I am a self employed contractor, and it's not a matter of being "forced". It's not for everyone, because you have to manage your own accounting and benefits, but you can make it work just as well or better than working for someone else's company. I have a group health plan (my wife also works for our company), 401k, and my annual income is substantially greater than my last W2 job. I get a couple unsolicited contract offers every week, which is what I view as my income security. I'm pretty good at what I do, and even though contractors usually go first when layoffs happen, exceptions are often made for the people who perform well (although it's also a sign to start looking at your other options).
So while that number may include contractors, you should recognize that many contractors were not forced into it.
Calories in, calories out is true, but the form of the calories is also significant. We are not simple systems. The starch issue is about glycemic response. Essentially, when your body digests starches, it produces insulin. More sugars, more insulin. When the insulin falls off, your body tells you that you're hungry again. It's sort of like a boom/bust cycle, and the result is an urge to overeat because of the hormone response. It's significantly more difficult to maintain proper portions when you're hungry.
I think he may have been reappropriating the term "drive by wire". It would not be in reference to the ford "drive by wire" system (electronic control system that appears the same as a traditional mechanical column). More likely meaning that power steering and power breaking require the engine chip to be functioning to operate.
And he is correct that those subsystems cut out with the engine. My vehicle recently had a vacuum leak. The engine stalled out as I was breaking. No power steering, no power breaking. It was not a good situation. The car behind me very nearly plowed into me when the light flipped to green.
Excellent point. If you change your target population significantly, then comparability goes out the window. I've done alot of health stats work, and that sort of change would probably mean the results were denoted as not comparable. In a related example, I had a heart disease analysis, and we had to break it in two parts because there was a significant change in the way that the diagnosis were recorded around 2005.
Now you could regenerate the pre-2003 numbers including the populations of the soon to join the EU members, and use that for comparison if the data is available. It would show a more accurate relative change.
I've done reporting work at a state health department. In general, information was suppressed if it was to small of a population (incident population or rate population). In general, a population under 50 is considered too small to report publicly without exposing protected health information (PHI). With accident records, you population is employees. Suppressing site information may help, but it also reduces the effectiveness. It's also likely that most small businesses would never have a large enough population. Most likely, the results would need to be aggregated over a long period of time. I don't think this works under the law as it currently stands.
These guys won't be able to pull it off now, but they could form a new corp with a new name, say they want to build usb connected gadgets, get their ID, *AND THEN* start sharing. It would probably help to get a device in the wild first so there isn't some sort of revocation issue.
There are plenty of circumstances where we have machines that are extensively automated and we still have highly trained people operate them. Commercial aircraft have pilots there because there are too many circumstances where a person is going to be best able to make the right decision. Most of the time, these planes are running on autopilot and they do very well. But the circumstances where the autopilot fails (i.e. does the wrong thing) can have catastrophic consequences. So we have multiple pilots there for safety. Freight trucks are the same way. These machines are require a fair amount of skill to handle troublesome situations. A loaded truck will weight in excess of 45000 lbs. That's more than 20 times the mass of most cars. I do not expect truck drivers to be overly affected by this for quite some time.
This happened to my girlfriend. They cut all the full time employees to working 25 hours and under. They went on a mass hiring spree to compensate. It's something Walmart has been doing for years and years. The problem is, it's not 2014 yet, so the affordable exchanges are not available to everyone yet. At that point all those people will be able to get health care for basically nothing, as their pay scale will determine how much in assisted aid they get. If they get paid $15k a year pumping gas, their health care will basically be entirely covered. Companies are using this as a method to push expenses from their pocket to the tax payers pocket.
Not that I don't have any problem with this. It's speeding up the process to get everything straight up nationalized. By the end of 2014, I am guessing most of the workforce will be covered by the government. At which point they will just say there is no point in having companies pay for it, and just move everyone to it. Then we can get all the providers under control with cost requirements.
This is actually an interesting observation. I never liked the form of this law. I always thought that the way to improve health care for the working poor was through expansion of medicaid. While I disagree with your perspective on the amount of workforce receiving coverage and overall nationalization, I think you have very astutely recognized how the coverage expansion will work. And I agree that it will be followed up by cost control measures (likely episodic pricing as opposed to a la carte pricing).
The real problem here is this law was intended to require a benefit (i.e. minimum compensation) for people who do not generally receive it already. So now, not only will they not get insurance, but they're also facing a 25% cut in income.
What percentage of those people voted for the politicians who enacted this law? I bet it's in the high 90's.
