That's true. What Amazon has done is retain the earnings, meaning the company increases in value. That means each share of stock increases in value. Retained earnings are of course taxable profit, so the tax situation comes out the same as a dividend when Bezos liquidates some of the stock value to make a charitable contribution.
Of course in reality it's the other way around. Amazon and Bezos pay more taxes this way. Whoever hands out the money doesn't pay income taxes on it. If Amazon gave the money to employees as paychecks, then Amazon wouldn't pay income taxes on it.*
What they've done instead is Bezos is giving it away AFTER Amazon already paid taxes on it and then distributed it to shareholders (Bezos). So Amazon made money, paid the corporate income tax, distributed it to shareholders, then Bezos gave away some of his portion, after the corporate tax was paid.
* Amazon DOES pay FICA taxes on paychecks, which is 7.65%. That's much less than the 22% they actually paid by taking it as profit.
If you have any income, you have to pay taxes in fiat currency. If you keep refusing to pay, eventually they'll put you in jail (after they first seize your assets). Almost everyone NEEDS fiat currency, so that's one big difference. There will always be someone who needs to pay taxes, so there will always be someone who needs dollars. They'll give me something of value in exchange for my dollars in order to pay their taxes.
Pop the battery out of your phone for a second. See those shiny things where the battery connects to the phone? That's gold, it's not Buttcoin. Have any computer motherboard or PC card laying around? See that shiny yellow stuff? That's gold. Gold is needed for real, actually valuable uses.
It seems to me in middle school and high school we teach everyone a little bit of math, a little bit of science, a little bit of English, a little bit art, etc. Some people enjoy math and are good at it. Some people don't like math and aren't very good at it. People who don't like math shouldn't major in math at a university, but I think it makes sense for everyone to learn a little math, a little English, etc. Everyone should have some basic competency.
Same with making a presentation - not everyone enjoys doing that, and like it's good for everyone to learn a bit of math, it's probably good for everyone to do a couple of presentations and gain a tad bit of very basic competency. Most jobs will require a presentation at some point, every job will require taking a deep breath and and doing something you're not 100% comfortable with. Asking for a raise sure does, at most any job. Some basic competency in doing presenting, and a little bit of experience doing something that isn't easy, seems like a really beneficial thing.
> And I have never, ever seen a deprecation warning in C or C++. You have to read the change sections for new standards to see what was deprecated or removed.
The default with gcc is to warn about deprecation. You can turn the warnings off by setting the CFLAGS environment variable to include -Wno-deprecated, which you can do in your.bashrc oe wherever. What's most often recommended is -Wall to show all warnings of all types.
The are used to replace tape drives, primarily enterprise backup and archiving.
Blu-ray video means millions of those discs are produced, so economic of scale make the Blu-ray format the economical one. Blu-ray is currently available in 25GB, 50GB, and 100GB.
There are a lot of profitable spun off from universities and the (taxpayer owned) university DOES get money back, someone's a pretty hefty sum. Obviously not every idea is commercially successful, but some are are. The payments back to the university help pay for the school, which reduxes the amount taxpayers pay. In this case we're talking about CU. They get about $5 million / year in royalties from spinoffs.
> How much can they expect in return? Annual reports are available at the above link, showing exactly how much return was received each year from the various spinoffs.
> Will they be reimbursed by the IPO or do they have to wait until the profits roll in?
Founders don't sell their stock at the time of an IPO. That would basically be announcing "we, who know the most about it, don't want this stock" at the same time you're trying to sell it to others. The financial equivalent of "ewww this milk is nasty, smell it". You wait until some time after the IPO. The (tax payer owned) university has founders stock. The up-front cash to the university is a license payment, the stock is one of several ways the taxpayers get ongoing long-term returns.
> for actual breakthrough there's several billions of parked cash waiting to be dumped on it to bring some factory online.
Who had that parked cash waiting for better batteries? Large car companies like BMW? Major electronics manufacturers like Samsung? I'll wait until companies like that put their money into something before I think it's really that promising.
That's great that they deprecate something on some occasions. MY experience with the Python I run is that one version gives no warning, going up one point release throws multiple fatal errors.
