Europeans use their phones about 1/3 as much as Americans (in terms of airtime it's about 250 minutes/month vs about 750 minutes/month). So it takes far fewer network resources to meet peak capacities in Europe so more of a European telco's investment goes to improving speed/coverage.
Sure we are, it's indirect, but by not "group buying" at the national level we're the only nation that encourages investment (and the drug companies have been moving their R&D here as a result). One study estimates that if Europe wasn't paying nationally negotiated prices, there would be another 44 drugs on the market. Sure 40 of those might be "me too" Lipitor competitors, but one might be a breakthrough drug that revolutionizes treatment of some disease that's currently untreated.
Why would a company that has seen declining volume trends for more than a decade spend heavily to build new breweries? Cost of goods sold is where beer ingredients would be. To be fair, most of their manufacturing talent goes to making sure that no matter where and what time of year you buy a Bud, it's going to taste exactly the same every single time. Every microbrewery I know of would kill for that sort of ability.
I'll grant that some good credit can be the result of luck, but from your list:
1. Savings and planning with good insurance means this won't destroy your credit.
2. Credit destroying ID theft, is pretty rare except when family does it, yeah it's luck, but managing those relationships (and having some surplus to help family in need can help improve your luck).
3. This is luck, but I doubt it's that common. I have an extremely common name, and have lived in several large apartment complexes, and while I keep an eye on my report, there hasn't been anything unexpected on there in the last several years.
4. Prudent decisions means having 6-12 months of expenses saved so this (far more likely risk than the others on the list don't destroy your credit).
5. I use credit cards for 80% of my spending but have never have carried a balance on them. About half of all card holders are like me, so it's not that uncommon.
Luck is a factor, but wise planning can really improve the full range of potential results no matter the random factor.
Trade is great and money makes trade far easier, but I think people are far worse at estimating inflation's effects than we've all thought. Looking back, how much of the housing bubble (or the stockmarket bubble before that) were mostly people who had no idea how quickly money was losing value, following advice that presumed a different rate of inflation than materialized?
Prior to the removal of the gold backed dollar (that happened slowly from 1907 to 1971) there was essentially no inflation in the US, the dollar's value fluctuated, but it was fluctuating over a very, very horizontal trendline. Since (especially since 1971) it's zoomed downward, that's a huge sea change, that completely changes how assets should be evaluated (and requires an understanding of exponential growth/decay). I don't think it's working (or rather it's working a little too well in a very cynical sense).
Fiat money is money that only has value because the government says, "it's money" prior to that most civilizations used gold, animal products as money (fish, shells, cattle, etc). Those are real, and have the unique property that they are exclusive, if I have a cow, you can't, but with modern banking and fiat money, you and I can definitely both have a legal claim to the same dollar (which is why bank runs scare the government more than almost anything else). The grand parent post was surprisingly insightful, even if they were just cracking a joke.
Medicaid eligibility ends if you make $7.5/hr full time and have a mom and two kids over 6, which is less than what most big city McDonald's pay but more than most rural McDonald's pay. So to qualify the mom must be working part time or have more children. Single men with a full time job are well over the qualification even if the job is minimum wage.
You're thinking is wrong about the emergency room. Going there means you get into the hospital without any checks on whether you can pay. You'll get a bill, but it's just like going to the hospital with a doctor's reference (except you usually wait in a longer line).
Canada has Euro-style health care. The US doesn't. We have public care for old people, and the poor (generally poor single mothers and their offspring) but everyone else is expected to have private insurance, pay for care, or walk into the emergency room and skip the bill.
We're not reforming it, because if you're middle class or above you have health insurance that's tied to your job/pension that usually includes very excellent care (it extends lives of people who other nations wouldn't waste resources on) and our old people are one of the key voting blocs. Those two groups like health care the way it is (because they get access to the best care in the world). It's fucked up, but in ways that enough voters benefit from that there is huge pressure not to change it.
My own choice for reform would be to have high deductable medical insurance along with health savings plans (so more people see the cost of their very, very expensive care and have incentives to do something about it) while reducing the cost of insurance (that now is really insurance).
Having good credit (into middle age earlier than that it's more a reflection of your parents) means that you pay attention to details, plan for contengencies, and make prudent decisions of how to allocate your resources, you don't think more than a few professions would benefit from being good at those skills?
There's medicaid, but most of the US social services are set up to pay for single moms and their kids, so the income requirements are low enough that if you don't have dependants you don't qualify.
