People do have natural skills and weaknesses though. You can (sometimes) overcome your limits, but somethings will always be easier for you than other things. Just like some people are naturally better endurance athletes, or naturally stronger or more coordinated; some people are naturally better at math and logic type skills, and others are naturally better at "people skills". Still others are exceptionally gifted and 'good' at all of it. Again, that isn't to say you can't overcome natural tendencies, just as I've made myself in a halfway decent distance runner despite not having the build or lungs for it. It will still always be easier for me to do pure strength work, and I'll improve more and faster when I play to my strengths. I just happen to like running so I do it despite not being naturally inclined to it.
While his willingness to commit bodily injury is perhaps a bit greater than average, how is he being self centered? Unless the traffic laws in Belgium have changed in the 15 years since I lived there, and are now completely different than in the rest of the Western World, cyclist who ride on the sidewalk/footpath are the ones being self centered. They're supposed to be on the bike path if available or the street if not. There's good reasons for that. Of course no one actually followed that rule when I was there either... Once I saw a guy riding his motor scooter on the sidewalk. The bike thing is pretty common a lot of places (certainly here in the US it is), the motor scooter made me a bit nervous.
It's a matter of politeness. One does not, normally, ask for a week of vacation on short notice (as is normally the case for job interviews). A day or two, I could see as "recharge" time on short notice, but a week of vacation is normally something one plans and asks for in advance out of respect for the rest of the team. If I were asking for that much time off, on that short of a time frame, my boss and most other people would assume it was an emergency. They'd want to know what was wrong, that I was taking nearly a third of my annual leave on a moment's notice.
So I go into my boss' office and say "So I need a week off next week to go down to Florida and do the world's most insane interview. Do you mind?" I mean, it's not like this is the sort of thing you can plan for months in advance and come up with a reasonable reason that you need the week off. If I ask my boss for a week off next month without any details, he might go for it without questions, but next week? He'll want to know who died. This is ignoring the fact that I like to use my vacation time for... ya know... vacation?
I think there's value in both honestly. If I'm traveling to Germany and I'm sitting in the middle of Munich looking for a quick and decent bite to eat near The Residenz, something like Yelp! has a lot of value. Even if the reviews are in German I can piece together enough of the language, and use the "Star" system well enough, to find someplace decent. I get to eat a fair to good lunch and everyone wins. If I want to find a nice restaurant to take my wife later that evening, something more like Zagat's or Fromer's would be more appropriate. Munich is a big city, the ability find and read reviews of particularly well know or popular restaurants, in my own native language, is useful.
Now back home, I'd be inclined to use Yelp! for either situation. After all, I know enough about my own city to give me a starting point for finding good places. When I'm traveling though, particularly when I'm traveling somewhere that English isn't the native tongue, editorial reviews have a very real place in my planning. Hell, even here at home I use a certain amount of editorial content. I watch the The Phantom Gourmet I've been known to check out restaurants they recommend.
Well ya see, it's like this. The carriers had been selling smartphones with data plans for years before the iPhone, and it was a great deal. People spent $20-30 extra every month, but rarely went out the of 10s of megabytes for traffic. Because those phones pretty much sucked for everything other than e-mail, contacts and calendaring. The browsers were terrible, and network aware apps were a rarity or so hard to use that no one did (I remember trying to do ssh on my Treo, it was awful). Then those damned iPhones came out, and shortly thereafter those stupid Android phones. Suddenly networking on phones actually worked. The browsers could deal intelligently with websites, networked apps actually worked, people were using smartphones to actually access the data plans they had paid for. The nerve! They actually used what they bought instead of just paying for it and passively consuming a small part of their purchase.
So you can totally see how it's all the iPhone's fault. Those assholes at Apple and Google made tools that people actually wanted to use. Why couldn't they just follow the status quo and network aware crap that allows the carrier to charge more, but not spend anything?