Highly unlikely. We never get voter turnout on that scale.
They don't have to pay the fine, or provide insurance. They just make their employees part timers.
I've seen some anecdotal evidence of this (from waitstaff at a couple different restaurants, security guards at my parking deck, blog posts). Unskilled labor positions (i.e. the people that were targeted to receive this benefit) are just having their hours cut to 30 hours/week because part time employees are not subject to the insurance requirement. With current employment trends, it's easy to hire some extra part timers to fill the gap. It's a non-issue for skilled laborers, because most already receive employer provided insurance.
The real problem here is this law was intended to require a benefit (i.e. minimum compensation) for people who do not generally receive it already. So now, not only will they not get insurance, but they're also facing a 25% cut in income.
That's highly inaccurate. The big HFTs no longer make much money, because like most technologies, it has been understood and adopted. Their margins have dramatically receded since the mid-2000's, because all the market-makers (i.e. the bank you place your order through) also have their own high speed machines.
Now, to the part about giving nothing of social value, well that's not really true (and in this context, social value applies only to stock market participants). What they provide is liquidity. When you place your order, the HFT programs are often buyer that make sure your order clears as you entered it. They do capture a very small amount of bid-ask spread (on the order of.1 cents/share these days), but they aren't taking it from the traders. They are really taking it from the market-maker banks that clear the orders. These banks have always captured the bid-ask spread (the positive difference in price between the seller's price and the buyer's offer). And this is where the positive part of HFT comes in. Spreads used to be fairly large (on the order of 10 cents/share in the late nineties). Now, they are measured in tenths of a cent. So the buyer and seller (i.e. the people in the market) now keep 9.9 cents of the 10 cents they used to lose to the market maker banks, because the HFTs keep spreads tight.
You always have your rights... it's just a question of if and how you exercise them.
The difference here is the guy who went to talk to the police on his own (ie voluntarily) vs being arrested (ie unwillingly).
The court ruled that in the prior, you have to make an affirmative statement as to you exercising your 5a rights.
Still bullshit to me. The fact that not explicitly stating that one is exercising one's rights implicitly means forgoing them? Does this mean that if I don't affirm my right to free speech or a fair trial that I cannot speak freely or will not get a fair trial? From the article:
This seems precisely correct, and this ruling seems very, very wrong. My understanding is that the law requires an "express waiver" for you to forgo any of your constitutionally declared rights, and there is no indication that he signed any such waiver.
I don't think that's it at all. I think Gnome3 has been weighed pretty well on it's merits. Many people consider it unusable. It made me jump ship for Mint (and I've been primarily running RH/Fedora since the mid nineties). I've tried alot of different desktops (Enlightenment, Gnome 1-3, TWM, KDE 1-4, and then some) . I'm not unwilling to change, and I think that's generally true of linux desktop users. We will try new things, and embrace the good ones. We will also harshly reject the bad ones. That's our culture.
And BTW, linux admins all have the same desktop. It's usually black w/ green monospace characters.;)
I bought my wife an iphone 5 for christmas to use on straight talk. Compared to a $75 per month subsidized plan, the payback period was 14months. There have been some hassles with MMS (which has been a bit of a big deal), and no LTE (yet), but that's fine because it turns the telco into a commodity (which is what we want).
Additionally, if you watch the deal sites, you'll sometimes see 6 month refill cards for $220. That takes the monthly cost down to $36, which is right where I am willing to pay.
How much does an email list weigh? Do you need to print it out to weigh it? Or can you just stick it on a flash drive and weight that? Could dramatically affect the price if weight is the unit of measure.
Not True. I worked a contract for a health department, and HIPAA violations cover employers, providers, and insurers/agents. However, the key thing is if it would be considered 'protected health information' (PHI). There is alot of data that is not PHI that can legally be shared. PHI really centers on personally identifiable health information. Insurance status generally falls outside of that.
I completely disagree. Developers should absolutely be involved with software installs. Rarely should they have the final say, but both operations and development staff benefit from working together on software installs.
The best example I can give for this is database installs. Working with the operations staff on installs helps developers better understand engine performance. They learn about things like prepared queries, connection pools, what tables remain paged into memory, etc. These are things that help the developers write better code. Similarly, the operations staff can learn what the application focuses are. They can optimize performance through VM provisioning, tablespace layout, memory pool size, etc. They can also understand the usage goals better, which lets them keep developers informed of important changes.
I've been running IT departments for over 10 years, and my experience has shown me that there is a definite benefit to having development and ops work together on installs.
