having a lock on my door is stupid because somebody can just kick in a window
Personally, I think it'd be more along the lines of putting a X09 lock on your door.
Even a fairly cheap lock is going to hold up better than a window - of course, like different methods compromising a computer network, there are variances in detectability, cost, danger, etc... Opening a door is cheap, bypassing a handle-lock takes more skill but is generally hard to detect, a deadbolt even more expensive. Long before you get anywhere near the X09, kicking in the door or a window becomes the obvious solution.
Besides, with the X09 you might find your family members not locking it because it's too much of a pain to open again - resulting in LESS security. I've seen it with passwords - they jacked the password requirements way up and the rate of writing them down skyrocketed - that's not more secure.
that someone can get over your security measures with effort is not an argument against the lowest level of security. the lowest level security practices always has value: against casual transgressions
I think that the point he was trying to make is that you can't make any one feature of your program 100%, so just do the best you can given the budget - and that's generally by shoring up your deficiencies rather than building on your strong points.
Jet fuel is actually pretty cheap. It's mostly other stuff that makes flying so expensive -
But, especially for major airports and longer distances, flying is often the cheapest option. I'm getting a round trip flight for myself that only cost $120 - it'd cost more in gas for that to drive to where I'm going.
prepared to have a big nuclear power plant coming to a neighborhood near you.
Where do I sign up?;)
By all accounts, even considering transmission losses and such, even coal power is cleaner than gasoline engines, and has fewer carbon emissions.
But yeah, if this keeps up we're going to need to build a lot more power plants. And I'd like to see them be cogeneration type plants - capable of exploiting even what's currently waste heat.
Batteries, especially 'bazillions' of them like what would be in electric cars would get recycled much like the lead-acid batteries currently are.
The only reason NiCD and NiMH end up in landfills so much is that they're used and disposed of at home - most people can't be bothered to take them in somewhere to be reycled. Same with liIon.
An electric car battery, even a hybrid battery is such that you're taking it to a store to be replaced - and they'll have enough to haul them over to the recycling facility that'll pay money for them in a truck big enough to at least break even.
1. Rent a car for said road trip out of the savings on $4+/gallon gasoline - for a road trip diesel will probably make more sense than gasoline. Diesel engine vehicles can beat hybrids on highway milage. 2. Fly or take a train instead 3. Rent a trailor with a generator(maybe a small, high efficiency diesel?)
In the longer run, it shouldn't take too much work to install charging booths at restraunts. With a 300 mile range at something like 75mph, you can schedule chargings around reasonable meal stops. Stuff like drive from 8 to noon, eat, 1-5, eat, 5-9, get a motel(and plug in). Drive before breakfast for even more charge, but then you'd also be busting recommended driving times(over 12 hours total on the road in a day).
"Since you reportedly can account for all the vehicle keys, the forensic information suggests that the loss did not occur as reported," the company wrote to Wassef, denying his claim. The barely hidden subtext: Wassef was lying."
My first thought: What about systems that don't require the engine to be one - such as a tow truck? My grandfather says he once played a 'prank' on a police officer when he was working as a wrecker - Simply hooked up the police car and left with it, putting it in the police lot.
Of course - such action is mentioned by the writer for his own stolen vehicle incident. And they've caught people cloning keys over in europe - so we know it can be done. Personally, any time they tried to tell me my vehicle couldn't be stolen because of the transponder, I'd hand that article to my lawyer to present to the judge/jury - that YES, these keys can be bypassed or stolen without the owner's knowledge.
I'm getting the sense that you were talking about rolling over a 401k or some other retirement vehicle into an IRA where I was specifically thinking about the Roth Conversions that netted the taxes that where differed over a period of a few years.
Ah... Now I get you - the conversion of a deferred tax IRA/401k into a post tax Roth IRA.
Still, what I meant by 'more or less even' for the government is a lot like a casino's income - Unless they do something strange*, you can expect about the same amount of money to be converted each year. It might be a large sum by the individual's standards, but the government is HUGE - and gets more money from Exxon ($30B) than the lower half of taxpayers.
Sure. But in a generation or two, that would be removed.
I agree with you that if they were legal, that they'd inevitably start asking for more wages, plus the employer would have to pay the taxes, provide benefits, etc... It probably wouldn't take more than a generation at most.
Hike up the penalties, use the penalty money to hire more enforcers, basically creating an organic system that makes hiring illegally not worth it even for small time operations - large corporations just can't hide that sort of stuff. While abuses happen, they're not in the corporate handbook, instead generally undertaken by a local manager.
And I'm not just talking about illegal immigrants here, but also people working 'under the table', where they're not officially employed - thus no SS taxes, no income taxes reported, etc... Fairly frequent for people on the dole - they get more spending cash and still have no income to disqualify them from welfare payments.
