The problem with this is that many very wealthy people create their own charities. Since it's your charity, you can control who controls it. And it's likely that the tax money saved by donating to the charity will be at least partially made up by the charity spending money on things you would have spent money on anyway. The result is that your effective tax rate is lower.
Using your example, why not donate $2 to a charity you control, have it spend 10c on something charitable, and have $1.90 go to pay for that vacation villa you want that lets disadvantaged children stay there every once in a while when you're gone anyway? There's rules governing how a charity can spend its money. But there are a lot of ways to game the system.
I'm not accusing Bill Gates of doing this. It looks as though he really is being charitable. But don't assume that every wealthy person who gives to charity is doing so out of altruism.
The workers at my local Wendy's developed an odd behavior. On occasion, whenever we would go through the drive-through, we'd see one of the workers lean out the window and lower a bucket almost to the ground. When they did this, they'd wrap a towel around the handle so that they could drop the bucket lower than their arms would normally reach. After seeing this for months, we asked the regional manager about it (we had gotten to know him over a couple years). His response was to thank us for (unintentionally) ratting out the other workers. Turns out there was a "car detector" at the cashier window that measured how long the customers waited. By dropping the metal bucket out the window, they could reset the timer and get better numbers.
Citibank is the bunch that *can* require seven days time for you to CLOSE out the account. They did not say they freeze accounts and anytime. Argh why am i responding to Anon...
They *can* put a 7 day hold on *any* withdrawal they like.
He could join his local Chamber of Commerce as well. Most offer group plans to members to help address this exact situation.
Everyone says this, but I've never been able to make it work. Every time I do research into this, I get nowhere. Please give me a phone number I can call to ask questions and sign up for this.
To all those people out there who the republicans talk about, the ones who are perfectly happy with their current health insurance situation, I ask this: If you were to lose your job because you can't work anymore due to health problems, how would your health care be paid?
I'm an independent consultant with my own corporation. I have 9 kids and a wife. I've been dealing with this problem for almost 10 years now.
At first, I switched back and forth between w2 and independent. I'd take a w2 contract for 6 months or so from a consulting firm that had health insurance (and take a dive on the rate to get it), then finish the contract, take cobra, and be independent for 18 months. This sucks though because of the taking a dive on the rate. It also causes tax problems being w2.
Good luck. Depending on what state you live in, you are either well and truly fucked, or deeply, seriously fucked.
The best thing you can do is start a trivial corporation, hire on some fake employees, and then get a group plan.
This works... sort of. But the insurance companies still rate you. Group policies are (amazingly) regulated so that they're not allowed to charge you more than a 66% increase over what the average premium is in your area. You need two people (not more) on the policy. One of you is a single parent with kids, the other an individual. They can do the 66% rate increase thing on both "policies". Count on it happening if you had the sniffles 5 years ago.
Another option that most people don't know about is an employer of record service. The idea is that you or your wife becomes an employee of this company. They charge the employee health insurance like you're getting now. Then they bill your corporation for this person's (you or your wife) services. Then every gets added to the family policy. We had been using this place called Solo W2 (nee Pace), but the health insurance premium got ridiculous, like $3000 a month. We kept getting the impression that they were slime-balls also. As I speak, I'm signing up with another place called MBO Partners. They seem brutally legal. But the health insurance is a more reasonable $2000 a month. You have to run $7500 a month through them. They take 3% (iirc) of that as their fee. They also give you all sorts of other tax benefits and other similar things you'd get as an employee.
This is sort of a mediocre arrangement. It gets us health insurance, but makes us buy other "services" we don't want or need. We seriously considered just going it alone. Since, with prescription med copays, we were looking at $40k to $50k a year just for health insurance. Banking that money would mean that we could just write a check for a broken leg or something. Only the catastrophic things would kill us. But with the preexisting condition rules and the reasonable and customary charge scam, we decided to go with mbo... for now.
What I really want is a public option or at least those exchanges they're talking about. Oh, and get rid of the anti-trust law exemption and make the insurance companies compete across state lines.
If you're against any kind of health reform, just remember that the independent people are subsidizing the large group insurance you're getting now. Sooner or later, they won't be able to squeeze us any harder, then expect your rates to rise. When that happens, your employer will stop paying the rate increases and either fire you, or drop your coverage. Then you're just as screwed as the rest of us.
