Fuck fuckity fuck fuck fuck!

[Beelzebubs]

This bill just got passed. Welcome to communist Britain!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/apr/08/digital-economy-bill-quick-guide-45-measures

[Lonskils]

The FCC started trying that here in the US, but the Supreme court just told them to go fuck themselves. Meanwhile we have a 2700 page Socialist/Communist Health Care bill that just passed that is gonna wind up in the Supreme Court as well. Just look at it this way Bubs, hackers always find a way around shit. In a year you'll be using some other method to get what you want and they'll never be able to keep up. Buy a proxy in a non net neutral country and enjoy!

[Beelzebubs]

To put the Digital Economy Bill into layman's terms, the grocer believes that someone is stealing fruit and vegetables from his shop display. He can't prove it, but his sales are going down, so the only explanation the grocer wants to publicise to his shareholders is someone must be stealing from the shop. So instead of looking at the quality of his produce, the prices he charges, the method of payment available, the availability of his goods, the competition, etc, and the general way he operates his business, he instead contacts the local bus company, who carry everyone into town; He orders them to strip search all of the passengers using on the bus just in case they might steal something from his shop. The bus company doesn't want to agree, but the Mayor tells the bus company that the shop keeper's profits are more important that the passengers right to 'innocent until proven guilty', so the bus company forced to undertake the strip search. Now the passengers cannot go into town without using the bus, but if they go into town, they must be strip searched by the bus company.

The Mayor is the government, the shopkeeper the BPI and the bus company are the ISPs.

The British public is supposed to roll over and accept this invasion, all to protect the Politicans pension fund (directorships).

[Aindayen]

Time to move to America Beelz!

Ain

[Lonskils]

Oh I know exactly what you are talking about, they've been pushing to pull this shit here for a while.

[Beelzebubs]

Time to move to America Beelz!

Ain

Considering it.

[Lonskils]

Time to move to America Beelz!

Ain


Why? We are about to have the same Health Care, the same Value Added Tax (VAT) and the same bill keeps trying to get passed here. Right now we are Britain light, but not for long. Makes me want to puke.

[Beelzebubs]

Oh I know exactly what you are talking about, they've been pushing to pull this shit here for a while.

Oh I know Lons, was just for the benefit of others so they can understand my pain :( There are already protest plans afoot.

[Lonskils]

Oh I know Lons, was just for the benefit of others so they can understand my pain :( There are already protest plans afoot.

It is the communist way!! And the protesters will just be labeled as the guilty. See how it works?

[Beelzebubs]

Why? We are about to have the same Health Care, the same Value Added Tax (VAT) and the same bill keeps trying to get passed here. Right now we are Britain light, but not for long. Makes me want to puke.


At least I'll get a gun!

[Domathoine]

Lons:

I've never heard you speak out against the most successful piece of Socialist legislature our country has ever produced: The G. I. bill. Nor have I ever heard you speak against policemen or firefighters or social security or medicare or mediaid or the department of transportation or the food and drug administration or our school systems...

...Choose your fights carefully.

[Valdis]

Doma that's a slippery slope argument, choose your arguments carefully. There is no reason one can disagree vehemently against certain socialist ideas and not others. For instance most would agree that policeman and fireman are fine to have as part of the government, even if they should perhaps be de-unionized, however social security, medicare, medicaid, health care, and a dept of ed that has mostly been pointed out to be one of the worst in the civilized world could easily be criticized and said to be far more trouble then they are worth.

[Aerothas]

$4.99 a month for the ability to browse/download freely. Just let me know.

[Aerothas]

I'm sick of having only Chinese clients.

[Domathoine]

Valdis:

My point was that the health care bill was attacked, by Lons, solely for this reasoning --


Meanwhile we have a 2700 page Socialist/Communist Health Care bill that just passed that is gonna wind up in the Supreme Court as well.

Nowhere does that say anything about problems that are *IN* the healthcare bill, just that the bill is problematic because it is Socialist//Communist. Thus, my point that much of our government has "Socialist//Communist" elements is a great way to counter this shallow, one dimensional thinking that does absolutely nothing to analyze the bills' contents or provide insight into Lons' opinion.

[Aindayen]

$4.99 a month for the ability to browse/download freely. Just let me know.

HUH, how does this work?

Ain

[Beelzebubs]

huh, how does this work?

Ain

vpn?

[Aerothas]

SSH tunneling is easier to setup but a VPN would work too

[Lonskils]

Valdis:

My point was that the health care bill was attacked, by Lons, solely for this reasoning --



Nowhere does that say anything about problems that are *IN* the healthcare bill, just that the bill is problematic because it is Socialist//Communist. Thus, my point that much of our government has "Socialist//Communist" elements is a great way to counter this shallow, one dimensional thinking that does absolutely nothing to analyze the bills' contents or provide insight into Lons' opinion.

