This is — hands-down — the best summary I have seen so far on the US health care dilemma:
I must say, even though our German health care system is f-ed up in many ways, and even though it is a “fat pig” (like the example in the video) as well, it is still a million times better than the US’s. I don’t know why the US don’t finally get that straight: in this respect, they are the laughing-stock of the countries…
Fellow German blogger ix got married in Las Vegas recently (congratulations) and faced the problem to have the marriage accepted by his local civil registry office in Hamburg—because only then they would be able to get all the rights and duties that marriage entails in Germany.
So far, so good: Along with a certified copy of the marriage certificate, he also needed to bring an “Apostille”—a standardized transcription of a legal document (in this case: the marriage certificate) to be accepted by another country (in this case: Germany). Of course, one cannot expect the government officials to be able to read the English language, not even when a marriage certificate consists of a quite simple set of information that does not differ significantly between the two countries. So he had to obtain an official translation of both documents from a certified translator, before they finally accepted his marriage as valid.
That the German government is very strict about “our official language is German” is no news to me: Once before I had to provide US documents to an agency and in spite of the relevant passages being very tiny, they demanded to have the whole document translated. Eventually, I managed to have them accept my (and therefore an uncertified) translation, which probably saved me what would have felt like a million dollars in translator fees.
Here’s an “award” the city of Pittsburgh would probably prefer not to have “won”. According to the 2008 American Lung Association’s State of the Air report, Pittsburgh is the number one U.S. city most polluted by short-term particle pollution.
Short-term exposures to particles (hours or days) can aggravate lung disease, causing asthma attacks and acute bronchitis, and may also increase susceptibility to respiratory infections. In people with heart disease, short-term exposures have been linked to heart attacks and arrhythmias. Healthy children and adults have not been reported to suffer serious effects from short-term exposures, although they may experience temporary minor irritation when particle levels are elevated.
On the year-round pollution scale, the city ranks almost equally as bad: Trading spots with the “short term” number 2, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh was the second most polluted city in the country, year-round.
Los Angeles/Long Beach/Riverside, Calif.
Pittsburgh, Pa.
Bakersfield, Calif.
Birmingham, Ala.
Visalia/Porterville, Calif.
Atlanta, Ga.
Cincinnati, Ohio
Fresno/Madera, Calif.
Hanford/Corcoran, Calif.
Detroit, Mich.
Only in the third discipline, Ozone pollution, Pittsburgh doesn’t rank among the top 10.
Link to the condensed lists, or look at the stateoftheair website for nice Google Maps overlays, and to find out how your city is doing.
(Thanks, Tara, for the link!) — (Photo “Pollution”, CC by-nc-sa licensed by Gilbert R. on flickr)