However, any emergency room is required to treat everyone who arrives (and treat them well except for the massive overcrowding) but they will bill your for that treatment and if you don't have insurance/huge stacks of cash you'll be declaring bankruptcy/dealing with collections pretty quickly.
You got to private hospitals which are required to treat everyone but get to bill (and then sell to collections the unpaid bills). Because so many people don't pay (and because everyone sues their doctor/hospital if something goes wrong and everything isn't state of the art), the sticker price for medical care in the US is very, very high.
When you get to applying for a mortgage (rather than just prequalifying) it will ding your credit, but it was only a point for me (a foreclosure fell through very close to closing so I lost a point of my score when we reapplied).
No your national health care systems set a single price they'll pay for any drug which they negotiate (without an agreement there are no or very few sales). Monopsony works. However if the US joins in with monopsony (for it's own benefit), there won't be anyone paying for new drug research so the overall amount of research done will decline. Game theory wasn't new economic thought when I was in college.
There is anecdotal evidence that EU firms have recently shifted some R&D
spending from the EU to the U.S. Consider that in 1990, European firms spent 73 percent
of their R&D in Europe and 26 percent in the U.S. By 2002, they spent 58 percent in
Europe and 34 percent in the U.S.9 Major European firms have moved their research or
operational headquarters to the U.S., including Pharmacia in 1995, Aventis in 1999,
GlaxoSmithKline in 2000, and Novartis in 2002. Reasons given for these moves include
growing U.S. sales compared to EU sales, and requirements that they perform clinical
trials in the U.S., particularly FDA phase three trials. U.S.-based trials also establish
relationships with top U.S. physicians who set prescription guidelines for other
physicians.
They're investing here because this is the lone market that allows products to be sold at prices that will pay the bills on R&D.
Believe me, if there was an easy way to tax this, I'd guess the cut taxes right would have it proposed and enacted quickly. It's a very hard to tax. That's probably because the US right wing has a lot of support (although fading) from the more libertarian wing of the economics profession and those sorts of things are what we're paid to spot. I do get a kick from the irony that some of the biggest losers will be the more socialist countries of Europe if the US actually does pass substantial health care reform.
From an average monthly revenue (across all AT&T wireless plans) of $51 not including the taxes (which they don't get to count as revenue) and equipment sales of $6, about $36 goes to operate the wireless network, purchase the phones (that's probably about $6-8) and pay for advertising, new signups (those kiosks get $100 or so per subscriber) and accountants and stuff. Then about $6 is the annual portion of the licenses and equipment cost (depreciation). Leaving about $13 in operating profit to pay intrest and income taxes (which across the company are another $4). Or about 9 in profit. Most of that profit goes to pension funds and the mutual funds in 401k plans.
Thanks for the maps, it looks like coverage is similar or better in Finland. As far as prices though, I'm not sure the headline is telling the right story. I checked AT&T's and TeleSonera's reports, and Verizon's monthy revenue per user were $51 while TeleSonera's were $30. But the surprising thing was the minutes of use for TS were only 196 while US minutes of use were more than 700 in 2007.
A big problem in Pharma is that only the US is paying for R&D costs (since most of the R&D takes place here some in the nation benefit from it), but if the US "fixes" the drug price problem, Europe and Canada would have to start footing more of the bill.
Everyone needed government money, if AIG had failed Goldman would be dust in the wind (their hedges wouldn't have paid off, because no one would have had money). Also, they only are making money because of the cheap FDIC loans which are still providing government subsidized loans.
It probably helps that the WSJ has always been a pay site, since it first went up. Even more that most of their client base is very used to paying tip top dollar for news a Bloomberg terminal lists at $1500/mo without any extras (trading private news etc).
There's both news and editorializing. If the program name contains a person's name (The O'Rielly Factor, Hannity and Combs (is that still on?) Glen Beck) it's generally editorializing, and if it's unnamed it's news. US Television news though is almost entirely human interest stories these days, though.
Our first amendment means you can pretty much call things whatever you want so long as there isn't an obsenity in the program name (even that would be ok if you don't use the airwaves). The founders had a very high regard for the listener's ability to sort through content, and a deep fear of trampling little voices that would go unheard with regulation.
Slashdot Mirror
Europeans use their phones about 1/3 as much as Americans (in terms of airtime it's about 250 minutes/month vs about 750 minutes/month). So it takes far fewer network resources to meet peak capacities in Europe so more of a European telco's investment goes to improving speed/coverage.