Oh forgive me Doma, I didn't know you wanted my dissertation on the subject. I will move to display what I feel is wrong with this bill and enlighten you as to that. I had tried to keep this as close to the chest as possible as this is the general forum on Hossguild, but I will as you have asked, explain to you why I feel this is a huge step towards socialism.

Many folks here know that for years I was on a ton of meds. The meds lead me down the dark path that was the socialized health care of TennCare. If you do not know of TennCare, I won't go into the list of what that has done to that state alone and its citizens, but take from it what I experienced for myself.

When you get on TennCare (NOW OBAMACARE!!!) You are given this huge list of doctors that you can choose from. After about 4 hours of dialing you come to realize, none of them are taking new patients. What happens then is that everyone just goes to the ER room. ER rooms are the most expensive fucking place on the Earth to get medical attention. After a while you have folks that aren't even sick, but think they are heading to the ER rooms to get MRI's! And any list they can think up. Hell, some folks would call 911 to get a ride there, just so they could walk out of the ER room and get to where they were going faster because they didn't have the money for a cab. So here you have all these folks that are not even paying into the system that are using the most expensive things about the system they can find and then taking it steps further and abusing it. Taking steps to remain on it by not working and being over medicated if they really were sick by the doctors to try and make sure they hit whatever problem was wrong with em.

TennCare has almost bankrupt Tennessee. Romni Care HAS bankrupted Mass. And here we have Obamacare that CANNOT be funded by anyone in any state without a VALUE ADDED TAX on top of income tax being added being passed. Already you have all the folks that do not work, do not pay into the system, have never paid into the system, being thrown on medicaid roles. The Feds will pay for that for a couple years, but then the states will have to fund them. So now ALL STATES will be like Mass and TN, but with no way to pay for medicaid.

We have been set up by this bill to pay into it for 4 fucking years before anyone ever gets to see a thing from it and then who is gonna be the doctors to take on the 30 million more people that they are saying are gonna be enrolled on that day? All to save 150 billion over 10 years that they didn't add into the "bribes" they have to pay doctors to even take medicaid patients which would make it that much more of a nanny state for being now in the hole the 150 billion over 10 years (I'd venture a guess that it will be a lot more than 150 billion over 10 years we will be in the hole though.)

Throw in that next up is making sure every illegal alien gets citizen ship in one swoop and you can add in another what? 10 million to the roles? But no measure that once we make them citizens that illegal migration will ever stop so we will basically be taken over from the inside by Mexico and pay for it ourselves!

To even compare the GI Bill/Police/Fire to this is a joke in and of itself. These folks actually put their lives on the line for us.

Do yourself a favor and start doing something besides watching CNN/MSNBC and start figuring out how much of your taxes that you'll be paying in now and in the future that actually will go to this mythical SS or Medicare that you'll get in the future. There is no money, the coffers and filled with IOU's. Over half our deficit is tied up in entitlements and the fucking sick thing about it is, WE CAN'T TOUCH EM!! Our GDP in 10 years will be 90%, that's Greece present day.

We are borrowing money or hell just printing money faster than anyone can earn it. The federal Gov now owns 51% of what was private business up to a year ago and they are trying to pass a law and I kid you not here that they will have to power to fire, divide and sell off the companies without a vote from the share holders nothing.

Adding another entitlement wasn't the smart thing to do here. This is socialism and the sad thing is, you think I just said this to say it and think oh it's just paranoid Lons. I'm not. The freedoms you have today, your kids won't have.

[Domathoine]

The point wasn't to elicit your wrath towards the bill or towards myself, but only to prove that blanket statements like that are completely unwarranted in any forum, not just hoss general.

To say that I need to "start doing something besides watching CNN/MSNBC" is also a joke. I spend more time at my computer reading into whats going on in the world around me than I do any other single activity in my day to day life, aside from maybe tennis, and thats only because I teach it AND play it.

[Lonskils]

Ok, then read this...http://cboblog.cbo.gov/

[Angelie]

Great. Post more blame on this year's administration when we are entering an era of recession that was not Obama's fault in the first place. People love to attribute budget deficits and other debts to the current administration instead of the administration that brought us there in the first place.

[Gheltire]

now to be fair, the last Q of Clinton's administration was already in a downturn, and no one liked to make that argument when Bush used it to defend him taking over the reins in Q1 2001.


What I always find amusing about "who started the bad economy" is like it exists in a 4 yr vacuum with a static beginning and endpoint which magically coincides with the inauguration of a President. Reagan and Clinton had 8 years to work their voodoo math and various other economic policies. Bush 1 and Bush 2 first term had extreme problems. And mid Bush2 2nd term, the stock market was back over 911 levels. Then the credit card/mortgage morass that was building for 30 years landed and crashed the world.