Sure. and I don't think I could agree more.
The problem with taxing the 'Rich', as I've seen it, is that they're precisely the group most capable of avoiding paying taxes, utilizing every loophole in existance, and creating their own if they have to. Another problem, as I see it, is that there's a disconnect - We tax based on income, but 'rich' and 'poor' is more a statement of value. I'd consider somebody with a million or so in liquid assetts being pretty rich - but if I had a million in my mutual funds, I'd also be retired, and have an income of only ~$50k/year. Of course, I loved it when one politician talked about 'taxing the rich', 'I'm going to tax the rich', etc... If you dug into his policies, he apparently defined rich as 'A family making more than $60k/year'.
*like offer a reduced tax rate for such a transfer - this would give people a obvious route to more money/less taxes in the future, so they'd roll them over left and right.
Personally, unless they do something more extreme than the XP service pack 2 updates, I figure I'll probably try to stick with XP and skip Vista in favor of the next OS, leaving it in the dust heap like millenium.
Assuming I stick with a MS OS, of course. I like gaming too much at the moment to NOT have a microsoft OS.
It's probably a sign of how much MORE problems they're having with corporate customers and Vista - XP, while it would certainly have the occasional problem that 2000 didn't, it was rare enough to be a special case.
That they're offering it mainstream like this indicates to me that you have double digit percentages of customers requesting sticking with XP.
With this, you simply have to think about the standard 4 year replacement schedule - most businesses and homes replace their computer every four years. It used to be 3, but has slowed down a bit.
Going by that, you're going to have better than 50% penetration of at least windows machines in 3 years by essentially forbidding sales of XP on new machines.
It's kinda like the switch to digital television - except the replacement rate for a TV is more like a decade, so if they'd started requiring a digital tuner in 2003 instead of 2006(or so), you'd have half as many TV's requiring a converter box.
Why at the airport? Why not a mall on black friday? Etc...
From what I've seen of the proposals, it'd take an almost obscenely big bomb to knock most maglevs off their track. Blowing up most bombs on the train would only result in injuries/deaths from the explosion - in that car and maybe the neighboring ones.
Given that the passenger density on a train is most likely much less than an aircraft, you're back to the problem that there's simply much easier and higher value targets.
The effect is that it only collects taxes deferred from the original earnings date before the deferral is up but instead of spreading it out over the lifespan of the payout, it consolidated them into one lump payment.
Huh? A traditional IRA is indeed tax deferred, but what happens is that you pay taxes on your withdrawals once you've retired - and those are mandatory. Withdraw $30k from your IRA after you're 65 and you have to pay income taxes on $30k of income.
Ultimately it should be more or less even.
Saving money is the only motivator that makes it worth risking legal ramifications for their hire. If we made them all legal, they would be fired and replaces by illegals in a heart beat because they would want a decent wage for the work.
Even if it was legal, so many of what are currently illegals are just plain used to lower standards of living that they'd still work cheaper, on average, than US Citizens are willing to work. I'm talking about stuff like putting 3 families in a 3 bedroom house, having a dozen men in a single house, etc...
I think the immigration system needs to be fixed, along with real border security.
I don't know if I explained that right, but it is supposed to boil down to all costs, even taxes, as passed to the customers.
Substitute 'Businesses' for 'Rich' and your explanation makes much more sense. In addition, business income taxes tend to disfavor domestic companies over foreign ones if the tax rate is lower overseas - due to various trade agreements a business can import goods without paying significant tariffs - one more reason to outsource, basically.
As an example of how taxing the rich tends to hurt the poor and middle class - at one time the US passed a law placing a huge 'sin tax' on yachts. It actually REDUCED tax income because the rich simply shifted to buying yachts from out of country, putting large number of yacht builders in the USA out of work. A rich person might not worry about the cost of a steak - but a multi-million dollar yacht is a different matter.
Agreed, though the way I was thinking of was to simply not increase funding - while the growing economy keeps growing, eventually balancing the budget pretty much by default, as happened in the Clinton years - there was so much fighting that spending bills with existing spending barely got passed.
Besides, done right IRA rollovers don't have any taxes charged.
find extra taxable income that pays the differences in a balanced budget compared to the current deficit.
Hmmm... How about a 100% tax on illegal labor?;)
Seriously, ANY tax is going to suck money out of the economy, the goal is to do it in the least economically damaging way.
Given our budget deficits, I wonder if that wouldn't be a good thing by default.
IE make it the default that agencies and such don't get raises. They eventually have to economize and projects that are of marginal use sort of fade away. IE No hires for a long time, eventually people start retiring and aren't replaced, etc...
Of course, I'd love to see a balanced budget - but economically realize that it isn't going to happen in a year at this point.
Can't remember which one, just that it's a common(and cheap) one.