Apple, notorious for its conservative forecasts, estimated earnings for the September quarter of $7.65 a share on revenue of $34 billion, well below the average estimate of $10.23 a share on revenue of $38.03 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
Apple beat its own estimates (actual earnings were $9.32 a share). So who, exactly, needs to learn the basics of how this works before they comment? Granted Apple is well known for low balling their own estimates so they can always beat them; but the fact remains that random guys on Wall Street, not Apple, are the ones whose projections were missed.
Apple did post a 23 percent jump in revenue from the same quarter the previous year to $35 billion, but that was about $2 billion below Wall Street's average forecast.
Note: Apple made a lot of money. Apple made even more money than it did in this quarter of last year (not typical of a company getting it's "lunch eaten". Apple did not make quite as much money as Wall Street forecast. Not Apple, Wall Street.
This isn't really a "problem", except in the eyes on a market focused on quarterly earnings. They make most of their money in the quarters they release a new phone or a new tablet. That doesn't mean they make less money overall, it just focuses when the majority of that money comes in. What's really insane is that not only did they make a shit pot of money this quarter, it's a much bigger shit pot than the same quarter last year. For some reason it's a "problem" that the shit pot is slightly smaller than some random guys who don't even work for the company sort of though it might be. This is rather like you winning a gold medal at the Olympics and me being upset with you because you didn't also set a world record in the process.
No Ordinary Family That one had real promise, but it never really got going. Shows like Grimm and Once Upon a Time are showing a willingness to drop a few extra bucks on special effects in TV Dramas again, maybe we can start to see something other than Reality TV and Cop Dramas again in the next few years. Don't get me wrong, I like Cop Dramas, but like Superhero Movies they're getting a tad overdone.
For that matter, the Superman cartoon of the same period (and I assume the same production team, it had a similar look and feel) was pretty good. Not quite on the level of Batman, but much better than many Superman adaptions. Supes has always been a weaker character to me though; two efforts of similar quality, one with each character, I'll usually like the Batman better.
I agree. I was pretty much useless at handy man activities until I bought a house. It's amazing how much contractor bills can convince you to learn. I can fix/build most simple stuff now if I have a need, but I also know that for anything complicated a contractor will probably do a better job and do it faster. Depending on the required tool investment he might even do it cheaper. I think that most home owners who aren't either rich or stupid pick up the basics if they didn't learn them from a father or uncle (these days possibly a mother or aunt). Anything more than the basics tends to quickly get beyond the point of diminishing returns.
Way to miss the point. He's saying that a libertarian should, logically, be in favor of a law that sets limits on government power. Much as the 4th Amendment (a law) prevents the government from turning your house into a barracks. As generally libertarian as this site is, I'm amazed that I haven't seen a single positive comment on this idea yet. Surely, whatever your opinion on Franken, the idea that the there should be limits on government use and abuse of facial recognition software is a win for both privacy and liberty. So far the comment all seem to lean toward "Al Franken is a liberal idiot so his idea much be awful no matter how much I might applaud if Ron Paul had said it".
There's one serious difference that Firefox will have to overcome in the Phone world that never bothered them in the Browser world. Install base. In teh Browser world, people saw the Firefox browser and they liked it. So they downloaded it and used it. Phone OS's aren't like that. i have to find ad buy a phone that has the OS on it. If the Mozilla foundation can't find partners, or if those partners put their OS on inferior handsets, it won't matter how good the OS is. This was on of Android's problem in the beginning. The phones were crap, so it didn't matter how good the OS was. It's still a lesser problem now, to some extent the whole ecosystem gets tarred by the brush of the cheaper models.
But that's an accident, not a deliberate thing that Blizzard has done. Macs are, at base, Unix machines using mostly open libraries. Windows also support those open libraries. To make WoW as portable as possible and reduce the work required to keep the Mac and Windows ports concurrent, Blizzard happened to write it in such a way that it's also easy to get working in Wine. Mostly because they tried to use the open libraries supported on both official platforms as often as possible, and Linux also happens to use those same open libraries.
It also doesn't help that while the government subsidizes solar power companies to an extent; it's a paltry level of support compared to the oil company subsidies. It's unlikely that solar by itself will be able to replace carbon fuels anytime soon, but we it could easily provide a much greater percentage of power than it does if it got a little support.