It's not Bush's fault then and not Obama's fault now aside from both of their administrations deciding that corporations were too big to fail and opened our funds to companies that were riding high on the hog already. But that was just pandering and angling towards support for whatever next legislation either side might have in the works then or now.

To the OP or rather Lons's point about VAT though...as soon as I saw that proposed earlier this week I just thought here we go.

Most anyone that either pays insurance premiums, or pays their own healthcare for lack of insurance, already knows that the price of medicine and the price of insurance for that medicine is through the roof. There is ZERO way that the government in its current form can pay for the millions of people who are about to choose the government option, and there is no way that we can pay the additional premiums in our pools now that Big Insurance is forced to add high risk individuals and put them into a supposedly separate pool. Newsflash. If you have two pools of premium payers, and one of them costs your company a crapton, the one you used to make money on and is a "lower risk to payout" will carry the weight of the high risk pool. Otherwise, the BI goes out of business.

The VAT is the government's solution for our higher healthcare costs just as BI will be passing along higher premiums to keep the pools afloat. It will just be another mismanaged pile of government money assigned to push terminable liability for the program into the next generation. Its insane

Social Security already mentioned and we know where that's headed. Smart guys already put their money elsewhere and figure their 7.65% chipin as additional tax and if they get it back like a coke bottle deposit whoopie. Its not even on my radar and Im old enough to have more than enough periods in the bank to already know what my "check" will be when Im 65.

You mentioned the GI Bill Doma, and yes its a socialized type of program, but you didnt pull the trigger on the real example of socialism for our veterans. Probably because you know its history too and didnt want to kick up too much dust. The VA.

for 100 years the VA has been a thorn in the side of government funding. It's the darling when you want the conservative vote, and the first to get the chopping block when you have the votes you need. Mainly because its too damn expensive to back up your promises when it comes to medical care. Walter Reed is just the iceberg of course, youll have to wander back through decades of legislation meant to curtail the promises made by the armed forces while recruiting to see where they told you it would handle your care for as long as you lived and then removed those benefits when you got too old to be a voting block anymore. WW2 vets, WW1 vets...theyve all seen this conversation. The VA was one of the first organizations to face cuts when FDR started the New Deal. Agent Orange for Vietnam, vets on the streets with mental illness caused by psychological trauma in the field, Desert Storm...you name it. The VA fails its intended recipients daily not because of lack of care, but because of lack of funding.

How about the postal system? How many billions down? How well did Hawaii's free child insurance program work? How many weeks (days actually) did it take to shut down due to insolvency? Lons has Tenn's example and mentions Mass. PA runs a lottery to help its eldercare programs as it is. A lottery? That's elective taxation. Least its not a VAT. But as the babyboomers continue to retire and hit that magical medicare/aid mark, how long can elective remain elective and not go mandatory?

Its not the Socialism angle that worries me. I believe we all have a civic duty to provide at least alternatives for each other as a society. Ignoring the dying man on the street corner because you think he is lazy and deserving of his fate isnt American in my eyes. And at the same time, when two 60 yr old parents are paying 1k a month for coverage as they approach a 3k a month social security check needs immense and immediate action. But those are economic issues in and of themselves. Just money or employment. Fixable by legislation if we can be smart enough to come up with a way.

What really scares me is the growing idea that we can keep mortgaging the future.

In the late 1600s Louis XIV recognized that France had a debt of 60million odd livres (HUGE!) and developed (well colbert did - not that colbert!) mercantilism as a way to channel money directly in to the coffers of the kingdom. He exploded the bank and totally turned the kingdom around, bringing in huge tax revenues, which started to lead to excess. By the time of his death, France was doing well, although the revenues were stagnating (mainly once the hugenots started to leave). They went into colonialism. Got into multiple wars. And still reduced that debt to 10mil. When Louis the XV took over he had huge coffers. A fair to middling economy. A colonial expansion going on. And a large military grudge with England. What would he do? No worries he would continue to tax, tax harder, and start using war to spark his economy. He threw huge parties at home. Built estates. And as money started to get tighter, he ignored warnings with the idea "Louis the XVI can handle it" Sound familiar?

We've already got a strong anticlericalism element going on in America today as it is. We have our wars. Our arguments of spiking the economy with military conflict. We have our rich and our poor. Our poor being buried by our system and our middle class rapidly progressing towards poor as it holds more and more of the burden of "civic responsibility" (because our corporations wisely setup shop in other countries to take advantage of our own lax tax laws with regards to big business). We've got guys flying planes into government buildings. Pipe bombs deployed around east texas mail boxes. Crusades against the Pope and a growing resentment for church affiliation in general (for fun, ask some of your academic PHD friends where they would rather have a PHD from on their CV, Notre Dame or Berkeley - answer is non religious funded university)

Now we've got tea partiers who think it excellent political dialogue to call minority government opposition officials the N word. We've got legislations trying to ban gays from getting married. We shut down proms for lesbian attendance. The government is removing the banks from college loan funding. ACORN is out there running dead people to vote and suing reporters for filming them advising on the best ways to be a Pimp and bring in illegal human chattel. School textbooks wont put Latin or Black Medal of Honor Winners?