For example, meloxicam (an NSAID) is available as a generic tablet in Canada and can be halved or quartered and given to a dog for about a tenth the price of the liquid that is meant to be used for canines.
1: You're talking about prescription drugs in CANADA - which has country level drug price controls through bargaining(IE you'll charge X, or your drug won't be available in Canada). 2: Tablet vs liquid - The case for my mom and the dog was identical looking pills.
Why a special liquid form for dogs? My family has never had a problem giving pills to our dogs. Usually stick them in a bit of hotdog. Toss them the one with a pill, then go to toss another piece - they'll swallow the first to be ready for the second, and that's for the ones that wouldn't just swallow it straight.
You changed the numbers by changing the scenario. I was talking about something about something that the price of drugs were independent of. You linked them.
I was pointing out a scenario where there was a higher initial cost per person helped, in exchange for helping more people in the future.
Any profit goes to the shareholders, who spend it on anything they wish, real estate, cars, education for their kids, etc.
Yes, thus allowing them to have a life, thus encouraging the shareholders and others to continue to invest in the drug companies and enable more drug research. More research = more drugs = more good(eventually).
In a more general discussion, the $100 stands for the price of generics, whereas the $1000 stands for the branded price.
Or, the $1000 price including capital costs such as research and approval costs, while the $100 doesn't.
10 new viagra type drugs is not better than 1 new AIDS drug.
Trick is, I remember it being stated that the drug being researched (before it became Viagra) wasn't originally intended for male impotence.
the issue is to not allow widespread patent licensing on drugs which have already been researched to heavily distort the fair market prices.
And to think that I've proposed having a public research fund to help study and gain approval for chemicals that aren't patentable as drugs for treating various conditions.
Drug companies go after drugs that they can patent, as there's not enough money to make back FDA approval expenses on 'instant generics'. In addition, I've thought that public research generally didn't find drugs for treatment, instead finding some marker or trigger that the drug companies then use to search for a drug to modify that response in the appropriate way.
Let's look at it a different way: How many drugs have been developed and brought to market in Europe in the last 10 years? How many have been developed and brought to market in the USA?
That really doesn't matter, because when they need it, they won't be able to afford the care.
I did state that they were being stupid not having insurance didn't I?
*Afford* means being able to bear the cost without serious financial consequences. It is often possible to *get* the care anyway by making radical decisions about expenditures, selling some assets or getting into debt for several years.
A lot of people who have paid off their cars don't get full coverage, just liability. They're effectively self-insuring themselves. Same thing with a paid off house or medical bills - the potential liability is simply much higher. Given the way insurance works, on average you're better off self-insuring than getting coverage - For a risk that's 10% per year of causing $1k damage, insurance, for example, might be $110-$125 per year. Toss the 'expected' average cost of $100 into an investment account, you'll be, on average, better off.
This is WORSE in the case of healthy types without kids(or possibility of same). Their premiums are probably up over the 400% range(IE every dollar they invest into a health care plan they can expect to see $1 back).
Of course most care such as for broken limbs is really not an issue of drug comany pricing,
Except for his painkillers and the antibiotics and such. They gave him the antibiotics because a broken bone, even a simple one, leaves injuries relatively ripe for infection. Those he had a harder time bargaining them down, but the drugs were common generics, so even paying cash they weren't too expensive. I listed it because it's the only uninsured medical care I'm aware of in my own family.
and you're right to point out that health care is a much bigger and more complex topic than the one in this slashdot story.
Like many Democrats, I feel that our current health care system is seriously broken. I just disagree with them on the correct solutions. My idea isn't to go to some national healthcare system, as I think our government would seriously screw it up. For one thing we already have a problem with people showing up at the emergency room for non-emergency illnesses. Most of the current crop of health care plans are too complicated and interfere far too much.
If a person has to pay for their own healthcare for the most part, we might see some conservation of resources. Combine that with clinics and hospitals that don't normally need to dicker with the insurance companies for payment, which can result in massive savings - paperwork and billing are some of the largest expenses in health care today in the USA, and it shouldn't be. The expenses are because the insurance companies try to get out of paying, the clinic needs money, and the consumer doesn't care because his copay is the same regardless.
My idea is something along these lines: 0-$5k health care costs in a year - paid by the consumer $5k - $500k - paid by an actual insurance company, as exceeding $5k in health care expenses in a year indicates a problem. $500k and up - government picks up the tab, sort of as a 'personal disaster' or disability clause. I don't see somebody with $500k of medical expenses in a single year being able to work most of the time. It also allows the insurance companies to not have to worry about budget busters. The upper cap could as easily be $1M, for example. Somebody could pick a $10k annual deductible to save money if they want to.
The actual value ranges are only approximate and subject to change with some directed surveys and research - I figure a 90-9-1 schedule - 90% of people each year pay for all their own care, 9% use insurance, 1% hit the government up. Again, subject to modification and tweaking based on actual statistics and actuarial tables.
