But we're talking about your wife, right? Was her $6000 broken ankle paid for by "health care coverage" or "out of pocket"? And hopefully that bill includes an ambulance ride and a some physical therapy, because this random page puts the average cost of a broken ankle at $1400 in 2003. Even at 20% annual growth*, the cost shouldn't be $6000.
My wife broke her ankle last fall. No ambulance ride or physical therapy, though it did require surgery, and I was out of pocket for thousands of dollars, even though I *do* have employer-provided health care, AND my health insurance premiums (not counting co-pays, prescriptions, dental) are still more than my federal taxes.
So even if my federal income tax doubled, I'd still be ahead if I didn't have to pay health insurance premiums as well.
I honestly think any attention given to Rush Limbaugh by the Democrat leadership is a ruse intended to promote an unlikable, unpopular image of the Republican party, and promotes dissent in the Republican party by forcing moderate republicans to battle the extremists in their own party.
Yeah, Rush is "popular" as radio talk show hosts go, but he couldn't win an election anywhere.
Not just video cards. Once it was common to spend $3000-$4000 on a PC, now hardly anybody does that, and no software really requires it. The high end has disappeared. So the same happening to video cards isn't at all improbable - and as you, to a large extent it already has.
While I agree with you in principle, I think your numbers might be a bit off. The ones I find indicate the U.S. is paying between 20% and 50% more than the next highest country (per capita). U.S. citizens pay about twice as much for health care as the average of all the other industrialized countries.
Are you comparing absolute amounts or percent GDP? In percent GDP our health care is merely expensive, while in absolute dollars it's insane.
I'd like to see a study on whether/how much proxies actually help. You can't cache all of youtube, or everything on bittorrent. I doubt just caching static images from popular websites would make much difference.
The computerized stuff is useful too but in most IT stuff you can't quickly read and scribble something on the record and rush off to the next patient. You can do that in paper (ok the minus is the scribble could be unreadable...).
Everybody is going to be "penalized," because medical costs in the US are insane and rapidly getting worse. Yes, doctors are overpaid, because the doctors' union (AMA) runs the industry for its own benefit so there are constant labor (doctor) shortages. Then there's the incredibly inefficient bureaucracy of insurance providers. The medical industry has been gobbling up a skyrocketing share of GDP for the last few decades, and it's simply mathematically impossible for that to continue forever.
There is a huge difference, though: the VA is run entirely by the government. What the rest of the US is going to wind up with is a huge train wreck of competing standards and products by proprietary vendors who don't want to interoperate. By the end it will have cost the industry 10x the price of one or two good products, but what do they care.
Bittorrent clients can be resource intensive though. rtorrent appears to be ncurses-based, which is a bit spartan for my taste. I've been using azureus, but the memory consumption is ridiculous - like, 200+ megabytes for 1 or 2 torrents!
What's an easy-to-use, full-featured, but resource-light torrent app?
That's wrong. The US federal government has not allowed banks to collapse since 1933
But that's just what I meant - without the backing of govt, especially the FDIC but also the bailouts - the banks and insurers would have imploded due to over-leveraging.
Now, if you are saying that a gold-backed economic system wouldn't have entered a bubble in the first place, that is something to think about.
We don't need the government to monitor banks, manage trade, run healthcare, etc, because those tasks can be performed by private institutions regulated by market forces.
What are you talking about? The international banking system collapsed just a few months ago. It survives today only due to government intervention. In America, pre-depression economics was a vicious cycle of boom and bust.
All of them need to be summarily rejected, with a polite e-mail sent to the submitter which says "within the bounds of the law, you need to do what your boss asks you to do whether or not you necessarily agree with it. If you cannot convince your boss to do otherwise, and this is a problem for you, perhaps you should consider working elsewhere."
Bull! Entirely aside from what the submitter should do to protect their job, it is topical on slashdot to question whether DIY ethernet cables are any good, just as people on a home repair DIY site might discuss whether doing drywall yourself is worthwhile.
When the only answer slashdotters can imagine is "just pay somebody else to do it," that is the day there is no point reading here.
That said, the later you try to crash the party, the more mature competition you are facing, and the bigger/better the launch has to be. Google didn't have Google to contend with.
Will it fail? Probably. But the stakes are enormous, so you can't blame a rich smart guy for trying.
The flu kills thousands of people every year. Why does this one have a special name? I can't decide how scared to be. As if there were anything I could do about it anyways.
There's no telling quite what they meant. Maybe they meant Reais instead of US dollars, maybe it's due to the aforementioned taxes, or maybe they are doing some more oblique conversion based on amount of disposable income the average consumer has. One way or another, they're undercutting the PS2 by 20%, and I assume current-gen consoles cost proportionally more.
Why do you think the family is hoping to eradicate the images from the Internet or stop other people from seeing them? Their own attorney stated, "Putting these photos on the Internet was akin to placing them in every mailbox in the world." Does it sound to you like they are hoping to un-do that? To me it's pretty obvious they're suing for the pain and suffering caused to them by the police, and possibly to decrease the chances of it happening again.
who really wants Yoko Ono to continue getting money off of Lennon's genius?
