the job regardless of whether or not she went in the day after giving birth or stayed at home for a couple of months. Which still leaves your previous assertion rendered false. In basically every other culture (including America before we moved to the cities), it's normal for a woman to have a kid then go back to working almost immediately. I completely understand the idea of BOTH parents taking time off just because they would be so frazzled from lack of sleep that they wouldn't make good workers, but you have to know that missing work for that long of a period will affect your job. |
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In many institutions, the actual practice is not especially damaging compared to the perception. It's tough to make much of anecdotal evidence, but I offer a recent one. A close colleague of mine recently had a baby. That is, his wife had a baby. Our firm offers equal paid parental leave for men and women, up to 18 weeks. As the delivery date approached, he was advised by one of our superiors to not take more than 2 or 3 days. He ended up taking just the delivery date because it fell on a Friday, and was back to work Monday morning.
Putting aside whether this is fair for right, it raises several interesting questions. Would the male supervisor have advised a woman the same? How would the woman have reacted compared to my friend (who had planned to take 2 or 3 days in any event)? Putting aside the advice, if the woman took several weeks of leave and it affected promotions, salary or bonuses, what would she attribute it to? What would a male in a similar situation?
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They're just not going to be able to articulate the plights of others quite as well as those on the shitty end of the social inequalities, and calling all social equality movements "feminism" also waters down the various movements to an extent.
There are obviously other aspects that are positive about third-wave feminism, but it's the absorbing of other equal rights movements that I find to be problematic.
I only have an outsider's perspective, but I notice in some of my female and minority colleagues a defeatist and attributionist attitude. They tend to attribute any slight (some of them perceived, some of them real) or any failure to external factors--the boss is racist or sexist, or the system is. This shields them from having to take any responsibility for their shortcomings. |
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Engineers, Scientists, CPAs, Investors, etc... all sit on the right side of the income curve. Just because women are getting more degrees doesn't mean it will remove income disparity. Income disparity will only be leveled by having more women pursuing the aforementioned fields instead of going to school to work in primary education or just because their parents said they had to (most 4 year business degrees have been described as high school 2.0).
Then there is the argument that true income equality still has women on the slightly lower side because of the fact that they play a necessary biological role which anchors stable family life.
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This argument has been made popular within the last year or so, and I haven't really done a lot of research into it this time around, but in the past when I saw this brought up, the data had ignored that men just tend to do jobs that are valued more by the market, and it wasn't necessarily an issue of sexism.
What I mean is that men do things like construction, crab fishing, trucking, plumbing, etc., things that women simply choose not to do. This can be because of social norms, but there's probably some biology to it, such as men generally being physically stronger than women and strength being something that's valuable when it comes to, say, lifting heavy shit? Fuck if I know. Anyway, women just don't do these jobs or go for them. Instead, they choose cushy office jobs, and many of them choose to be homemakers whereas fewer men choose cushy office jobs and being homemakers and teachers and shit.
So I'm wondering if this same counterargument applies today. When we talk about women making $0.77 for every $1 a man makes, is it for the same job? Does the study control for other variables?
Just to be clear, here, I completely agree that sexism is a very real problem in our culture, including the workplace. When women are assertive, they're called "bitchy" or "bossy" whereas men are "confident" or "possess leadership qualities" and so forth. I read about one study that showed biases in hiring managers, and even when they were made aware of their biases, they still fail to properly compensate for it. I agree that we live in a culture that blames rape victims for being raped. Etc. It's not much of a stretch for me to buy into this argument about how much women make vs how much men make. But I know that there have been problems with the argument in the past, and I wanna see someone back it up with real data.
I thought that statistic was long ago corrected to $0.95 for every $1 men earn. And I'm especially curious what this stat is for the millennial generation and beyond where women are graduating college at a significantly higher rate. Feminism is going to fuck over the next generation of men. |
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This is more about Christianity than Judaism, but this is my favorite religious movie. Not my favorite movie of all-time; that would be Jacob's Ladder. But my favorite religious movie. The Body starring Spanish actor Antonio Banderas and Israeli Actor Mohammad Bakri. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZllO9w0DKAout of all the thousands of types of holy head wear, what is your favourite ?those pointy hats probably started off 6 inches high many years ago a grew year by year, a bit like the growth of the mitre ... in 500 years the mitre could be 6 foot tall ? The Druze head wear is my favorite. I think the Druze community is very interesting. From a Rabbi I talked to, a person born to a Jewish mother can be secular or even be an atheist and is still considered Jewish. So I would still be considered Jewish even if I am secular. Though he did say that atheists have no place in Olam Haba (The World to Come). |
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This is more about Christianity than Judaism, but this is my favorite religious movie. Not my favorite movie of all-time; that would be Jacob's Ladder. But my favorite religious movie. The Body starring Spanish actor Antonio Banderas and Israeli Actor Mohammad Bakri. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZllO9w0DKA |
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