You should take a look at NAI. It covers alot of this: http://www.networkadvertising.org/ There is actually alot of transparency, but many/most people don't actually take the time to look at the information and opt-out options.
I work in this field, and people are acutely aware of the privacy issues, for both ethical and pragmatic reasons. Pragmatically, as pointed out in the infamous article about Target stores sending advertisements to women 3-6 months pregnant, people find it creepy when they're clearly being targeted. Hence, it reduces effectiveness. Ethically, well, that varies. Many people in the industry have a merchant oriented perspective (they are trying to help the merchants find interested customers, which is not an evil motive). Many also view what advertising as heading towards a more concierge type service (i.e. ads that highlight the interests the customer has been looking for, rather than pushing an irrelevant sale). And there are also people who don't care one way or the other about the ethics, and we have privacy laws that help there.
The rebate did not factor in at all once he was ahead. The soft 17, playing perfect cards, and being allowed to vary his bets as he saw fit did it. Kid Dynamite covered this much better.
Where are you coming up with this? Do you know any drug reps? Are you in the business? Getting white papers, case studies, etc to doctors is probably 70% of what drug reps do (I know more than a few of them). The other 30% is price negotiation. But all of that is drug marketing. And this is all just a matter of accounting, because the point was "Major pharmaceutical companies spend more on marketing than R&D". The accountants put these costs under marketing.
While it's true that the big pharmaceutical companies don't develop most of their own drugs, they do pay for the R&D done by the small firms. More importantly though, they tend to be what takes the drugs out of the lab and into a usable form. They primarily handle the drug safety (i.e. drug trials), manuafacturing, and marketing (because it's no good if the doctors don't know about it). They're just later in the chain, but they have done their work to create the drugs. If the Indian people/government paid for the work done prior to it being acquired by Bayer, then maybe you can justify setting the price so low for the work they did. But if not, it's just a straight ripoff. They better hope they know everything about the drug, because Bayer certainly won't be looking to help them.
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I am a self employed contractor, and it's not a matter of being "forced". It's not for everyone, because you have to manage your own accounting and benefits, but you can make it work just as well or better than working for someone else's company. I have a group health plan (my wife also works for our company), 401k, and my annual income is substantially greater than my last W2 job. I get a couple unsolicited contract offers every week, which is what I view as my income security. I'm pretty good at what I do, and even though contractors usually go first when layoffs happen, exceptions are often made for the people who perform well (although it's also a sign to start looking at your other options).
So while that number may include contractors, you should recognize that many contractors were not forced into it.
It's a good thing they did this. Otherwise, the Beatles would have no incentive to produce new songs.
Calories in, calories out is true, but the form of the calories is also significant. We are not simple systems. The starch issue is about glycemic response. Essentially, when your body digests starches, it produces insulin. More sugars, more insulin. When the insulin falls off, your body tells you that you're hungry again. It's sort of like a boom/bust cycle, and the result is an urge to overeat because of the hormone response. It's significantly more difficult to maintain proper portions when you're hungry.
I think he may have been reappropriating the term "drive by wire". It would not be in reference to the ford "drive by wire" system (electronic control system that appears the same as a traditional mechanical column). More likely meaning that power steering and power breaking require the engine chip to be functioning to operate.
And he is correct that those subsystems cut out with the engine. My vehicle recently had a vacuum leak. The engine stalled out as I was breaking. No power steering, no power breaking. It was not a good situation. The car behind me very nearly plowed into me when the light flipped to green.
Excellent point. If you change your target population significantly, then comparability goes out the window. I've done alot of health stats work, and that sort of change would probably mean the results were denoted as not comparable. In a related example, I had a heart disease analysis, and we had to break it in two parts because there was a significant change in the way that the diagnosis were recorded around 2005.
Now you could regenerate the pre-2003 numbers including the populations of the soon to join the EU members, and use that for comparison if the data is available. It would show a more accurate relative change.
Really well!
http://seekingalpha.com/article/1864111-the-post-crisis-facts-are-in-and-theyre-not-kind-to-keynesian-thinking
I've done reporting work at a state health department. In general, information was suppressed if it was to small of a population (incident population or rate population). In general, a population under 50 is considered too small to report publicly without exposing protected health information (PHI). With accident records, you population is employees. Suppressing site information may help, but it also reduces the effectiveness. It's also likely that most small businesses would never have a large enough population. Most likely, the results would need to be aggregated over a long period of time. I don't think this works under the law as it currently stands.
