1099 Employees charge about the same rate as W-2 labor + burden. That's because they get double hit with FICA. Contracting houses often charge MORE because the sales person gets a spiff on each hour, often as much as $5 to $10.
Contractors don't get paid to sit on the bench, whereas W-2 people do. So depending on the project you pick the staff that gets it done on time and within the customer's budget, and if it's short duration with little downstream maintenance you hire contractors if your plate is full.
So before you start the "evil corporations oppressing the masses" crap take a look at reality. I hire developers and run jobs. Do you?
So if you ran a business, you'd opt for the highest cost labor you could find, the most expensive copier, serve world class food in your cafeteria, have the swankiest offices, and use only full time employees with maximum benefits for every job?
No, you wouldn't. Because you'd go out of business almost immediately. You can't seem to grasp that sub-contracting a cafeteria actually makes sense, because Facebook isn't in the cafeteria business, and would probably suck at it. There's nothing "skirting employment laws" about it. And besides, nobody is forcing the employees to eat lunch there...
The government has never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever SAVED on ANYTHING ever.
In government speak a "surplus" or a "saving" is "We planned to spend $1 we didn't have, but only spent 50 cents we didn't have, so we have a surplus of 50 cents" NO YOU SPENT FIFTY CENTS YOU DO NOT HAVE.
"very few people "need" a 500HP Corvette or a 400HP pickup truck"
Using this logic, I believe very few people need to use the Internet. Think of the reduced carbon footprint if we eliminated all those data centers. Speaking of "need" do we really need sex? What about alcohol? I certainly don't "need" people lecturing me about what I "need" "for my own good". In my experience the people lecturing me about what I "need" never seem to apply this logic to themselves, only others.
Thank You. One would think they could dip into the bribe fund and pay a marketing agency to come up with a set of colors, fonts, logo, slogan, and theme song that wasn't so over the top PATHETIC as what we've seen the last few years....
It's pretty much beyond the pale given that the new "Better Pizza, Better Ingredients" slogan and associated press is exactly the platform known as "Make America Great Again"
Medicare billing, thanks to the aforementioned insane layers of regulatory complexity, is so complicated one has to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to figure out how to quote a plan, let alone process a payment.
In the 80's some idiot in Washington decided that the Doctor's can't work for the hospitals anymore, they had to become "independent contractors" and an entire industry to bill Doctor services was created overnight. I know, I capitalized on this market and wrote software for it.
Due to the bribery system that runs everything on planet earth, big regulations create huge monopolistic enterprises that are better equipped to pay these bribes and therefore influence legislation. The larger you get, the more inefficient you become, so you hire smaller firms to do what you can't do efficiently. This gave rise to the TPA (Third Party Claims Administrator) and a host of other service businesses.
The ever benevolent government decided that you can't open an aspirin bottle and give a patient an aspirin, oh the horror. So each aspirin in the hospital is individually wrapped, and therefore costs more. How did this happen? The government capped the margin to "reduce costs". A bottle of aspirin costs $7.99 if the margin is capped at 10% you can mark that up.79 which for a 50 aspirin bottle is.0158 cents per aspirin but an individually wrapped aspirin is $1.00 so you can mark each one up ten cents. That's the idiocy of "One size fits all" federal mandated price controls.
It used to be that doctors just worked for hospitals and filled out simple time cards and you got charged for what hospital services you used. But no, that couldn't be properly regulated, and because of the politicians allowing malpractice to get out of control hospitals had to limit their liability as it's the doctor that gets sued... So they fired them all, and everything as a diagnostic code and a cap on what will be paid for that code, leading to utilization and review which for all practical purposes are death panels. They meet ever week and say "Hey the patient in room 214 has an ICD 555-772 they have been here 3 days we only get paid for 3 kick grandma out on the street. Never mind that grandma isn't healing as fast as the industry has decided she should. This led to way too many codes, and so things get mis-coded all the time, and of course as we learn more we come up with new things.
I could go on, and on, and on, and on. The biggest problem with health care costs is 1) Bribes paid to insurance companies in return for contributions and 2) Provider billing practices that have grown out of an over-regulated and over-sued industry and no the solution is not yet another fucking thousand page bill nobody understands implemented by civil servants who don't give a crap... and it's not single payer either that will be worse, go somewhere that has it and live there for a while. The whole industry is designed - with help from the government at every turn - to ensure that you, the patient, have no clue how anything is priced. Which means you can't shop around, and make informed decisions, and there is ZERO INCENTIVE for anyone to make it the least bit competitive.