> This is readily obvious when you look at the changelogs
Maybe that's the thing - one has read the changelogs to see what is deprecated, as opposed to getting a clear deprecation warning from the interpreter/compiler like you would with C, Perl, and other languages?
It's possible that a Python expert might be able to tell me something like: If you want to be warned about deprecations, while setting up thr virtual environment for that script you have to set the shell environment variable PYTHON_DONT_BE_SHITTY or whatever.
Following the basic HOW-TO on Python.org, they run clean under 2.x and die with fatal errors on 2.y. If I studied the changelogs enough I might be able to maintain these scripts, but that leaves a terrible first impression so I don't WANT to deal with this *;"+_!" language. I learn new languages and figure out things like that if the language seems like it's going to make my life easier and be worth it. Python appears to be a major pain in the ass for no good reason in several ways, so I'm not seeing that it's something I want to learn. Not more than enough basics that I can do some simple maintainence when I have to.
In Texas , two different kinds of homeowners insurance can legally be sold. One is actual cash value, deprecation and all. The other is replacement cost - what it would cost to build a new home of the same size. I have replacement cost coverage. Because of various factors with the housing market, most new Texas policies are replacement (cost to build new) rather than cash value.
> the most likely outcome would be for you to have a $400,000 home with a $200,000 mortgage, not a $200,000 home with a $0 morgage.
In this area, the average home is on the market for about three days. So let's say I had a $400,000 house and a $200,000 mortgage. It would take a few days to sell that $400,000 house and turn it into $200,000 cash and no mortage. Which is exactly what I would do.
Well, I might end up with a $230,000 home and a $30,000 mortage. Or pay off $10,000 in higher interest debt and have a $40,000 mortgage. Whatever I want to do, if I did have a brand new $400,000 house being built, it doesn't take long to turn that into cash and do whatever I want with it.
I COULD have the insurance company pay to build a $400,000 house here on this lot. Therefore, their expected cost is $400,000. Before starting any negotiation, they are required to build a $400,000 house here.
Then negotiation starts. In my particular situation, it would be stupid to build a $400,000 house on this particular lot. It would also be stupid for me to have a $400,000 house. I would rather have $390,000 cash than have a $400,000 house. The insurance company would rather pay $390,000 cash than pay for a $400,000 house. Settling at $390K is a win-win for the insurance company and for me.
The Texas Department of Insurance web site has the precise rules if you want to know exactly what they actually are, as opposed to what you've heard from your brother-in-law, who is a carpenter who once got an insurance check for a job. https://www.tdi.texas.gov/
Alongside those rules is the negotiation between the public adjuster you should hire and the insurance company's adjuster. It might go something like this:
Your adjuster: we estimate replacement cost at $390K to $420K.
Company: Our estimate is $395-$405k, so we're in the same ballpark, slightly lower.
Yours: Due to the storm, construction crews are very busy right now. Under rule x subsection y, you have no more than 30 days to issue the initial payment. It's already been 22 days. It could get very expensive to get a crew to drop their current project and start on this this week. Very expensive. Might end up costing $435K to get it done within the required time frame.... We'll take $400K cash today, though.
> It won't pay off your house AND build you a new one. It will ONLY rebuild same like, kind and quality
Yes, the amount (on my policy) is to build a new house of the same size, 3,500 square feet. That's a really big house. About $400,000 to build a new house the same size.
I wouldn't build a new house twice the size of what I need, a five bedroom house for me, my, wife, and our 4yo. Instead I'd use half of the $400,000 to buy an existing 1,800 square foot house, half to pay off the existing mortgage.
> Pay you ALS (i.e. apply depreciation to everything) if you want to walk away. That is how it works in ALL states.
In Texas , two different kinds of homeowners insurance can legally be sold. One is actual cash value, deprecation and all. The other is replacement cost - what it would cost to build a new home of the same size. I have replacement cost coverage. Because of various factors with the housing market, most new Texas policies are replacement (cost to build new) rather than cash value.
I'm afraid not. Read your mortgage and see if you find that anywhere. It's not there.
What is wiped out is your ability to pay it without eating nothing but rice and beans while living in a roach apartment.
> the insurance benefits the bank, which is why the bank forces you to pay for it.
