Get a job and you will have some kind of insurance. Hell work at Walmart part time.[/quote]
Fred (oh wise one), Shows how much you know about Walmart employee health benefits!! [/quote]
Alien, you could always join the US diplomatic service and get all those great government benefits paid for, in part, from the tax dollars of many uninsured Walmart employees. I hear it provides a very comfortable life, sort of like the ivory tower world where all those liberal academics hide out.
If you are curious, here’s a link to the great benefits available to our valued foreign service officers.
A lot of folks wanted to have a separate forum for IP.
Here is an interesting statistic:
The IP Forum contains 403 topics out of a total of 12,426 topics on Forumosa (as of about 2:30 pm today). Thus, the IP Forum accounts for approximately [color=red]3%[/color] of all of the topics on Forumosa.
However, the IP Forum accounts for 20,148 posts out of a total of 167,334 posts on Forumosa (again as of about 2:30 pm today). Thus, while accounting for only approximately [color=red]3%[/color] of all of the topics on Forumosa, the IP Forum accounts for approximately [color=red]12%[/color] of all posts on Forumosa .
There would appear to be a niche need or desire for IP discussions on Forumosa.
Tigerman: Just look at the Slogan of Forumosa: “Taiwan Oriented Online Community”. Just because there are a lot posts doesn’t mean anything other than to prove my point that that this International Politics forum is eating up 12% of the bandwidth of this Taiwan expat website. It has nothing to do with us all here in Taiwan. They can do it elsewhere. They do not even discuss relevant International Politics to Taiwan. It is a waste of the bandwidth. There are hundreds of websites to discuss International Politics, BUT ONLY PLACE for the English speaking community in Taiwan to discuss topics relevant to Taiwan.
How has America gone to hell in a handbasket?.[/quote]
The price of gas is the highest of all time (yes, we deal with that, don’t we).[/quote]
If I’m reading the pump prices correctly here, it’s cheaper in the U.S. than it is in Taiwan. Also, the price is only “highest” if you don’t adjust for inflation.
Hmm. The place I just sublet doesn’t even have a phone, because there’s no line to it, because (IIRC) the last two tenants couldn’t get the telco to deal with a foreigner.
Oh, and what’s the deal with having to get a Taiwanese “guarantor” for a credit card, cellphone, or nearly anything else??
[quote=“Alien”]It’s backwards here, meaning that it’s about ten years or so behind TW in as far as technology goes.
There’s ONE place in Greensboro that has wireless internet connection. Even Asheville NC is ahead of here, a town where I went to college that hasn’t developed AT ALL in the past twenty years.[/quote]
Asheville had wireless internet TWENTY YEARS AGO?!?!?
The demand for it doesn’t exist as much in the U.S. because practically everyone there has computers and DSL at home. I know I don’t relish lugging my laptop around, and I wouldn’t bother doing it at all except for security issues when using internet-cafe computers for my banking (keystroke loggers, etc.).
The other night I talked to a Taiwanese physician who had quit clinical practice because it just doesn’t pay anything here. (In the U.S., it took tort lawyers to destroy the medical industry; here, the government does it as a day-to-day matter.)
BTW, you must have a ridiculously high risk profile – Blue Cross only charges me $301/month to maintain mine. And I’m over a decade older than you, IIRC; age-adjusted, my rates should be under $200/month. Unless I’m mistaken and you’re a really ancient crone, of course.
Oh, and that’s in Washington state, which (thanks to the left’s “compassion”) has some of the highest (if not the highest) health insurance rates in the U.S.
Yawn. The average person in the U.S. is doing better than ever before, despite the Clinton bubble-recession and the WTC attacks. (I’m an admitted exception – my whole industry evaporated to India. But that’s not the general case, at least not right now.)
[quote=“Alien”]I’ll keep you posted, but don’t hold your breath on Gorgeous George’s election, unless, like I mentioned before, DIEBOLD has anything to do with it…
Kerry is quite a likeable chap after all.[/quote]
Actually, I like Bush’s chances pretty well at this point. The economy is picking up steam again, and Kerry frankly hasn’t a clue.
BTW, what happened to your promise to post how terribly viciously the Patriot Act has destroyed your life? Nothing happened??
The IP forum is obviously popular and brings a lot of people back to the website. Maybe if the IP forum was limited in the way you want some of these people wouldn’t come back as often and then other parts of the site would lose out too. It also gives expats etc who like to discuss IP topics a place to find other like minded souls in Tawian which isn’t such a bad thing.
MaPoSquid, is that $301 a month health insurance through an employer. Ten years ago my coworker was paying that much for his girlfriend who was in her 20s and that was in Virginia.
I don’t know how you can say “most” people have DSL…I think most people still have dial-up (once you leave the big cities). My family in N.C. have dial-up as do the ones in Tennessee. I had dial-up in Oklahoma four years ago.
As for medical practice here, well the doctors might be suffering but at least in Taiwan poor people can still see a doctor.
And I will be sure to tell my family and friends that “The average person in the U.S. is doing better than ever before …” although I am not sure what that before is in reference to. Of course since most of my friends and family in the U.S. don’t live in major cities they might see things a little differently than you.
One of my coworkers studied in Washington (state) and during a discussion last year she made the comment that ‘most’ americans recycle. I had to control my laughing fit. Having lived in over 7 different states, numerous cities, during the first 40 years of life, I think I can safely say most american don’t give a damn about recycling. Sure…more now than before but not most.
Forty-eight Nobel laureates denounced President Bush (news - web sites) on Monday for “compromising our future” when it comes to scientific research and the environment, and said Sen. John Kerry (news - web sites) “will restore science to its appropriate place in government and bring it back into the White House.”
The star-studded scientific endorsement for Kerry came on a day when the presumptive Democratic nominee stood in Civic Center Park and told several hundred rain-soaked voters that the way to build the economy is to invest in science, technology and higher education…
In an open letter to the American public, Nobel Prize winners including Caltech President David Baltimore and cancer researcher Harold Varmus said “the Bush administration has ignored unbiased scientific advice in the policy-making that is so important to our collective welfare.”
Burton Richter, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1976 and helped organize the letter of support for Kerry, said laureates don’t usually take such a public stand on non-scientific matters. “It’s unusual, and I hope you take this as a sign of how seriously all of us think the errors of our present course are,” said Richter.
Among the others signing the letter were physicists James Cronin of the University of Chicago and Leon Lederman, former director of Fermilab.
speaking of orwell, here’s a great orwell quote in hitchens’ latest column:
"The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States
What does it matter? But no, that was my own personal policy. Most of the ones I was offered through employers came out to about the same cost, but would have been limited to the duration of my employment (plus 18 months under COBRA).
Well if you get free health care for being “indigent” what’s your bloody beef. It just goes to show that the poor you are so keen to defend are in fact covered, no?
It is the fact that so many immigrants and “indigents” do use the system in such a way that medical care is so expensive in the US. And think of those lawyers voting democrat. There is no cap on medical claims for “pain” and “injury” and juries like to award hundreds of millions of dollars. When this is not quantifiable, how can insurance companies adequately assess risk? I know that these kinds of ideas are a bit difficult for you to digest but do try to think through to the consequences of these actions and you might understand why there is a problem.
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