Sure we are, it's indirect, but by not "group buying" at the national level we're the only nation that encourages investment (and the drug companies have been moving their R&D here as a result). One study estimates that if Europe wasn't paying nationally negotiated prices, there would be another 44 drugs on the market. Sure 40 of those might be "me too" Lipitor competitors, but one might be a breakthrough drug that revolutionizes treatment of some disease that's currently untreated.
Why would a company that has seen declining volume trends for more than a decade spend heavily to build new breweries? Cost of goods sold is where beer ingredients would be. To be fair, most of their manufacturing talent goes to making sure that no matter where and what time of year you buy a Bud, it's going to taste exactly the same every single time. Every microbrewery I know of would kill for that sort of ability.
Of course that's pretty easy, there was no naked, petrified Natalie Portman nearby.
I'll grant that some good credit can be the result of luck, but from your list:
1. Savings and planning with good insurance means this won't destroy your credit.
2. Credit destroying ID theft, is pretty rare except when family does it, yeah it's luck, but managing those relationships (and having some surplus to help family in need can help improve your luck).
3. This is luck, but I doubt it's that common. I have an extremely common name, and have lived in several large apartment complexes, and while I keep an eye on my report, there hasn't been anything unexpected on there in the last several years.
4. Prudent decisions means having 6-12 months of expenses saved so this (far more likely risk than the others on the list don't destroy your credit).
5. I use credit cards for 80% of my spending but have never have carried a balance on them. About half of all card holders are like me, so it's not that uncommon.
Luck is a factor, but wise planning can really improve the full range of potential results no matter the random factor.
Trade is great and money makes trade far easier, but I think people are far worse at estimating inflation's effects than we've all thought. Looking back, how much of the housing bubble (or the stockmarket bubble before that) were mostly people who had no idea how quickly money was losing value, following advice that presumed a different rate of inflation than materialized?
Prior to the removal of the gold backed dollar (that happened slowly from 1907 to 1971) there was essentially no inflation in the US, the dollar's value fluctuated, but it was fluctuating over a very, very horizontal trendline. Since (especially since 1971) it's zoomed downward, that's a huge sea change, that completely changes how assets should be evaluated (and requires an understanding of exponential growth/decay). I don't think it's working (or rather it's working a little too well in a very cynical sense).
Fiat money is money that only has value because the government says, "it's money" prior to that most civilizations used gold, animal products as money (fish, shells, cattle, etc). Those are real, and have the unique property that they are exclusive, if I have a cow, you can't, but with modern banking and fiat money, you and I can definitely both have a legal claim to the same dollar (which is why bank runs scare the government more than almost anything else). The grand parent post was surprisingly insightful, even if they were just cracking a joke.
Medicaid eligibility ends if you make $7.5/hr full time and have a mom and two kids over 6, which is less than what most big city McDonald's pay but more than most rural McDonald's pay. So to qualify the mom must be working part time or have more children. Single men with a full time job are well over the qualification even if the job is minimum wage.
You're thinking is wrong about the emergency room. Going there means you get into the hospital without any checks on whether you can pay. You'll get a bill, but it's just like going to the hospital with a doctor's reference (except you usually wait in a longer line).
Canada has Euro-style health care. The US doesn't. We have public care for old people, and the poor (generally poor single mothers and their offspring) but everyone else is expected to have private insurance, pay for care, or walk into the emergency room and skip the bill.
We're not reforming it, because if you're middle class or above you have health insurance that's tied to your job/pension that usually includes very excellent care (it extends lives of people who other nations wouldn't waste resources on) and our old people are one of the key voting blocs. Those two groups like health care the way it is (because they get access to the best care in the world). It's fucked up, but in ways that enough voters benefit from that there is huge pressure not to change it.
My own choice for reform would be to have high deductable medical insurance along with health savings plans (so more people see the cost of their very, very expensive care and have incentives to do something about it) while reducing the cost of insurance (that now is really insurance).
Having good credit (into middle age earlier than that it's more a reflection of your parents) means that you pay attention to details, plan for contengencies, and make prudent decisions of how to allocate your resources, you don't think more than a few professions would benefit from being good at those skills?
There's medicaid, but most of the US social services are set up to pay for single moms and their kids, so the income requirements are low enough that if you don't have dependants you don't qualify.
However, any emergency room is required to treat everyone who arrives (and treat them well except for the massive overcrowding) but they will bill your for that treatment and if you don't have insurance/huge stacks of cash you'll be declaring bankruptcy/dealing with collections pretty quickly.