The benefit to the bank is that when you can't afford two house payments because one house got destroyed, they still get paid. The house being destroyed doesn't relieve you of your responsibility to pay, having insurance means you can pay it off without working three jobs. A lot of people wouldn't work two or three jobs, they'd just fail to pay what they owe if they didn't have it insured.
In Texas, home owners insurance can legally be either actuall cash value (made whole) or replacement cost (what it would cost build a new home of the same size).
With property values increasing at 8%-10% per year the last several years, most policies, including mine, are replacement cost. Both the cost and the coverage, is based on building a new 3,500 square foot home to replace the 25 year old piece of junk I live in.
> If you lose your home, the insurance company will only pay for replacement
Yes, the insurance, both the cost and the coverage, is based on building a new 3,500 square foot home to replace the 25 year old peice of junk I live in. At least that's how it is in Texas. Other states may vary.
I pointed out that insuring your home and its contents removed the risk of financial ruin due to a fire, tornado, etc. That's the proper use of insurance - preventing financial ruin by making a predictable small payment so you don't have to worry about losing $200,000.
The other insurance I carry is because I have a young child and I am the essentially the sole bread winner for our family. It only costs a couple hundred dollars per year for me to have a $250,000 life insurance policy to take care of my family if I die before I'm retired. Again, losing me without having insurance would be a financial catastrophe for my family. Insurance largely fixes that. (Wife has a plan to complete her degree while paying the bills with the first half of the insurance money).
A corollary is that you should NOT buy insurance on your $60 DVD player and other consumer items. A broken DVD player is not a catastrophe. It won't ruin you. Therefore rather than paying an extra $25-$50 every time you shop the electronics section, it is wiser to put that money in the bank. Then when the DVD player breaks you just buy a new one. It costs 75% that way, and you don't have to deal with filing a claim.
Twenty years ago you could be medical insurance in the US. It covered you for major medical expenses that would be catastrophic. A $35 doctor visit for strep throat isn't a major catastrophe, so insurance isn't relevant and wasn't involved. Medical insurance was fairly reasonably priced. In the last 20 years, people in the US, and our lawmakers, seem to have totally forgotten what insurance is. Insurance isn't for $35 items, that's what twenty dollar bills are for. But now we have insurance companies inserted into the process even for a $10 vaccine, so the doctor gets to pay a full-time claims person to handle paperwork and they wait a month or more to get their $10 for the vaccine. The insurance company has thousands of employees handling these tiny claims. All of those people and all of that process costs money. So now the insurance costs over twice as much and you STILL pay the doctor the $30, now they call it a co-pay. Now you ALSO get too pay the insurance company hundreds of dollars per month more and mostly you're paying for everyone's paperwork.
I wish I could still buy medical insurance, instead of a health plan. Medical insurance isn't that expensive and the claims hassle isn't that big of a deal for something you only deal with once or twice in your life. I've got $35 in the bank, so I can pay for a a strep test without also paying an insurance company an extra $35 to process the payment.
Even worse, now not only does the insurance company bureacracy have to get involved in every little medical thing, I'm also required to pay for crap that's rather questionable as to whether it's medical or not. The UK association of chiropractors, when organization which licenses chiropractors in the UK, says that the entire idea of "sublaxation" is bull, total snake oil, and that's what chiropractic is bases on in the US - snake oil. Yet I'm forced to pay for this snake oil, because lawmakers require insurance companies to include it. As I recall, one bill even listed aromatherapy (smelly candles) as something insurance companies (and therefore their customers) would be forced to pay for.
You want to fix medical costs in the US? That will require several different changes, but bringing back *medical insurance* as an alternative to *health plans* would certainly help.
I paid $240,000 for my house. I owe $200,000 on it. Without insurance, if/when something happens to my house - hurricane, fire, etc, I'd have no place to live AND owe $200,000 paying for a house I no longer have. That would be catastrophic for my family.
It's insured for $400,000. If it's destroyed by a hurricane (or more likelly in my area, tornado or fire), I'll pay off the $200,000 I owe and then use the other $200,000 to buy another house with cash.
If a fire or tornado destroys my house, I'll still have an house and won't have a mortgage payment. I'm HOPING for a tornado. Insurance means it would be a windfall (haha) instead of a catastrophe.