These guys won't be able to pull it off now, but they could form a new corp with a new name, say they want to build usb connected gadgets, get their ID, *AND THEN* start sharing. It would probably help to get a device in the wild first so there isn't some sort of revocation issue.
There are plenty of circumstances where we have machines that are extensively automated and we still have highly trained people operate them. Commercial aircraft have pilots there because there are too many circumstances where a person is going to be best able to make the right decision. Most of the time, these planes are running on autopilot and they do very well. But the circumstances where the autopilot fails (i.e. does the wrong thing) can have catastrophic consequences. So we have multiple pilots there for safety.
Freight trucks are the same way. These machines are require a fair amount of skill to handle troublesome situations. A loaded truck will weight in excess of 45000 lbs. That's more than 20 times the mass of most cars. I do not expect truck drivers to be overly affected by this for quite some time.
This happened to my girlfriend. They cut all the full time employees to working 25 hours and under. They went on a mass hiring spree to compensate. It's something Walmart has been doing for years and years. The problem is, it's not 2014 yet, so the affordable exchanges are not available to everyone yet. At that point all those people will be able to get health care for basically nothing, as their pay scale will determine how much in assisted aid they get. If they get paid $15k a year pumping gas, their health care will basically be entirely covered. Companies are using this as a method to push expenses from their pocket to the tax payers pocket.
Not that I don't have any problem with this. It's speeding up the process to get everything straight up nationalized. By the end of 2014, I am guessing most of the workforce will be covered by the government. At which point they will just say there is no point in having companies pay for it, and just move everyone to it. Then we can get all the providers under control with cost requirements.
This is actually an interesting observation. I never liked the form of this law. I always thought that the way to improve health care for the working poor was through expansion of medicaid. While I disagree with your perspective on the amount of workforce receiving coverage and overall nationalization, I think you have very astutely recognized how the coverage expansion will work. And I agree that it will be followed up by cost control measures (likely episodic pricing as opposed to a la carte pricing).
The real problem here is this law was intended to require a benefit (i.e. minimum compensation) for people who do not generally receive it already. So now, not only will they not get insurance, but they're also facing a 25% cut in income.
What percentage of those people voted for the politicians who enacted this law? I bet it's in the high 90's.
Highly unlikely. We never get voter turnout on that scale.
They don't have to pay the fine, or provide insurance. They just make their employees part timers.
I've seen some anecdotal evidence of this (from waitstaff at a couple different restaurants, security guards at my parking deck, blog posts). Unskilled labor positions (i.e. the people that were targeted to receive this benefit) are just having their hours cut to 30 hours/week because part time employees are not subject to the insurance requirement. With current employment trends, it's easy to hire some extra part timers to fill the gap. It's a non-issue for skilled laborers, because most already receive employer provided insurance.
The real problem here is this law was intended to require a benefit (i.e. minimum compensation) for people who do not generally receive it already. So now, not only will they not get insurance, but they're also facing a 25% cut in income.
That's highly inaccurate. The big HFTs no longer make much money, because like most technologies, it has been understood and adopted. Their margins have dramatically receded since the mid-2000's, because all the market-makers (i.e. the bank you place your order through) also have their own high speed machines. .1 cents/share these days), but they aren't taking it from the traders. They are really taking it from the market-maker banks that clear the orders. These banks have always captured the bid-ask spread (the positive difference in price between the seller's price and the buyer's offer). And this is where the positive part of HFT comes in. Spreads used to be fairly large (on the order of 10 cents/share in the late nineties). Now, they are measured in tenths of a cent. So the buyer and seller (i.e. the people in the market) now keep 9.9 cents of the 10 cents they used to lose to the market maker banks, because the HFTs keep spreads tight.
Now, to the part about giving nothing of social value, well that's not really true (and in this context, social value applies only to stock market participants). What they provide is liquidity. When you place your order, the HFT programs are often buyer that make sure your order clears as you entered it. They do capture a very small amount of bid-ask spread (on the order of
You always have your rights... it's just a question of if and how you exercise them.
The difference here is the guy who went to talk to the police on his own (ie voluntarily) vs being arrested (ie unwillingly).
The court ruled that in the prior, you have to make an affirmative statement as to you exercising your 5a rights.
Still bullshit to me. The fact that not explicitly stating that one is exercising one's rights implicitly means forgoing them? Does this mean that if I don't affirm my right to free speech or a fair trial that I cannot speak freely or will not get a fair trial? From the article:
This seems precisely correct, and this ruling seems very, very wrong. My understanding is that the law requires an "express waiver" for you to forgo any of your constitutionally declared rights, and there is no indication that he signed any such waiver.