The existence of long-lived copyright corporations like Sony and Disney means artists (not just their descendants and other hangers-on) CAN profit - while living - from proceeds after their deaths. The rights to the music are more valuable now because of the revenue they are expected to generate in the future. Michael Jackson, for instance, might have to sell off the rights to his music to stay financially afloat. But if those rights were to perish with him, the companies who will soon be bidding for those rights would bid much less.
Seriously, if copyright were tied to death + only a short time, JK Rowling would be toast. All the publishing houses would be hiring professional hitmen.
Quite the opposite. If her death reverted her works to the public domain, anybody could then publish them, so her publishers would no longer get a juicy slice of her copyright-protected works, as they do now.
If Obama allows Bush officials to do jail time, then he's going to open himself and his staff to charges once the next administration comes to power. Every President has their dirty little secrets.
All Presidents are not equal. Nixon was forced out of office, and it did not set a precedent of Presidents being driven out of office. Why? Because he was more corrupt than most. Also, what you are saying implies the President and anybody acting under his orders truly is above the law, since they'll never prosecute themselves, and you don't want subsequent administrations to do so either.
$100/mo from 18-65 in the S&P 500 is about million dollars, which would give easily 80,000 a year withdrawal without hurting the principle,
P.S. Talking about numbers like that without adjusting for inflation is extremely misleading. If those are 2009 dollars, that means you're talking about somebody who started saving $100/mo when they were 18 which was 47 years ago, in 1962. That's the equivalent of an 18 year old now saving $705/mo! How many 18 year olds are capable of that? Furthermore, if retiring at 65 now, you have about 20 years to go, so that will be more like $44K inflation adjusted by the time you die. Is that enough? Probably not, but there's really no telling - remember, you are assuming no medicare safety net, so you are quite likely to incur hundreds of thousands in medical expenses, though it will be extremely variable. Thus the only way to be sure is an extremely expensive private insurance policy, which you won't be able to get at all unless you have the good fortune of clean health record.
$100/mo from 18-65 in the S&P 500 is about million dollars, which would give easily 80,000 a year withdrawal without hurting the principle,
Clearly there are a lot of assumptions in that figure. If everybody invested in S&P 500 stocks on the scale necessary to replace Social Security, the returns would go down because there would be too much capital. That might sound like an unfounded assumption, but look at it this way, all monetary sleight of hand aside, the world GDP in any given year almost exactly equals world consumption. That is, few goods can be stored for years, and services cannot be stored at all. Imagine, hypothetically the whole population stashed away lots of cash, but only had a few kids. So when they were old, there would be lots of money in banks but very few able-bodied workers. What would those savings be worth then? Getting your bedpan changed would probably cost $10,000.
So my point is, everybody simultaneously getting rich though mass investing is simply not going to happen. By in large, on average, adjusted for inflation, you will get back what you put in plus a little more. US history to date, especially post-war US, was a historical anomaly because the nation was so rich in under-utilized natural resources so the population was rapidly growing, and other nations were relatively under-developed so wealth was pouring in from all over the world. Those things aren't as true any more and probably won't be as true again.
Slashdot Mirror
My wife broke her ankle last fall. No ambulance ride or physical therapy, though it did require surgery, and I was out of pocket for thousands of dollars, even though I *do* have employer-provided health care, AND my health insurance premiums (not counting co-pays, prescriptions, dental) are still more than my federal taxes.
So even if my federal income tax doubled, I'd still be ahead if I didn't have to pay health insurance premiums as well.
Yeah, Rush is "popular" as radio talk show hosts go, but he couldn't win an election anywhere.
What are you talking about? I don't remember him running on the platform of forcefully reforming nations all over the globe.
Not just video cards. Once it was common to spend $3000-$4000 on a PC, now hardly anybody does that, and no software really requires it. The high end has disappeared. So the same happening to video cards isn't at all improbable - and as you, to a large extent it already has.
Are you comparing absolute amounts or percent GDP? In percent GDP our health care is merely expensive, while in absolute dollars it's insane.
I'd like to see a study on whether/how much proxies actually help. You can't cache all of youtube, or everything on bittorrent. I doubt just caching static images from popular websites would make much difference.
Medical errors are the fifth-leading cause of deaths in the US, with up to 98,000 deaths annually. "Medical errors in the healthcare system arise from miscommunication, physician order transcription errors, adverse drug events, or incomplete patient medical records," says David Plow, Senior Analyst at MRG.
Everybody is going to be "penalized," because medical costs in the US are insane and rapidly getting worse. Yes, doctors are overpaid, because the doctors' union (AMA) runs the industry for its own benefit so there are constant labor (doctor) shortages. Then there's the incredibly inefficient bureaucracy of insurance providers. The medical industry has been gobbling up a skyrocketing share of GDP for the last few decades, and it's simply mathematically impossible for that to continue forever.
There is a huge difference, though: the VA is run entirely by the government. What the rest of the US is going to wind up with is a huge train wreck of competing standards and products by proprietary vendors who don't want to interoperate. By the end it will have cost the industry 10x the price of one or two good products, but what do they care.