> No risk is reduced by that "product".
Have you ever heard of Underwriters Laboratories (UL Listed, UL registered)? Or fire codes? Underwriters means insurers. The primary product safety organization was founded by insurance companies.
How about the National Fire Protection Association, which writes the fire codes? That's insurance companies again.
Ever heard car commercials bragging about their IIHS safety rating? IIHS is the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Again, the primary safety organization is insurance companies.
That's a fair point, to the caller it appears analogous.
To the CPU, they are vastly different. The CPU assigns integers, with a single instruction. Copying a Pascal string is most often hundreds of CPU instructions, there is a function that does that. The String type in Pascal is far more complex than the x bits that comprise an integer. Perhaps most importantly, the variable doesn't hold the value, it's a pointer to memory that is later allocated elsewhere. The function takes the Pascal String type and derefences it to the actual vue in memory, after performing various checks, THEN it asks the CPU to copy a little bit at a time. Contrasted with a pure I assignment, which translates directly to CPU instruction.
What looks like an assignment isn't. An assignment should mean both variables point to the same string. It's creating a new string, copying all the data from the source string to the destination, then finally assigning the new string to the destination variable.
There's a string copy function which accepts the source string as an argument and returns a new string with the data copied from the source.
Slashdot Mirror
That's true. What Amazon has done is retain the earnings, meaning the company increases in value. That means each share of stock increases in value. Retained earnings are of course taxable profit, so the tax situation comes out the same as a dividend when Bezos liquidates some of the stock value to make a charitable contribution.
That was funny.
Of course in reality it's the other way around. Amazon and Bezos pay more taxes this way.
Whoever hands out the money doesn't pay income taxes on it. If Amazon gave the money to employees as paychecks, then Amazon wouldn't pay income taxes on it.*
What they've done instead is Bezos is giving it away AFTER Amazon already paid taxes on it and then distributed it to shareholders (Bezos). So Amazon made money, paid the corporate income tax, distributed it to shareholders, then Bezos gave away some of his portion, after the corporate tax was paid.
* Amazon DOES pay FICA taxes on paychecks, which is 7.65%. That's much less than the 22% they actually paid by taking it as profit.
If anyone thinks the Max iPhone naming is bad, just wait for the iPad version. The new MaxiPad.
> no different than gold or any fiat currency.
If you have any income, you have to pay taxes in fiat currency.
If you keep refusing to pay, eventually they'll put you in jail (after they first seize your assets). Almost everyone NEEDS fiat currency, so that's one big difference. There will always be someone who needs to pay taxes, so there will always be someone who needs dollars. They'll give me something of value in exchange for my dollars in order to pay their taxes.
Pop the battery out of your phone for a second. See those shiny things where the battery connects to the phone? That's gold, it's not Buttcoin. Have any computer motherboard or PC card laying around? See that shiny yellow stuff? That's gold. Gold is needed for real, actually valuable uses.
It seems to me in middle school and high school we teach everyone a little bit of math, a little bit of science, a little bit of English, a little bit art, etc. Some people enjoy math and are good at it. Some people don't like math and aren't very good at it. People who don't like math shouldn't major in math at a university, but I think it makes sense for everyone to learn a little math, a little English, etc. Everyone should have some basic competency.
Same with making a presentation - not everyone enjoys doing that, and like it's good for everyone to learn a bit of math, it's probably good for everyone to do a couple of presentations and gain a tad bit of very basic competency. Most jobs will require a presentation at some point, every job will require taking a deep breath and and doing something you're not 100% comfortable with. Asking for a raise sure does, at most any job. Some basic competency in doing presenting, and a little bit of experience doing something that isn't easy, seems like a really beneficial thing.
> And I have never, ever seen a deprecation warning in C or C++. You have to read the change sections for new standards to see what was deprecated or removed.
The default with gcc is to warn about deprecation. .bashrc oe wherever. What's most often recommended is -Wall to show all warnings of all types.
You can turn the warnings off by setting the CFLAGS environment variable to include -Wno-deprecated, which you can do in your
The easy way to know is to drop the other person from the sentence and try it. In this example:
Research is typically paid for by you and I through our taxes.
Research is typically paid for by I through my taxes.