Eventually people do tend to get promoted beyond programming positions.
And the other 90% that don't get promoted because those spots were filled by the 10%?
I think the real reason is simple. People older than me (almost 40) are likely to be mainframe programmers. Back then, there weren't a lot of computers. So there weren't a lot of programmers. The office where I work now is filled with people around 40yo doing c++/unix. Come back in about 10 or 20 years, and you'll see a lot of older programmers.
The way the internet is, all you have to do is say "I like toast" and someone from the Anti-Cruelty to Bread Society will come out of the woodwork to harass you.
Please provide examples. Humans can last a long time without food. You could probably go weeks without it. A human couldn't possibly exist that long on stored glucose/glycogen. Glucose is very short term, and glycogen can be exhausted with intensive exercise in a few hours. After that energy has to come from somewhere.
It comes from ketones that are liberated from burning fat. That is, of course, if the metabolic process that liberates ketones from fat isn't broken. It's possible to starve to death while you're obese.
I believe the obesity problem in the US is a function of lifestyle and food quality. We allow things in our food that are banned in europe. Europe also has a lot of walking cities with a lot of public transportation. Most places in america have dysfunctional or non-existant public transportation. Some places in america are practically impossible to visit without a car. You drive literally everywhere. The work culture and the general amount of stress and sleep deprivation that people live with here also plays a part.
This shouldn't be modded troll because he's spot on. Obesity is one of the few diseases that is self inflicted and especially for a rich celebrity who will have access to the finest health care, there really isn't much excuse. If he's happy with it then fine but like all freedoms there are responsibilities. It really hacks me off when people cry for their freedoms but once the responsibilities come up they want nothing to do with those.
Obesity is also the last physical characteristic where discrimination is socially acceptable. I agree that many people are overweight because they choose to eat and not exercise. And everyone brings up the fact that some people have physical problems that make it impossible to lose weight. But I frequently see this minimized so that people can continue to not feel bad about making fun of fat people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pcos
As an example, 5% to 10% of all women of child-bearing years (not just obese women) have PCOS. And I know from the experience of my family members that the weight problems don't go away after menopause. Imagine being a 5'6" woman, 100lbs overweight, and eating only 800 calories a day with a brutal exercise campaign (2-3 hours every day at the gym), but still unable to lose weight. Then you go out in public and get made fun of... I mean, people laugh and point. People make fat jokes loud enough for you to hear. Imagine a mom going to the grocery store (alone) to shop for the entire family and having someone look at the full grocery cart and say that if you wouldn't eat all that, maybe you wouldn't be fat.
Sitting next to a huge person on an airplane sucks. But I assure you being fat sucks more. And every one of them, if they could overcome whatever problems they're dealing with, would choose to be thin. The next time you want to make fun of a fat person, why not tell a nigger joke instead?
Compared to 20 years ago, airline fares are dramatically cheaper, and service is dramatically worse. Coincidence? I think not...
I would argue that this is a consequence of large corporations (this includes airlines) and government squeezing the middle class. My wife's grandparents both worked when he got out of the air force after WW2. He was an accountant, she was a school teacher. They saved money for for 4 or 5 years and bought... a house. Cash. Try pulling that one off today.
If people were paid enough to support their families, save for their future, and still have money left over to enjoy life, then they wouldn't mind paying an extra 10% or 20% to get a fscking pillow on a flight.
I don't buy it. My dog had arthritis before she died. She didn't walk on two legs. Lower back problems probably have more to do with genetics and lifestyle.
One is science the other is religion. Guess which one does not belong in a schoolbook?
Science belongs in science books. If public schools want to have a world religion class, they need to talk about Christianity also. Both classes need text books. They shouldn't be mixed.
This is true. We need an amendment that says -- and I think the more plain English the better -- something along the lines of: communication on the internet is protected in the same way any other communication is protected.
They'll vote on that right after they vote to outlaw lobbying.
I'm not as USian but as an outside observer it seems to me you need a new amendment for the digital age to finally codify the limits on police powers that apply to modern technology.
If we've learnt anything so far, it's that you can't rely on those in charge to care about the spirit of the law.
