Yes and they usually charge you MUCH MUCH more than they would charge you and an insurer if you pay without insurance.
If you ask me that is the real problem with the system. The correct intervention if there is one are to
A) Make medical benefits payed to employees taxable at the same rate as all other compensation. (well I really think we should eliminate income taxes and move to a consumptive system but..)
B) Discourage employees from offering medical benefits. Not necessarily with a tax, but perhaps incentiveze salary only compensation with simpler reporting requirements etc.
C) Bar medical practitioners from price discrimination, its inelastic anyway. Tell them they have to publish a price book for all those medical codes and services and can do so as frequently as they like down to a 24 hour window. They have to charge everyone the same, no matter who the payer actually is. So no group discounts, etc. They would be allowed to offer discounts for payment method limited to demonstrable differences in processing costs. IE they could charge you less if you pay in cash, they could charge an insurer a small percentage less if they do bulk settlements rather than individual transactions etc. They would be required to be able to show the level of discount is highly correlated to the real reduction in their overhead, if they do chose to make such discount rates available.
If you made these changes prices would reflect the real cost of services, and we'd have a working market. Prices would no doubt come down for the uninsured.
I got 3 stitches a year ago. I let them send me the bill first because I wanted to see what it would be without my insurance company. They wanted $1200! After I submitted it to my insurer, they settled for something like $350! That really ought to be criminal. It really is an abusive practice against the uninsured. I don't normally support regulation but something needs to be address pricing. What the AFCA did will make the problem infinitely worse.
You are just a Linux hater, everything in that post is incorrect.
Vendors won't touch Linux because it is too unstable
What do mean by unstable? A given kernel on known fixed hardware usually is incredibly stable, Which is exactly why Linux is not just ascendant but dominate in the embedded space.
breaks too much and is unsupported.
There are plenty of commercial Linux vendors large and small that offer great support. Red Hat software is not exactly what you'd call fly by night anymore. I bet most of the vendors you work with have a lessor market cap and are if anything more likely to vanish.
Linux always took great pride in breaking shit all the time...
No they never. User space interfaces to kernel have been stable or backward compatible for almost two decades now. If you mean for stuff that runs in kernel space, or stuff build on top of other user land platforms you might have an argument. Still we are talking about medical devices here, they should not be running the same stack your desktop/server is. You really should be using a basic init and tiny set of services you need. Heck you might even build your own init. All of that would be arguably easier on Linux than on any commercial UNIX and certainly easier than Windows. If you build yourself a little stack of job specific custom binaries you could expect to run them unmodified for the life span of the product, even as you update to the latest kernels.
And there you have it...Instead of Unix we got friggin' Windows *everywhere*.
I think this has much more to do with Microsoft marketing dollars, spreading FUD, old prejudices rather than honest analysis, political games, and the like than it does with Linux's quality or its effect on the commercial UNIX space.
I agree mostly but elementary is pretty young. I am not sure you can get your point across without scaring then. Also most social network terms of service don't really allow ementry age kids anyway. They certainly are not in a position to be managing the security of their own machines.
Middle school and Junior high though would be a great time to address these topics. They often have some class like "life skills" where basic cooking, check book balancing, and similar personal business matter as taught. Internet safety would be a good subject to spend a little time on in such a course
Its not theft of service! First the CC is required under the current regulations to make those channels available in the clear to their customers. He *IS* a customer, he has a cable modem!
Now if he was not a customer or was somehow defeating the protection on the other channels that would be theft of service. What this is the FCC is allowing them to cut the services they offer to certain classes of customer, which he happens to fall into. His complaint is that he will be asked to pay the same rate for a smaller service offering now, if the CC takes advantage of the new regs. They probably will do that too since it will push more people to subscribe to an bundle that includes their pay TV offerings.
You can deny it all you want but somebody would have done something with those cars had they not been destroyed or fewer new cars would have been produced/sold or some combination of the two.
To suggest anything else is just lying! Quite literally the hand of God would have to have come down and stanched them out of the market place, just like the hand of government did.
So someone suffered for others gain. A certain group of producers got to move more of a product than the market currently demanded. Certain groups of buyers got access to a subsidy on an asset.
Everyone else paid for it, either directly through higher prices on used autos if they were in that market, indirectly thru inflationary monetary policy, or through other lost opportunities. You're $3000 dollars is a nice magic number. I'll tell you my first car was 14 years new and I paid like $300 for it certainly not $3000. I never could have scraped the money for $3000 dollar car and insurance together as a high school sophomore. Being able to buy that $300 dollar car though let me drive to school and a job after school so by my senior year I had savings I could put toward college (and other uses).
Chances are pretty good some kind lost out on similar opportunities because of that program. If you took advantage of the program than you STOLE from him or her, from me, your neighbors, your parents, your children.