You would write:
Research is typically paid for by me through my taxes.
Therefore:
Research is typically paid for by you and me through our taxes.
> I'm still waiting for those 1TB optical disks that've been promised for 15+ years.
This link is the 3.3TB version. Near the bottom you'll see buttons for 1.5TB, 600GB, etc.
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c...
The are used to replace tape drives, primarily enterprise backup and archiving.
Blu-ray video means millions of those discs are produced, so economic of scale make the Blu-ray format the economical one. Blu-ray is currently available in 25GB, 50GB, and 100GB.
There are a lot of profitable spun off from universities and the (taxpayer owned) university DOES get money back, someone's a pretty hefty sum. Obviously not every idea is commercially successful, but some are are. The payments back to the university help pay for the school, which reduxes the amount taxpayers pay. In this case we're talking about CU. They get about $5 million / year in royalties from spinoffs.
See also:
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
> When a great discovery is made, all the profits go to private parties.
Uhm, no. The company already paid the school to license the technology, and they'll keep paying royalties.
> When do we get reimbursed?
Starting in 2011, in this case, and continuing forever.
In addition to giving the (taxpayer owned) school stock in the company name(profits), the company pays:
Up-front license fees for the technology developed at the school
Minimum annual and/or milestone payments
Royalties on net sales
Sublicense royalties
More information can be found here:
https://www.colorado.edu/techt...
> How much can they expect in return?
Annual reports are available at the above link, showing exactly how much return was received each year from the various spinoffs.
> Will they be reimbursed by the IPO or do they have to wait until the profits roll in?
Founders don't sell their stock at the time of an IPO. That would basically be announcing "we, who know the most about it, don't want this stock" at the same time you're trying to sell it to others. The financial equivalent of "ewww this milk is nasty, smell it". You wait until some time after the IPO. The (tax payer owned) university has founders stock. The up-front cash to the university is a license payment, the stock is one of several ways the taxpayers get ongoing long-term returns.
> for actual breakthrough there's several billions of parked cash waiting to be dumped on it to bring some factory online.
Who had that parked cash waiting for better batteries? Large car companies like BMW? Major electronics manufacturers like Samsung? I'll wait until companies like that put their money into something before I think it's really that promising.
That's great that they deprecate something on some occasions.
MY experience with the Python I run is that one version gives no warning, going up one point release throws multiple fatal errors.
> This is readily obvious when you look at the changelogs
Maybe that's the thing - one has read the changelogs to see what is deprecated, as opposed to getting a clear deprecation warning from the interpreter/compiler like you would with C, Perl, and other languages?
It's possible that a Python expert might be able to tell me something like:
If you want to be warned about deprecations, while setting up thr virtual environment for that script you have to set the shell environment variable PYTHON_DONT_BE_SHITTY
or whatever.
Following the basic HOW-TO on Python.org, they run clean under 2.x and die with fatal errors on 2.y. If I studied the changelogs enough I might be able to maintain these scripts, but that leaves a terrible first impression so I don't WANT to deal with this *;"+_!" language. I learn new languages and figure out things like that if the language seems like it's going to make my life easier and be worth it. Python appears to be a major pain in the ass for no good reason in several ways, so I'm not seeing that it's something I want to learn. Not more than enough basics that I can do some simple maintainence when I have to.
Here's some info from the Texas Department of Insurance for you.
https://www.tdi.texas.gov/pubs... [texas.gov]
In Texas , two different kinds of homeowners insurance can legally be sold. One is actual cash value, deprecation and all. The other is replacement cost - what it would cost to build a new home of the same size. I have replacement cost coverage. Because of various factors with the housing market, most new Texas policies are replacement (cost to build new) rather than cash value.
> the most likely outcome would be for you to have a $400,000 home with a $200,000 mortgage, not a $200,000 home with a $0 morgage.
In this area, the average home is on the market for about three days. So let's say I had a $400,000 house and a $200,000 mortgage. It would take a few days to sell that $400,000 house and turn it into $200,000 cash and no mortage. Which is exactly what I would do.
Well, I might end up with a $230,000 home and a $30,000 mortage. Or pay off $10,000 in higher interest debt and have a $40,000 mortgage. Whatever I want to do, if I did have a brand new $400,000 house being built, it doesn't take long to turn that into cash and do whatever I want with it.