It's a vicious cycle to an extent. The poorest people like to go to Walmart and pay the lowest possible prices for cheaply made Chinese manufactured products. People with a little more room in their budgets might be willing to pay for quality, but the poor can't afford that luxury. Seeing how well places like Walmart are doing, and how well manufacturer that outsource productions can control costs, more and more stores become like Walmart, and more and more manufacturers offshore production. This increases the number of poor people as more manufacturing jobs leave and more retail places try to squeeze the last penny out of their labor costs. So fewer and fewer people have the extra room in their budgets to pay for quality and more and more of them buy cheaply manufactured goods at Walmart.
To make matters even worse, the premium for quality manufacture keeps going up, because fewer and fewer places are doing it, and the economies of scale fail. So those of use with regular middle class incomes who could still afford to shop at local stores and pay a bit more for quality find it harder and harder to even find the stores and products to spend more money on. Outside of major metro areas, almost everyone buys cheap crap from big box stores, whether they can afford better or not. There's nothing else available.
people (even the uninsured) typically only go to the ER as a last resort. People, with insurance go to their doctor's for a hang-nail.
Exactly. You know what happens to hang nails that aren't treated? They get infected, and people go to the ER as a last resort. Maybe not every hang nail, but a lot of them. Some of them (on the stubbornest people who refuse to go to the ER until it's unbearable), probably even become major medical issues. Nearly every study of the matter, by economists on both sides of the issue, indicates that by making simple preventative care more available, huge saving can be realized in acute care. Even if five extra people go to the doctor for a hang nail, that's probably a savings over one person with a severely infected foot.
The government spends a fortune taking care of those "risky and dumb" people anyway. We basically have three choices at this point: refuse service to people who can't pay for it, socialize the whole health care system, or force everyone to get insurance. Everything else is unsustainable. What do you think happens when an uninsured person shows up at a hospital? They don't say, "Sorry, we can't help you." They treat you, they're *required* to treat you. Then they send you a bill for a few hundred, or a few thousand, or a few tens of thousands of dollars. Inevitably most of those bills don't get paid (because if you can't afford a few hundred bucks a month in health insurance where are you going to get ten thousand?). The Hospital eventually gets part of the bill from the government, and eats the rest.
Unless we're prepared to be a society where people who can't pay medical bills don't get medical care, or a society where the government simply handles medical care, we pretty much have to figure something out. I'd like to think (and hope) we aren't the first type of society, and it's pretty clear from the whole fight over a single payer system that we aren't the second type and don't (as a group, I disagree) want to be. Given the reality of situation, I'm not sure what else could have been done.
Actually it does affect you, largely in the theoretical future, but primarily in positive ways. A coworker of mine at a previous job paid an outrageous amount of money for the highest tier health coverage our University offered. She did so because her husband had a chronic condition, and was either over or approaching the 1 million dollar lifetime benefits limit on all of our other policies. She felt lucky that the University actually offered a (much more expensive) unlimited lifetime benefit policy, as most employers don't. In some future where you have a chronic condition that requires care over many years and eventually takes you over a million dollars of lifetime care, you won't have to worry about it.
For that matter, even acute conditions can go over a million dollars rather fast. My wife's dear friend had a baby a few years ago. Though everything was fine with the birth, and the baby was healthy at first, she developed pneumonia at three days old (it's thought that it was a result of a freak case of meningitis). After three months in an induced coma and several near death experiences, the girl is now a healthy three year old. She'll likely have some learning disabilities and other minor mental issues, but her prognosis is generally good. If not for a wealthy aunt willing to foot the bill for medical care though, she would already have surpassed her mother's million dollar lifetime benefit limit and would no longer be coverable by her insurance... Ever. That will soon no longer be able to happen, nor will future insurance companies be able to deny her coverage because of her preexisting conditions. Planning to have kids?