Who would write the amendment? Politicians? Lobbyists? Or would large corporations just write it and hand it to congress Paulson-style? Regardless, I'm certain that the people wouldn't be writing the amendment. You may as well ask the fox guarding the hen house to design a security system to keep the hens safe.
It's too late for that. The only options that are left are fascism or revolution.
So, after the war, they put #2 in there to make sure that people always had the right to form their own militia and fight back against their government if they deemed it tyranical or for any other reason.
I agree. But just to be clear, people need to have guns, personally, before they decide to form a militia. Otherwise, they may find themselves unable to arm themselves when they finally get together.
Of course, all of this is moot. When the corporatocracy finally seizes complete control, they can limit guns as much as they want because it's large corporations that make the guns or, more importantly, ammunition.
Since bad health costs more, and diet is so important, will the government mandate government-healthcare-prescribed daily diets?
Maybe they could start with, oh, I don't know, banning high fructose corn syrup? you know, like all those evil socialist countries who have state health insurance?
This argument goes both ways. If every "person" is free to do whatever they want, then maybe certain "people" will lobby congress to force american people to accept HFCS in their food because they own all the corn farms and want to block foreign (real actual) sugar from cutting into their profits. You want to stop obesity in america and improve public health? Try starting there. Then after that you can move on to trans fats.
When did insurance companies start to care about laws? They'll just deny your application without any reasons or make one up. What makes you think their hordes of lawyers wouldn't find a way to weasel around such irrelevant laws?
With the recent supreme court decision, they'll just buy politicians who will roll back that law in the name of "reform", just like the banks did for bankruptcy "reform".
Mod me a troll if you like, but I speak from experience. My wife used to work in emergency rooms. There was more than one occasion where people who were not quite brain dead were taken for organ harvesting. She was so disturbed that she never does organ donor cards now.
Never mod someone -1 Troll simply because you disagree with the politics.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with this is that many very wealthy people create their own charities. Since it's your charity, you can control who controls it. And it's likely that the tax money saved by donating to the charity will be at least partially made up by the charity spending money on things you would have spent money on anyway. The result is that your effective tax rate is lower.
Using your example, why not donate $2 to a charity you control, have it spend 10c on something charitable, and have $1.90 go to pay for that vacation villa you want that lets disadvantaged children stay there every once in a while when you're gone anyway? There's rules governing how a charity can spend its money. But there are a lot of ways to game the system.
I'm not accusing Bill Gates of doing this. It looks as though he really is being charitable. But don't assume that every wealthy person who gives to charity is doing so out of altruism.
I've heard of that! That's where people get together and put Yamahas on their heads, right?
Remember, this is only what a model predicts,
When did we start relying on runway models for our science? Aren't they all vacuous and under-fed?
The workers at my local Wendy's developed an odd behavior. On occasion, whenever we would go through the drive-through, we'd see one of the workers lean out the window and lower a bucket almost to the ground. When they did this, they'd wrap a towel around the handle so that they could drop the bucket lower than their arms would normally reach. After seeing this for months, we asked the regional manager about it (we had gotten to know him over a couple years). His response was to thank us for (unintentionally) ratting out the other workers. Turns out there was a "car detector" at the cashier window that measured how long the customers waited. By dropping the metal bucket out the window, they could reset the timer and get better numbers.
The error message has to have a good plot and some character development.
Clue: It was Mr Raid, in the Server Room, with the Disk Error.
Fewer People.
I agree. You go first.
Citibank is the bunch that *can* require seven days time for you to CLOSE out the account. They did not say they freeze accounts and anytime.
Argh why am i responding to Anon...
They *can* put a 7 day hold on *any* withdrawal they like.
He could join his local Chamber of Commerce as well. Most offer group plans to members to help address this exact situation.
Everyone says this, but I've never been able to make it work. Every time I do research into this, I get nowhere. Please give me a phone number I can call to ask questions and sign up for this.
To all those people out there who the republicans talk about, the ones who are perfectly happy with their current health insurance situation, I ask this: If you were to lose your job because you can't work anymore due to health problems, how would your health care be paid?
I'm an independent consultant with my own corporation. I have 9 kids and a wife. I've been dealing with this problem for almost 10 years now.