I COULD have the insurance company pay to build a $400,000 house here on this lot. Therefore, their expected cost is $400,000. Before starting any negotiation, they are required to build a $400,000 house here.
Then negotiation starts.
In my particular situation, it would be stupid to build a $400,000 house on this particular lot. It would also be stupid for me to have a $400,000 house. I would rather have $390,000 cash than have a $400,000 house. The insurance company would rather pay $390,000 cash than pay for a $400,000 house. Settling at $390K is a win-win for the insurance company and for me.
The Texas Department of Insurance web site has the precise rules if you want to know exactly what they actually are, as opposed to what you've heard from your brother-in-law, who is a carpenter who once got an insurance check for a job.
https://www.tdi.texas.gov/
Alongside those rules is the negotiation between the public adjuster you should hire and the insurance company's adjuster. It might go something like this:
Your adjuster: we estimate replacement cost at $390K to $420K.
Company: Our estimate is $395-$405k, so we're in the same ballpark, slightly lower.
Yours: Due to the storm, construction crews are very busy right now. Under rule x subsection y, you have no more than 30 days to issue the initial payment. It's already been 22 days. It could get very expensive to get a crew to drop their current project and start on this this week. Very expensive. Might end up costing $435K to get it done within the required time frame. ... We'll take $400K cash today, though.
> It won't pay off your house AND build you a new one. It will ONLY rebuild same like, kind and quality
Yes, the amount (on my policy) is to build a new house of the same size, 3,500 square feet. That's a really big house. About $400,000 to build a new house the same size.
I wouldn't build a new house twice the size of what I need, a five bedroom house for me, my, wife, and our 4yo. Instead I'd use half of the $400,000 to buy an existing 1,800 square foot house, half to pay off the existing mortgage.
> Pay you ALS (i.e. apply depreciation to everything) if you want to walk away. That is how it works in ALL states.
Here's some info from the Texas Department of Insurance for you.
https://www.tdi.texas.gov/pubs...
In Texas , two different kinds of homeowners insurance can legally be sold. One is actual cash value, deprecation and all. The other is replacement cost - what it would cost to build a new home of the same size. I have replacement cost coverage. Because of various factors with the housing market, most new Texas policies are replacement (cost to build new) rather than cash value.
> If the collateral is wiped out so is the loan;
I'm afraid not. Read your mortgage and see if you find that anywhere. It's not there.
What is wiped out is your ability to pay it without eating nothing but rice and beans while living in a roach apartment.
> the insurance benefits the bank, which is why the bank forces you to pay for it.
The benefit to the bank is that when you can't afford two house payments because one house got destroyed, they still get paid. The house being destroyed doesn't relieve you of your responsibility to pay, having insurance means you can pay it off without working three jobs. A lot of people wouldn't work two or three jobs, they'd just fail to pay what they owe if they didn't have it insured.
I don't need a brand new 3,500 SQ foot house, so I wouldn't build one. I'd buy an existing $200,000 home of about 1,800 square feet or so.
"made whole" is a general rule, yes.
In Texas, home owners insurance can legally be either actuall cash value (made whole) or replacement cost (what it would cost build a new home of the same size).
With property values increasing at 8%-10% per year the last several years, most policies, including mine, are replacement cost. Both the cost and the coverage, is based on building a new 3,500 square foot home to replace the 25 year old piece of junk I live in.
> If you lose your home, the insurance company will only pay for replacement
Yes, the insurance, both the cost and the coverage, is based on building a new 3,500 square foot home to replace the 25 year old peice of junk I live in. At least that's how it is in Texas. Other states may vary.
I pointed out that insuring your home and its contents removed the risk of financial ruin due to a fire, tornado, etc. That's the proper use of insurance - preventing financial ruin by making a predictable small payment so you don't have to worry about losing $200,000.
The other insurance I carry is because I have a young child and I am the essentially the sole bread winner for our family. It only costs a couple hundred dollars per year for me to have a $250,000 life insurance policy to take care of my family if I die before I'm retired. Again, losing me without having insurance would be a financial catastrophe for my family. Insurance largely fixes that. (Wife has a plan to complete her degree while paying the bills with the first half of the insurance money).
