As California ag scales back, one of two things will happen:
1) The increase in food prices makes agriculture elsewhere in the giant-ass United States more viable and those locations bring their own ag industries online, stabilizing food prices.
2) That doesn't happen and food prices spiral out of control and we all starve to death after the riots and zombies have their way with us.
I know where I'd place my money. Really, "food prices" is not something Americans as a whole have had to be concerned about for some time.
The implication there is that if we don't grow these things in California, they'll never be grown anywhere. It's a pretty good be that that's not true.
So you've gotten to the point where you realize the other guys are bad and that's what happens most of the time when the other guys are in charge. Wake me when you figure out that that's what happens most of the time no matter who is in charge.
"Rich guy with access to lots of resources uses those resources to transfer more wealth to himself," is not exactly a major headline in any country. This one was just notable because it was really blatantly illegal.
Yep, the socialists are totally into the idea of taking money from a bunch of poor people and giving it to one rich guy. You have their philosophy all figured out.
I'm pretty sure in general it's illegal to take out a loan with no intention of paying it back. That's the bare minimum I can think of. There's also the fact that while he had a controlling share of the banks, it doesn't sound like he completely owned them, so he defrauded the other shareholders of the bank. Then there are the main victims--all of the bank's customers. It's pretty blatantly illlegal to set up a bank, take deposits, and then walk off with them. This is doing exactly that but using some other companies to do the walking off part. I'd be stunned if there were enough loopholes for this guy to plausibly claim that what he did was illegal. However, I wouldn't be totally surprised if he was friendly enough with the government to get off with a slap on the wrist. I have no idea how the legal system works over there, but I do know that he has a lot of money to spread around if he needs to.
This, 100x. They're not bailing out "the bank" or the bank's owners. They're bailing out the people who were doing business with the bank who thought it was a bank and not a scam to steal all of the assets the bank was managing. If they can't get the money back from the people who stole it (and it looks like that's pretty unlikely), those people are in a world of hurt without some intervention.
In either case, boiling the perpetrators in oil is probably a good next step. Not doing that is where we tend to go wrong.
I'm onboard with paying a proper amount for the eye exam. My major problem is that a lot of providers roll their costs into ridiculously inflated glass and wire. Even that would be sort of OK assuming you never lost or broke your glasses or needed a second pair. As it is, if you do, you end up paying the hidden cost of an exam again rather than just paying for hardware. And all that is ignoring the monstrosity that is Luxottica.
Transparency is good for all of us, so I'm done buying glasses from my optometrist. If they start losing money over it, they can change their model to price their time appropriately instead of hiding their charges somewhere else.
It's tempting to bring my own aspirin and saline the next time I end up going to a hospital for something. At some point, we just need to say, "Enough is enough. Itemize my bill properly and let the world know what things really cost." As it is, everybody is running a scam if they can get away with it.
Balko is fantastic. I strongly recommend Rise of the Warrior Cop to anybody interested in law enforcement violence and accountability. Surprise, surprise, a huge amount of it is tied to the drug war.
Can you buy your glasses from somebody like Zenni Optical over there? My wife and I just changed over to them about a year ago and we're paying between $15 and $60 for glasses depending on the bells and whistles. The company I worked for made biometric imaging hardware and did a lot of custom lens designs and the engineers were noting that we could manufacture much more precise and complex lenses than you get in a typical pair of glasses for a tiny percentage of the normal price of prescription lenses, so I went hunting. Lo and behold, there are places that sell glasses at prices that reflect what they are: a very simple single lens of mediocre precision mounted in a cheap ass wire or plastic frame.
It's not a fricking pacemaker or insulin pump. We've been making hardware like this for centuries. Schools should be *giving* simple prescription glasses away to kids with vision problems.
The other possibility is that if they stay in network they only get paid the negotiated rate, but if they do a little out of network freelancing, they can bill massive amounts and often end up wtih more cash in the pockets, especially when the out-of-network insurer just ponies up the cash. The term is drive-by doctoring.
Your stats are pretty much junk. OF COURSE we spend more, we have more people than any other country in the modern world, including Australia, Canada and the UK and our health care system is among the best (if not the best) in the world.
You do realize that as a percentage of GDP, we still spend massively more than any of those other countries, right? It has nothing to do with population.
Personally, I don't see what all the hubbub was about with healthcare in the first place. Did we have uninsured? Yes. Where they getting necessary treatment? Yes. They just waked into the emergency room and got treatment, regardless of their ability to pay or who they where...
Emergency rooms are awesome for broken limbs and gunshot wounds, but they're not that great for treating chronic illness. They're there to stabilize you when a crisis hits, not do all of the other stuff a real health care system does. And of course there's the other issue: Those emergency room visits aren't free. Somebody pays for them. So where does that money come from?
