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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (266228)	12/28/2005 2:50:47 PM
From: Elroy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575154

Wealth and good times used to be shared... now the good times only reward the top 20%. You have no idea what the rest of the world considers good times. 98% of Americans enjoy "good times" compared with the "working class" in half the world. I live amongst a huge "working class" population, which means people who get paid $300 per month, work 6 days a week, 9-11 hours per day, in shared communal accomodation, with no driver's license, no chance of job advancement, the employer holds the passport to ensure the worker doesn't leave without paying the ~$1,000 fee for early employment contract termination, and institutionalized discrimination. I could go on. And they left their own country for this job. Go ahead, tell us how bad US working class has it again...because their health care plan is less than ideal!

To: Road Walker who wrote (266228)	12/28/2005 3:09:22 PM
From: Amy J	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575154

John, Is there any reason why you biasedly assumed the blue collar plan had to be worse than the white collar plan? RE: "She would probably be embarrassed at how weak they are. Have you heard about the white collar unions that are starting to form?" Of course I have. Apparently you haven't heard of the white collar GM union that's beginning to form - purely because of the blue collar union's greed, not because of upper management. The white collar people that are organizing only because they believe the blue collar union is bankrupting GM - and they believe management's powerless with breaking the union up. Ted, I saw your post, but it's as if you didn't read my posts on the topic over the past few years. (Or, did I post them on the Intc thread and possibly you missed them.) Bottom-line: there isn't a single newspaper article in the United States that compares the Japanese auto manufactures health care bill to GM's $98B liability & $5B annual health care bill. There's one very analytical and informative poster that I've asked if he knows how much Japanese auto firms pay in health care and he doesn't (or, he doesn't post the info) - yet he'll focus nearly exclusively on his criticism that ignores a $5B/year and $98B lifetime handicap. $5B is one heck of a large annual RND budget that could instead be used to invent hybrid cars, etc. Your post when down the same trap - you never once made a comparison to Japan's health care bill, nor considered that $5B is a huge annual RND budget. In California, us taxpayers kicked in something like a billion to fund stemcell research and now the place is packed full with wonderful ideas and entrepreneurs doing real tangible things, because investors started to fund them when they heard about the billion dollar fund that will be rolled out in the future. You are overly dismissive of $5B in annual RND, so your post just didn't hold any weight without that critical piece of data. I am careful not to weigh in a decision without a complete analysis of the $5B. Regards, Amy J