kimmy

Meh. It's "the new normal", Dick. When you offshore the jobs and saddle people with enormous student loans, you can't be too shocked when they can't afford to move out on their own until later. -k

Well, they've been keeping records since the 1840s, so they know this drought is the worst in at least 170 years. And they can measure rings in trees. Narrow rings indicate years when water was scarce. And they can study sediment layers and deposits of shells in riverbeds and things like that as well. Regardless, whether its 1580 or 1840, this is the worst drought in a very long time, and claiming Obama and the smelts caused it is false. -k

I have a hard time feeling a lot of sympathy. Young people-- people with the least seniority and work experience-- were the first people laid off and the last hired back when the "global economic meltdown" occurred. Boomers who spent most of their careers working in an era where jobs were plentiful and private companies still had pension plans have little excuse for still having mortgages and credit card debt at that point in their life. "Toughen up! Be responsible for your own finances! Stay out of debt!" That's the message we younger people hear every day. I don't see why boomers who got "affected" by the economic meltdown should do any less. Anyways, I doubt that those are really the ones being discussed when we talk about old-age poverty in Canada. I suspect the large majority of old-age poverty in Canada is among the parents of boomers, who got put into homes or slum apartments so that they won't be a burden to their offspring as they "Freedom 55". -k

ok, and that relates to Obamacare? If publicly-run health insurance in Canada can't keep a hospital from billing $1200 for crutches, what hope has a private citizen in the US got in fighting overbilling? -k

After doing some looking into this Smelts issue: -this is the driest year in California since 1580. You can't blame that on smelts. All of California is under drought, not just the Central Valley area served by water diversion. -the reduced diversion from northern California was not just done to protect smelts, it was done to protect the entire Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta (or California Delta) ecosystem, which was seeing plummeting fish stocks due to the massive amount of water being diverted to southern California farms. 2/3 of California's commercial fish come from this ecosystem. The california delta smelt might be the only species in danger of extinction, but the whole ecosystem is suffering. -the fight over water diversion in California is not new to this year, or to the Obama administration. Debate over the destruction of the California Delta ecosystem goes back to at least 2004, and probably far longer. -among those who are crying loudest are Central Valley farms growing water-intensive crops like almonds and pistachios. Maybe Central Valley farms should be moving towards crops that are less dependent on water being diverted from northern California for their survival. While there is a political fight over water diversion in California, claiming that "the government made this drought" is utter falsehood. And representing the efforts to preserve the California Delta ecosystem as being about "a 3-inch fish" is a deliberate attempt to minimize the damage being done to the California Delta by diverting water south. There is a very real political aspect to this, a fight over an increasingly scarce resource. And right now dramatic pictures of cracked fields and headlines about 3-inch smelts have given the southern California agriculture a political edge in that fight. -k

Que? -k

The real problem with Obamacare is that it doesn't address overcharging. Here's an example. A woman goes to a doctor for regular treatments that cost $500. Medicare pays $216 of it. Then her doctor sells his practice to a hospital. She goes back to get her treatment and now it costs $19,235 and Medicare pays $2623. The same treatment costs Medicare $2400 more because the ownership changed? There are endless examples of this sort of thing. Patients find themselves flabbergasted by their bills and request an itemized breakdown, and find $24 Tylenol-3, $95 bags of saline solution, and $12 for a "mucous recovery system": Making sure everybody has access to health insurance might help people, but it doesn't address the underlying issue. When I was still a teenager, I looked into getting a replacement windshield for my first car (the mighty Reliant K-car I bought for $500 with my McDonalds money.) I went to a major autoglass company and got a quote from the guy at the counter. I believe it was somewhere in the range of $350. I balked at the idea of buying a $350 windshield for a $500 car, and he said "your insurance is paying for it, right?" I said that I was paying out of pocket, and he said "oh!" and came up with a new quote-- I think it was about $120, which I agreed to. I was surprised at the time to learn that the same windshield had different prices depending on who was paying for it. I wonder if expanding health insurance coverage in America will just create more opportunities for hospitals to overcharge. -k

Really? We're critiquing Megyn's physical appearance? Why her looks and not Hannity's? I mean, the guy's hair looks like a shiny grey helmet. He looks like a live-action Lego Man. -k

Yes, the the bottom of the barrel ones at least. The finest care you can get for $9 an hour! Lifespans are increasing, your houses and stocks and bonds and nest-eggs aren't going to last forever, and by and large your kids aren't going to look after you. These are the realities that have Tim G talking about Soylent Green type solutions to elder care in the other thread. Personally, I vote for a Hunger Games style tournament for old-people, or perhaps they could be fed to the lions at Danish zoos. -k

The Baby Boomer generation isn't "much larger", and the refusal of younger adults to repeat the spending habits of their parents is impacting the economy right now. And what makes you think "the echo boomers" are going to be any different? They'll have the same sucky economy and the same ridiculous student debts when they start entering the workforce. -k

Of course. But that's the premise it's being sold to voters under. "A rising tide raises all boats!" remember? -k

