If you hold the contractors responsible, then the contractors will have to check every single part to make sure it's authentic, a very expensive proposition even for military parts. Of course, if that's the standard set for all contractors, then they'd all have to do it so they wouldn't feel the need to cut corners.
Except that Mil-Spec parts already have a premium price due to tighter tolerances and higher quality control. The suppliers should be held to their contract that already states clearly what the requirements are. It is the standard set for all contractors, it's simply not being enforced despite being paid for. It's corruption in the system, it's costing us money not saving it.
And BTW, the contractor wouldn't have to check every part for authenticity if they used a trusted supplier. The only people who would have a problem are the ones injecting the counterfeit parts into the supply chain. It's not a China vs US manufactured issue, it's lax quality control allowing intentional abuse of the system.
Yes, seconding this. People just don't seem to realize the completely insane amount of money it takes. It's also not a one-time payment; any time you change technologies you literally need to build an entire new facility.
So any time we change technologies it would be practical to on-shore manufacturing. Except for labor costs and environmental policies. And we're against slave wages and pollution anyway, so we're just supporting our beliefs with our pocketbook, correct? It's not like China is eating the cost of building a new facility, they're passing it on in component prices. Maybe that's a hard sell for American corporations, because despite being recognized by the legal system as a 'person', they are soulless when it comes to choosing ethics over profits. But the government has the added incentives of promoting jobs and national security.
And really, billions in relation to a multi-trillion annual budget is an 'insane amount'? The US Federal government will waste more this year on canceled boondoggle projects than a fab facility costs.
They made an unenforceable threat and you caved instead of calling them out just as they expect.
You have obviously never refused to pay Verizon Wireless money that they think they are owed. You can call their customer circus and play stump the clown, asking them to explain why you owe the charge and you will be told because it's on the invoice. If you back them into a corner with a question they can't answer, like "where did the charge come from", you will be transferred to a 'supervisor', rinse and repeat until your head explodes. I spent 2 hours on one call (never on hold) trying to get a charge justified. I then spent 2 weeks trying to ignore them and got robo-called daily. In the end I wrote off $80 as a learning experience to never deal with them again.
Every interaction with Verizon Wireless was like this, contempt for the customer. 3G service suddenly disappear at your home, "well we see some data traffic on your phone, so it works good enough!" Or ask them to explain how you can possibly be past due when they automatically bill EVERY invoice to your VISA, and every transaction went through.
No ETF is worth the headache of dealing with a telephone company's billing department. It sucks that Verizon Wireless benefited from the $200 ETF I had to pay to leave, but it's the best money I ever spent.
They've already stated that they're ditching Clearwire.
No, what they said is that their current contracts only run through 2012. Of course, the fact that everyone is reading that as ditching Clearwire and torpedoing CLWR stock doesn't really upset them either. Even though S has a 54% stake in CLWR.
Since Clearwire isn't expanding their coverage, Sprint is simply hedging their bets with Lightsquared and their own LTE buildout.
How long can Sprint explain to customers that despite having 5 bars of signal and 3G coverage, they'll just have to wait to use the 4G on their phone because there are no Wimax towers near by.
Student loans are currently facing the same bubble that housing faced a few years ago.
Student loan default rates have been high for decades. Back in the early 90s I applied for a loan and had to go through 'extended requirements due to high default rates'. It included higher requirements, lower maximums, and a mandatory seminar on your responsibilities to repay your loans. Schools were being threatened with losing their ability to offer student loans due to high default rates.
Student loan defaults are a combination of students being over sold what their degree will get them in regards to employment offers, and fairly toothless penalties for defaulting. Believe it or not, but there is a large percentage of US population that doesn't care about their credit rating. Organizations like Sallie Mae are very liberal on their terms if you really want to pay back your obligations. Loan terms up to 30 years, refinancing (consolidating), and liberal forbearances.
Default rates are climbing now due to the economy, (pay rent or student loan = homeless or lose my tax refund, not a difficult choice) but many were already in trouble before the recession.
After a couple years, every university in the country will radically adjust their prices and cut waste in order to not cease to exist since no one will be able to afford the ridiculous cost anymore.
Either that, or they would more actively recruit foreign students. There have already been news stories of state funded schools preferring foreign students because they don't have to give them the in-state discount rate. We'll just end up with more tax funded institutions that Americans can't afford to attend.