What we need to do is start over, which could very well happen when the ACA completely collapses. But given the greed in DC it's not likely.
No, no, no that's not how the system works! The government forces you to loan money to people who can't pay it back, and when you get out from under it by selling it to some sucker, you get called a racist, or worse. Gee, where have you been the last twenty years? Oh, and I forgot, it's never the government's fault, not ever.
If you confiscated all the wealth of the top 1% it would fund the government for about a week and a half. Then what?
So you want to kill the means of production, and centralize it in the government. I think you need to take a trip to Russia, or Eastern Europe, and ask the people there how that system worked.
Eliminate the military. Awesome! When you are a slave or someone else that conquered you I'm sure they will let you complain about how unfair that all is.
I guess you've never heard of ICD, and it's current flavor ICD-10? Otherwise you wouldn't start with the premise that "Hospitals just make up their charges"
All the crazy bullshit baked into the system was, for the most part, put there by well intentioned regulators not evil people who wanted to steal your money. I lived through this, and watched it happen starting in the early eighties. Heath Care and Insurance are completely fucked up in America because of endless thousand page bills and armies of regulators piling one crazy requirement on top of another one.
And nobody wants it to end, because every one of those thousand page bills, "reforms", and "mandates" paid off some person who gave money to the politician... The cornhusker kickback. The Alaska payoff, etc. etc. etc. Just look at the current debacle for proof of this. Why do you think they want Single payer? They can payoff every contributor five times over if they control all of it. And who will get screwed? YOU. The Republicans are against it because they will loose all their bribes. It really is as simple as that.
Between 2013 and 2014, according to the IEA, global energy demand grew by 2,000 terawatt-hours. In order to meet this demand, we would need to build 350,000 new 2-megawatt wind turbines – 50% more turbines than have been built globally since the year 2000. Wind power is not the future; there is simply not enough extraditable energy. Unfortunately, better technology cannot overcome this problem: turbines can become only so efficient due to the Betz limit, which specifies how much energy can be extracted from a moving fluid.
But Elon Musk, who's claim to fame is that he has fleeced more taxpayer dollars than any person in the history of mankind said it, so it must be true, right?
The "Ghost Towns" in the West dried up because the mine quit producing. Fact is, a large number of people prefer living in small towns, and don't appreciate city folk lecturing them on how "their lifestyle is not sustainable".
For many of us, being packed in cities where you are wholly dependent on carbon eating transportation to bring you food every day is "not sustainable". It also gives you funny ideas about how people should live, and what "values" are most cherished.
It's the same as Russia-Gate. Every day, we are breathlessly told THIS IS IT! THIS IS THE SMOKING GUN! WE HAVE HIM!
With the renewable crowd it's exactly the same. We'll all be driving electric cars in ______! We'll be on all renewable by ________! We won't need oil by ________! We're at PEAK OIL!
Same with the environmentalists. By ______ we'll be dead! The Earth will be superheated in __________ years. The oceans will be devoid of life by _______.
After years and years and years of these of claims none of them have happened. Which is proof that these groups of people here have no memory and oh so desperately WANT TO BELIEVE. Now it seems Morgan Stanley wants you to INVEST. Their motives are pure.
Kill all the subsidies for all of this crap and see what happens...
Slashdot Mirror
This argument has worked for every political policy for 100 years...
1099 Employees charge about the same rate as W-2 labor + burden. That's because they get double hit with FICA. Contracting houses often charge MORE because the sales person gets a spiff on each hour, often as much as $5 to $10.
Contractors don't get paid to sit on the bench, whereas W-2 people do. So depending on the project you pick the staff that gets it done on time and within the customer's budget, and if it's short duration with little downstream maintenance you hire contractors if your plate is full.
So before you start the "evil corporations oppressing the masses" crap take a look at reality. I hire developers and run jobs. Do you?
So if you ran a business, you'd opt for the highest cost labor you could find, the most expensive copier, serve world class food in your cafeteria, have the swankiest offices, and use only full time employees with maximum benefits for every job?
