Wabash82

The hospital's charges have little to no connection to their cost for the services, so those figures honestly don't tell us whether the hospital is still making a profit at that level of payment. The "window sticker" charges at hospitals are almost never paid by anyone: private insurance companies aren't paying anything close to those charges, and most poor uninsured people don't pay full boat because the hospitals just write off the charges. Because of the way our health care system works, the hospital's charge list exist mainly just to (a) be the place to start the negotiations with insurers (public and private) over discounts and actual reimbursement rates, and (b) get over in those rare cases where a wealthy person is willing and able to pay out of pocket.

And if we stop this waste, we can fund the entire Green New Deal!! Upfront! With cash!

At the risk of stating the obvious, the cost/benefit analysis of handing out drinking straw, versus handing out clean syringes, is a bit different (unless we are equating human lives and tortoise lives).

"New photos" from 30 years ago. (Before The Hair had fully ripened.) Lots has changed since then, including the "$hlthole countries" remark, etc. Do you think The Donald would softly caress Rev Al's hand like that if they met up today? His opinion of those two gentlemen obviously has also changed since that long ago day when this warm and fuzzy snapshot was taken. Perhaps they all just know each other's true character better now days?

That is one of the reasons I use a VPN on my personal laptop -- in addition to my having finally been convinced by a certain GID poster that the government is out there watching my every move! 😄

You may also have to refresh your router's connection to the internet (to your ISP), since they also sometimes track visits to their pages by IP address as well.

That's weird. Normally Republicans just get an intense electrical shock sent over the interwebs whem they click the link! 😄 The story outlines a recently-released study (jointly made by the University of Chicago and the Fed) of the effects of the tariff on foreign-made washing machines imposed by the Trump administration at the request of Whirlpool. The study showed that the tariff appeared to create about 2,000 new U.S. jobs, and that the tariff-based price increases paid by consumers for washers and dryers (dryers were not subject to the tariff, but since they are usually bought in tandem with washers, manufacturers thought, why not?) worked out to $1.5 billion annually, or around $815,000 per job created (again, that's an annual cost, presumably, until the tariffs go away). The study also pointed out that, historically, federal job-creation programs that are funded directly by taxes create one new job per $50,000 of tax dollars directed to the program.

Not that this outcome was unexpected, but surely the President could have found a cheaper way to buy 2,000 votes in Michigan for his re-election campaign: https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/04/23/trumps-washing-machine-tariffs-cost-us-consumers-every-job-created/

I am a little puzzled why this "But I personally didn't do anything wrong!!!" whining wasn't raised when the U.S. under President Reagan paid reparations to Japanese-Americans placed in detention during WW II, or the multiple times in the last 100 years when the U.S. has paid billions in reprations to various Native American tribes for dirty deeds it had done long ago to their ancestors. I am reminded of the line from the movie "Diner" where the guy tells the creepy guy who is getting in his face, "I'll hit you so hard it'll kill your whole family." Isn't this another case, ala the Native American tribes, where the U.S. government would just be acknowledging that it did wrong in the past to a group of people in a manner that was so eggregious that it literally is still causing harm to those people's ancestors generations later? The United States as a nation frequently takes current tax dollars to pay for obligations it incurred in some past time, when many current tax payers may not have even been alive, and had nothing to do with the events that created that obligation -- the reparations paid out in 1988 to Japanese-Americans interred in WW II being just one example. I think it would have struck people as odd to have heard some 35 year old white taxpayer back in 1988 complain about those reparations because he personally had no beef with Japanese-Americans, and his parents told him that they were against the internment when it happened.

#6,274 on the list of things Hillary was way wrong about. She thought her husband was faithful, too....

Not enough hair there for him to sniff!

Mike Pence will crush him? Or are you referring to something/someone else? Didn't follow that statement.... In what I have seen of him so far, Mayor Pete (not gonna commit to trying to spell that last name accurately) seems to be minimizing the identity politics aspects of his sexual orientation and positioning himself more broadly as the candidate who is "just as progressive, but also much more practical" than Bernie, or Corey, or Kamala, or Elizabeth, etc., with a "plus, I'm a millennial, so I think like you" ("you" as in second largest voting bloc demographically) kicker, to separate himself from the other (older) candidates with executive office experience. I see his recent statements related to Pence's purported view of gay people as a framing mechanism for the pitch he eventually has to make successfully to the many Americans who are still uncertain in how they "feel" about homosexuals: the folks who 20 to 15 years ago firmly believed gay people were "perverts", equivalent to pedophiles, but who have come to discover in the last decade or so that there seem to be a heck of a lot of "normal" gay people. He has to convince those people that he's gay because that's how God made him, and while he is not ashamed or embarrassed of it, it is also just one of many components of the person God made him to be; it is not the animating "force" of what he is about, as a person or as a politician, any more than the fact that God made them heterosexual defines who they are.

I’m a weekend hat wearer and have about 8 currently that I rotate thru. A nicely broken in hat is like a well worn pair of jeans for me, part of the “uniform” on Saturdays. I don’t think I have ever bought a hat, though, which explains why my wife won’t be seen with me when I am wearing some of them. (The neon yellow “corn” cap I got as a giveaway at the State Fair a few years back was one of her least favorites; it mysteriously disappeared from my closet a few weeks later....)