What about preexisting conditions? You may not have one, but lets say you lose you job and your insurance lapses. You break your leg during this time, and pay out of pocket for the fix up. Sucks, but what are you gonna do. Until you get a new job and find out that nothing related to that can be covered by your new insurance. More serious problems that pop up during an uninsured period can even leave you unable to get insurance. Soon none of that matters.
So yeah, other than hopefully saving you money in the long run, nothing here matters to you much in the short term. Some of it could be really great in the long term though.
I've signed up for it. It's trivial, like signing up for a Facebook account. Get an anonymous e-mail address and an anonymous payment method and you could put anything in the fields, they only verify stuff by sending you verification e-mails. They never called me, never sent any snail-mail, and if they did a background check it was the fastest one ever, because I was ready to go in a few seconds. Even if they wanted to do a real background check, there's a serious limit to what yo can find out without a taxID/social security number, and they never ask for any of that.
Ehh, what? I'll grant that you need a Mac to develop for iOS, but that's hardly the same thing as a background check. I'm quite sure they don't perform background checks on people getting new Macs. To sell on the App Store (as opposed to merely side loading on your own devices, which you can do for free) you also have to be a registered developer, but that's just a $99 fee. There's certainly no background check involved there either. If you were moderately clever you could probably even do it with all false information so that Apple couldn't track you down. Only hard part would be paying the fee without a real billing address for your credit card, but one of those rechargeable Visa gift cards could probably solve that.
Conversely the reasons American workers hop jobs so easily is the corporate "all about me, all the time" culture that makes them feel like replaceable cogs rather than valued team members. It's a vicious cycle. You're always going to have mercenary employees willing to "trade up" for a 5% pay rise, and you're always going to have crummy companies that treat everyone like dirt; but somewhere we have to find a happy medium where most people are willing to hang out a while and in exchange most companies are willing to treat people well and show some loyalty themselves. Otherwise we're never going to get anywhere (at least not until after the current crop of "trained" people have all died or retired and companies *have* to train some new grads to get any workers at all).
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Probably make your arm sore for four or five days? It's not like they're going to be any bigger, it's just changing the composition of the payload.
People do have natural skills and weaknesses though. You can (sometimes) overcome your limits, but somethings will always be easier for you than other things. Just like some people are naturally better endurance athletes, or naturally stronger or more coordinated; some people are naturally better at math and logic type skills, and others are naturally better at "people skills". Still others are exceptionally gifted and 'good' at all of it. Again, that isn't to say you can't overcome natural tendencies, just as I've made myself in a halfway decent distance runner despite not having the build or lungs for it. It will still always be easier for me to do pure strength work, and I'll improve more and faster when I play to my strengths. I just happen to like running so I do it despite not being naturally inclined to it.
While his willingness to commit bodily injury is perhaps a bit greater than average, how is he being self centered? Unless the traffic laws in Belgium have changed in the 15 years since I lived there, and are now completely different than in the rest of the Western World, cyclist who ride on the sidewalk/footpath are the ones being self centered. They're supposed to be on the bike path if available or the street if not. There's good reasons for that. Of course no one actually followed that rule when I was there either... Once I saw a guy riding his motor scooter on the sidewalk. The bike thing is pretty common a lot of places (certainly here in the US it is), the motor scooter made me a bit nervous.
It's a matter of politeness. One does not, normally, ask for a week of vacation on short notice (as is normally the case for job interviews). A day or two, I could see as "recharge" time on short notice, but a week of vacation is normally something one plans and asks for in advance out of respect for the rest of the team. If I were asking for that much time off, on that short of a time frame, my boss and most other people would assume it was an emergency. They'd want to know what was wrong, that I was taking nearly a third of my annual leave on a moment's notice.
So I go into my boss' office and say "So I need a week off next week to go down to Florida and do the world's most insane interview. Do you mind?" I mean, it's not like this is the sort of thing you can plan for months in advance and come up with a reasonable reason that you need the week off. If I ask my boss for a week off next month without any details, he might go for it without questions, but next week? He'll want to know who died. This is ignoring the fact that I like to use my vacation time for... ya know... vacation?