Keeping in mind that the law is in Italian, if 'degraded' is an accurate translation than any degredation could meet the requirements - even if imperceptable. Like a radio signal, for example.
In audio and video, especially in pre-processing/recording you record much more information than what's perceptable, gives you more room for editing before artifacting becomes perceptable.
Think of it like amplifying a quiet instrument so you can hear tones that would otherwise be imperceptable, or zooming in on an image to display only a part of it during a shot. What would be thrown out by 'final product' standards are kept 'just in case' by authoring standards.
Maybe not hear, but our hearing is not the sole sense that detects airwave patterns, especially the deeper ones.
Going to a 32bit 48khz sample rate might help a few golden ears, as I understand the CD standard was something of a compromise. Still, you need a reallly good sound system to be able to tell the difference.
If you look at what companies and people are paying to get health 'insurance'*, they can actually pay for quite a bit of medical care out of their own pocket before they're worse off than being insured.
This is why I like the idea of the high deductible insurance plans combined with a tax-advantaged savings account for healthcare expenses.
It gives people more of a reason to control their healthcare expenses/spending again.
My brother broke his arm when he was without insurance(was in the transition period) - got many of the procedures at 50% off the insurance rate because he was willing to pay cash. Ended up costing him LESS than a month's premium would have cost.
Then there was the Reader's digest article of a doctor who, fed up with the stresses of working in a clinic, quit, started working out of her home, running a part-time doctors office - she didn't accept insurance(one of the bigger headaches), but many people WITH insurance would go to see her as her rates were lower than many deductables, and she ended up with something like 80% of the income she had while working twice as many hours in the clinic.
Our current healthcare system is in part a large reason for the high healthcare costs. It can be done much cheaper - and I'm opposed to national healthcare because I see it following the Canada/England model(delays, reduced service, non-availability, no significant savings, etc...) more so than the more successful general european model.
Have you also dug into the studies, where you can find out that most of them are healthy sub-30 types without children who have chosen to be without healthcare?
Not smart, in my opinion, but in todays society mostly a good deal - they pay far more in insurance premiums than they get out of it. You need insurance, but most health care plans are overkill.
I was pointing out that investing in the future increases future returns. In this case, I was making an analogy - the profit scenario was like investing an endowment to get future returns, ultimately helping more people.
Requiring charging the minimum prices for drugs is the equivalent of 'spend everything now' scenario.
Allowing profit is the equivalent of 'permanent endowment' scenario.
Oh, and it looks like you're forgetting that drugs aren't free to produce. So you're not going to generally see a course selling for $1k have the option to sell at $100 - production costs would be too high. Remember that generics are the equivalent of known technology, having had a lot of time to develop cost saving measures.
In this case, the core argument that we were on is that new drugs are good for society. Not magical bullets by any means, but which would be the better scenario: Allow profits on drugs and get 10 new drugs a year approved, or not allow profits and get 1?
In your case, you take the $1M and use it to help a thousand families through a $1k financial difficulty.
He takes it, invests it in a bank and helps fifty families the next year. And the next year. And the year after that, etc...
It takes him 20 years to match the number of families you helped. But after 20 years, his foundation is still helping people from his donation, while your foundation has been broke for the last 20 years.
In the LONG RUN, more drugs are better than fewer drugs. In time, they all end up being cheapish generics anyways.
So, while the profit motive might mean fewer people are helped today, it does mean that more people can be helped decades down the road because there's dozens more generic drugs available.
It's along the lines of 'help 100 fewer people today in order to help 500 more 20 years in the future'.
I never said the system is perfect. What makes my little scenario work, realistically, is that the people who can afford the high price vastly outnumber those that can't afford the treatment. Remember, being able to afford the treatment pretty much means 'has healthcare, a job, decent credit, or is on medicare or other welfare type system'.
Those that truly can't afford to pay the price are actually fairly rare, and the medical industry has managed to create a fair amount of price differentation.
At least in the USA, the type L and LLs are actually fairly rare. Given the tax benefits, you'd probably need to sell at least 6 treatments for every charity case for the deduction for the charity to help. Given price variations and such, you can accept that the occasional person doesn't get treatment(as no system is perfect), and that the occasional person who could pay doesn't(again, no system is perfect), since the selling at $100 and giving away bunches of free medicine for the deductions allows you to: 1. Get a bunch of goodwill for being 'nice'. (even though you're really a sociopath looking at the bottom line) 2. Charge more for the product, on average 3. Get a rebate even on the products you don't sell at full price
Slashdot Mirror
having a lock on my door is stupid because somebody can just kick in a window
Personally, I think it'd be more along the lines of putting a X09 lock on your door.