No, you wouldn't. Because you'd go out of business almost immediately. You can't seem to grasp that sub-contracting a cafeteria actually makes sense, because Facebook isn't in the cafeteria business, and would probably suck at it. There's nothing "skirting employment laws" about it. And besides, nobody is forcing the employees to eat lunch there...
There was nothing at all wrong with the electoral college until November 9, 2016. Strange coincidence, isn't it?
The government has never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever SAVED on ANYTHING ever.
In government speak a "surplus" or a "saving" is "We planned to spend $1 we didn't have, but only spent 50 cents we didn't have, so we have a surplus of 50 cents" NO YOU SPENT FIFTY CENTS YOU DO NOT HAVE.
This is a piece of clickbait, because there is no TAX PLAN at all if you read the source it's based on nothing.
It depends on where you live. $150K a year in San Francisco is barely above the poverty level...
You need to get out and do some real travelling. Our infrastructure is superb compared to most of the world....
https://fee.org/articles/the-m...
http://www.nationalreview.com/...
https://sweden.se/culture-trad...
https://stream.org/5-myths-nor...
It's mostly a myth.
"very few people "need" a 500HP Corvette or a 400HP pickup truck"
Using this logic, I believe very few people need to use the Internet. Think of the reduced carbon footprint if we eliminated all those data centers. Speaking of "need" do we really need sex? What about alcohol? I certainly don't "need" people lecturing me about what I "need" "for my own good". In my experience the people lecturing me about what I "need" never seem to apply this logic to themselves, only others.
Thank You. One would think they could dip into the bribe fund and pay a marketing agency to come up with a set of colors, fonts, logo, slogan, and theme song that wasn't so over the top PATHETIC as what we've seen the last few years....
Hey it worked for the housing crisis, didn't it?
It's pretty much beyond the pale given that the new "Better Pizza, Better Ingredients" slogan and associated press is exactly the platform known as "Make America Great Again"
Look, squirrel!
Total 2016 vehicle sales in U.S.17.55 million. Tesla sales in U.S. 45,000 units. What, exactly, is a "small niche" to you?
Sources: http://www.latimes.com/busines... and http://insideevs.com/tesla-mot...
There's a medical billing industry because:
.79 which for a 50 aspirin bottle is .0158 cents per aspirin but an individually wrapped aspirin is $1.00 so you can mark each one up ten cents. That's the idiocy of "One size fits all" federal mandated price controls.
Medicare billing, thanks to the aforementioned insane layers of regulatory complexity, is so complicated one has to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to figure out how to quote a plan, let alone process a payment.
In the 80's some idiot in Washington decided that the Doctor's can't work for the hospitals anymore, they had to become "independent contractors" and an entire industry to bill Doctor services was created overnight. I know, I capitalized on this market and wrote software for it.
Due to the bribery system that runs everything on planet earth, big regulations create huge monopolistic enterprises that are better equipped to pay these bribes and therefore influence legislation. The larger you get, the more inefficient you become, so you hire smaller firms to do what you can't do efficiently. This gave rise to the TPA (Third Party Claims Administrator) and a host of other service businesses.
The ever benevolent government decided that you can't open an aspirin bottle and give a patient an aspirin, oh the horror. So each aspirin in the hospital is individually wrapped, and therefore costs more. How did this happen? The government capped the margin to "reduce costs". A bottle of aspirin costs $7.99 if the margin is capped at 10% you can mark that up
It used to be that doctors just worked for hospitals and filled out simple time cards and you got charged for what hospital services you used. But no, that couldn't be properly regulated, and because of the politicians allowing malpractice to get out of control hospitals had to limit their liability as it's the doctor that gets sued... So they fired them all, and everything as a diagnostic code and a cap on what will be paid for that code, leading to utilization and review which for all practical purposes are death panels. They meet ever week and say "Hey the patient in room 214 has an ICD 555-772 they have been here 3 days we only get paid for 3 kick grandma out on the street. Never mind that grandma isn't healing as fast as the industry has decided she should. This led to way too many codes, and so things get mis-coded all the time, and of course as we learn more we come up with new things.