At first, I switched back and forth between w2 and independent. I'd take a w2 contract for 6 months or so from a consulting firm that had health insurance (and take a dive on the rate to get it), then finish the contract, take cobra, and be independent for 18 months. This sucks though because of the taking a dive on the rate. It also causes tax problems being w2.
Good luck. Depending on what state you live in, you are either well and truly fucked, or deeply, seriously fucked.
The best thing you can do is start a trivial corporation, hire on some fake employees, and then get a group plan.
This works... sort of. But the insurance companies still rate you. Group policies are (amazingly) regulated so that they're not allowed to charge you more than a 66% increase over what the average premium is in your area. You need two people (not more) on the policy. One of you is a single parent with kids, the other an individual. They can do the 66% rate increase thing on both "policies". Count on it happening if you had the sniffles 5 years ago.
Another option that most people don't know about is an employer of record service. The idea is that you or your wife becomes an employee of this company. They charge the employee health insurance like you're getting now. Then they bill your corporation for this person's (you or your wife) services. Then every gets added to the family policy. We had been using this place called Solo W2 (nee Pace), but the health insurance premium got ridiculous, like $3000 a month. We kept getting the impression that they were slime-balls also. As I speak, I'm signing up with another place called MBO Partners. They seem brutally legal. But the health insurance is a more reasonable $2000 a month. You have to run $7500 a month through them. They take 3% (iirc) of that as their fee. They also give you all sorts of other tax benefits and other similar things you'd get as an employee.
This is sort of a mediocre arrangement. It gets us health insurance, but makes us buy other "services" we don't want or need. We seriously considered just going it alone. Since, with prescription med copays, we were looking at $40k to $50k a year just for health insurance. Banking that money would mean that we could just write a check for a broken leg or something. Only the catastrophic things would kill us. But with the preexisting condition rules and the reasonable and customary charge scam, we decided to go with mbo... for now.
What I really want is a public option or at least those exchanges they're talking about. Oh, and get rid of the anti-trust law exemption and make the insurance companies compete across state lines.
If you're against any kind of health reform, just remember that the independent people are subsidizing the large group insurance you're getting now. Sooner or later, they won't be able to squeeze us any harder, then expect your rates to rise. When that happens, your employer will stop paying the rate increases and either fire you, or drop your coverage. Then you're just as screwed as the rest of us.
Eventually people do tend to get promoted beyond programming positions.
And the other 90% that don't get promoted because those spots were filled by the 10%?
I think the real reason is simple. People older than me (almost 40) are likely to be mainframe programmers. Back then, there weren't a lot of computers. So there weren't a lot of programmers. The office where I work now is filled with people around 40yo doing c++/unix. Come back in about 10 or 20 years, and you'll see a lot of older programmers.
The way the internet is, all you have to do is say "I like toast" and someone from the Anti-Cruelty to Bread Society will come out of the woodwork to harass you.
Please provide examples. Humans can last a long time without food. You could probably go weeks without it. A human couldn't possibly exist that long on stored glucose/glycogen. Glucose is very short term, and glycogen can be exhausted with intensive exercise in a few hours. After that energy has to come from somewhere.
It comes from ketones that are liberated from burning fat. That is, of course, if the metabolic process that liberates ketones from fat isn't broken. It's possible to starve to death while you're obese.
I believe the obesity problem in the US is a function of lifestyle and food quality. We allow things in our food that are banned in europe. Europe also has a lot of walking cities with a lot of public transportation. Most places in america have dysfunctional or non-existant public transportation. Some places in america are practically impossible to visit without a car. You drive literally everywhere. The work culture and the general amount of stress and sleep deprivation that people live with here also plays a part.
This shouldn't be modded troll because he's spot on. Obesity is one of the few diseases that is self inflicted and especially for a rich celebrity who will have access to the finest health care, there really isn't much excuse. If he's happy with it then fine but like all freedoms there are responsibilities. It really hacks me off when people cry for their freedoms but once the responsibilities come up they want nothing to do with those.