Even a fairly cheap lock is going to hold up better than a window - of course, like different methods compromising a computer network, there are variances in detectability, cost, danger, etc... Opening a door is cheap, bypassing a handle-lock takes more skill but is generally hard to detect, a deadbolt even more expensive. Long before you get anywhere near the X09, kicking in the door or a window becomes the obvious solution.
Besides, with the X09 you might find your family members not locking it because it's too much of a pain to open again - resulting in LESS security. I've seen it with passwords - they jacked the password requirements way up and the rate of writing them down skyrocketed - that's not more secure.
that someone can get over your security measures with effort is not an argument against the lowest level of security. the lowest level security practices always has value: against casual transgressions
I think that the point he was trying to make is that you can't make any one feature of your program 100%, so just do the best you can given the budget - and that's generally by shoring up your deficiencies rather than building on your strong points.
Jet fuel is actually pretty cheap. It's mostly other stuff that makes flying so expensive -
But, especially for major airports and longer distances, flying is often the cheapest option. I'm getting a round trip flight for myself that only cost $120 - it'd cost more in gas for that to drive to where I'm going.
prepared to have a big nuclear power plant coming to a neighborhood near you.
;)
Where do I sign up?
By all accounts, even considering transmission losses and such, even coal power is cleaner than gasoline engines, and has fewer carbon emissions.
But yeah, if this keeps up we're going to need to build a lot more power plants. And I'd like to see them be cogeneration type plants - capable of exploiting even what's currently waste heat.
Batteries, especially 'bazillions' of them like what would be in electric cars would get recycled much like the lead-acid batteries currently are.
The only reason NiCD and NiMH end up in landfills so much is that they're used and disposed of at home - most people can't be bothered to take them in somewhere to be reycled. Same with liIon.
An electric car battery, even a hybrid battery is such that you're taking it to a store to be replaced - and they'll have enough to haul them over to the recycling facility that'll pay money for them in a truck big enough to at least break even.
Hmmm...
1. Rent a car for said road trip out of the savings on $4+/gallon gasoline - for a road trip diesel will probably make more sense than gasoline. Diesel engine vehicles can beat hybrids on highway milage.
2. Fly or take a train instead
3. Rent a trailor with a generator(maybe a small, high efficiency diesel?)
In the longer run, it shouldn't take too much work to install charging booths at restraunts. With a 300 mile range at something like 75mph, you can schedule chargings around reasonable meal stops. Stuff like drive from 8 to noon, eat, 1-5, eat, 5-9, get a motel(and plug in). Drive before breakfast for even more charge, but then you'd also be busting recommended driving times(over 12 hours total on the road in a day).
"Since you reportedly can account for all the vehicle keys, the forensic information suggests that the loss did not occur as reported," the company wrote to Wassef, denying his claim. The barely hidden subtext: Wassef was lying."
My first thought: What about systems that don't require the engine to be one - such as a tow truck? My grandfather says he once played a 'prank' on a police officer when he was working as a wrecker - Simply hooked up the police car and left with it, putting it in the police lot.
Of course - such action is mentioned by the writer for his own stolen vehicle incident. And they've caught people cloning keys over in europe - so we know it can be done. Personally, any time they tried to tell me my vehicle couldn't be stolen because of the transponder, I'd hand that article to my lawyer to present to the judge/jury - that YES, these keys can be bypassed or stolen without the owner's knowledge.
I'm getting the sense that you were talking about rolling over a 401k or some other retirement vehicle into an IRA where I was specifically thinking about the Roth Conversions that netted the taxes that where differed over a period of a few years.
Ah... Now I get you - the conversion of a deferred tax IRA/401k into a post tax Roth IRA.
Still, what I meant by 'more or less even' for the government is a lot like a casino's income - Unless they do something strange*, you can expect about the same amount of money to be converted each year. It might be a large sum by the individual's standards, but the government is HUGE - and gets more money from Exxon ($30B) than the lower half of taxpayers.
Sure. But in a generation or two, that would be removed.
I agree with you that if they were legal, that they'd inevitably start asking for more wages, plus the employer would have to pay the taxes, provide benefits, etc... It probably wouldn't take more than a generation at most.
Hike up the penalties, use the penalty money to hire more enforcers, basically creating an organic system that makes hiring illegally not worth it even for small time operations - large corporations just can't hide that sort of stuff. While abuses happen, they're not in the corporate handbook, instead generally undertaken by a local manager.
And I'm not just talking about illegal immigrants here, but also people working 'under the table', where they're not officially employed - thus no SS taxes, no income taxes reported, etc... Fairly frequent for people on the dole - they get more spending cash and still have no income to disqualify them from welfare payments.
Sure. and I don't think I could agree more.