Basic economics insists that if the supply of used cars was larger they would command a lower price. Which would put them in affordability reach of more people. This is very simple supply and demand, the most well understood and accepted theory in economics. Suggesting this is wrong is an extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary proof.
Cash for Clunkers was designed to benefit specific groups and it arguably did that; but it also did harm to other groups. There is room to debate if it was a net positive for the nation as whole.
I for one find it very difficult from an instinctive point of view to think forcibly removing assets from the economy prior to the end of their useful service life, and compensating people with capital made available by leveraging debt instruments can really work out to be a win for the nation as a whole. I can totally see how the class of folks who did stand to gain from it would have a huge over lap with the class of likely and eligible voters though.
I agree as long as this is evidence in an on going investigation the authorities should not be publishing it. Now once it gets brought up in court it becomes a matter of public record, and should be available to anyone interested and willing to cover the minor costs of reproduction, which would perhaps include a few pennies worth of photo copies and 15min of wages for some court clerk.
If after the cases are settled and these people really are guilty only then should law enforcement be more visibly publishing it and only if they really think it would aide in future enforcement efforts.
Which ignores the fact that Britain had legally secured the mineral rights to virtually all of Iran. The new government was going to welch on the deal. It was clear and plain act of war. The actions taken in response were perfectly justified; unless you want to argue that nations should be freely allowed to ignore treaties with no retaliatory action from the counter party.
Even if we ignore the question of if such a ban is an unethical infringement on individual liberties, the law is still wrong. If elected officials want to enact legislation to ban something alright democracy at work I guess but all the exceptions are terrible. The law should apply to everyone equally. If large sugary beverages are such a health hazard than nobody should be selling them. This law picks winners and loosers, one class of business is favored over others with the right to sell a high margin product denied to everyone else. It is arbitrary as well 7-11 cannot control risks better than a cinema. This is not like saying you have to be a licensed pharmacy to dispense certain classes of drugs or something.
If this is the way our society is going to keep moving we might as well just move to a completely command economy, freedom and capitalism are all but dead.
Yes it does. SeaMonkey uses 13% less memory on my system with the same three tabs, slashdot, slate, and LQ open as does FireFox. Which is funny considering FF was started to be lighter weight than SeaMonkey. SeaMonkey is far and away the better browser now in terms of UI as well.
Well yes and know. Authentication, Confidentiality, and forms of integrity are session or higher layer problems. Availability is also a key component of security. You can't tell me issues like ye'old LAND attack, tear drop, ping of death, negative sequence numbers etc don't cause Availability problems and they are decidedly network and transport layer. If I can cut your wire to jam your airwaves thats a physical layer issue.
No its not fine as a layer, and yes if you rely on it you are most certainly doing it wrong. While I'll agree it might be best not publish you network diagrams and similar as that might just be inviting trouble your components should not be secret.
It can take way less time than you might be inclined to think for skilled cracker to develop a vulnerability. If they get their foot in the door anywhere, that obscure device or software component might well be their easiest path to escalated privileges. Since few use it and few have access the weakness have not been exposed, patches and mitigation strategies not developed. It ends up in many cases being easy prey for a 0-day.
I'd hate to imagine the outrage on Slashdot if folks here learned how mushrooms are produced, right here in the good old USA. Hint: Chickens play an important role.
And why would they do otherwise? Food poising is not going to kill you. It makes perfect economic sense to risk food poisoning for a little cheaper fish when Medicaid, your employers group plan, and now your highly subsidized Obama Health Exchange plan is going to pick up the bill for the antibiotics, bed time, and bag of saline solution to fix it, should it happen.
We take away peoples incentive to protect themselves, when we socialize the costs to fix it. The result trickle down government ends up raining shit on Chinese fish.
Yes it probably will. It will cause customers who are worried to avoid Chinese sea food, might even put the producers or the importers out of business.
Looks what some of the contaminated vegetable scares have done to certain groups of farmers in our nation. They have driven them out of business and forced others to take elaborate measures to ensure and convince customers of the safety of their product.
With "openness" the market will do the job just fine. As long as people know where their sea food product is coming from and what the methods of production are I don't see any problem.
and that would be far less democratic (at least for us in the USA) than it is now. Just look at what happens with the EC.
Trust me Washing politicians would love nothing more than to be able to shield themselves from accountability to their electorate, by hiding behind the actions of some politician appointee at the UN, they can pretend to disagree with later.
No there is no gradient here. I don't think any information or expression should be subject to censorship ever. Which is not to suggest the government can't or should not try and keep some state secrets.
Even things like CP should not be restricted. Now the production of it should be illegal. It should constitute "rape of child" and it should probably be a capital crime; but the mere possession of a photo should not be.
