TomAiello

Believe it or not, there were gun racks on trucks at my high school--in California. Of course, we also had a hitching post for people who rode their horses to school, and dorms for the students who had to travel more than a couple hours to get to school (they went home on weekends). The folks 45 minutes away got bussed in every day, though. It's weird for me to read about California today and compare it with the California I grew up in. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Which is kinda crappy. As far as I know, most - if not all - major changes in society were done against so-called "community standards". That's fine. Go make the changes somewhere other than the rooms my 3 year old plays in. You want Jesus to live your kids alone, right? So do I. But I'd also like for community activists of other varieties to leave my kids alone. Point is: the mission of the library is to be accessible to the largest segment of the community possible. Allowing unrestricted access to fringe material scares away a large portion of the intended users, even if it brings in a small number of other people. That hurts the library's mission. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

So if a person happens to be unfortunate enough to be born into the "wrong" community, they don't have access to book that the "local board" deems appropriate? The library board can't ban a book from the community. You can still go down to Barnes and Noble and order a copy, or just get on Amazon. Your gun ban example would apply to the entire community. To make it a more accurate example, you'd have to say that gun owners would be forced to put up with not being allowed to carry in some public buildings. Guess what? That's exactly the way it works right now in virtually every courthouse in the nation. An even more accurate analogy would be that citizens wouldn't be allowed to check machine guns out from the town armory for private use. But that falls apart on so many levels it becomes obviously silly. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Well, that's what the "donations" are for, isn't it? You pay off your congressman so he sends you government money. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

You've got my vote.

Nothing. Those roadways ought to be privatized, and run under a fee-for-use system, like the toll roads that many commuters in big cities prefer to use. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

No, it's more like saying "a skydiving rig is not dangerous when handled properly." It's the activity of skydiving that's dangerous--not the equipment. Handing someone a firearm loaded with dummies is no more dangerous than handing them a rig on solid ground. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

In my opinion, Kelo was the all time second worst decision ever handed down by the SCOTUS. I actually wonder if we'd be better off with the supremes not taking this case up, because if they do rule for the unsecured creditors, it sets precedent that hurts everyone in the future. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

I think most businesses would prefer the 120% simple interest rate and take the $120 in sixty days. That's a pretty respectable return. There is a very real chance that the collection in sixty days will be zero. The non-payment rate in medicine is staggering. And that's even true among people with health insurance. Insurance companies pay late, underpay, and sometimes don't pay at all, leaving the doctor stuck with the bill, and the patient thinking he already paid. This is one of the big reasons that some doctors are experimenting with "cash for service" (no insurance accepted, all payment up front) models--it reduces their workload by guaranteeing collections, and also eliminates a vast amount of paperwork. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Community standards. Local people on the library board make the decisions that seem most appropriate for the majority of their community. Believe it or not it works in 99% of cases (like this one, where the library's board seems to have made reasonable decisions). That doesn't mean that this (or that material) ought to be included on a blanket basis across the nation--each community needs to be allowed to make their own determination. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Mayo is actually a good bit cheaper than most places. The interdisciplinary approach can cut out a lot of needless tests, because a specialist can often rule things out without the couple thousand dollars of testing that a generalist (or another specialist) might need to reach the same issue. There's an excellent article here, on the topic. It's long, but well worth the time. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

How much did you spend converting yours? I think the Red Stick ones cost about $1400-$1500 new. I'm not saying you're wrong, and I actually think there's a lot of value in DIY for learning the gun inside and out, but there are still people (like me, frequently) who have more money than time on most days. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Oh, you did. I was mostly responding to JR's post, but I responded to yours because it had that bit that I could work off of. The point is that in the "trenches" of local library management (in a library that my child actually spent a lot of time at), I participated in making a great number of "middle of the road" decisions that actually make a lot of sense on the local level. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

That's not a liberal/conservative issue. It's very smart for him to do that in this speech. It draws commonalities with his target audience, and helps defuse their feelings of alienation. I'm quite pleased to see him making efforts to get people to stop killing Americans in ways that don't involve spending massive amounts of my money on killing other people, re-building their nations in our image, or otherwise pushing them around. Talk is cheap, and as such ought to always be our first option. Now if he could only back up his words with some policy changes... -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Personally, I was very surprised to hear Obama cite the Mayo clinic, because it's my belief that encouraging more healthcare to follow the Mayo model would be a giant leap forward in quality, accompanied by a significant cost savings. The basic reason we don't have more Mayo type organizations is government intervention--Medicare reimbursement scales penalize the model at the expense of other models (more procedures=higher reimbursement). The only people who have a real interest in reducing cost and increasing quality (a la Mayo) are the people who have to foot the bill--the taxpayers, or the individual consumers. In our current, largely government funded system, the providers have a strong incentive to over-provide, so that they can bill more. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

It's not that easy. I've been involved in discussions on running local public libraries. The issue is that the library needs to be run in a manner that makes it welcoming to all it's intended patrons (the local people). If you allow it to become a place of totally open expression, you have the loud political protestor types (the book burners, in this example) scaring away the average citizen, thereby rendering the library useless for it's intended purpose. The library has a mission. To the extent that allowing different materials aids in that mission, it ought to be encouraged. To the extent that it impedes that mission, it should not be allowed. The library is not the place for some wacky book burning protest, because that impedes the mission of the library. Nor is it the place to allow totally unfettered access to all materials (pornography, for example) because that also impedes it mission (parents who don't want their children having access will simply not patronize the library, thereby defeating it's purpose). -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Nope. Sorry. We here in Speakers' Corner do not have a sense of humor we are aware of. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

If the NRA got volunteers (I think I saw one just a few posts back) to do the teaching, you wouldn't have any government officials. And no government expenditures, either. It's a win-win-win situation. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Ease down there. You need to play the ball, not the player. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

I will be very pleasantly surprised if it happens that way. I envisioned the receipts going to create a NHS-like entity. If they actually went back to the folks buying health plans, that would be much better. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Yes, but his waits are insane. The Red Stick ones aren't half bad, and they're available much more quickly. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Wasn't this McCain's proposal, back during the campaign? And didn't Obama slam it as a "trillion dollar tax increase" or some such? Except that McCain wanted to tax the benefits, and then give every american a tax credit to go buy insurance with, if I recall correctly. While Obama wants to tax the benefits and then keep the cash for the government. In economic terms, it makes a lot of sense to tax employee benefits (like employer provided insurance) as income. It encourages people to seek out the least costly insurance alternatives (because they realize that they actually are paying for them). Which makes it more likely that health "insurance" will actually become insurance (for catastrophic events), with high deductible policies (and savings reserved for health expenditures by individuals) that kick in to cover unforeseen occurrences, rather than the current system where we call our health plan "insurance", but it acts nothing like insurance. I highly recommend this book for a thoughtful discussion of the economics of our current system, and some good ideas for reforming it to provide affordable, quality healthcare for everyone without spending more tax dollars. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

To avoid the Zimbabwe argument, you might rephrase this as "current wealth is finite." The actual wealth in a system at any one time is limited. Over time, of course, more can be created, leading to a (long term) situation where wealth is virtually unlimited. In order to create that wealth, though, conditions must encourage (and allow) it's creation. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Have you thought about filing the Form 1 and shortening the barrel? I was considering doing that with mine, but I haven't gotten around to it. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

If the proposed "solution" will make the problem worse, then "nay" is actually a very productive contribution to the discussion. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com