The problem with taxing the 'Rich', as I've seen it, is that they're precisely the group most capable of avoiding paying taxes, utilizing every loophole in existance, and creating their own if they have to. Another problem, as I see it, is that there's a disconnect - We tax based on income, but 'rich' and 'poor' is more a statement of value. I'd consider somebody with a million or so in liquid assetts being pretty rich - but if I had a million in my mutual funds, I'd also be retired, and have an income of only ~$50k/year. Of course, I loved it when one politician talked about 'taxing the rich', 'I'm going to tax the rich', etc... If you dug into his policies, he apparently defined rich as 'A family making more than $60k/year'.
*like offer a reduced tax rate for such a transfer - this would give people a obvious route to more money/less taxes in the future, so they'd roll them over left and right.
You might think it looks ancient, but even today one of the first things I do on a vista box is change the theme to 'windows classic'.
I like the new start menu options, but that's about it.
Personally, unless they do something more extreme than the XP service pack 2 updates, I figure I'll probably try to stick with XP and skip Vista in favor of the next OS, leaving it in the dust heap like millenium.
Assuming I stick with a MS OS, of course. I like gaming too much at the moment to NOT have a microsoft OS.
It's probably a sign of how much MORE problems they're having with corporate customers and Vista - XP, while it would certainly have the occasional problem that 2000 didn't, it was rare enough to be a special case.
That they're offering it mainstream like this indicates to me that you have double digit percentages of customers requesting sticking with XP.
With this, you simply have to think about the standard 4 year replacement schedule - most businesses and homes replace their computer every four years. It used to be 3, but has slowed down a bit.
Going by that, you're going to have better than 50% penetration of at least windows machines in 3 years by essentially forbidding sales of XP on new machines.
It's kinda like the switch to digital television - except the replacement rate for a TV is more like a decade, so if they'd started requiring a digital tuner in 2003 instead of 2006(or so), you'd have half as many TV's requiring a converter box.
Why at the airport? Why not a mall on black friday? Etc...
From what I've seen of the proposals, it'd take an almost obscenely big bomb to knock most maglevs off their track. Blowing up most bombs on the train would only result in injuries/deaths from the explosion - in that car and maybe the neighboring ones.
Given that the passenger density on a train is most likely much less than an aircraft, you're back to the problem that there's simply much easier and higher value targets.
The effect is that it only collects taxes deferred from the original earnings date before the deferral is up but instead of spreading it out over the lifespan of the payout, it consolidated them into one lump payment.
Huh? A traditional IRA is indeed tax deferred, but what happens is that you pay taxes on your withdrawals once you've retired - and those are mandatory. Withdraw $30k from your IRA after you're 65 and you have to pay income taxes on $30k of income.
Ultimately it should be more or less even.
Saving money is the only motivator that makes it worth risking legal ramifications for their hire. If we made them all legal, they would be fired and replaces by illegals in a heart beat because they would want a decent wage for the work.
Even if it was legal, so many of what are currently illegals are just plain used to lower standards of living that they'd still work cheaper, on average, than US Citizens are willing to work. I'm talking about stuff like putting 3 families in a 3 bedroom house, having a dozen men in a single house, etc...
I think the immigration system needs to be fixed, along with real border security.
I don't know if I explained that right, but it is supposed to boil down to all costs, even taxes, as passed to the customers.
Substitute 'Businesses' for 'Rich' and your explanation makes much more sense. In addition, business income taxes tend to disfavor domestic companies over foreign ones if the tax rate is lower overseas - due to various trade agreements a business can import goods without paying significant tariffs - one more reason to outsource, basically.
As an example of how taxing the rich tends to hurt the poor and middle class - at one time the US passed a law placing a huge 'sin tax' on yachts. It actually REDUCED tax income because the rich simply shifted to buying yachts from out of country, putting large number of yacht builders in the USA out of work. A rich person might not worry about the cost of a steak - but a multi-million dollar yacht is a different matter.
Agreed, though the way I was thinking of was to simply not increase funding - while the growing economy keeps growing, eventually balancing the budget pretty much by default, as happened in the Clinton years - there was so much fighting that spending bills with existing spending barely got passed.
;)
Besides, done right IRA rollovers don't have any taxes charged.
find extra taxable income that pays the differences in a balanced budget compared to the current deficit.
Hmmm... How about a 100% tax on illegal labor?
Seriously, ANY tax is going to suck money out of the economy, the goal is to do it in the least economically damaging way.
Given our budget deficits, I wonder if that wouldn't be a good thing by default.
IE make it the default that agencies and such don't get raises. They eventually have to economize and projects that are of marginal use sort of fade away. IE No hires for a long time, eventually people start retiring and aren't replaced, etc...
Of course, I'd love to see a balanced budget - but economically realize that it isn't going to happen in a year at this point.
Can't remember which one, just that it's a common(and cheap) one.