I could go on, and on, and on, and on. The biggest problem with health care costs is 1) Bribes paid to insurance companies in return for contributions and 2) Provider billing practices that have grown out of an over-regulated and over-sued industry and no the solution is not yet another fucking thousand page bill nobody understands implemented by civil servants who don't give a crap... and it's not single payer either that will be worse, go somewhere that has it and live there for a while. The whole industry is designed - with help from the government at every turn - to ensure that you, the patient, have no clue how anything is priced. Which means you can't shop around, and make informed decisions, and there is ZERO INCENTIVE for anyone to make it the least bit competitive.
What we need to do is start over, which could very well happen when the ACA completely collapses. But given the greed in DC it's not likely.
No, no, no that's not how the system works! The government forces you to loan money to people who can't pay it back, and when you get out from under it by selling it to some sucker, you get called a racist, or worse. Gee, where have you been the last twenty years? Oh, and I forgot, it's never the government's fault, not ever.
"A corporation declares bankruptcy and it has virtually no effect. "
Please confirm you have no higher education. If you do, then I hope you didn't take out a loan to learn this.
If you confiscated all the wealth of the top 1% it would fund the government for about a week and a half. Then what?
So you want to kill the means of production, and centralize it in the government. I think you need to take a trip to Russia, or Eastern Europe, and ask the people there how that system worked.
Eliminate the military. Awesome! When you are a slave or someone else that conquered you I'm sure they will let you complain about how unfair that all is.
Thanks. Not the least bit surprised. Get into management this kind of thing is every day...
I guess you've never heard of ICD, and it's current flavor ICD-10? Otherwise you wouldn't start with the premise that "Hospitals just make up their charges"
All the crazy bullshit baked into the system was, for the most part, put there by well intentioned regulators not evil people who wanted to steal your money. I lived through this, and watched it happen starting in the early eighties. Heath Care and Insurance are completely fucked up in America because of endless thousand page bills and armies of regulators piling one crazy requirement on top of another one.
And nobody wants it to end, because every one of those thousand page bills, "reforms", and "mandates" paid off some person who gave money to the politician... The cornhusker kickback. The Alaska payoff, etc. etc. etc. Just look at the current debacle for proof of this. Why do you think they want Single payer? They can payoff every contributor five times over if they control all of it. And who will get screwed? YOU. The Republicans are against it because they will loose all their bribes. It really is as simple as that.
Between 2013 and 2014, according to the IEA, global energy demand grew by 2,000 terawatt-hours. In order to meet this demand, we would need to build 350,000 new 2-megawatt wind turbines – 50% more turbines than have been built globally since the year 2000. Wind power is not the future; there is simply not enough extraditable energy. Unfortunately, better technology cannot overcome this problem: turbines can become only so efficient due to the Betz limit, which specifies how much energy can be extracted from a moving fluid.
https://www.nationaleconomicse...
https://www.spectator.co.uk/20...
Wind is not the answer.
The story is a rip off of this http://www.businessinsider.com...
The problem with this theory is that electricity is only 20% of mankinds energy consumption https://www.iea.org/publicatio... each panel requires 20 grams of silver to build https://www.usatoday.com/story... so to build this solar farm would require 7.2 times all the silver on planet earth.... https://www.nationaleconomicse...
But Elon Musk, who's claim to fame is that he has fleeced more taxpayer dollars than any person in the history of mankind said it, so it must be true, right?
The "Ghost Towns" in the West dried up because the mine quit producing. Fact is, a large number of people prefer living in small towns, and don't appreciate city folk lecturing them on how "their lifestyle is not sustainable".
For many of us, being packed in cities where you are wholly dependent on carbon eating transportation to bring you food every day is "not sustainable". It also gives you funny ideas about how people should live, and what "values" are most cherished.
I've been reading slashdot for a very long time, have you?
I have a sense of humor, do you?
I think I know the answer here.
It's the same as Russia-Gate. Every day, we are breathlessly told THIS IS IT! THIS IS THE SMOKING GUN! WE HAVE HIM!
With the renewable crowd it's exactly the same. We'll all be driving electric cars in ______! We'll be on all renewable by ________! We won't need oil by ________! We're at PEAK OIL!
Same with the environmentalists. By ______ we'll be dead! The Earth will be superheated in __________ years. The oceans will be devoid of life by _______.
After years and years and years of these of claims none of them have happened. Which is proof that these groups of people here have no memory and oh so desperately WANT TO BELIEVE. Now it seems Morgan Stanley wants you to INVEST. Their motives are pure.
Kill all the subsidies for all of this crap and see what happens...