Hiya, point one - I am absolutely as full of BS as the next person, at least. Sometimes, also like everyone else, I forget that small but important fact! I think it was the recent HYS about people taking fag breaks that finally tipped me over the edge - I mean, everyone posting on it "knew better"! Yet how many bother to vote, how many get involved in their communities regarding those issues of public health... I suddenly found it funny, the scales dropped from my eyes just as I was about to post a really opinionated comment - and I suddenly realised I'm right there in the frog chorus, and it all looks absurd, given that A. the majority of people think they have all the answers and B. life's not perfect yet. This would, to my mind anyway, indicate that a lot of people are very deluded. I'm quite sure I'm one of them. The bigger issue is that services are not designed for people as they are, as opposed to as they "should" be, and that we are all paying for these services. We can gripe about "them" all we like, and it;s often enjoyable, but it doesn't change the nature of reality. If we all like to think of ourselves only as responsible users then it seems likely we are the ones who will lose out the most if the ambulance service is cut back until it can only cater for real emergencies, because as any reader of this blog knows, there are so many more calls that waste time. Nature builds in multiple redundancies, from the number of unused brain parts (that can be reconfigured after a stroke or brain injury) to the number of sperm released, how many pints of blood we can lose, the amount of general damage our bodies can take before they pack it in. Even the immune system as a whole is more of a contingency plan, again with different approaches and multiple redundancy - politicians redesigning the human body would probably pare it down, and replace it with ASBOs for viruses (then blame someone else when the body - dies). It seems only reasonably (to this eejit) that services our lives rely upon have the same allowance for error/abuse, and the same flexibility.