[geeks] Socialized medicine [was Re: nVidia 8800GT for Apple Mac Pro]

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 11:08:48PM -0400, Shannon Hendrix wrote:
I wrote:

> >Most of the early settlers in the English part of the "new world"
> >went there to evade religous persecution.
> 
> Actually, only a few came here because of that.
> 
> That's an old American myth.
> 
> Most of the early settlements were purely economic colonies run as  
> standard business arrangements.
> 
> People just tend to focus on the pilgrims for some odd reason.


I spent most of my life in Philly. Pennsylvania was rpivate land, you had
to buy/rent it from Penn or his decendents for a long time, He was a Quaker
(as in the Religous Society of Friends, not the oats) and the government
culture, etc followed Quaker religous beliefs until as late as the 1990's.

For example, when I was growing up in the 1960's, checks written on Sundays
were not enforcable in a court of law, alcohol was sold by the state, bars
were not open on Sundays or Election days, and so on. In fact most retail
stores were closed on Sundays by law. 

AFAIK the only place you could get a bottle of wine on Sunday as a Jewish
bookstore, who only sold kosher wine and was allowed to do it for religeous
reasons. However the wine they sold had been purchased by the case from the
state. 

So while you can safely assume the Quakers and their descendents were a very
small minority three hundred years later, their influence still was felt.

Geoff.
-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM