But it's even simpler than that; if you are considering moving lock-stock-and-barrel to the cloud, ask yourself the following question first:
Which is more likely to happen:
a) A drunk driver smashes into your data-center (or there's a flood or a fire, or some other disaster) or
b) your Internet goes down
Whoops! False dichotomy. It's not just about "your" internet, it is about all of your customer's internet access (you do have paying customers, right?) And yes, it is more likely that when your servers are "all in one basket" something bad will happen to them, more often than something bad happens at large. Especially when the servers (like in this story) are not in a place hardened against common outage causes (car accidents, backhoe>fiber accidents, transformer explosions, etc.)
or is it just the name for all datacenter hosted servers now? (trick question.. it is).
"The Cloud" when done right is hosted servers that can (and will) move around from place to place as fast as they need to; from local servers to in-country data centers to data centers around the world in order to optimize response time and minimize down time. Just because a lot of people do it wrong, doesn't mean the concept is wrong... Just really hard to understand.
You have a point in that Europe has a higher population density than the US, but some European countries are less actually less dens.
Country Density Carbon efficiency
- - - - -
USA 35 pop/km2 1.77 CO2 emissions/$ GDP
Sweden 23 pop/km2 0.7 CO2 emissions/$ GDP
Norway 16 pop/km2 0.74 CO2 emissions/$ GDP
That said Sweden and Norway probably have an advantage in having plenty of waterpower.
That's some pretty intense cherry picking. If you looked at the stats for just Oregon or Washington (with decent carbon-free power sources) you would find the same. However, across the entire US (just like across the entire EU) the picture is different because not all areas have the same resources.
Humans in general like to LOOK at nature, not be subject to it's whims. Especially after we messed up the usual pattern.
And why not the US? The UN has signaled it is against geoengineering in principle. This makes strategic sense, it would be foolish to allow big carbon emitters to say "Oh, we'll just fix it later" while continuing to burn coal like there's no tomorrow. However, it's clear that some climate change is going to happen, and that it will negatively impact a lot of people. Not researching geoengineering is kind of foolish in that sense. Those countries which are contributing to climate change should probably invest in fixing the problems they largely created. Ideally after doing no further damage, but none of us were born yesterday: we know we're going to be getting our power coal until some climate-change related problem makes enough people in the US realize that nuclear or solar power would have been a better choice..
It's pretty clear that managing emissions down to pre-industrial levels is a non-starter; even if we did agree that it is a problem, we simply can never agree as a planet on what each nation's "fair" reduction would be. Therefore, it will be the usual token gestures of reducing carbon by x percent in a certain industry while other industries quickly rise up to fill the gap. If climate change is going to hurt us, our only protection will be taking action *after* it happens, until then there just won't be consensus on what to do. I for one am glad at least someone realizes that (they probably got the idea from reading my emails).
Most of them do that automatically - they'll automatically try to authenticate against the strongest signal they can find that will let them authenticate, no matter what network it is.
When your provider has a roaming agreement in place with another provider, they set things up so that they can authenticate the phones of the provider with whom they have the agreement. Most providers don't enter into roaming agreements with other providers within the same country, which is why your phone doesn't usually start roaming when you are in your home country. But this can mean that if you live near the border of two countries and you pick up a stronger signal from a foreign network, your phone automatically jumps on it.
The first you learn of this is when your next phone bill arrives as a multi-volume set of books, luxuriously bound in finest Italian leather and delivered by a liveried courier.
The US is a tad bit... Different. We have 3.794 million square miles (to your 1.6M sq miles of EU) and mobile subscribers, god bless them, expect their shit to work _Everywhere_. Sprint especially does a good job of borrowing access on other networks (mostly Verizon) since Sprint isnt nearly as thorough in terms of coverage.
A US provider not entering into a roaming agreement with another US provider would be, eh, a little bit ridiculous. Sprint piggybacks Verizon, and Tmobile piggybacks AT&T, each of the former having far less actual infrastructure than the latter (but employing similar technology.)
yea, i use aokp and i love it. that being said, it isnt google's fault that they cant get the patches out to everyone as soon as they create them. the problem lies with the cell phone distributors who consistently take forever to install all their adware and crapware onto each patch before deployment. it takes at&t over a year to release the operating systems on their phones, whereas a rooted phone can get it instantly.
Except, my "adware and crapware" laden Samsung Galaxy S3 from Verizon was patched a few days after the story was in the news, without me rooting or romming or anything. Nexus devices that get updates straight from Google (who has publicized the patched code) have not been patched via update yet. Phones running totally custom ROMs (which is very different from rooting, fyi) can obviously get the update whenever the ROM maintainer releases a patch, or if their ROM isn't maintained (a lot aren't) they can switch roms entirely, wiping their phone in the process (not a lot of fun). A user that is merely rooted without access to a patch is only making their phone that much easier to completely pwn, if they do get a malicious app that uses this exploit.
This is one of the rare cases where I have to side with the patent holders (despite how uncomfortable it is). Myriad Genetics did *not* patent a gene, they patented a propensity for disease test, that featured a specific gene at the center of the test.
What did getting a patent do for them? It allowed them (or their licensees) to be the only ones legally allowed to perform propensity for disease tests as a service, using that gene. What else did it do? It allowed them to be open about their research, so that the gene and it's functionality could be better understood. What would happen if a patent were not a viable option from the onset? Myriad would have either not put the research in (fearing that their work would go unrewarded) and we would have not found this gene until much later on when casual science (at universities) came across it, or they would have done the work, and kept it all a secret in order to protect their ability to recoup the money spent on the research. Either way, we never would have found out what that gene does until some other research effort came across it, perhaps in 10 more years, or even 20 or 50.
How many other diseases will go unstudied, now that there is no reward for linking a gene to a disease? How close might we have been to spotting/treating other cancers? Does that matter at all, or is this just about "putting patent trolls in their place"?
Equal value doesn't mean identical. I have 5 dollars of bread, you've got 5 dollars of cucumbers, we each sell each other 2.5 dollars of material and have sandwiches.
Market dollar value is far from the only measure of value to an individual. If you were stranded in the Mojave and dying of thirst but your pocket had $500 in it, how much of that would you spend on a bottle of water that, in a store, sells for $1? Would you gladly procure 2.5 dollars in cucumbers if you weren't planning on eating a sandwich for a few weeks? Equal value doesn't mean identical just like identical doesn't mean equal value. Exchanges between individuals are based on many more criteria than that.
I am an EE, and like every other EE I know, I advise my children to stay the hell out of engineering.
Out of curiosity, what is it that you are advising your children to get into? Automotive repair? Software non-engineering? Acting? Not trolling, genuinely curious. I wouldn't hesitate to encourage my kids to get into any aspect of engineering, but would obviously steer them toward the higher demand fields. Engineering as a whole isn't dead, is it?
That was the word Bluebox used to describe it... Honestly, their original press release blew this way out of proportion.
Most Android devices now have support for scanning of sideloaded APKs for Malware now (it's a Google Play service), and I'm assuming that while a week or two ago that detector wasn't configured to detect this exploit, it almost surely does by now.
Why should that get in the way of a good story? "Master key" sounds like something that will grant anyone access to your device, any time they want, without your permission, and plays so well with the "Android devices take months/years to get patched" meme. Which is all much more salacious than the reality, considering that only apps intentionally sideloaded by the user (After deactivating the default protection) can run with unchecked permissions, IF you havent gotten the Google Play Store updates yet, which are pushing out with quite rapid speed.
1. People seem to not care. This is why I only buy Nexus devices though. 2. Totally correct.
I wish google would use their leverage over the android trademarks, not the software, to force updates for X amount of time and a longer amount of time for security patches. The real issue here is the whole carrier model. If you bought your PC from your ISP and they provided all the software for it you would be in the same boat there.
Except, that is exactly what Google is doing. This vulnerability is being patched by pushing updated apps directly to the phones via the shadowy Google "remote control", and the carriers don't need to do anything about it. My handset was patched as soon as the Google updates started rolling out, and my carrier could care less.
Gravity is synonymous with velocity change, so if you are relatively motionless wrt the earth's surface, a sensor will register 9.8m/s/s "up" (if it is oriented the right way).
What seems more amazing is that a simple software check pre-launch (i.e. "do all the sensors think they are pointed up?") was not part of the SOP. Given that their exact function is orientation detection, skipping the opportunity for self-test via that function is somewhat baffling.
I call BS on that guy. He claims there are 5000 people working there. At $100k/year salaries (and it's probably more), that puts this program up to at least $1 billion dollars per year for payroll and equipment. I would assume there is some accounting for that kind of spending.
The US spends upwards of $500B on "Defense" each year... Do you really think a missing $1B would get noticed here and there?
But I'm quite sure that if I ever will catch one, it won't be from pressing my cellphone display against my ear. I'd me worried much more worried about those earbuds on my mp3-player or touching my keyboard before scratching my ear.
But it might still be a valid point for ATM-Touchscreens.
But always keep in mind that exposure to microorganisms is vital to develop a healthy immune system. sanitizing everything is bad for your long-term health. Anyone still thinks long-term at all nowadays?.
Don't worry, you will still get plenty of germs in you even if every cellphone and ATM you ever touch is germ-free. TFA points out how this type of glass is effective at killing MRSA, which means that one more commonly touched thing in hospitals can prevent infection instead of harboring germs. Unless you want to get MRSA just so your immune system is "healthy", in which case please don't reproduce.
Neither of the bacteria you mention are spread by contact, so antibacterial surfaces will have absolutely no effect whatsoever on them. Not exactly a good argument for your case.
I didn't claim that bacteria can't be harmful, but simply that we don't need to go to absurd extremes to try and eliminate all bacteria that we may encounter because that's frankly fucking stupid and nonsensical.
Who claimed that we should "go to absurd extremes to try and eliminate all bacteria that we may encounter"? Not me. Not TFA. You did, as a straw man for your bizarre pro-bacteria agenda.
"We know from Galileo that all objects near the surface of the Earth accelerate downward at the same rate," he says. "But you also have to think about air resistance. That's why a bowling ball and a piece of paper don't fall at the same rate. You accelerate at a certain rate, but the force that's pulling you down depends on that number and your mass."
Everyone knows this. But then...
As for rides with steep drops instead of curves, heavier riders do go faster, he says.
Now I am confused. Is this assuming heavy riders have more friction with the slide/water or more air resistance or that Newtonian Physics can suck a fat one?
Heavy riders experience less relative resistance, since an object (er, a human's) mass increases faster than the area in contact with the slide. Same goes for wind resistance but i suspect it plays a smaller role.
What about them? Humans didn't evolve in a vacuum, we evolved to encounter and co-exist with bacteria. Making ATMs bacteria proof wont magically protect you from them, it'll just mean your body is even less well equipped to cope when you inevitably do encounter harmful bacteria elsewhere.
Just stick to basic hygiene like washing your hands before you eat and you'll be fine. GP is right, it's like some kind of cultural OCD.
Yes, because it's not like there have ever been problems with spread of bacteria in the past and it also doesn't seem like it will ever be a problem in the future either! Who needs to worry about bacteria! Nature wouldn't make something that could hurt me, would it?
Hand washing is great, but that doesn't mean reducing bacteria count on contact surfaces doesn't help since hand washing alone is certainly not 100% effective.
When last I contracted (2008-09), and had to pay for my own insurance, I paid $180/month. Pretty sure that price has at least doubled, since the ironically named ACA passed, but even then it's just over $4000 a year. If what you're saying is true, and companies are wasting that much, then it's no wonder the (real) economy hasn't been able to recover.
Employer sponsored, pooled insurance with what most people call "Acceptable" deductibles and yearly out-of-pocket limits are in the $5000-$6000 for singles, and often over $10000 for families of 2 or more. What you purchased was probably "catastrophic health insurance" which is more consistent with the typical definition of "insurance" but does not cover much in terms of everyday prescriptions, routine doctor visits, or urgent care visits. And those plans have been seeing at least 10% y/y growth since the mid-90s up to and including since the ACA passed; "skyrocketing healthcare costs" have been around for a lot longer than most Obamacare critics can remember.
Thanks for the info guys. I don't really keep up on these things, since I'm not directly involved in those issues. I was working from memory of previous employers, years ago.
I guess I should read up a bit soon.
Healthcare is *everyone's* issue at this point, with or without government mandated/subsidized systems. The cost of living/dying in the US is staggering and the more individuals that are informed as to what is going on, the better chance we have at changing it before it bankrupts us (more).
I pay about $65/wk ($3380/yr) into my employer healthcare. They pay about 3 times that ($10140/yr). Multiply that by the roughly 450 employees on the plan and it's the single greatest expense they have after employee salaries and taxes.
Personally, I'd much rather take that $13500 (my cost plus theirs) in my paycheck so I could shop around for my own insurance. The employer offered plan includes tons of crap for women and children that don't apply to me, while omitting many things that would be a huge help to me such as hearing aids.
Making health insurance/care portable would go a LONG way to making the entire system more competitive and the customers a lot happier, but the system (legally, financially, and historically) is basically set up to make sure that the cash flow for the insurance companies remains reliable (and growing). Do you expect an industry with a grip on about 1.5 trillion dollars of spending annually to just give it up? Hah.
Maybe they did realize that during this tough economic time (that will probably go on forever since we only consume and don't actually produce anything) it might be a bad thing to force businesses to offer health insurance that is rapidly rising..
Our company only employees 22 people and we provide health insurance that costs us somewhere in the neighborhood of 75k/year.. Having gone up about 20% since obama care passed.
$3400 a person for health care is pretty f'ing cheap. Most employers spend 8,000 to 10,000 per employee (not including what the employee contributes out of their salary).
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underneath it, but opening the trunk is going too far in my opinion.
If that's all you object to, then take the time to bring your car's "valet key" which is coded to prevent them from using it to open the trunk.
That, or just drive the Range Rover when you go to the airport. Come on, how many first world problems do we need?
Agreed.
But it's even simpler than that; if you are considering moving lock-stock-and-barrel to the cloud, ask yourself the following question first:
Which is more likely to happen:
a) A drunk driver smashes into your data-center (or there's a flood or a fire, or some other disaster)
or
b) your Internet goes down
Whoops! False dichotomy. It's not just about "your" internet, it is about all of your customer's internet access (you do have paying customers, right?) And yes, it is more likely that when your servers are "all in one basket" something bad will happen to them, more often than something bad happens at large. Especially when the servers (like in this story) are not in a place hardened against common outage causes (car accidents, backhoe>fiber accidents, transformer explosions, etc.)
or is it just the name for all datacenter hosted servers now? (trick question.. it is).
"The Cloud" when done right is hosted servers that can (and will) move around from place to place as fast as they need to; from local servers to in-country data centers to data centers around the world in order to optimize response time and minimize down time. Just because a lot of people do it wrong, doesn't mean the concept is wrong... Just really hard to understand.
You have a point in that Europe has a higher population density than the US, but some European countries are less actually less dens.
Country Density Carbon efficiency
- - - - -
USA 35 pop/km2 1.77 CO2 emissions/$ GDP
Sweden 23 pop/km2 0.7 CO2 emissions/$ GDP
Norway 16 pop/km2 0.74 CO2 emissions/$ GDP
That said Sweden and Norway probably have an advantage in having plenty of waterpower.
That's some pretty intense cherry picking. If you looked at the stats for just Oregon or Washington (with decent carbon-free power sources) you would find the same. However, across the entire US (just like across the entire EU) the picture is different because not all areas have the same resources.
Humans in general like to LOOK at nature, not be subject to it's whims. Especially after we messed up the usual pattern.
And why not the US? The UN has signaled it is against geoengineering in principle. This makes strategic sense, it would be foolish to allow big carbon emitters to say "Oh, we'll just fix it later" while continuing to burn coal like there's no tomorrow. However, it's clear that some climate change is going to happen, and that it will negatively impact a lot of people. Not researching geoengineering is kind of foolish in that sense. Those countries which are contributing to climate change should probably invest in fixing the problems they largely created. Ideally after doing no further damage, but none of us were born yesterday: we know we're going to be getting our power coal until some climate-change related problem makes enough people in the US realize that nuclear or solar power would have been a better choice..
It's pretty clear that managing emissions down to pre-industrial levels is a non-starter; even if we did agree that it is a problem, we simply can never agree as a planet on what each nation's "fair" reduction would be. Therefore, it will be the usual token gestures of reducing carbon by x percent in a certain industry while other industries quickly rise up to fill the gap. If climate change is going to hurt us, our only protection will be taking action *after* it happens, until then there just won't be consensus on what to do. I for one am glad at least someone realizes that (they probably got the idea from reading my emails).
Most of them do that automatically - they'll automatically try to authenticate against the strongest signal they can find that will let them authenticate, no matter what network it is.
When your provider has a roaming agreement in place with another provider, they set things up so that they can authenticate the phones of the provider with whom they have the agreement. Most providers don't enter into roaming agreements with other providers within the same country, which is why your phone doesn't usually start roaming when you are in your home country. But this can mean that if you live near the border of two countries and you pick up a stronger signal from a foreign network, your phone automatically jumps on it.
The first you learn of this is when your next phone bill arrives as a multi-volume set of books, luxuriously bound in finest Italian leather and delivered by a liveried courier.
The US is a tad bit... Different. We have 3.794 million square miles (to your 1.6M sq miles of EU) and mobile subscribers, god bless them, expect their shit to work _Everywhere_. Sprint especially does a good job of borrowing access on other networks (mostly Verizon) since Sprint isnt nearly as thorough in terms of coverage.
A US provider not entering into a roaming agreement with another US provider would be, eh, a little bit ridiculous. Sprint piggybacks Verizon, and Tmobile piggybacks AT&T, each of the former having far less actual infrastructure than the latter (but employing similar technology.)
yea, i use aokp and i love it. that being said, it isnt google's fault that they cant get the patches out to everyone as soon as they create them. the problem lies with the cell phone distributors who consistently take forever to install all their adware and crapware onto each patch before deployment. it takes at&t over a year to release the operating systems on their phones, whereas a rooted phone can get it instantly.
Except, my "adware and crapware" laden Samsung Galaxy S3 from Verizon was patched a few days after the story was in the news, without me rooting or romming or anything. Nexus devices that get updates straight from Google (who has publicized the patched code) have not been patched via update yet. Phones running totally custom ROMs (which is very different from rooting, fyi) can obviously get the update whenever the ROM maintainer releases a patch, or if their ROM isn't maintained (a lot aren't) they can switch roms entirely, wiping their phone in the process (not a lot of fun). A user that is merely rooted without access to a patch is only making their phone that much easier to completely pwn, if they do get a malicious app that uses this exploit.
This is one of the rare cases where I have to side with the patent holders (despite how uncomfortable it is). Myriad Genetics did *not* patent a gene, they patented a propensity for disease test, that featured a specific gene at the center of the test.
What did getting a patent do for them? It allowed them (or their licensees) to be the only ones legally allowed to perform propensity for disease tests as a service, using that gene. What else did it do? It allowed them to be open about their research, so that the gene and it's functionality could be better understood. What would happen if a patent were not a viable option from the onset? Myriad would have either not put the research in (fearing that their work would go unrewarded) and we would have not found this gene until much later on when casual science (at universities) came across it, or they would have done the work, and kept it all a secret in order to protect their ability to recoup the money spent on the research. Either way, we never would have found out what that gene does until some other research effort came across it, perhaps in 10 more years, or even 20 or 50.
How many other diseases will go unstudied, now that there is no reward for linking a gene to a disease? How close might we have been to spotting/treating other cancers? Does that matter at all, or is this just about "putting patent trolls in their place"?
Equal value doesn't mean identical. I have 5 dollars of bread, you've got 5 dollars of cucumbers, we each sell each other 2.5 dollars of material and have sandwiches.
Market dollar value is far from the only measure of value to an individual. If you were stranded in the Mojave and dying of thirst but your pocket had $500 in it, how much of that would you spend on a bottle of water that, in a store, sells for $1? Would you gladly procure 2.5 dollars in cucumbers if you weren't planning on eating a sandwich for a few weeks? Equal value doesn't mean identical just like identical doesn't mean equal value. Exchanges between individuals are based on many more criteria than that.
I am an EE, and like every other EE I know, I advise my children to stay the hell out of engineering.
Out of curiosity, what is it that you are advising your children to get into? Automotive repair? Software non-engineering? Acting? Not trolling, genuinely curious. I wouldn't hesitate to encourage my kids to get into any aspect of engineering, but would obviously steer them toward the higher demand fields. Engineering as a whole isn't dead, is it?
That was the word Bluebox used to describe it... Honestly, their original press release blew this way out of proportion.
Most Android devices now have support for scanning of sideloaded APKs for Malware now (it's a Google Play service), and I'm assuming that while a week or two ago that detector wasn't configured to detect this exploit, it almost surely does by now.
Why should that get in the way of a good story? "Master key" sounds like something that will grant anyone access to your device, any time they want, without your permission, and plays so well with the "Android devices take months/years to get patched" meme. Which is all much more salacious than the reality, considering that only apps intentionally sideloaded by the user (After deactivating the default protection) can run with unchecked permissions, IF you havent gotten the Google Play Store updates yet, which are pushing out with quite rapid speed.
1. People seem to not care. This is why I only buy Nexus devices though.
2. Totally correct.
I wish google would use their leverage over the android trademarks, not the software, to force updates for X amount of time and a longer amount of time for security patches. The real issue here is the whole carrier model. If you bought your PC from your ISP and they provided all the software for it you would be in the same boat there.
Except, that is exactly what Google is doing. This vulnerability is being patched by pushing updated apps directly to the phones via the shadowy Google "remote control", and the carriers don't need to do anything about it. My handset was patched as soon as the Google updates started rolling out, and my carrier could care less.
How does a velocity sensor know position?
Gravity is synonymous with velocity change, so if you are relatively motionless wrt the earth's surface, a sensor will register 9.8m/s/s "up" (if it is oriented the right way).
What seems more amazing is that a simple software check pre-launch (i.e. "do all the sensors think they are pointed up?") was not part of the SOP. Given that their exact function is orientation detection, skipping the opportunity for self-test via that function is somewhat baffling.
Obligatory: It's not rocket science!
I call BS on that guy. He claims there are 5000 people working there. At $100k/year salaries (and it's probably more), that puts this program up to at least $1 billion dollars per year for payroll and equipment. I would assume there is some accounting for that kind of spending.
The US spends upwards of $500B on "Defense" each year... Do you really think a missing $1B would get noticed here and there?
HL3 is about zombies? Confirmed!
Or did you mean L4D3?
No. I've had luck here so far.
But I'm quite sure that if I ever will catch one, it won't be from pressing my cellphone display against my ear. I'd me worried much more worried about those earbuds on my mp3-player or touching my keyboard before scratching my ear.
But it might still be a valid point for ATM-Touchscreens.
But always keep in mind that exposure to microorganisms is vital to develop a healthy immune system. sanitizing everything is bad for your long-term health. Anyone still thinks long-term at all nowadays?.
Don't worry, you will still get plenty of germs in you even if every cellphone and ATM you ever touch is germ-free. TFA points out how this type of glass is effective at killing MRSA, which means that one more commonly touched thing in hospitals can prevent infection instead of harboring germs. Unless you want to get MRSA just so your immune system is "healthy", in which case please don't reproduce.
Neither of the bacteria you mention are spread by contact, so antibacterial surfaces will have absolutely no effect whatsoever on them. Not exactly a good argument for your case.
OK, if you don't like analogues, here is the example right out of TFA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicillin-resistant_Staphylococcus_aureus
>
I didn't claim that bacteria can't be harmful, but simply that we don't need to go to absurd extremes to try and eliminate all bacteria that we may encounter because that's frankly fucking stupid and nonsensical.
Who claimed that we should "go to absurd extremes to try and eliminate all bacteria that we may encounter"? Not me. Not TFA. You did, as a straw man for your bizarre pro-bacteria agenda.
"We know from Galileo that all objects near the surface of the Earth accelerate downward at the same rate," he says. "But you also have to think about air resistance. That's why a bowling ball and a piece of paper don't fall at the same rate. You accelerate at a certain rate, but the force that's pulling you down depends on that number and your mass."
Everyone knows this. But then...
As for rides with steep drops instead of curves, heavier riders do go faster, he says.
Now I am confused. Is this assuming heavy riders have more friction with the slide/water or more air resistance or that Newtonian Physics can suck a fat one?
Heavy riders experience less relative resistance, since an object (er, a human's) mass increases faster than the area in contact with the slide. Same goes for wind resistance but i suspect it plays a smaller role.
What about them? Humans didn't evolve in a vacuum, we evolved to encounter and co-exist with bacteria. Making ATMs bacteria proof wont magically protect you from them, it'll just mean your body is even less well equipped to cope when you inevitably do encounter harmful bacteria elsewhere.
Just stick to basic hygiene like washing your hands before you eat and you'll be fine. GP is right, it's like some kind of cultural OCD.
Yes, because it's not like there have ever been problems with spread of bacteria in the past and it also doesn't seem like it will ever be a problem in the future either! Who needs to worry about bacteria! Nature wouldn't make something that could hurt me, would it?
Hand washing is great, but that doesn't mean reducing bacteria count on contact surfaces doesn't help since hand washing alone is certainly not 100% effective.
When last I contracted (2008-09), and had to pay for my own insurance, I paid $180/month. Pretty sure that price has at least doubled, since the ironically named ACA passed, but even then it's just over $4000 a year. If what you're saying is true, and companies are wasting that much, then it's no wonder the (real) economy hasn't been able to recover.
Employer sponsored, pooled insurance with what most people call "Acceptable" deductibles and yearly out-of-pocket limits are in the $5000-$6000 for singles, and often over $10000 for families of 2 or more. What you purchased was probably "catastrophic health insurance" which is more consistent with the typical definition of "insurance" but does not cover much in terms of everyday prescriptions, routine doctor visits, or urgent care visits. And those plans have been seeing at least 10% y/y growth since the mid-90s up to and including since the ACA passed; "skyrocketing healthcare costs" have been around for a lot longer than most Obamacare critics can remember.
Thanks for the info guys. I don't really keep up on these things, since I'm not directly involved in those issues. I was working from memory of previous employers, years ago.
I guess I should read up a bit soon.
Healthcare is *everyone's* issue at this point, with or without government mandated/subsidized systems. The cost of living/dying in the US is staggering and the more individuals that are informed as to what is going on, the better chance we have at changing it before it bankrupts us (more).
I pay about $65/wk ($3380/yr) into my employer healthcare. They pay about 3 times that ($10140/yr). Multiply that by the roughly 450 employees on the plan and it's the single greatest expense they have after employee salaries and taxes.
Personally, I'd much rather take that $13500 (my cost plus theirs) in my paycheck so I could shop around for my own insurance. The employer offered plan includes tons of crap for women and children that don't apply to me, while omitting many things that would be a huge help to me such as hearing aids.
Making health insurance/care portable would go a LONG way to making the entire system more competitive and the customers a lot happier, but the system (legally, financially, and historically) is basically set up to make sure that the cash flow for the insurance companies remains reliable (and growing). Do you expect an industry with a grip on about 1.5 trillion dollars of spending annually to just give it up? Hah.
Maybe they did realize that during this tough economic time (that will probably go on forever since we only consume and don't actually produce anything) it might be a bad thing to force businesses to offer health insurance that is rapidly rising..
Our company only employees 22 people and we provide health insurance that costs us somewhere in the neighborhood of 75k/year.. Having gone up about 20% since obama care passed.
$3400 a person for health care is pretty f'ing cheap. Most employers spend 8,000 to 10,000 per employee (not including what the employee contributes out of their salary).