I don't have any moral objection to the concept of assisted suicide. But, we do provide support for old-people, and lots of it. And I think that touting assisted suicide as a solution to elder care issues in Canada is going to be a very tough sell. By and large, people support assisted suicide in specific cases where quality of life is irreparably declining. They don't see it as a large-scale solution to the question of how to care for the large and growing number of old-people in our country. This isn't Logan's Run or Soylent Green. -k

Another of these articles pleading with millennials to start spending to stimulate the economy. -k

The policies have worked great at what they're intended to do. Corporate profits have never been higher, and the stock market has done incredibly well under Obama. What's this "problem" you speak of? Jobs? It seems pretty unlikely to me that "jobs" is the real priority of the decision-makers who set the economic policies. They're transferring money into the pockets of the financial sector and the wealthy based on the premise that making life easier for the financial sector and the wealthy will produce benefits that "trickle down" to everybody else. You can quibble over the point that it's not tax breaks in this instance, but the overall theory is the same: if the rich guy train gets rolling, everybody gets to ride! And you don't get to call every government policy you don't like "trickle down government". I understand the term when you're applying it to cases where the government is stimulating spending by putting money in the hands of poor-people through food stamps and shovel jobs and that sort of thing. But applying it to quantitative easing is not an accurate use of the term in the accepted Breitbart sense. You're abusing your own terminology. -k

Assisted suicide? Is that what you're referring to? Geez, Tim, I think any self-respecting Rugged Individualist should be able to do that without government support. Lots of people do. Pull yourself by your bootstraps! -k

People used to take care of their own parents in old age, didn't they? Isn't this a recent result of people deciding that they should be able to put their elderly parents in a home so that they can "Freedom 55" without troubling themselves? Maybe if the Boomers aren't happy with the way their elderly parents are being looked after, they should man up and do it themselves instead of griping about a lack of public funds. -k

I have been watching the new "Intelligence" show. It's about a US government agent who has a computer planted in his brain that allows him to access information, hack computers and security systems, and this sort of thing. He can also create 3d renderings of scenes in his head that allow him to investigate them. It's pretty high-concept and the technological stuff seems awfully far-fetched, but I find the show enjoyable because of the cast. It stars Josh Holloway ("Sawyer", from Lost) as the agent, Meghan Ory ("Ruby"/"Red Riding Hood" from Once Upon A Time) as a Secret Service agent assigned to protect him, and Marg Helgenberger ("Catherine Willows" from CSI, obviously) as their overseer. Their weekly espionage capers are somewhat far fetched but entertaining. What makes it work is the interaction of Holloway and Ory. Each week their working and personal relationship develops a little more, in a way that seems authentic. I think the show would probably still work if their characters were Josh from Marketing and Meg from Accounting. -k

Well that was a complete disaster The Seahawks are basically the unofficial home team here in BC so I guess I should be happy for them, and if they'd been playing anybody else I would have been. But Peyton is my favorite player and I was really hoping he'd win today. I'm not sure if you guys out east knew much about Russell Wilson before today. A couple of years ago when all those young quarterbacks came into the league at the same time we heard a lot about "RG3" and Cam Newton and Tim Tebow, but somehow Russell Wilson didn't get much attention, and I was never sure if because he's short or if it's because he plays out west. Anyway, he's pretty good. The Seahawks defense is just ruthless and nasty and pulverizing, and the Broncos looked like the Keystone Cops all game. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjc3P8bAIeg -k

Obama has hired a whole platoon of Wall Street goons, including one of Mitt Romney's old friends from Bain Capital, to guide the economic policy of his administration. That's probably a big part of the problem, in fact. It's a great environment for Wall Street, but "good for Wall Street" doesn't necessarily mean "good for Main Street". As for Quantitative Easing, yeah... I read one article not too long ago arguing that Quantitative Easing is the biggest transfer of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy in history. As I understand it it's basically Trickle Down Economics dusted off and disguised enough that people won't recognize it. -k

Of course you don't worry about Stephen Harper doing something that will impact you. You've posted 32000 messages in this forum, and I bet at least a quarter of them are about how what happens in Canada is of no concern to Americans, but what happens in America matters around the world. I think we've got what you're saying by this point. As for the premise that condemning bad policy ideas is an act of helpless victimhood, it's stupid. -k

As I said, it's not just the one law, there's a number of Republican bills and laws in various states that are intended to provide religious people with exemptions. I'll post some when I get home from work. -k

This is an interesting concept for me. I encountered it recently in a self-help book I've been reading. The author talks about 12-step programs quite a bit and argues that it's applicable to a wide range of behavioral issues that are rooted in hidden guilt or shame. (in my case, I'm not an alcoholic, I'm a rageoholic. I'm addicted to rageohol.) I like your phrase "a benevolent abstraction." And like you this author (John Bradshaw, a Catholic who attended seminary school, interestingly enough) explains that there's need that this "higher power" be a god or God or any supernatural entity. He wrote about one member of one of his 12-step groups whose higher power was a tree. The man came into a meeting one day and exclaimed "They're cutting down my higher power!" The power of this apparently comes from the "benevolent abstraction" itself. It's apparently a useful psychological tool. There are other instances where religion can provide people with useful psychological tools as well. -k