Obesity is also the last physical characteristic where discrimination is socially acceptable. I agree that many people are overweight because they choose to eat and not exercise. And everyone brings up the fact that some people have physical problems that make it impossible to lose weight. But I frequently see this minimized so that people can continue to not feel bad about making fun of fat people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pcos
As an example, 5% to 10% of all women of child-bearing years (not just obese women) have PCOS. And I know from the experience of my family members that the weight problems don't go away after menopause. Imagine being a 5'6" woman, 100lbs overweight, and eating only 800 calories a day with a brutal exercise campaign (2-3 hours every day at the gym), but still unable to lose weight. Then you go out in public and get made fun of... I mean, people laugh and point. People make fat jokes loud enough for you to hear. Imagine a mom going to the grocery store (alone) to shop for the entire family and having someone look at the full grocery cart and say that if you wouldn't eat all that, maybe you wouldn't be fat.
Sitting next to a huge person on an airplane sucks. But I assure you being fat sucks more. And every one of them, if they could overcome whatever problems they're dealing with, would choose to be thin. The next time you want to make fun of a fat person, why not tell a nigger joke instead?
Compared to 20 years ago, airline fares are dramatically cheaper, and service is dramatically worse. Coincidence? I think not...
I would argue that this is a consequence of large corporations (this includes airlines) and government squeezing the middle class. My wife's grandparents both worked when he got out of the air force after WW2. He was an accountant, she was a school teacher. They saved money for for 4 or 5 years and bought... a house. Cash. Try pulling that one off today.
If people were paid enough to support their families, save for their future, and still have money left over to enjoy life, then they wouldn't mind paying an extra 10% or 20% to get a fscking pillow on a flight.
I don't buy it. My dog had arthritis before she died. She didn't walk on two legs. Lower back problems probably have more to do with genetics and lifestyle.
One is science the other is religion. Guess which one does not belong in a schoolbook?
Science belongs in science books. If public schools want to have a world religion class, they need to talk about Christianity also. Both classes need text books. They shouldn't be mixed.
P.S. I'm a Christian.
I could care less.
You could? I couldn't.
This is true. We need an amendment that says -- and I think the more plain English the better -- something along the lines of: communication on the internet is protected in the same way any other communication is protected.
They'll vote on that right after they vote to outlaw lobbying.
I'm not as USian but as an outside observer it seems to me you need a new amendment for the digital age to finally codify the limits on police powers that apply to modern technology.
If we've learnt anything so far, it's that you can't rely on those in charge to care about the spirit of the law.
Who would write the amendment? Politicians? Lobbyists? Or would large corporations just write it and hand it to congress Paulson-style? Regardless, I'm certain that the people wouldn't be writing the amendment. You may as well ask the fox guarding the hen house to design a security system to keep the hens safe.
It's too late for that. The only options that are left are fascism or revolution.
So, after the war, they put #2 in there to make sure that people always had the right to form their own militia and fight back against their government if they deemed it tyranical or for any other reason.
I agree. But just to be clear, people need to have guns, personally, before they decide to form a militia. Otherwise, they may find themselves unable to arm themselves when they finally get together.
Of course, all of this is moot. When the corporatocracy finally seizes complete control, they can limit guns as much as they want because it's large corporations that make the guns or, more importantly, ammunition.
Make sure you use Y2KY jelly. It allows you to fit four digits into your date instead of two.
Since bad health costs more, and diet is so important, will the government mandate government-healthcare-prescribed daily diets?
Maybe they could start with, oh, I don't know, banning high fructose corn syrup? you know, like all those evil socialist countries who have state health insurance?
This argument goes both ways. If every "person" is free to do whatever they want, then maybe certain "people" will lobby congress to force american people to accept HFCS in their food because they own all the corn farms and want to block foreign (real actual) sugar from cutting into their profits. You want to stop obesity in america and improve public health? Try starting there. Then after that you can move on to trans fats.
wtf is the FDA for anyway?
When did insurance companies start to care about laws? They'll just deny your application without any reasons or make one up. What makes you think their hordes of lawyers wouldn't find a way to weasel around such irrelevant laws?
With the recent supreme court decision, they'll just buy politicians who will roll back that law in the name of "reform", just like the banks did for bankruptcy "reform".
Mod me a troll if you like, but I speak from experience. My wife used to work in emergency rooms. There was more than one occasion where people who were not quite brain dead were taken for organ harvesting. She was so disturbed that she never does organ donor cards now.
Never mod someone -1 Troll simply because you disagree with the politics.