Letters to the Editor
Jeffrey P. Harrison
Published Letters: 336 Editor's Choice: 39
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As usual, there's no one answer
[Read the article: Win or lose, the UAW is doomed]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Blame management, they're great for passing around fat bonuses and obscene base pay and congratulating themselves on what a great short term job they did. Executive pay rewards short term performance which isn't what top management's role is and, as usual, you get what you pay for.
Blame labor, they came up with the silly assed workrules that jack the cost of production up under the guise of protecting workers jobs because if somebody else could do this or that part of a job, the company might need fewer people. Unfortunately, the cost of that extra job is diddlysquat compared to the cost of labor lost as a result of people standing around waiting for someone to show up to do this task or fix that device that could easily have been done by somebody else whose real job was to do something else but who's doing something else right then. All because of the work rules.
And, yes, you can blame the government. Not because we don't have universal, government controlled, health insurance. You'll notice I didn't say health care. We used to pay for our own health care - I know, I'm old enough to remember when it was done and your fear was that something catastrophic would happen that you couldn't afford. That's what you bought health insurance for. Insurance is a bet. You bet something's going to happen, the insurance company bets it isn't. If nothing happens, the insurance company gets your money. If it does, you get the insurance company's money. Today's insurance isn't a bet at all. It's pretty much guaranteed delivery that I'll need to see the doctor once or maybe twice a year for some minor thing that will be taken care of in the doctor's office. It also covers those catastrophic things that can happen as well. So why don't we pay for our own doctor's visits for minor stuff? Because it costs so much. Why does it cost so much? Because of the price that doctors have to pay for malpractice insurance (as well as the extra staff they require to process insurance claims). Why is malpractice insurance so expensive? Your buddies the lawyers. Not because they win huge awards suing doctors but because there are any (large) number of law suits that should never see the inside of a courtroom. These are the cases where there was no negligence, or reckless behavior, or failure on the doctor's part. But somebody got hurt nonetheless and they want to make the doctor pay. Unfortunately, it isn't the doctor that pays, it's the rest of us. And, while there is an argument to be made about competitive advantage in a country where health insurance is covered by the employer verses where it is covered by the government, all you're doing there is squeezing the balloon and shifting cost from here to there. The real competitive advantage would be to lower the cost which won't happen by moving health insurance to a bunch of bumbling incompetents.. I mean the government. It will take real tort reform (not caps) and changes in the way we deliver health care.
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This Iranian gay issue may not be as clear as it seems
[Read the article: Various items]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I don't really know what Iran is doing vis-a-vis gays other than to hear people tell me that the Iranians executed a number of gays. I don't because, frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. It's their country. not mine.
However comma I can tell you this: When I lived in Iran, a country with some of the most gracious people I've ever met, homosexual relations between young men were as common as june bugs on a summer's day. And, mind you, these were not young men who were actually homosexual. They will, in turn, go on and marry when it's their turn because... In Iranian society (at least, in Iranian society 30 years ago and societies don't change that fast), women marry men much older than they are. A young woman of 19 or 20 would probably wind up marrying a man of between 35 and 45 normally. This has the obvious effect of drying up the pool of available females for young males.
Couple that factoid with the next. Iranian society is obsessed with feminine virginity. Hymen replacement is a very common operation. If you are seeing a girl and you're both interested in sex, she's most likely to roll over and offer anal sex as a way of having sex without breaking that precious hymen.
So when the Iranians are saying homosexual, they don't mean (as we appear to) anybody who's had homosexual sex.