You are talking about attempts to manipulate prices, which there very much are rules against. That is not exactly the same thing as HFT which seeks to try and profit from tiny fluctuations in price but is not specifically geared toward moving the price.
I know its split hairs to so degree, because and HFT player is likely a market mover in terms of quantity all by themselves and the algorithms take that into account but what you are describing falls outside of what most people think of as "just HFT".
Nobody has made a compelling case that HFT has any real net impact on retail investors or anyone making an IPO or issuance. Look to my other post in this discussion but by and large HFT is just Wall Street Banks pirating from each other.
The liquidity argument aside, the HFT guys are the ones who drove the technology that has enable you and I to trade online for low fixed prices, rather than the bad old days where you had to find a broker who would bother with you in the first place and then put up with his 3+% commission.
It is transfer but its really only transfer between Wall Street Entities. There is a great deal of hand ringing about HFT but I don't see much evidence it does anything to your typical retail investor.
Look if your timescales are weeks,months,years and likely even intra-day its hard for me to see how HFT harms you. In the 2500ms it takes your brain to click the mouse, your online broker to process your web post and execute your transaction the HFT machines may have moved the share price up or down a few pennies. That might just as easily work for your as against you, and keep in mind its going to happen on the other side of the trade too, so over even over just a handful of trades it more than likely washes out.
If you are worried the "flash crash" or "melt up" might happen just as you click, you can protect yourself easily just use limit orders (you should almost always anyway). I don't know about others but the brokerage I use charges the same commission for both limit and market orders, so I always just enter a value a few pennies more than my bid prices or a few less than my ask, that way I don't get burned, if the bizarre happens.
Finally what if you hold positions in a "flash crash" or "melt up" depending on what your position is and if you have any cash on hand it might be an INCREDIBLE opportunity for you. You might have a shot out buying or selling at 1000 times the margin you otherwise hoped to get. If you are long wait a day. If it was really a good company it should recover most of its share price in that time, no need to panic.
They know they just have NDA's and similar that don't let them disclose that information. You can't even make a 10K cash withdraw without the FED and Treasury being informed. You bet the exchange knows who did this, and there is a good chance the SEC does too. Unless they are confident that a criminal prosecution is going to happen the names will never be made public, it would only invite a tsunami of lawsuits.
Forever is a long time, and there are major events like if quantum computing suddenly became a mass market reality but baring something like that:
The humble project box style PC remains the most powerful, inexpensive, and flexible personal computer device you can get. Even if we get to the point where its not the center of our day to day computing tasks (and some folks may be there already) there is just nothing like for trying out new ideas.
Any software project, hardware peripheral, interface, network architecture you can image can at least be experimented with on PC. There is just no platform like it. I am including things like ARM boards etc in this, basically anything you can stuff in in a industry standard project box style case, run with one of the common standard power supply types etc.
Ask yourself how much would traction would the environmental movement have received if you had to convince people barely making enough to get by to support those higher costs? Answer none. The environment movement exists precisely because people are/were affluent enough to try and clean up and live more cleanly.
You don't see people in impoverished nations stopping the use of wood as a primary heating and cooking fuel. They just walk farther as the forest retreats. The are not stupid either they know they risking the future habitability of their land, they'd use something better if it cost more to get it, would they could afford it at all, but they *need* to be warm and fed today.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes and they usually charge you MUCH MUCH more than they would charge you and an insurer if you pay without insurance.
If you ask me that is the real problem with the system. The correct intervention if there is one are to
A) Make medical benefits payed to employees taxable at the same rate as all other compensation. (well I really think we should eliminate income taxes and move to a consumptive system but..)
B) Discourage employees from offering medical benefits. Not necessarily with a tax, but perhaps incentiveze salary only compensation with simpler reporting requirements etc.
C) Bar medical practitioners from price discrimination, its inelastic anyway. Tell them they have to publish a price book for all those medical codes and services and can do so as frequently as they like down to a 24 hour window. They have to charge everyone the same, no matter who the payer actually is. So no group discounts, etc. They would be allowed to offer discounts for payment method limited to demonstrable differences in processing costs. IE they could charge you less if you pay in cash, they could charge an insurer a small percentage less if they do bulk settlements rather than individual transactions etc. They would be required to be able to show the level of discount is highly correlated to the real reduction in their overhead, if they do chose to make such discount rates available.
If you made these changes prices would reflect the real cost of services, and we'd have a working market. Prices would no doubt come down for the uninsured.
I got 3 stitches a year ago. I let them send me the bill first because I wanted to see what it would be without my insurance company. They wanted $1200! After I submitted it to my insurer, they settled for something like $350! That really ought to be criminal. It really is an abusive practice against the uninsured. I don't normally support regulation but something needs to be address pricing. What the AFCA did will make the problem infinitely worse.
You are just a Linux hater, everything in that post is incorrect.