I don't think that's it at all. I think Gnome3 has been weighed pretty well on it's merits. Many people consider it unusable. It made me jump ship for Mint (and I've been primarily running RH/Fedora since the mid nineties). I've tried alot of different desktops (Enlightenment, Gnome 1-3, TWM, KDE 1-4, and then some) . I'm not unwilling to change, and I think that's generally true of linux desktop users. We will try new things, and embrace the good ones. We will also harshly reject the bad ones. That's our culture.
And BTW, linux admins all have the same desktop. It's usually black w/ green monospace characters. ;)
I bought my wife an iphone 5 for christmas to use on straight talk. Compared to a $75 per month subsidized plan, the payback period was 14months. There have been some hassles with MMS (which has been a bit of a big deal), and no LTE (yet), but that's fine because it turns the telco into a commodity (which is what we want).
Additionally, if you watch the deal sites, you'll sometimes see 6 month refill cards for $220. That takes the monthly cost down to $36, which is right where I am willing to pay.
How much does an email list weigh? Do you need to print it out to weigh it? Or can you just stick it on a flash drive and weight that? Could dramatically affect the price if weight is the unit of measure.
Not True. I worked a contract for a health department, and HIPAA violations cover employers, providers, and insurers/agents. However, the key thing is if it would be considered 'protected health information' (PHI). There is alot of data that is not PHI that can legally be shared. PHI really centers on personally identifiable health information. Insurance status generally falls outside of that.
Do you like digging in the dirt, with just a pick and brush?
I completely disagree. Developers should absolutely be involved with software installs. Rarely should they have the final say, but both operations and development staff benefit from working together on software installs.
The best example I can give for this is database installs. Working with the operations staff on installs helps developers better understand engine performance. They learn about things like prepared queries, connection pools, what tables remain paged into memory, etc. These are things that help the developers write better code. Similarly, the operations staff can learn what the application focuses are. They can optimize performance through VM provisioning, tablespace layout, memory pool size, etc. They can also understand the usage goals better, which lets them keep developers informed of important changes.
I've been running IT departments for over 10 years, and my experience has shown me that there is a definite benefit to having development and ops work together on installs.
tell me when it's done
I expect you'll know when it happens.
You should take a look at NAI. It covers alot of this:
http://www.networkadvertising.org/
There is actually alot of transparency, but many/most people don't actually take the time to look at the information and opt-out options.
I work in this field, and people are acutely aware of the privacy issues, for both ethical and pragmatic reasons. Pragmatically, as pointed out in the infamous article about Target stores sending advertisements to women 3-6 months pregnant, people find it creepy when they're clearly being targeted. Hence, it reduces effectiveness.
Ethically, well, that varies. Many people in the industry have a merchant oriented perspective (they are trying to help the merchants find interested customers, which is not an evil motive). Many also view what advertising as heading towards a more concierge type service (i.e. ads that highlight the interests the customer has been looking for, rather than pushing an irrelevant sale). And there are also people who don't care one way or the other about the ethics, and we have privacy laws that help there.
The rebate did not factor in at all once he was ahead. The soft 17, playing perfect cards, and being allowed to vary his bets as he saw fit did it. Kid Dynamite covered this much better.
http://kiddynamitesworld.com/why-cant-journalists-who-write-articles-about-gambling-understand-math/
Where are you coming up with this? Do you know any drug reps? Are you in the business? Getting white papers, case studies, etc to doctors is probably 70% of what drug reps do (I know more than a few of them). The other 30% is price negotiation. But all of that is drug marketing.
And this is all just a matter of accounting, because the point was "Major pharmaceutical companies spend more on marketing than R&D". The accountants put these costs under marketing.
While it's true that the big pharmaceutical companies don't develop most of their own drugs, they do pay for the R&D done by the small firms. More importantly though, they tend to be what takes the drugs out of the lab and into a usable form. They primarily handle the drug safety (i.e. drug trials), manuafacturing, and marketing (because it's no good if the doctors don't know about it). They're just later in the chain, but they have done their work to create the drugs. If the Indian people/government paid for the work done prior to it being acquired by Bayer, then maybe you can justify setting the price so low for the work they did. But if not, it's just a straight ripoff. They better hope they know everything about the drug, because Bayer certainly won't be looking to help them.