A better solution would be to push trades and entrepreneurial skills in high school. Reduce the demand for student loans by showing students how they can earn a living without a college requirement. Many of the trades taught at Vocational Technical schools can earn above median incomes. Personally, I don't know that I wouldn't have been just as happy doing engine repair for the last 30 years as I have been working in IT. I certainly would have been healthier with a less sedentary job, and once you calculate in all that I have spent on education expenses I probably would have earned more.
This isn't about principle or money. It's about Assange fighting for the Wikileaks brand name.
No, it's about money. It's Assange saying "if you want to see the leaked documents from xxxx, I need my pound of flesh." It's how they do fund raising.
If it was about getting the information to the public, they'd simply post a torrent. If it was about Wikileaks getting credit they could just put banner files in the archives like the warez groups do. But that doesn't give Assange money to fly around the world or support his agendas.
We need to develop technologies that counter-act the current cause of global warming, and cool the planet down again (if/as needed). Ceasing CO2 output completely, right now, will not return the atmosphere to a pre-human state, not in any of our lifetimes, or even our childrens' lifetimes.
We don't need to develop technologies, nature has already provided them. Short of blowing up the planet or mining all it's resources and shooting them into space, humans are not going to destroy the earth. We'll simply make it unlivable for us. As the saying goes, "if you find yourself in a whole, stop digging." That's all we need to do and the environment will return to equilibrium.
If the petroleum industry wanted to produce carbon capture systems and put the cost in the sale price of crude oil, it would be a huge step towards making petroleum more acceptable. The problem isn't CO2, and I doubt it's what you consider the 'actual problem'. The problem is simple economics. We have to be honest about the economic costs (including environmental and military) of various energy sources.
And seriously, you want to reverse thousands of years of human actions (pre-human state?) in a generation or two?
Look closer at the LightSquared deal. IF the FCC lets them activate their network, Sprint will be using LightSquared money to help upgrade their network. Basically Sprint is saying "we'll deploy our Network Vision equipment, then you can plug your radios into it." They'll get to share Sprint's towers and backhaul, and Sprint will get much needed $$$ and access to spectrum at wholesale prices. Sprint may actually turn into what LightSquared wants to be, a wholesale infrastructure provider.
iDEN PTT is still available and they are still selling new phones for it. They also recently announced PTT service on their CDMA network with certain phones. It has just been lost in all the iPhone and LTE hype.
They said they would sell Wimax devices through 2012. They will mostly likely support Wimax for far long than that.
Unless they want to let a bunch of people out of their valuable smartphone contracts, they'll have to support it until at least 2014. But if you're looking for commitment, look at how long Sprint has continued to support iDEN to keep their push to talk customers happy.
Sprint's WiMAX service is provided primarily by Clear's network. Clear is also looking to overlay their network with LTE, but Clear has stated that they will continue to support WiMAX for M2M and stationary devices even after they roll out LTE. All they need is cash flow and as long as Sprint needs to support WiMAX handsets (at least until 2014), they will have some guaranteed revenue.
Of course, what Clear should be doing is looking at Open Range right now. Open Range filed bankruptcy today and is looking to sell or liquidate. Since Open Range operates in rural areas and Clear has concentrated on metro areas, it would seem like a bargain for them. Even though they only have 20k subscribers, Open Range is in something like 170 markets. It's all about coverage.
It is certainly not the be all and end all, but calling it meaningless is laughable.
Tell that to the investors of Enron and Worldcom. Currently it's not fashionable to consider book value, and that is fortunate for many companies because their stocks are over valued. Currently AAPL trading at 5 times it's book value. An over valued stock only retains it's value as long as people continue to drink the koolaid.
Taking the top 3; AAPL 5 times book value, IBM 9 times book value, and MSFT 3.5 times book value. Even Google has a better share to book value ratio, and they don't manufacture anything.
The housing market is an excellent example of what happens when an investment is overvalued and the market loses confidence.
Medicare would need to be taxed at about 10x its current rate to sustian it.