Uh, your simplistic view of economics is showing - those 'civilised' countries have much greater tax burdens to pay for all that marvelous 'free' education and 'free' healthcare.
It's worth noting that if you add the portion they pay in taxes to the portion they pay out of pocket, they still spend way less of their GDP on healthcare than we do.
Employees are offered subsidized healthcare coverage by employers, employees don't have to take it (many, not all, but many) employers will give you cash money in place of subsidized healthcare if you get outside coverage (for example, if your spouse has better/cheaper coverage available for you through their employer).
That's true (although I'd dispute the "many" claim--neither my wife nor I have ever worked somewhere where that happens, and when it does, I strongly doubt it's likely to equal the amount they pay for your health benefits), but there are some major structural problems with it being the way it is.
We do the employer sponsored healthcare thing for two reasons: First, it gives you a group rating which is hard to get on the solo market. Second, it's a way for your employer to give you part of your income untaxed. That tax break is problematic: It's a subsidy on health insurance spending that drives the price up, and it's a subsidy that not everybody gets, so a lot of people are out of pocket more if they need to buy insurance on their own. It's a massive market distortion that causes a lot of issues.
One thing we really don't have here in the U.S. Is healthcare rationing - for example, we can get MRIs done the day the doctor prescribes it, we have no waiting lists.
We absolutely do ration healthcare. We just ration it based on different variables. Some countries ration it by waiting list and or the severity of the illness. In the US, we ration by how much money people are willing to pay. That's how we ration most things. Some people just don't agree that it's the best way to ration medical resources.
I think part of the problem, though, is that a lot of people probably get jerked around by the cops a lot more often than you or I do. I very rarely have to explain myself to a police officer, so I just deal with it. If I got pulled over for DWB or stopped on the street regularly (or God forbid, lived in a stop-and-frisk city), my patience would probably wear pretty thin after 10 or 15 years. I think I'd probably be able to keep it together for a lifetime of that bullshit, and I think that most people do. But not everybody does, and it's not 100% crazy that they can't.
Just make the H1B slot an expiring license (say 5 years). Auction it off at the beginning and allow it to be resold on the open market until it expires. Then you can stop bothering with questions about pay gaps and other nonsense. If there's a $10K per year arbitrage opportunity, the market will quickly sort it out.
We could use the spot price of visas at different maturities as a "yield curve" to see what the predictions are for future technical labor demand and as an indicator for how tight labor demand is right now. Best of all, the visas will be used on rock stars who are actually worth importing rather than being doled out more or less at random.
H1B fees and legal expenses are not cheap, nor is paying international relocation expenses for a candidate and his/her family, so we're certainly not saving money by hiring H1B's.
You just described the alternative of paying enough to make your total package competitive as being too expensive. It sounds like you're saving money by that any reasonable definition, even after the government and lawyers take their share. If it wasn't cheaper than raising your pay rates, you wouldn't be doing it.
That being said, I'm willing to grant that a company that hires PhD level people is much more likely to run into a real hard limit when it comes to finding subject matter experts, and they're the types of operations that the H1B system is supposed to work for on paper. If we did the sensible thing and auctioned off H1B slots and allowed them to be resold on an open market, those are probably the types of companies that would buy them.
I'd agree with this, but for better or worse, going to a university provides not just an education but a credential. What other people do may not really affect my education as long as they're not being disruptive, but if my university graduates a bunch of people who clearly didn't learn anything, it erodes the value of the credential. Having an engineering degree from a school that has a reputation for graduating engineers who can't do basic algebra is barely better than having no degree at all when it comes to getting your resume noticed. Allowing a university with a decent reputation to turn into a diploma mill does a major disservice to all of your alumni.
It's really too bad he didn't hang in there until the end and give legitimate supportable F grades to most of the class while showing good faith by giving appropriate grades to decent students. Getting an F that sticks stings a lot more than making news while your professor melts down and having your grade adjusted by the university.
I'd love to see a world where professors hand out failing grades more liberally. I got really sick of seeing cheaters and whiners get their way when I was in college.
I'm wondering what percentage of the price of a basket of strawberries is the labor to pick them. Assume that a good picker can pick, say, an average of 30 strawberries a minute if you include the time it takes to empty baskets and walk around to different rows of plants. What does that work out to in human touch time per basket? I'm thinking the cost of that basket is land, shipping, fertilizer, varous capital, and various labor. It seems like far too much is made of the harvesting effort just because it's the most visible and probably the most physically taxing.