For example, meloxicam (an NSAID) is available as a generic tablet in Canada and can be halved or quartered and given to a dog for about a tenth the price of the liquid that is meant to be used for canines.
1: You're talking about prescription drugs in CANADA - which has country level drug price controls through bargaining(IE you'll charge X, or your drug won't be available in Canada).
2: Tablet vs liquid - The case for my mom and the dog was identical looking pills.
Why a special liquid form for dogs? My family has never had a problem giving pills to our dogs. Usually stick them in a bit of hotdog. Toss them the one with a pill, then go to toss another piece - they'll swallow the first to be ready for the second, and that's for the ones that wouldn't just swallow it straight.
But it doesn't. The numbers I gave you show it.
You changed the numbers by changing the scenario. I was talking about something about something that the price of drugs were independent of. You linked them.
I was pointing out a scenario where there was a higher initial cost per person helped, in exchange for helping more people in the future.
Any profit goes to the shareholders, who spend it on anything they wish, real estate, cars, education for their kids, etc.
Yes, thus allowing them to have a life, thus encouraging the shareholders and others to continue to invest in the drug companies and enable more drug research. More research = more drugs = more good(eventually).
In a more general discussion, the $100 stands for the price of generics, whereas the $1000 stands for the branded price.
Or, the $1000 price including capital costs such as research and approval costs, while the $100 doesn't.
10 new viagra type drugs is not better than 1 new AIDS drug.
Trick is, I remember it being stated that the drug being researched (before it became Viagra) wasn't originally intended for male impotence.
the issue is to not allow widespread patent licensing on drugs which have already been researched to heavily distort the fair market prices.
And to think that I've proposed having a public research fund to help study and gain approval for chemicals that aren't patentable as drugs for treating various conditions.
Drug companies go after drugs that they can patent, as there's not enough money to make back FDA approval expenses on 'instant generics'. In addition, I've thought that public research generally didn't find drugs for treatment, instead finding some marker or trigger that the drug companies then use to search for a drug to modify that response in the appropriate way.
Let's look at it a different way: How many drugs have been developed and brought to market in Europe in the last 10 years? How many have been developed and brought to market in the USA?
That really doesn't matter, because when they need it, they won't be able to afford the care.
I did state that they were being stupid not having insurance didn't I?
*Afford* means being able to bear the cost without serious financial consequences. It is often possible to *get* the care anyway by making radical decisions about expenditures, selling some assets or getting into debt for several years.
A lot of people who have paid off their cars don't get full coverage, just liability. They're effectively self-insuring themselves. Same thing with a paid off house or medical bills - the potential liability is simply much higher. Given the way insurance works, on average you're better off self-insuring than getting coverage - For a risk that's 10% per year of causing $1k damage, insurance, for example, might be $110-$125 per year. Toss the 'expected' average cost of $100 into an investment account, you'll be, on average, better off.
This is WORSE in the case of healthy types without kids(or possibility of same). Their premiums are probably up over the 400% range(IE every dollar they invest into a health care plan they can expect to see $1 back).
Of course most care such as for broken limbs is really not an issue of drug comany pricing,
Except for his painkillers and the antibiotics and such. They gave him the antibiotics because a broken bone, even a simple one, leaves injuries relatively ripe for infection. Those he had a harder time bargaining them down, but the drugs were common generics, so even paying cash they weren't too expensive. I listed it because it's the only uninsured medical care I'm aware of in my own family.
and you're right to point out that health care is a much bigger and more complex topic than the one in this slashdot story.
Like many Democrats, I feel that our current health care system is seriously broken. I just disagree with them on the correct solutions. My idea isn't to go to some national healthcare system, as I think our government would seriously screw it up. For one thing we already have a problem with people showing up at the emergency room for non-emergency illnesses. Most of the current crop of health care plans are too complicated and interfere far too much.
If a person has to pay for their own healthcare for the most part, we might see some conservation of resources. Combine that with clinics and hospitals that don't normally need to dicker with the insurance companies for payment, which can result in massive savings - paperwork and billing are some of the largest expenses in health care today in the USA, and it shouldn't be. The expenses are because the insurance companies try to get out of paying, the clinic needs money, and the consumer doesn't care because his copay is the same regardless.
My idea is something along these lines:
0-$5k health care costs in a year - paid by the consumer
$5k - $500k - paid by an actual insurance company, as exceeding $5k in health care expenses in a year indicates a problem.
$500k and up - government picks up the tab, sort of as a 'personal disaster' or disability clause. I don't see somebody with $500k of medical expenses in a single year being able to work most of the time. It also allows the insurance companies to not have to worry about budget busters. The upper cap could as easily be $1M, for example. Somebody could pick a $10k annual deductible to save money if they want to.