The limiting statement "a few births out of a thousand", refers specifically to instances of people being born with a single sex chromosome. The article does not say anything about how common it is to have the "variety of different combinations of sex chromosomes and genes" discovered in recent research. Again, the whole point of the book discussed in the New Stateman review is that the recent research has overturned the traditional focus on the X and Y chromsomes being the the "sex chromosomes", and thus the traditional view that only mutations/variations affecting those two chromosomes are relevant to determining a person's sex. Rather, the new research shows exactly what the last sentence of your quoted article says: "Clearly, there are not only females who are XX and males who are XY, but rather, there is a range of chromosome complements, hormone balances, and phenotypic variations that determine sex."

I get the comparison, and there are certainly many black Americans who agree with you regarding other black people using the n-word. As we have discussed before, I think it would be great if nobody used the word. But the historical context makes the use of it by a white person much, much worse than the use of it by a black person, and it is simply not a justification for any white person to use it just because some black people do. And I feel the same is true with regard to wearing a MAGA hat: the fact that some people (like this elderly Jewish man in the news story) may not be aware or care that the hat has been adopted by white supremists as a symbol of their "cause" doesn't justify a person who does know and care about that fact continuing to wear one. It is like a rainbow flag: whether a person likes it or not, that flag has been adopted by a group of people as a symbol of their cause, and flying that flag makes a statement as a result, inadvertently or not.

Yes, and the science and medical sources you linked to supported the info in the article I linked to... which was a book review describing things in a new book written by a well-respected historian who studies the history of science. So books somehow are now tainted by the supposed politics of their reviewers?

Well, the Taliban have proven to be a more diffficult adversary to fully vanquish. But in terms of fighting for an evil or bad cause, I'd say that they were pretty comparable. You are not suggesting that the Confederates were the "good guys"? The "MAGA" thing is like the three fingers down "OK" sign thing. Neither is inherently racist. But, unfortunately, both have noe been adopted by white supremist in the U.S. and internationally as a means to make winking references to each other. They are good for that purpose because they carry plausible deniability, as there are (obviously) people who flash that particular OK sign and who wear "MAGA" hats who are not white supremists. Once a person who is not a white supremist has become aware that these hate groups have co-opted the MAGA hat for their movement, it is difficult for me to understand why that person would continuing to wear one, in the same way that I'd have a difficult time understanding why a non-fascist would display a swastika symbol after the Nazis had gone and "ruined it" for everyone.

The South won the waiting game in regard to the North tiring of the efforts of Reconstruction, and in that respect the South was the ultimate "victor" when it came to reframing a war over slavery into a war supposedly over the great "lost cause" of defending "States Rights". Sort of like how the Taliban will eventually win the waiting game in Afghanistan and one day write the "history" of the defeat of the American Infidel Crusaders.

Maybe you and I have a different idea as to what "crony capitalism" means. While having cronies in government positions is one aspect of how it has tended to work in the U.S., it is certainly not an inherent aspect of crony capitalism as I understand it. To me, that term primarily refers to a "corrupted" system of capitalism in which many financial and business opportunities and outcomes are controlled by social and family connections, and not by market forces, and in which such connections largely override the Darwinian-like notion of "survival of the fittest" that is often applied to the concept of free market capitalism. Crony capitalism may include governmental cronies intervening in markets to benefit their cronies, but it much more often involves rather mundane things like Fred's fraternity brother's rich dad throwing less-than-a-go-getter Fred a nice piece of a "deal", because he also went to the same elite boarding school as Fred's dad.

It's all science. Per the point specifically made in the first article you linked to, recent scientific advances have disclosed that there are multiple genetic and biological factors beyond the (so called) sex chromosomes that create and influence development of the multiple sex phenotypes (the physical characteristics associated with human males and human females, including -- but certainly not limited to-- the parts that make up the "plumbing", as SF puts it). Modern science tells us that these multiple genetic factors mean that humans can have multiple combinations of sex phenotypes that place individuals on a spectrum that goes far beyond simply who has twigs and berries at birth and who doesn't.

Eliminate cronies. Seriously, how is guv'ment responsible for crony capitalism? I'd say that, here in the U.S., private schools and college fraternities and sororities have contributed a lot more to the development of crony capitalism that the guv'ment has. The real truth is that the whole concept of "private property" rests upon the shoulders of functioning government. Without it, you can "own" anything only until someone bigger and stronger decides that he now "owns" it.

https://www.newstatesman.com/future-proof/2015/02/sex-isn-t-chromosomes-story-century-misconceptions-about-x-y

Perhaps AOC, Biden, Beto et al are referencing the version of capitalism we actually have, not the fantasy capitalism Mises and the article's author are describing?

Those words came from your post, not the articles. So are you now going to try to claim that you posted this article in a thread dealing with liberals alleged overreaction to President Trump simply as a commentary on our judicial system, and not because of the supposed political angle to the story? Muda, come on dude. You will strain something making a stretch like that....

Huh? The whole point of your original comment, the precise REASON you posted this here, was to make a comment on the supposed political aspects of the incident -- supposedly tolerant lib SJW warrior assaults some guy because of the guy's differing political views, and (supposedly) only gets a slap on the wrist for it. If you now claim that you "know nothing" about Winder's politics, then how do you know he isn't a white supremist, also, and the reason he hit the other guy had nothing to do with that guy's political views?