I think there's value in both honestly. If I'm traveling to Germany and I'm sitting in the middle of Munich looking for a quick and decent bite to eat near The Residenz, something like Yelp! has a lot of value. Even if the reviews are in German I can piece together enough of the language, and use the "Star" system well enough, to find someplace decent. I get to eat a fair to good lunch and everyone wins. If I want to find a nice restaurant to take my wife later that evening, something more like Zagat's or Fromer's would be more appropriate. Munich is a big city, the ability find and read reviews of particularly well know or popular restaurants, in my own native language, is useful.
Now back home, I'd be inclined to use Yelp! for either situation. After all, I know enough about my own city to give me a starting point for finding good places. When I'm traveling though, particularly when I'm traveling somewhere that English isn't the native tongue, editorial reviews have a very real place in my planning. Hell, even here at home I use a certain amount of editorial content. I watch the The Phantom Gourmet I've been known to check out restaurants they recommend.
Well ya see, it's like this. The carriers had been selling smartphones with data plans for years before the iPhone, and it was a great deal. People spent $20-30 extra every month, but rarely went out the of 10s of megabytes for traffic. Because those phones pretty much sucked for everything other than e-mail, contacts and calendaring. The browsers were terrible, and network aware apps were a rarity or so hard to use that no one did (I remember trying to do ssh on my Treo, it was awful). Then those damned iPhones came out, and shortly thereafter those stupid Android phones. Suddenly networking on phones actually worked. The browsers could deal intelligently with websites, networked apps actually worked, people were using smartphones to actually access the data plans they had paid for. The nerve! They actually used what they bought instead of just paying for it and passively consuming a small part of their purchase.
So you can totally see how it's all the iPhone's fault. Those assholes at Apple and Google made tools that people actually wanted to use. Why couldn't they just follow the status quo and network aware crap that allows the carrier to charge more, but not spend anything?
Oh, and also from the article:
Apple, notorious for its conservative forecasts, estimated earnings for the September quarter of $7.65 a share on revenue of $34 billion, well below the average estimate of $10.23 a share on revenue of $38.03 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
Apple beat its own estimates (actual earnings were $9.32 a share). So who, exactly, needs to learn the basics of how this works before they comment? Granted Apple is well known for low balling their own estimates so they can always beat them; but the fact remains that random guys on Wall Street, not Apple, are the ones whose projections were missed.
No, from the article:
Apple did post a 23 percent jump in revenue from the same quarter the previous year to $35 billion, but that was about $2 billion below Wall Street's average forecast.
Note: Apple made a lot of money. Apple made even more money than it did in this quarter of last year (not typical of a company getting it's "lunch eaten". Apple did not make quite as much money as Wall Street forecast. Not Apple, Wall Street.
This isn't really a "problem", except in the eyes on a market focused on quarterly earnings. They make most of their money in the quarters they release a new phone or a new tablet. That doesn't mean they make less money overall, it just focuses when the majority of that money comes in. What's really insane is that not only did they make a shit pot of money this quarter, it's a much bigger shit pot than the same quarter last year. For some reason it's a "problem" that the shit pot is slightly smaller than some random guys who don't even work for the company sort of though it might be. This is rather like you winning a gold medal at the Olympics and me being upset with you because you didn't also set a world record in the process.
No Ordinary Family That one had real promise, but it never really got going. Shows like Grimm and Once Upon a Time are showing a willingness to drop a few extra bucks on special effects in TV Dramas again, maybe we can start to see something other than Reality TV and Cop Dramas again in the next few years. Don't get me wrong, I like Cop Dramas, but like Superhero Movies they're getting a tad overdone.
For that matter, the Superman cartoon of the same period (and I assume the same production team, it had a similar look and feel) was pretty good. Not quite on the level of Batman, but much better than many Superman adaptions. Supes has always been a weaker character to me though; two efforts of similar quality, one with each character, I'll usually like the Batman better.