You got to private hospitals which are required to treat everyone but get to bill (and then sell to collections the unpaid bills). Because so many people don't pay (and because everyone sues their doctor/hospital if something goes wrong and everything isn't state of the art), the sticker price for medical care in the US is very, very high.
When you get to applying for a mortgage (rather than just prequalifying) it will ding your credit, but it was only a point for me (a foreclosure fell through very close to closing so I lost a point of my score when we reapplied).
No but fiat money is a virtual world.
No your national health care systems set a single price they'll pay for any drug which they negotiate (without an agreement there are no or very few sales). Monopsony works. However if the US joins in with monopsony (for it's own benefit), there won't be anyone paying for new drug research so the overall amount of research done will decline. Game theory wasn't new economic thought when I was in college.
From your paper:
There is anecdotal evidence that EU firms have recently shifted some R&D spending from the EU to the U.S. Consider that in 1990, European firms spent 73 percent of their R&D in Europe and 26 percent in the U.S. By 2002, they spent 58 percent in Europe and 34 percent in the U.S.9 Major European firms have moved their research or operational headquarters to the U.S., including Pharmacia in 1995, Aventis in 1999, GlaxoSmithKline in 2000, and Novartis in 2002. Reasons given for these moves include growing U.S. sales compared to EU sales, and requirements that they perform clinical trials in the U.S., particularly FDA phase three trials. U.S.-based trials also establish relationships with top U.S. physicians who set prescription guidelines for other physicians.
They're investing here because this is the lone market that allows products to be sold at prices that will pay the bills on R&D.
Believe me, if there was an easy way to tax this, I'd guess the cut taxes right would have it proposed and enacted quickly. It's a very hard to tax. That's probably because the US right wing has a lot of support (although fading) from the more libertarian wing of the economics profession and those sorts of things are what we're paid to spot. I do get a kick from the irony that some of the biggest losers will be the more socialist countries of Europe if the US actually does pass substantial health care reform.
From an average monthly revenue (across all AT&T wireless plans) of $51 not including the taxes (which they don't get to count as revenue) and equipment sales of $6, about $36 goes to operate the wireless network, purchase the phones (that's probably about $6-8) and pay for advertising, new signups (those kiosks get $100 or so per subscriber) and accountants and stuff. Then about $6 is the annual portion of the licenses and equipment cost (depreciation). Leaving about $13 in operating profit to pay intrest and income taxes (which across the company are another $4). Or about 9 in profit. Most of that profit goes to pension funds and the mutual funds in 401k plans.
Thanks for the maps, it looks like coverage is similar or better in Finland. As far as prices though, I'm not sure the headline is telling the right story. I checked AT&T's and TeleSonera's reports, and Verizon's monthy revenue per user were $51 while TeleSonera's were $30. But the surprising thing was the minutes of use for TS were only 196 while US minutes of use were more than 700 in 2007.
http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/732717/000073271709000050/att2q0910q.htm>AT&T's 2Q report (ARPU page 20)
TeleSonera's annual report ARPU [PDF]and MoU on pg 8
US vs European MoU are on page 2 with a nice chart of US usage on page 6
Yeah I know it's a lobbing chart, but we get a huge amount more usage than most Europeans do, so we pay for it.
The reason governments switched from savings to value added is that they get free enforcement (since the price paid becomes someone else's deduction).
A big problem in Pharma is that only the US is paying for R&D costs (since most of the R&D takes place here some in the nation benefit from it), but if the US "fixes" the drug price problem, Europe and Canada would have to start footing more of the bill.
Everyone needed government money, if AIG had failed Goldman would be dust in the wind (their hedges wouldn't have paid off, because no one would have had money). Also, they only are making money because of the cheap FDIC loans which are still providing government subsidized loans.
It probably helps that the WSJ has always been a pay site, since it first went up. Even more that most of their client base is very used to paying tip top dollar for news a Bloomberg terminal lists at $1500/mo without any extras (trading private news etc).
There's both news and editorializing. If the program name contains a person's name (The O'Rielly Factor, Hannity and Combs (is that still on?) Glen Beck) it's generally editorializing, and if it's unnamed it's news. US Television news though is almost entirely human interest stories these days, though.
Our first amendment means you can pretty much call things whatever you want so long as there isn't an obsenity in the program name (even that would be ok if you don't use the airwaves). The founders had a very high regard for the listener's ability to sort through content, and a deep fear of trampling little voices that would go unheard with regulation.
Very little, life's pretty good when you stop trying to keep up with the Jones'.