10x? Doubtful. Currently Medicare payroll taxes are 2.9%. (supposedly 1.45% employer, 1.45% employee, but ALL expenses directly related to an employee are calculated against the cost of employing someone and offset the salary an employer is willing to pay). 4 years ago my former employer (with ~4000 employees) was paying $5000/yr per employee for HMO healthcare. So roughly 10% of median income is going to healthcare. Taking that into account, there could be a payroll tax of nearly 13% without reducing an employee's take home pay. And that's without taking into account recovered costs of the uninsured. Uninsured go to the emergency room because they can't afford regular clinic visits; you can't be refused treatment at the ER. (At least stabilize and transfer) Years ago when I had to go to the emergency room (chest pains, no insurance), the wait was 1-2 hours at 2am for non life threatening cases. (severe bleeding and chest pains moved you to the front of the line) It was a very busy place. In my case if I had been seeing a doctor regularly he could have given me the same diagnosis (ulcer) much earlier and avoided the ER.
Oh, and the first thing neglected on a car when the owner is having financial problems is maintenance. I could probably skip changing the oil on my car for 30-40,000 miles without seeing a long term effect if I drove sensibly. But what happens if I skip a Dr visit to get a flu shot, get the flu and it turns into pneumonia? FYI, diabetics are on the short list for flu shots because they are more susceptible to getting pneumonia, and diabetes is nearing epidemic levels.
If you want lower healthcare costs, removing the profit from the equation with a single payer system is a proven method.
One you decouple the person receiving the service from the entity paying for it, you remove an important feedback process.
I've heard this many times, I'd like to see some study that supports it. Do people with lower co-pays go to the doctor more often than people with larger ones? It seems like there should be enough data to compare # of visits vs co-pays to give a good analysis. More often I hear of doctors running more tests and trying more treatments than necessary to avoid malpractice suits. Doctors are normal people, they aren't omnipotent. So rather than saying "I don't know" they'll run every test they can think of. And when their patient comes in and says "I have restless leg syndrome", their doctor will prescribe medicine that the pharma company insists has no long term side effects rather than argue.
I have never run into any of those "I have the sniffles, I'm going to go see my Doctor" people. But most of the people I know work for a living and there are costs involved with missing work, so maybe I just don't see the hypochondriacs.
Not the original poster, but here are a couple pluses for (new) small businesses.
1. If your health insurance is tied to your current employer, can you afford to quit and start your own business? New businesses tend to be cash poor, depending on the owner's sweat equity to survive until they can become established. Do you go without insurance until then?
2. In a normal job market, if you are a small business trying to hire talented technical people, you have to compete with companies in a much larger insurance pool. There is no way you can match the benefit costs of a business 10x or 100x your size. So you have to pay more to attract the same level of candidate. Single payer instantly levels the playing field on the most expensive benefit.
Another thing that would help is fixing intellectual property laws, but that's out of scope for this discussion.
I'd like to see the government provide catastrophic care insurance - insure everyone with a $5k/year deductable and some lifetime cap (maybe a couple million), lets say.
I'd prefer they left catastrophic care (Major Medical) to the private industry. First, it would be a lot cheaper and it would truly be insurance, not health care. As a society we don't have to care if you lose all your savings paying for your cancer treatments. OTOH, when our overweight population avoids clinic visits because they have no healthcare coverage and they become diabetic, we will be paying for it when they show up in the emergency room with complications.
I personally would modify medicare (reduce coverages to a fixed set of manageable illnesses) and expand it to the entire population. Social Security is fully funded, and if it wasn't it could be just by modifying the payroll tax rate. Expanded Medicare costs could be funded the same way. (Although you might have to stop letting people have a free ride for non-earned income, likely through modification of the alternative minimum tax)
Scanning for major version number will only end up with two people that both have a mercedes SL. Hint, one of them is a 60's classic while the other is a three year old pile of German Büro garbage.
You're talking about model numbers rather than versions. For example, over the years Mozilla has produced different models of browsers; Netscape Navigator, Seamonkey, Firefox. Version numbers on cars are the year they were produced. In your example; say a 1966 vs a 2008. Or are you saying that the SL hasn't changed features in 4 decades?
We've remodeled every room in our house except one, increased the appraised value by over 50%, cost us less than 10% total,
Labor has no value? Looking at current prices at LumberLiquidators for the bamboo floor I bought a while back. $1.89 sq/ft for the flooring. $50 per 100 sq/ft for glue. And LumberLiquidators is currently offering installation at $1.99 sq/ft. So just in this case labor is as high as materials. On other items, like concrete work or drywall installation (mud/tape/paint), material costs are a fraction of labor costs.
Sure, you can take a house with the 'right' kind of necessary upgrades and out perform the cost. I have done it, but it's not a given. Since the housing market crash I doubt you'll find too many markets that are 'ridiculously overpriced'. Given the proper financing, I could buy a house every day that was selling for 1/2 it's value in a reasonable market.
Can the government stop the import of certain brand just because the competition is moving in?
Apple and Samsung are currently in a patent war. Apple gets Samsung products pulled in one country for patent violations, Samsung follows up by filing a patent suit in another country looking to ban the iPhone5 and iPad. And they jump around the globe hoping to beat their competitor into submission with various legal systems. I don't know if Argentina is one of those countries, but it's possible. As a government official are you going to look more favorably at the company that is paying taxes and creating jobs in your country or the one that just wants to import products?
Higher wages, but... Shorter shipping distance Less product in the middle of the ocean Possibly more favorable tariffs Less bad press about working conditions and employees committing suicide? If they weren't keeping the same supplier I'd say possibly better new product security.
I'm not sure I'd say that the rich use more public services, but I would say that they have received more benefit from our society than average. Unless they earned all their money in another country and moved here.
Of course, you could say that that wealthy receive more protection from public police and fire departments since they have more assets to protect. Does a wealthy business owner get more benefit from the US military protecting markets for US products than the Walmart clerk that is selling them?
My Father was an old time telephone man and "back in the day" cables were ALWAYS fished through the walls, or run down the inside of closets and along baseboards. Now days the OUTSIDE of most houses around here have a web of cables running to each room where there is something that needs to have a cable connection -- whether it is for TV or telephone it does not matter.
This isn't anything new. My mom's house has a phone extension in the master bedroom that was added in the 60s. The cable runs across the inside of the garage (from what is now the phone co demarc), through a wall to the outside, across the front of the house and around the corner, then through an exterior wall into the bedroom. My house had the extension to the master run using the same technique, although I don't know when it was run since I've only owned the house for a little over a decade. On my house at least it could have been easily run through the basement.
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If you hold the contractors responsible, then the contractors will have to check every single part to make sure it's authentic, a very expensive proposition even for military parts. Of course, if that's the standard set for all contractors, then they'd all have to do it so they wouldn't feel the need to cut corners.
Except that Mil-Spec parts already have a premium price due to tighter tolerances and higher quality control. The suppliers should be held to their contract that already states clearly what the requirements are. It is the standard set for all contractors, it's simply not being enforced despite being paid for. It's corruption in the system, it's costing us money not saving it.
And BTW, the contractor wouldn't have to check every part for authenticity if they used a trusted supplier. The only people who would have a problem are the ones injecting the counterfeit parts into the supply chain. It's not a China vs US manufactured issue, it's lax quality control allowing intentional abuse of the system.
Yes, seconding this. People just don't seem to realize the completely insane amount of money it takes. It's also not a one-time payment; any time you change technologies you literally need to build an entire new facility.
So any time we change technologies it would be practical to on-shore manufacturing. Except for labor costs and environmental policies. And we're against slave wages and pollution anyway, so we're just supporting our beliefs with our pocketbook, correct? It's not like China is eating the cost of building a new facility, they're passing it on in component prices. Maybe that's a hard sell for American corporations, because despite being recognized by the legal system as a 'person', they are soulless when it comes to choosing ethics over profits. But the government has the added incentives of promoting jobs and national security.
And really, billions in relation to a multi-trillion annual budget is an 'insane amount'? The US Federal government will waste more this year on canceled boondoggle projects than a fab facility costs.
Zip code verification for credit card transactions are market research being sold as a security feature.
They made an unenforceable threat and you caved instead of calling them out just as they expect.
You have obviously never refused to pay Verizon Wireless money that they think they are owed. You can call their customer circus and play stump the clown, asking them to explain why you owe the charge and you will be told because it's on the invoice. If you back them into a corner with a question they can't answer, like "where did the charge come from", you will be transferred to a 'supervisor', rinse and repeat until your head explodes. I spent 2 hours on one call (never on hold) trying to get a charge justified. I then spent 2 weeks trying to ignore them and got robo-called daily. In the end I wrote off $80 as a learning experience to never deal with them again.
Every interaction with Verizon Wireless was like this, contempt for the customer. 3G service suddenly disappear at your home, "well we see some data traffic on your phone, so it works good enough!" Or ask them to explain how you can possibly be past due when they automatically bill EVERY invoice to your VISA, and every transaction went through.
No ETF is worth the headache of dealing with a telephone company's billing department. It sucks that Verizon Wireless benefited from the $200 ETF I had to pay to leave, but it's the best money I ever spent.
They've already stated that they're ditching Clearwire.
No, what they said is that their current contracts only run through 2012. Of course, the fact that everyone is reading that as ditching Clearwire and torpedoing CLWR stock doesn't really upset them either. Even though S has a 54% stake in CLWR.
Since Clearwire isn't expanding their coverage, Sprint is simply hedging their bets with Lightsquared and their own LTE buildout.
How long can Sprint explain to customers that despite having 5 bars of signal and 3G coverage, they'll just have to wait to use the 4G on their phone because there are no Wimax towers near by.
Simple to fix. Forbid it at the State level for State schools.
Wouldn't it be ironic if Ron Paul's Libertarian plan to cut student loans resulted in more government regulations and oversight?
Student loans are currently facing the same bubble that housing faced a few years ago.
Student loan default rates have been high for decades. Back in the early 90s I applied for a loan and had to go through 'extended requirements due to high default rates'. It included higher requirements, lower maximums, and a mandatory seminar on your responsibilities to repay your loans. Schools were being threatened with losing their ability to offer student loans due to high default rates.
Student loan defaults are a combination of students being over sold what their degree will get them in regards to employment offers, and fairly toothless penalties for defaulting. Believe it or not, but there is a large percentage of US population that doesn't care about their credit rating. Organizations like Sallie Mae are very liberal on their terms if you really want to pay back your obligations. Loan terms up to 30 years, refinancing (consolidating), and liberal forbearances.
Default rates are climbing now due to the economy, (pay rent or student loan = homeless or lose my tax refund, not a difficult choice) but many were already in trouble before the recession.
After a couple years, every university in the country will radically adjust their prices and cut waste in order to not cease to exist since no one will be able to afford the ridiculous cost anymore.
Either that, or they would more actively recruit foreign students. There have already been news stories of state funded schools preferring foreign students because they don't have to give them the in-state discount rate. We'll just end up with more tax funded institutions that Americans can't afford to attend.
A better solution would be to push trades and entrepreneurial skills in high school. Reduce the demand for student loans by showing students how they can earn a living without a college requirement. Many of the trades taught at Vocational Technical schools can earn above median incomes. Personally, I don't know that I wouldn't have been just as happy doing engine repair for the last 30 years as I have been working in IT. I certainly would have been healthier with a less sedentary job, and once you calculate in all that I have spent on education expenses I probably would have earned more.
This isn't about principle or money. It's about Assange fighting for the Wikileaks brand name.
No, it's about money. It's Assange saying "if you want to see the leaked documents from xxxx, I need my pound of flesh." It's how they do fund raising.
If it was about getting the information to the public, they'd simply post a torrent. If it was about Wikileaks getting credit they could just put banner files in the archives like the warez groups do. But that doesn't give Assange money to fly around the world or support his agendas.
This is Assange promoting Assange.
We need to develop technologies that counter-act the current cause of global warming, and cool the planet down again (if/as needed). Ceasing CO2 output completely, right now, will not return the atmosphere to a pre-human state, not in any of our lifetimes, or even our childrens' lifetimes.
We don't need to develop technologies, nature has already provided them. Short of blowing up the planet or mining all it's resources and shooting them into space, humans are not going to destroy the earth. We'll simply make it unlivable for us. As the saying goes, "if you find yourself in a whole, stop digging." That's all we need to do and the environment will return to equilibrium.
If the petroleum industry wanted to produce carbon capture systems and put the cost in the sale price of crude oil, it would be a huge step towards making petroleum more acceptable. The problem isn't CO2, and I doubt it's what you consider the 'actual problem'. The problem is simple economics. We have to be honest about the economic costs (including environmental and military) of various energy sources.
And seriously, you want to reverse thousands of years of human actions (pre-human state?) in a generation or two?