How does it fit with Facebook's business model? Not sure. But if I were facebook, I'd be very concerned about my business model going away if there's an unpredictable shift in peoples' preferences WRT social networking. It seems like a lot of eggs to have in that one basket even though network effects are on their side right now. If I was sitting on a ridiculous amount of money with that one narrow business model, I'd be diversifying left and right. Maybe not at the $2B for Oculus pricepoint, but I'd be doing something like it.
Slashdot Mirror
Boiling water on the scale of a water treatment plant would require an ungodly amount of energy.
As California ag scales back, one of two things will happen:
1) The increase in food prices makes agriculture elsewhere in the giant-ass United States more viable and those locations bring their own ag industries online, stabilizing food prices.
2) That doesn't happen and food prices spiral out of control and we all starve to death after the riots and zombies have their way with us.
I know where I'd place my money. Really, "food prices" is not something Americans as a whole have had to be concerned about for some time.
That's amazing! Sounds like agriculture has all that water in a nearly closed system with almost no net loss!
So why are they running out of water in those aquifers again? Am I drinking their milkshake?
The implication there is that if we don't grow these things in California, they'll never be grown anywhere. It's a pretty good be that that's not true.
So you've gotten to the point where you realize the other guys are bad and that's what happens most of the time when the other guys are in charge. Wake me when you figure out that that's what happens most of the time no matter who is in charge.
"Rich guy with access to lots of resources uses those resources to transfer more wealth to himself," is not exactly a major headline in any country. This one was just notable because it was really blatantly illegal.
Yep, the socialists are totally into the idea of taking money from a bunch of poor people and giving it to one rich guy. You have their philosophy all figured out.
I'm pretty sure in general it's illegal to take out a loan with no intention of paying it back. That's the bare minimum I can think of. There's also the fact that while he had a controlling share of the banks, it doesn't sound like he completely owned them, so he defrauded the other shareholders of the bank. Then there are the main victims--all of the bank's customers. It's pretty blatantly illlegal to set up a bank, take deposits, and then walk off with them. This is doing exactly that but using some other companies to do the walking off part. I'd be stunned if there were enough loopholes for this guy to plausibly claim that what he did was illegal. However, I wouldn't be totally surprised if he was friendly enough with the government to get off with a slap on the wrist. I have no idea how the legal system works over there, but I do know that he has a lot of money to spread around if he needs to.
This, 100x. They're not bailing out "the bank" or the bank's owners. They're bailing out the people who were doing business with the bank who thought it was a bank and not a scam to steal all of the assets the bank was managing. If they can't get the money back from the people who stole it (and it looks like that's pretty unlikely), those people are in a world of hurt without some intervention.
In either case, boiling the perpetrators in oil is probably a good next step. Not doing that is where we tend to go wrong.
I'm onboard with paying a proper amount for the eye exam. My major problem is that a lot of providers roll their costs into ridiculously inflated glass and wire. Even that would be sort of OK assuming you never lost or broke your glasses or needed a second pair. As it is, if you do, you end up paying the hidden cost of an exam again rather than just paying for hardware. And all that is ignoring the monstrosity that is Luxottica.
Transparency is good for all of us, so I'm done buying glasses from my optometrist. If they start losing money over it, they can change their model to price their time appropriately instead of hiding their charges somewhere else.
It's tempting to bring my own aspirin and saline the next time I end up going to a hospital for something. At some point, we just need to say, "Enough is enough. Itemize my bill properly and let the world know what things really cost." As it is, everybody is running a scam if they can get away with it.
Balko is fantastic. I strongly recommend Rise of the Warrior Cop to anybody interested in law enforcement violence and accountability. Surprise, surprise, a huge amount of it is tied to the drug war.
Can you buy your glasses from somebody like Zenni Optical over there? My wife and I just changed over to them about a year ago and we're paying between $15 and $60 for glasses depending on the bells and whistles. The company I worked for made biometric imaging hardware and did a lot of custom lens designs and the engineers were noting that we could manufacture much more precise and complex lenses than you get in a typical pair of glasses for a tiny percentage of the normal price of prescription lenses, so I went hunting. Lo and behold, there are places that sell glasses at prices that reflect what they are: a very simple single lens of mediocre precision mounted in a cheap ass wire or plastic frame.
It's not a fricking pacemaker or insulin pump. We've been making hardware like this for centuries. Schools should be *giving* simple prescription glasses away to kids with vision problems.
The other possibility is that if they stay in network they only get paid the negotiated rate, but if they do a little out of network freelancing, they can bill massive amounts and often end up wtih more cash in the pockets, especially when the out-of-network insurer just ponies up the cash. The term is drive-by doctoring.
Right. Declines in quality and increases in prices for insurnance were totally unheard of until that socialist messed everything up.
Weirdly, I'd be shocked if your Ohio provider didn't charge you a higher rate because you live in Silicon Valley for exactly that reason.