The actual value ranges are only approximate and subject to change with some directed surveys and research - I figure a 90-9-1 schedule - 90% of people each year pay for all their own care, 9% use insurance, 1% hit the government up. Again, subject to modification and tweaking based on actual statistics and actuarial tables.
Keeping in mind that the law is in Italian, if 'degraded' is an accurate translation than any degredation could meet the requirements - even if imperceptable. Like a radio signal, for example.
In audio and video, especially in pre-processing/recording you record much more information than what's perceptable, gives you more room for editing before artifacting becomes perceptable.
Think of it like amplifying a quiet instrument so you can hear tones that would otherwise be imperceptable, or zooming in on an image to display only a part of it during a shot. What would be thrown out by 'final product' standards are kept 'just in case' by authoring standards.
Maybe not hear, but our hearing is not the sole sense that detects airwave patterns, especially the deeper ones.
Going to a 32bit 48khz sample rate might help a few golden ears, as I understand the CD standard was something of a compromise. Still, you need a reallly good sound system to be able to tell the difference.
Sorry, incomplete post(had to leave).
If you look at what companies and people are paying to get health 'insurance'*, they can actually pay for quite a bit of medical care out of their own pocket before they're worse off than being insured.
This is why I like the idea of the high deductible insurance plans combined with a tax-advantaged savings account for healthcare expenses.
It gives people more of a reason to control their healthcare expenses/spending again.
My brother broke his arm when he was without insurance(was in the transition period) - got many of the procedures at 50% off the insurance rate because he was willing to pay cash. Ended up costing him LESS than a month's premium would have cost.
Then there was the Reader's digest article of a doctor who, fed up with the stresses of working in a clinic, quit, started working out of her home, running a part-time doctors office - she didn't accept insurance(one of the bigger headaches), but many people WITH insurance would go to see her as her rates were lower than many deductables, and she ended up with something like 80% of the income she had while working twice as many hours in the clinic.
Our current healthcare system is in part a large reason for the high healthcare costs. It can be done much cheaper - and I'm opposed to national healthcare because I see it following the Canada/England model(delays, reduced service, non-availability, no significant savings, etc...) more so than the more successful general european model.
Have you also dug into the studies, where you can find out that most of them are healthy sub-30 types without children who have chosen to be without healthcare?
Not smart, in my opinion, but in todays society mostly a good deal - they pay far more in insurance premiums than they get out of it. You need insurance, but most health care plans are overkill.
I was pointing out that investing in the future increases future returns. In this case, I was making an analogy - the profit scenario was like investing an endowment to get future returns, ultimately helping more people.
Requiring charging the minimum prices for drugs is the equivalent of 'spend everything now' scenario.
Allowing profit is the equivalent of 'permanent endowment' scenario.
Oh, and it looks like you're forgetting that drugs aren't free to produce. So you're not going to generally see a course selling for $1k have the option to sell at $100 - production costs would be too high. Remember that generics are the equivalent of known technology, having had a lot of time to develop cost saving measures.
In this case, the core argument that we were on is that new drugs are good for society. Not magical bullets by any means, but which would be the better scenario: Allow profits on drugs and get 10 new drugs a year approved, or not allow profits and get 1?
You forgot to carry the six though.
Look at it like an endowment of 1 Million.
In your case, you take the $1M and use it to help a thousand families through a $1k financial difficulty.
He takes it, invests it in a bank and helps fifty families the next year. And the next year. And the year after that, etc...
It takes him 20 years to match the number of families you helped. But after 20 years, his foundation is still helping people from his donation, while your foundation has been broke for the last 20 years.
In the LONG RUN, more drugs are better than fewer drugs. In time, they all end up being cheapish generics anyways.
So, while the profit motive might mean fewer people are helped today, it does mean that more people can be helped decades down the road because there's dozens more generic drugs available.
It's along the lines of 'help 100 fewer people today in order to help 500 more 20 years in the future'.
I never said the system is perfect. What makes my little scenario work, realistically, is that the people who can afford the high price vastly outnumber those that can't afford the treatment. Remember, being able to afford the treatment pretty much means 'has healthcare, a job, decent credit, or is on medicare or other welfare type system'.
Those that truly can't afford to pay the price are actually fairly rare, and the medical industry has managed to create a fair amount of price differentation.
At least in the USA, the type L and LLs are actually fairly rare. Given the tax benefits, you'd probably need to sell at least 6 treatments for every charity case for the deduction for the charity to help. Given price variations and such, you can accept that the occasional person doesn't get treatment(as no system is perfect), and that the occasional person who could pay doesn't(again, no system is perfect), since the selling at $100 and giving away bunches of free medicine for the deductions allows you to:
1. Get a bunch of goodwill for being 'nice'. (even though you're really a sociopath looking at the bottom line)
2. Charge more for the product, on average
3. Get a rebate even on the products you don't sell at full price