Look closer at the LightSquared deal. IF the FCC lets them activate their network, Sprint will be using LightSquared money to help upgrade their network. Basically Sprint is saying "we'll deploy our Network Vision equipment, then you can plug your radios into it." They'll get to share Sprint's towers and backhaul, and Sprint will get much needed $$$ and access to spectrum at wholesale prices. Sprint may actually turn into what LightSquared wants to be, a wholesale infrastructure provider.
iDEN PTT is still available and they are still selling new phones for it. They also recently announced PTT service on their CDMA network with certain phones. It has just been lost in all the iPhone and LTE hype.
They said they would sell Wimax devices through 2012. They will mostly likely support Wimax for far long than that.
Unless they want to let a bunch of people out of their valuable smartphone contracts, they'll have to support it until at least 2014. But if you're looking for commitment, look at how long Sprint has continued to support iDEN to keep their push to talk customers happy.
Sprint's WiMAX service is provided primarily by Clear's network. Clear is also looking to overlay their network with LTE, but Clear has stated that they will continue to support WiMAX for M2M and stationary devices even after they roll out LTE. All they need is cash flow and as long as Sprint needs to support WiMAX handsets (at least until 2014), they will have some guaranteed revenue.
Of course, what Clear should be doing is looking at Open Range right now. Open Range filed bankruptcy today and is looking to sell or liquidate. Since Open Range operates in rural areas and Clear has concentrated on metro areas, it would seem like a bargain for them. Even though they only have 20k subscribers, Open Range is in something like 170 markets. It's all about coverage.
It is certainly not the be all and end all, but calling it meaningless is laughable.
Tell that to the investors of Enron and Worldcom. Currently it's not fashionable to consider book value, and that is fortunate for many companies because their stocks are over valued. Currently AAPL trading at 5 times it's book value. An over valued stock only retains it's value as long as people continue to drink the koolaid.
Taking the top 3; AAPL 5 times book value, IBM 9 times book value, and MSFT 3.5 times book value. Even Google has a better share to book value ratio, and they don't manufacture anything.
The housing market is an excellent example of what happens when an investment is overvalued and the market loses confidence.
Medicare would need to be taxed at about 10x its current rate to sustian it.
10x? Doubtful. Currently Medicare payroll taxes are 2.9%. (supposedly 1.45% employer, 1.45% employee, but ALL expenses directly related to an employee are calculated against the cost of employing someone and offset the salary an employer is willing to pay). 4 years ago my former employer (with ~4000 employees) was paying $5000/yr per employee for HMO healthcare. So roughly 10% of median income is going to healthcare. Taking that into account, there could be a payroll tax of nearly 13% without reducing an employee's take home pay. And that's without taking into account recovered costs of the uninsured. Uninsured go to the emergency room because they can't afford regular clinic visits; you can't be refused treatment at the ER. (At least stabilize and transfer) Years ago when I had to go to the emergency room (chest pains, no insurance), the wait was 1-2 hours at 2am for non life threatening cases. (severe bleeding and chest pains moved you to the front of the line) It was a very busy place. In my case if I had been seeing a doctor regularly he could have given me the same diagnosis (ulcer) much earlier and avoided the ER.
Oh, and the first thing neglected on a car when the owner is having financial problems is maintenance. I could probably skip changing the oil on my car for 30-40,000 miles without seeing a long term effect if I drove sensibly. But what happens if I skip a Dr visit to get a flu shot, get the flu and it turns into pneumonia? FYI, diabetics are on the short list for flu shots because they are more susceptible to getting pneumonia, and diabetes is nearing epidemic levels.
If you want lower healthcare costs, removing the profit from the equation with a single payer system is a proven method.
One you decouple the person receiving the service from the entity paying for it, you remove an important feedback process.
I've heard this many times, I'd like to see some study that supports it. Do people with lower co-pays go to the doctor more often than people with larger ones? It seems like there should be enough data to compare # of visits vs co-pays to give a good analysis. More often I hear of doctors running more tests and trying more treatments than necessary to avoid malpractice suits. Doctors are normal people, they aren't omnipotent. So rather than saying "I don't know" they'll run every test they can think of. And when their patient comes in and says "I have restless leg syndrome", their doctor will prescribe medicine that the pharma company insists has no long term side effects rather than argue.
I have never run into any of those "I have the sniffles, I'm going to go see my Doctor" people. But most of the people I know work for a living and there are costs involved with missing work, so maybe I just don't see the hypochondriacs.
Not the original poster, but here are a couple pluses for (new) small businesses.
