Health insurance is very expensive in any case. Our plan at work cost the company $400 for a single, $650 for a single plus one, $1000 for a family. Employee contribution, if any, varies depending on a few factors, but no matter how you cut it, the overall cost is high. Not every employer can afford to give it away, especially for part time employees. The employer, of course, it not paying the bill anyway, but factoring it in to his overhead and passing it on to customers. If every burger flipper gets the single plan, what does that add to the cost of a McMeal?
I'm going to look up that book. I totally agree that big-box stores are quite easy to compete against if you aren't competing on price alone, and have many friends who have been very successful in doing so.
I definitely recommend Gladstone's book...unfortunately that was not the book that had the information I was referring to. The book I should have referenced is, "The World Is Flat", by Thomas Friedman.
I've found that I often learn as much or more from the debunking than an original work.
Occasionally, Usenet discussions can be similar. Somebody posts something, the resulting back-and-forth discussion is where I pick up the real knowledge.
That is monthly. The plans I listed have a $1000 deductible, but the company picks up the deductible. To get a plan with no deductible, the rates are considerably higher and not everyone needs or uses it so the total cost is less this way. I'm fortunate that I don't have to pay for any of it, only my prescription deductibles that range from $10 (about 95% of them) to $50.
Unfortunately, it is often more cost effective to buy "cheap crap" every 2-3 years than it is to buy good quality once, for the same reason people buy new cars every 3-4 years when they could easily keep them for 10.
While I wouldn't agree with the work contributing toward shortening the sentence, after all, the sentence is a penalty for a crime, not something to be bartered with, I would like to see *ALL* criminals who are not in without possibility of parole, be required to be trained in job skills. They should not be permitted out of prison unless they can demonstrate the ability to satisfactorily support themselves with some skill.
I disagree with that statement completely, for reasons which will be explained below...
.. but agree with that, for the same reason I disagree with the first part, to wit:
It is in my view a misunderstanding of the proper role of prisons to see jail sentences as punishment for crime; it is also a misunderstanding, but of much lesser degree, to view prison as primarily a place in which offenders can be rehabilitated. The proper role of prison is this only: to protect society, by removing from our midst for a time those whose actions harm others. Once an offender no longer poses a danger to society, no additional purpose is served by retaining him in prison.
I don't follow that at all. What are you proposing as alternatives?
I see it in the reverse order. It's stupid to put people into a criminal training ground if you're trying to rehabilitate them.
If a crack addict goes to prison for mugging someone or stealing something, serves three to five, they're still a threat to society. Are they supposed to stay in prison until their chemical imbalance for crack goes away? I don't understand...
I thought of a response, but calling what you wrote - this:
"The fact that these people have no education and no skills and half of them have 6 kids by 6 fathers by the time they're 24 because nobody ever taught them to be responsible isn't Walmart's problem. Hell, without Walmart, these people would be on welfare and completely living off the public dole."
- the writings of an idjit, seemed rude to me, so I didn't.
You have no information to support anything you wrote because there is none. You created bogus scenarios to support your preconceived notions. Walmart employs over a million people and you're saying half of them have multiple kids by multiple fathers (when you resort to exaggeration to make an adult point, you've lost), have no education (they're working in a retail store - what are they supposed to have? A PHD? I'm sure the majority of them have a high school diploma), and the rest is just absurd so I won't dignify it.
If you want to discuss things where opinions are _all_ there is, comic books for instance, that's fine. I'm a big fan of comics myself. But don't start spewing hateful opinions, with ludicrous comments and expect to not get called on it. You could have expressed the exact same sentiments without spewing the bile. Remember - Truth, Justice and the American Way. That includes Canada, Mexico, South and Central
Maybe you should have read the whole paragraph before commenting.
I didn't say we were trying to rehabiliate them. That's not the proper role of jail *either*.
How so? After five years, he's certainly going to be de-toxed.
It's not the crack addiction that's the problem there, it's the mugging. Putting people in jail for using drugs -- and doing nothing more than using drugs -- is stupid: those people aren't endangering society. Muggers are a danger to society, whether they're doing it to pay for a crack addiction or for their kids' college tuition.
You can say that again. You don't understand how much it costs to administer "training," "treatment" or "community service" programs either. Neither do judges, though if they'd look at the names and faces before them they'd realize that the first two or three attempts had already failed..
Chemical imbalance my ass. What used to really puzzle me, after releasing an inmate from six months in a smokeless jail, was watching said former and future inmate shake one up from the six-month dry pack and light it up as s/he walked away. Or rather staggered from the habit of inhaling.
You're replying on a tangent to what I was saying. You're telling me that it's expensive to keep/treat/imprison a person for years, and that there are repeat offenders - no kidding. That was my point. That was why I brought up prison work programs.
Your ass has a chemical imbalance? Sounds messy. =:O
There's nothing surprising about being deprived off something you want/crave, and dreaming of it constantly for years. I have no answers on that one.
This thread started with Walmart's prices and practices. This thread should be allowed to age gracefully and die on its own.
I don't know why you say "chemical imbalance my ass". It's pretty well established that people who become addicted to drugs, including alcohol, have physical differences at the biochemical level from those who don't. There's a stereotype of the "drunken Indian"--there's also truth to it--Native Americans (and Japanese as well) don't process alcohol the same way as most Caucasians and so are more likely to become addicted to it--they've even found some of the genes that cause this and have identified some of the abnormalities--it's not something that somebody made up to excuse "bad behavior" and it's not "racism". I read many years ago that Heroin was originally created as a nonaddictive substitute for Morphine (the "Hero" in Heroin is for the wounded soldiers it was intended to help)--in clinical trials it was shown to be nonaddictive--none of the patients treated with it became addicted. So they put it in service and lo and behold the trials were wrong--just so happens that by chance everybodey in the trials group had a genetic makeup that made it difficult for them to become addicted to Heroin. I'm told that this is or at one time was used as a case study in medical schools of the dangers of small trial groups. Personally I can chain-smoke a pack of Sobranies and then have no desire at all for a cigarette for years but I recognize that others have serious trouble with tobacco.
No, this thread started on the quality of furniture sold at Wal Mart compared to what a wrecker can make and it turned into a "Wal Mart is the ruination of america! and is responsible for all the world's problems." thread.
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