Bittorrent clients can be resource intensive though. rtorrent appears to be ncurses-based, which is a bit spartan for my taste. I've been using azureus, but the memory consumption is ridiculous - like, 200+ megabytes for 1 or 2 torrents!
What's an easy-to-use, full-featured, but resource-light torrent app?
Are those numbers inflation-adjusted? A 2% "increase" in the number of dollars owed is actually a decrease if inflation was 2.1%.
But that's just what I meant - without the backing of govt, especially the FDIC but also the bailouts - the banks and insurers would have imploded due to over-leveraging.
Now, if you are saying that a gold-backed economic system wouldn't have entered a bubble in the first place, that is something to think about.
What are you talking about? The international banking system collapsed just a few months ago. It survives today only due to government intervention. In America, pre-depression economics was a vicious cycle of boom and bust.
Bull! Entirely aside from what the submitter should do to protect their job, it is topical on slashdot to question whether DIY ethernet cables are any good, just as people on a home repair DIY site might discuss whether doing drywall yourself is worthwhile.
When the only answer slashdotters can imagine is "just pay somebody else to do it," that is the day there is no point reading here.
Yeah, I'd say that's less than 10,000 CPUs.
That said, the later you try to crash the party, the more mature competition you are facing, and the bigger/better the launch has to be. Google didn't have Google to contend with.
Will it fail? Probably. But the stakes are enormous, so you can't blame a rich smart guy for trying.
So, would it be better to get this flu now to develop immunity rather than waiting until fall for it to come back with a vengeance?
The flu kills thousands of people every year. Why does this one have a special name? I can't decide how scared to be. As if there were anything I could do about it anyways.
There's no telling quite what they meant. Maybe they meant Reais instead of US dollars, maybe it's due to the aforementioned taxes, or maybe they are doing some more oblique conversion based on amount of disposable income the average consumer has. One way or another, they're undercutting the PS2 by 20%, and I assume current-gen consoles cost proportionally more.
Why do you think the family is hoping to eradicate the images from the Internet or stop other people from seeing them? Their own attorney stated, "Putting these photos on the Internet was akin to placing them in every mailbox in the world." Does it sound to you like they are hoping to un-do that? To me it's pretty obvious they're suing for the pain and suffering caused to them by the police, and possibly to decrease the chances of it happening again.
Prince is still averaging an album every year and I'm pretty sure they are profitable. He is a far cry from Michael Jackson.
The existence of long-lived copyright corporations like Sony and Disney means artists (not just their descendants and other hangers-on) CAN profit - while living - from proceeds after their deaths. The rights to the music are more valuable now because of the revenue they are expected to generate in the future. Michael Jackson, for instance, might have to sell off the rights to his music to stay financially afloat. But if those rights were to perish with him, the companies who will soon be bidding for those rights would bid much less.
Quite the opposite. If her death reverted her works to the public domain, anybody could then publish them, so her publishers would no longer get a juicy slice of her copyright-protected works, as they do now.
All Presidents are not equal. Nixon was forced out of office, and it did not set a precedent of Presidents being driven out of office. Why? Because he was more corrupt than most. Also, what you are saying implies the President and anybody acting under his orders truly is above the law, since they'll never prosecute themselves, and you don't want subsequent administrations to do so either.
P.S. Talking about numbers like that without adjusting for inflation is extremely misleading. If those are 2009 dollars, that means you're talking about somebody who started saving $100/mo when they were 18 which was 47 years ago, in 1962. That's the equivalent of an 18 year old now saving $705/mo! How many 18 year olds are capable of that? Furthermore, if retiring at 65 now, you have about 20 years to go, so that will be more like $44K inflation adjusted by the time you die. Is that enough? Probably not, but there's really no telling - remember, you are assuming no medicare safety net, so you are quite likely to incur hundreds of thousands in medical expenses, though it will be extremely variable. Thus the only way to be sure is an extremely expensive private insurance policy, which you won't be able to get at all unless you have the good fortune of clean health record.
Clearly there are a lot of assumptions in that figure. If everybody invested in S&P 500 stocks on the scale necessary to replace Social Security, the returns would go down because there would be too much capital. That might sound like an unfounded assumption, but look at it this way, all monetary sleight of hand aside, the world GDP in any given year almost exactly equals world consumption. That is, few goods can be stored for years, and services cannot be stored at all. Imagine, hypothetically the whole population stashed away lots of cash, but only had a few kids. So when they were old, there would be lots of money in banks but very few able-bodied workers. What would those savings be worth then? Getting your bedpan changed would probably cost $10,000.
So my point is, everybody simultaneously getting rich though mass investing is simply not going to happen. By in large, on average, adjusted for inflation, you will get back what you put in plus a little more. US history to date, especially post-war US, was a historical anomaly because the nation was so rich in under-utilized natural resources so the population was rapidly growing, and other nations were relatively under-developed so wealth was pouring in from all over the world. Those things aren't as true any more and probably won't be as true again.