1. If your health insurance is tied to your current employer, can you afford to quit and start your own business? New businesses tend to be cash poor, depending on the owner's sweat equity to survive until they can become established. Do you go without insurance until then?
2. In a normal job market, if you are a small business trying to hire talented technical people, you have to compete with companies in a much larger insurance pool. There is no way you can match the benefit costs of a business 10x or 100x your size. So you have to pay more to attract the same level of candidate. Single payer instantly levels the playing field on the most expensive benefit.
Another thing that would help is fixing intellectual property laws, but that's out of scope for this discussion.
I'd like to see the government provide catastrophic care insurance - insure everyone with a $5k/year deductable and some lifetime cap (maybe a couple million), lets say.
I'd prefer they left catastrophic care (Major Medical) to the private industry. First, it would be a lot cheaper and it would truly be insurance, not health care. As a society we don't have to care if you lose all your savings paying for your cancer treatments. OTOH, when our overweight population avoids clinic visits because they have no healthcare coverage and they become diabetic, we will be paying for it when they show up in the emergency room with complications.
I personally would modify medicare (reduce coverages to a fixed set of manageable illnesses) and expand it to the entire population. Social Security is fully funded, and if it wasn't it could be just by modifying the payroll tax rate. Expanded Medicare costs could be funded the same way. (Although you might have to stop letting people have a free ride for non-earned income, likely through modification of the alternative minimum tax)
Scanning for major version number will only end up with two people that both have a mercedes SL. Hint, one of them is a 60's classic while the other is a three year old pile of German Büro garbage.
You're talking about model numbers rather than versions. For example, over the years Mozilla has produced different models of browsers; Netscape Navigator, Seamonkey, Firefox. Version numbers on cars are the year they were produced. In your example; say a 1966 vs a 2008. Or are you saying that the SL hasn't changed features in 4 decades?
And what is a build number but a version number?
We've remodeled every room in our house except one, increased the appraised value by over 50%, cost us less than 10% total,
Labor has no value? Looking at current prices at LumberLiquidators for the bamboo floor I bought a while back. $1.89 sq/ft for the flooring. $50 per 100 sq/ft for glue. And LumberLiquidators is currently offering installation at $1.99 sq/ft. So just in this case labor is as high as materials. On other items, like concrete work or drywall installation (mud/tape/paint), material costs are a fraction of labor costs.
Sure, you can take a house with the 'right' kind of necessary upgrades and out perform the cost. I have done it, but it's not a given. Since the housing market crash I doubt you'll find too many markets that are 'ridiculously overpriced'. Given the proper financing, I could buy a house every day that was selling for 1/2 it's value in a reasonable market.
Can the government stop the import of certain brand just because the competition is moving in?
Apple and Samsung are currently in a patent war. Apple gets Samsung products pulled in one country for patent violations, Samsung follows up by filing a patent suit in another country looking to ban the iPhone5 and iPad. And they jump around the globe hoping to beat their competitor into submission with various legal systems. I don't know if Argentina is one of those countries, but it's possible. As a government official are you going to look more favorably at the company that is paying taxes and creating jobs in your country or the one that just wants to import products?
What advantage does Brazil offer?
Higher wages, but...
Shorter shipping distance
Less product in the middle of the ocean
Possibly more favorable tariffs
Less bad press about working conditions and employees committing suicide?
If they weren't keeping the same supplier I'd say possibly better new product security.
I'm not sure I'd say that the rich use more public services, but I would say that they have received more benefit from our society than average. Unless they earned all their money in another country and moved here.
Of course, you could say that that wealthy receive more protection from public police and fire departments since they have more assets to protect. Does a wealthy business owner get more benefit from the US military protecting markets for US products than the Walmart clerk that is selling them?
My Father was an old time telephone man and "back in the day" cables were ALWAYS fished through the walls, or run down the inside of closets and along baseboards. Now days the OUTSIDE of most houses around here have a web of cables running to each room where there is something that needs to have a cable connection -- whether it is for TV or telephone it does not matter.
This isn't anything new. My mom's house has a phone extension in the master bedroom that was added in the 60s. The cable runs across the inside of the garage (from what is now the phone co demarc), through a wall to the outside, across the front of the house and around the corner, then through an exterior wall into the bedroom. My house had the extension to the master run using the same technique, although I don't know when it was run since I've only owned the house for a little over a decade. On my house at least it could have been easily run through the basement.