A corollary is that you should NOT buy insurance on your $60 DVD player and other consumer items. A broken DVD player is not a catastrophe. It won't ruin you. Therefore rather than paying an extra $25-$50 every time you shop the electronics section, it is wiser to put that money in the bank. Then when the DVD player breaks you just buy a new one. It costs 75% that way, and you don't have to deal with filing a claim.
Twenty years ago you could be medical insurance in the US. It covered you for major medical expenses that would be catastrophic. A $35 doctor visit for strep throat isn't a major catastrophe, so insurance isn't relevant and wasn't involved. Medical insurance was fairly reasonably priced. In the last 20 years, people in the US, and our lawmakers, seem to have totally forgotten what insurance is. Insurance isn't for $35 items, that's what twenty dollar bills are for. But now we have insurance companies inserted into the process even for a $10 vaccine, so the doctor gets to pay a full-time claims person to handle paperwork and they wait a month or more to get their $10 for the vaccine. The insurance company has thousands of employees handling these tiny claims. All of those people and all of that process costs money. So now the insurance costs over twice as much and you STILL pay the doctor the $30, now they call it a co-pay. Now you ALSO get too pay the insurance company hundreds of dollars per month more and mostly you're paying for everyone's paperwork.
I wish I could still buy medical insurance, instead of a health plan. Medical insurance isn't that expensive and the claims hassle isn't that big of a deal for something you only deal with once or twice in your life. I've got $35 in the bank, so I can pay for a a strep test without also paying an insurance company an extra $35 to process the payment.
Even worse, now not only does the insurance company bureacracy have to get involved in every little medical thing, I'm also required to pay for crap that's rather questionable as to whether it's medical or not. The UK association of chiropractors, when organization which licenses chiropractors in the UK, says that the entire idea of "sublaxation" is bull, total snake oil, and that's what chiropractic is bases on in the US - snake oil. Yet I'm forced to pay for this snake oil, because lawmakers require insurance companies to include it. As I recall, one bill even listed aromatherapy (smelly candles) as something insurance companies (and therefore their customers) would be forced to pay for.
You want to fix medical costs in the US? That will require several different changes, but bringing back *medical insurance* as an alternative to *health plans* would certainly help.
I paid $240,000 for my house. I owe $200,000 on it.
Without insurance, if/when something happens to my house - hurricane, fire, etc, I'd have no place to live AND owe $200,000 paying for a house I no longer have. That would be catastrophic for my family.
It's insured for $400,000. If it's destroyed by a hurricane (or more likelly in my area, tornado or fire), I'll pay off the $200,000 I owe and then use the other $200,000 to buy another house with cash.
If a fire or tornado destroys my house, I'll still have an house and won't have a mortgage payment. I'm HOPING for a tornado. Insurance means it would be a windfall (haha) instead of a catastrophe.
> No risk is reduced by that "product".
Have you ever heard of Underwriters Laboratories (UL Listed, UL registered)? Or fire codes? Underwriters means insurers. The primary product safety organization was founded by insurance companies.
How about the National Fire Protection Association, which writes the fire codes? That's insurance companies again.
Ever heard car commercials bragging about their IIHS safety rating? IIHS is the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Again, the primary safety organization is insurance companies.
That's a fair point, to the caller it appears analogous.
To the CPU, they are vastly different. The CPU assigns integers, with a single instruction. Copying a Pascal string is most often hundreds of CPU instructions, there is a function that does that. The String type in Pascal is far more complex than the x bits that comprise an integer. Perhaps most importantly, the variable doesn't hold the value, it's a pointer to memory that is later allocated elsewhere. The function takes the Pascal String type and derefences it to the actual vue in memory, after performing various checks, THEN it asks the CPU to copy a little bit at a time. Contrasted with a pure I assignment, which translates directly to CPU instruction.
> an assignment operation is not a function call
What looks like an assignment isn't. An assignment should mean both variables point to the same string.
It's creating a new string, copying all the data from the source string to the destination, then finally assigning the new string to the destination variable.
There's a string copy function which accepts the source string as an argument and returns a new string with the data copied from the source.