Socialism?

Hell Id take a little Socialism right now:P

What we're going towards is division.

When the US was fledgling in its political parties its initial crop of rulers, whether Fed or AntiFed, feared one thing. The one thing that brought down France. The one thing that scared the crap outta Southern White Dems and Reps in the early 1900s too. Populism. When the common people banded together to form cohesive political opposition to the status quo of big government. Didnt matter if it was Piedmonters in the 1700s upset that there was no more Tidewater land to be had and no more land was available west. Didnt matter if it was Georgians bumping into British laws stopping them from moving west as they ran into landed gentry who already owned most of that state. The only way the British government, the early American government, the Reconstruction American government, and our current government can handle the threat of populism is to keep division out there and alive.

Might be civil rights, might be abortion, might be gay rights, might be healthcare and the spectre of communism/socialism. Theyre just hotbutton tools used to keep us as fragmented and fractured as possible.

And dont worry, Im not a psychotic Unibomber antigovernment guy. I do pretty damn well with what I have here, and would defend the US, right or wrong in a lot of arguments, mainly because I try to track very close to the center along a timeline of history. And for what its worth, America got where it has gotten over monumental obstacles placed in its path by the world for 300 years+. But it got great by standing up for its own. Banding together when the time required it. And not feeling entitled to anything. It was better to abide by one of those "Christian Work Ethic" principles than it was to sit around and let someone else solve its problems. Once Katrina happened and most of us realized that the government cannot solve our problems, we should have learned something...that we are bigger than our government. But we didn't. We fingerpointed and blamed. We sit back and let the government raise our kids. Let it tell us whether or not we can discuss evolution or sex ed or Cesar Chavez or Jesus Christ or Buddha or the Trail of Tears. Now we look to it to be our miracle end of life solution.

At some point in the French Revolution, it became law that the "only religion in France is that of The State". As in, you dont believe in the Catholic God anymore, you believe in France. It didnt work out so well there. Brought us Napoleon to be precise. Didnt work out so well in the Soviet Union either.

It's not a God issue. I dont believe you HAVE to believe in a God to sit by me in McDonalds. What Im REALLY REALLY REALLY scared of is that both sides, republican and democrat alike, want us to believe in the state. Whether right or left, pro gun or Green Initiative. And both extremes of the debate want me to believe their side is right, so Ill hate the other side and keep buying its books. And secretly wish the other side fails when it comes into power.

I really try to stay out of the realm of political debate on the forums these days. Mainly because its just BS from two camps that they mostly got in their chain email box this morning. But I figured Id let the dog off the leash a little on this and the IRS plane thread.

I just wish we were smarter than to believe less than 1000 men and women had the capacity, even if they were working with all good intention and deed, to solve all of our problems for us.

[Lonskils]

/applaud

[Aindayen]

Good stuff Ghel

Ain

[Octavus]

I'll put that in my pipe and smoke it. It's people with your thought, insight and knowledge of our own history, that should be leading the country or at least guiding us. Unfortunately those who desire the power are usually those who are least able and less deserving to do so. Knowledge of past mistakes, trends and follies as well as recognition of what has worked and what was used to triumph over adversity and social induced problems is key to fixing future and present problems. Of course new ones always arise and require new approaches and ideas, but learning from past mistakes seems to be harder for people, countries, cultures and the greater good of humanity to accomplish and recognize.

As you stated the main problem is our inability to recognize the true power we have in shaping our destiny. Instead of looking inward and doing what we know needs to be done, we instead expect it handed to us. Perhaps its fear, maybe its laziness, most likely it is being content with mediocrity and a lack of desire to put in the effort to really make a difference and get off of our lazy fucking asses and do something worth doing.

Thanks for posting, it has re lit a fire in my ass that from time to time smoothers out from the weight of my own self indulgences.

EDITED: I should really review or at least use spell/grammar check more often before posting.

[Valdis]

I can honestly say I always enjoy reading your posts Ghel. It even makes me sometimes want to go back and finish my BS in History but then I remember I have way more then enough student loan debt and I hate homework.

P.S. Just to clarify I did finish college with a BS in Information Systems Security but before I went down that route I was nearly finished with a triple major in English, History and Philosophy, with a minor in Religion. Needless to say I have enough student loan debt now to keep me company for a good long while.