You do realize that as a percentage of GDP, we still spend massively more than any of those other countries, right? It has nothing to do with population.
Emergency rooms are awesome for broken limbs and gunshot wounds, but they're not that great for treating chronic illness. They're there to stabilize you when a crisis hits, not do all of the other stuff a real health care system does. And of course there's the other issue: Those emergency room visits aren't free. Somebody pays for them. So where does that money come from?
But wait! People with lots of money getting non-critical surgery have to wait a long time for it! Intolerable!
It's worth noting that if you add the portion they pay in taxes to the portion they pay out of pocket, they still spend way less of their GDP on healthcare than we do.
That's true (although I'd dispute the "many" claim--neither my wife nor I have ever worked somewhere where that happens, and when it does, I strongly doubt it's likely to equal the amount they pay for your health benefits), but there are some major structural problems with it being the way it is.
We do the employer sponsored healthcare thing for two reasons: First, it gives you a group rating which is hard to get on the solo market. Second, it's a way for your employer to give you part of your income untaxed. That tax break is problematic: It's a subsidy on health insurance spending that drives the price up, and it's a subsidy that not everybody gets, so a lot of people are out of pocket more if they need to buy insurance on their own. It's a massive market distortion that causes a lot of issues.
We absolutely do ration healthcare. We just ration it based on different variables. Some countries ration it by waiting list and or the severity of the illness. In the US, we ration by how much money people are willing to pay. That's how we ration most things. Some people just don't agree that it's the best way to ration medical resources.
I think part of the problem, though, is that a lot of people probably get jerked around by the cops a lot more often than you or I do. I very rarely have to explain myself to a police officer, so I just deal with it. If I got pulled over for DWB or stopped on the street regularly (or God forbid, lived in a stop-and-frisk city), my patience would probably wear pretty thin after 10 or 15 years. I think I'd probably be able to keep it together for a lifetime of that bullshit, and I think that most people do. But not everybody does, and it's not 100% crazy that they can't.
Also known as "stop snitching" when non-cops do it.
Just make the H1B slot an expiring license (say 5 years). Auction it off at the beginning and allow it to be resold on the open market until it expires. Then you can stop bothering with questions about pay gaps and other nonsense. If there's a $10K per year arbitrage opportunity, the market will quickly sort it out.
We could use the spot price of visas at different maturities as a "yield curve" to see what the predictions are for future technical labor demand and as an indicator for how tight labor demand is right now. Best of all, the visas will be used on rock stars who are actually worth importing rather than being doled out more or less at random.
You just described the alternative of paying enough to make your total package competitive as being too expensive. It sounds like you're saving money by that any reasonable definition, even after the government and lawyers take their share. If it wasn't cheaper than raising your pay rates, you wouldn't be doing it.
That being said, I'm willing to grant that a company that hires PhD level people is much more likely to run into a real hard limit when it comes to finding subject matter experts, and they're the types of operations that the H1B system is supposed to work for on paper. If we did the sensible thing and auctioned off H1B slots and allowed them to be resold on an open market, those are probably the types of companies that would buy them.
I'd agree with this, but for better or worse, going to a university provides not just an education but a credential. What other people do may not really affect my education as long as they're not being disruptive, but if my university graduates a bunch of people who clearly didn't learn anything, it erodes the value of the credential. Having an engineering degree from a school that has a reputation for graduating engineers who can't do basic algebra is barely better than having no degree at all when it comes to getting your resume noticed. Allowing a university with a decent reputation to turn into a diploma mill does a major disservice to all of your alumni.
It's really too bad he didn't hang in there until the end and give legitimate supportable F grades to most of the class while showing good faith by giving appropriate grades to decent students. Getting an F that sticks stings a lot more than making news while your professor melts down and having your grade adjusted by the university.
I'd love to see a world where professors hand out failing grades more liberally. I got really sick of seeing cheaters and whiners get their way when I was in college.
I'm wondering what percentage of the price of a basket of strawberries is the labor to pick them. Assume that a good picker can pick, say, an average of 30 strawberries a minute if you include the time it takes to empty baskets and walk around to different rows of plants. What does that work out to in human touch time per basket? I'm thinking the cost of that basket is land, shipping, fertilizer, varous capital, and various labor. It seems like far too much is made of the harvesting effort just because it's the most visible and probably the most physically taxing.
How does it fit with Facebook's business model? Not sure. But if I were facebook, I'd be very concerned about my business model going away if there's an unpredictable shift in peoples' preferences WRT social networking. It seems like a lot of eggs to have in that one basket even though network effects are on their side right now. If I was sitting on a ridiculous amount of money with that one narrow business model, I'd be diversifying left and right. Maybe not at the $2B for Oculus pricepoint, but I'd be doing something like it.