I agree. I was pretty much useless at handy man activities until I bought a house. It's amazing how much contractor bills can convince you to learn. I can fix/build most simple stuff now if I have a need, but I also know that for anything complicated a contractor will probably do a better job and do it faster. Depending on the required tool investment he might even do it cheaper. I think that most home owners who aren't either rich or stupid pick up the basics if they didn't learn them from a father or uncle (these days possibly a mother or aunt). Anything more than the basics tends to quickly get beyond the point of diminishing returns.
Way to miss the point. He's saying that a libertarian should, logically, be in favor of a law that sets limits on government power. Much as the 4th Amendment (a law) prevents the government from turning your house into a barracks. As generally libertarian as this site is, I'm amazed that I haven't seen a single positive comment on this idea yet. Surely, whatever your opinion on Franken, the idea that the there should be limits on government use and abuse of facial recognition software is a win for both privacy and liberty. So far the comment all seem to lean toward "Al Franken is a liberal idiot so his idea much be awful no matter how much I might applaud if Ron Paul had said it".
There's one serious difference that Firefox will have to overcome in the Phone world that never bothered them in the Browser world. Install base. In teh Browser world, people saw the Firefox browser and they liked it. So they downloaded it and used it. Phone OS's aren't like that. i have to find ad buy a phone that has the OS on it. If the Mozilla foundation can't find partners, or if those partners put their OS on inferior handsets, it won't matter how good the OS is. This was on of Android's problem in the beginning. The phones were crap, so it didn't matter how good the OS was. It's still a lesser problem now, to some extent the whole ecosystem gets tarred by the brush of the cheaper models.
But that's an accident, not a deliberate thing that Blizzard has done. Macs are, at base, Unix machines using mostly open libraries. Windows also support those open libraries. To make WoW as portable as possible and reduce the work required to keep the Mac and Windows ports concurrent, Blizzard happened to write it in such a way that it's also easy to get working in Wine. Mostly because they tried to use the open libraries supported on both official platforms as often as possible, and Linux also happens to use those same open libraries.
It also doesn't help that while the government subsidizes solar power companies to an extent; it's a paltry level of support compared to the oil company subsidies. It's unlikely that solar by itself will be able to replace carbon fuels anytime soon, but we it could easily provide a much greater percentage of power than it does if it got a little support.
It's a vicious cycle to an extent. The poorest people like to go to Walmart and pay the lowest possible prices for cheaply made Chinese manufactured products. People with a little more room in their budgets might be willing to pay for quality, but the poor can't afford that luxury. Seeing how well places like Walmart are doing, and how well manufacturer that outsource productions can control costs, more and more stores become like Walmart, and more and more manufacturers offshore production. This increases the number of poor people as more manufacturing jobs leave and more retail places try to squeeze the last penny out of their labor costs. So fewer and fewer people have the extra room in their budgets to pay for quality and more and more of them buy cheaply manufactured goods at Walmart.
To make matters even worse, the premium for quality manufacture keeps going up, because fewer and fewer places are doing it, and the economies of scale fail. So those of use with regular middle class incomes who could still afford to shop at local stores and pay a bit more for quality find it harder and harder to even find the stores and products to spend more money on. Outside of major metro areas, almost everyone buys cheap crap from big box stores, whether they can afford better or not. There's nothing else available.
people (even the uninsured) typically only go to the ER as a last resort. People, with insurance go to their doctor's for a hang-nail.
Exactly. You know what happens to hang nails that aren't treated? They get infected, and people go to the ER as a last resort. Maybe not every hang nail, but a lot of them. Some of them (on the stubbornest people who refuse to go to the ER until it's unbearable), probably even become major medical issues. Nearly every study of the matter, by economists on both sides of the issue, indicates that by making simple preventative care more available, huge saving can be realized in acute care. Even if five extra people go to the doctor for a hang nail, that's probably a savings over one person with a severely infected foot.
