KayEss

I think every national health service does something similar (minus the ambulance fee generally), but that might be too incredible for the Americans to believe?

This is such an American take.

If you're unhappy with the wait time then get private insurance and go to a private doctor, just like you would in the US. But if you're too poor for that, at least you get something in six to twelve months instead of nothing or bankruptcy. And your insurance will be much much less because you're getting most of what you need publicly. Your US insurance is in the order of three to five times as much as private insurance in the EU, so your taxes are lower, but your costs are too.

The real problem always seems to be that universal health care would leave rich Americans worse off (higher taxes), would likely be about a wash for most middle earners (higher taxes, but none/less health care costs), but would leave the poor significantly better off (who are totally stiffed in the US at the moment).

So, by saying you don't want universal health care you're effectively saying that you're rich enough that you don't care about it, and you don't want poor people to be able to get health care at all, and if some die early or go bankrupt at least it isn't your problem.

Generally if you get turned away at the destination then the airline is liable for taking you away, so they won't let you fly unless they're sure that you will be accepted at the destination country.

I've been using proportional fonts for programming for more than thirty years. Makes things much easier to read and it's only a problem where people try to make patterns out of the code

I have fond memories of bricking my Smalltalk environment several times trying to get instance behaviour working :-)

I think this is looking at what OOP has become (as implemented by systems and programming languages that don't care a wit about what OO was meant to be) rather than what Alan Kay described.

If you think about something like a web server as an object, it has arbitrarily high cohesion and arbitrarily low coupling. You can only communicate to it through messages (HTTP); binding happens at the point in time that the message arrives (notwithstanding that this may be cached in all sorts of interesting ways in the implementation of any given server); and the web server is fully encapsulated (security flaws notwithstanding).

I think it's perfectly reasonable to argue that much of what gets called OOP doesn't deliver on the promise, but then it doesn't deliver on the premise either, and I think these are inextricably linked.

This of course plays into the fear US gun advocates have of any attempt to remove their gun rights. If it were to happen though, then maybe as a prepper type with a house and lands in the woods you'd stand a chance against an armed mob that came for you, but certainly not the government. If you're defending your sub-urban house (or even worse flat), I suspect that the gun you have for self defense would make very little difference to the final outcome, but might make you feel a bit better about it.

I have had a gun pointed at me, and I've been where guns have been fired in anger around me.

I'm kind of surprised to hear somebody in America think it's a likely enough thing to happen to be worth the obvious societal cost of the wide spread weapons.

Realistically, if they did come for you, how much use would your weapon be? Do you believe that it would mean the difference between your life and death, or just that you'd feel better going having been able to put up some defence? Several genocides have happened in neighbouring countries from where I live in living memory, and it isn't at all clear that having access to a weapon allowed anybody who was targeted to survive.

The cost in mass shootings (now nearly two per day in the US) is a real cost borne by society at large. Your cost is still only hypothetical, and of unclear value if the worst did happen.

This comes across a lot like you're saying that your personal feeling of safety for you and your family is worth more than the actual safety of innocent schoolchildren who are being mass murdered.

This is what makes securing this stuff so hard when you don't have proper review. What seems like a good idea from one perspective opens up another gaping hole somewhere else.

Off the cuff suggestions for improving UX in secure flows just make things worse.