The government spends a fortune taking care of those "risky and dumb" people anyway. We basically have three choices at this point: refuse service to people who can't pay for it, socialize the whole health care system, or force everyone to get insurance. Everything else is unsustainable. What do you think happens when an uninsured person shows up at a hospital? They don't say, "Sorry, we can't help you." They treat you, they're *required* to treat you. Then they send you a bill for a few hundred, or a few thousand, or a few tens of thousands of dollars. Inevitably most of those bills don't get paid (because if you can't afford a few hundred bucks a month in health insurance where are you going to get ten thousand?). The Hospital eventually gets part of the bill from the government, and eats the rest.
Unless we're prepared to be a society where people who can't pay medical bills don't get medical care, or a society where the government simply handles medical care, we pretty much have to figure something out. I'd like to think (and hope) we aren't the first type of society, and it's pretty clear from the whole fight over a single payer system that we aren't the second type and don't (as a group, I disagree) want to be. Given the reality of situation, I'm not sure what else could have been done.
Actually it does affect you, largely in the theoretical future, but primarily in positive ways. A coworker of mine at a previous job paid an outrageous amount of money for the highest tier health coverage our University offered. She did so because her husband had a chronic condition, and was either over or approaching the 1 million dollar lifetime benefits limit on all of our other policies. She felt lucky that the University actually offered a (much more expensive) unlimited lifetime benefit policy, as most employers don't. In some future where you have a chronic condition that requires care over many years and eventually takes you over a million dollars of lifetime care, you won't have to worry about it.
For that matter, even acute conditions can go over a million dollars rather fast. My wife's dear friend had a baby a few years ago. Though everything was fine with the birth, and the baby was healthy at first, she developed pneumonia at three days old (it's thought that it was a result of a freak case of meningitis). After three months in an induced coma and several near death experiences, the girl is now a healthy three year old. She'll likely have some learning disabilities and other minor mental issues, but her prognosis is generally good. If not for a wealthy aunt willing to foot the bill for medical care though, she would already have surpassed her mother's million dollar lifetime benefit limit and would no longer be coverable by her insurance... Ever. That will soon no longer be able to happen, nor will future insurance companies be able to deny her coverage because of her preexisting conditions. Planning to have kids?
What about preexisting conditions? You may not have one, but lets say you lose you job and your insurance lapses. You break your leg during this time, and pay out of pocket for the fix up. Sucks, but what are you gonna do. Until you get a new job and find out that nothing related to that can be covered by your new insurance. More serious problems that pop up during an uninsured period can even leave you unable to get insurance. Soon none of that matters.
So yeah, other than hopefully saving you money in the long run, nothing here matters to you much in the short term. Some of it could be really great in the long term though.
Actually that's a good point. I stand corrected, on that (I never did get around to selling anything). Still not really a background check though.
I've signed up for it. It's trivial, like signing up for a Facebook account. Get an anonymous e-mail address and an anonymous payment method and you could put anything in the fields, they only verify stuff by sending you verification e-mails. They never called me, never sent any snail-mail, and if they did a background check it was the fastest one ever, because I was ready to go in a few seconds. Even if they wanted to do a real background check, there's a serious limit to what yo can find out without a taxID/social security number, and they never ask for any of that.
Ehh, what? I'll grant that you need a Mac to develop for iOS, but that's hardly the same thing as a background check. I'm quite sure they don't perform background checks on people getting new Macs. To sell on the App Store (as opposed to merely side loading on your own devices, which you can do for free) you also have to be a registered developer, but that's just a $99 fee. There's certainly no background check involved there either. If you were moderately clever you could probably even do it with all false information so that Apple couldn't track you down. Only hard part would be paying the fee without a real billing address for your credit card, but one of those rechargeable Visa gift cards could probably solve that.
Conversely the reasons American workers hop jobs so easily is the corporate "all about me, all the time" culture that makes them feel like replaceable cogs rather than valued team members. It's a vicious cycle. You're always going to have mercenary employees willing to "trade up" for a 5% pay rise, and you're always going to have crummy companies that treat everyone like dirt; but somewhere we have to find a happy medium where most people are willing to hang out a while and in exchange most companies are willing to treat people well and show some loyalty themselves. Otherwise we're never going to get anywhere (at least not until after the current crop of "trained" people have all died or retired and companies *have* to train some new grads to get any workers at all).