Vendors won't touch Linux because it is too unstable
What do mean by unstable? A given kernel on known fixed hardware usually is incredibly stable, Which is exactly why Linux is not just ascendant but dominate in the embedded space.
breaks too much and is unsupported.
There are plenty of commercial Linux vendors large and small that offer great support. Red Hat software is not exactly what you'd call fly by night anymore. I bet most of the vendors you work with have a lessor market cap and are if anything more likely to vanish.
Linux always took great pride in breaking shit all the time...
No they never. User space interfaces to kernel have been stable or backward compatible for almost two decades now. If you mean for stuff that runs in kernel space, or stuff build on top of other user land platforms you might have an argument. Still we are talking about medical devices here, they should not be running the same stack your desktop/server is. You really should be using a basic init and tiny set of services you need. Heck you might even build your own init. All of that would be arguably easier on Linux than on any commercial UNIX and certainly easier than Windows. If you build yourself a little stack of job specific custom binaries you could expect to run them unmodified for the life span of the product, even as you update to the latest kernels.
And there you have it...Instead of Unix we got friggin' Windows *everywhere*.
I think this has much more to do with Microsoft marketing dollars, spreading FUD, old prejudices rather than honest analysis, political games, and the like than it does with Linux's quality or its effect on the commercial UNIX space.
I agree mostly but elementary is pretty young. I am not sure you can get your point across without scaring then. Also most social network terms of service don't really allow ementry age kids anyway. They certainly are not in a position to be managing the security of their own machines.
Middle school and Junior high though would be a great time to address these topics. They often have some class like "life skills" where basic cooking, check book balancing, and similar personal business matter as taught. Internet safety would be a good subject to spend a little time on in such a course
Its not theft of service! First the CC is required under the current regulations to make those channels available in the clear to their customers. He *IS* a customer, he has a cable modem!
Now if he was not a customer or was somehow defeating the protection on the other channels that would be theft of service. What this is the FCC is allowing them to cut the services they offer to certain classes of customer, which he happens to fall into. His complaint is that he will be asked to pay the same rate for a smaller service offering now, if the CC takes advantage of the new regs. They probably will do that too since it will push more people to subscribe to an bundle that includes their pay TV offerings.
Lost without MSNBC? Seriously they are about as reputable as Fox News.
You can deny it all you want but somebody would have done something with those cars had they not been destroyed or fewer new cars would have been produced/sold or some combination of the two.
To suggest anything else is just lying! Quite literally the hand of God would have to have come down and stanched them out of the market place, just like the hand of government did.
So someone suffered for others gain. A certain group of producers got to move more of a product than the market currently demanded. Certain groups of buyers got access to a subsidy on an asset.
Everyone else paid for it, either directly through higher prices on used autos if they were in that market, indirectly thru inflationary monetary policy, or through other lost opportunities. You're $3000 dollars is a nice magic number. I'll tell you my first car was 14 years new and I paid like $300 for it certainly not $3000. I never could have scraped the money for $3000 dollar car and insurance together as a high school sophomore. Being able to buy that $300 dollar car though let me drive to school and a job after school so by my senior year I had savings I could put toward college (and other uses).
Chances are pretty good some kind lost out on similar opportunities because of that program. If you took advantage of the program than you STOLE from him or her, from me, your neighbors, your parents, your children.
unsupportable political opinion aside
Basic economics insists that if the supply of used cars was larger they would command a lower price. Which would put them in affordability reach of more people. This is very simple supply and demand, the most well understood and accepted theory in economics. Suggesting this is wrong is an extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary proof.
Cash for Clunkers was designed to benefit specific groups and it arguably did that; but it also did harm to other groups. There is room to debate if it was a net positive for the nation as whole.
I for one find it very difficult from an instinctive point of view to think forcibly removing assets from the economy prior to the end of their useful service life, and compensating people with capital made available by leveraging debt instruments can really work out to be a win for the nation as a whole. I can totally see how the class of folks who did stand to gain from it would have a huge over lap with the class of likely and eligible voters though.
I agree as long as this is evidence in an on going investigation the authorities should not be publishing it. Now once it gets brought up in court it becomes a matter of public record, and should be available to anyone interested and willing to cover the minor costs of reproduction, which would perhaps include a few pennies worth of photo copies and 15min of wages for some court clerk.
If after the cases are settled and these people really are guilty only then should law enforcement be more visibly publishing it and only if they really think it would aide in future enforcement efforts.
Which ignores the fact that Britain had legally secured the mineral rights to virtually all of Iran. The new government was going to welch on the deal. It was clear and plain act of war. The actions taken in response were perfectly justified; unless you want to argue that nations should be freely allowed to ignore treaties with no retaliatory action from the counter party.
Maybe also build a big catapult.
Even if we ignore the question of if such a ban is an unethical infringement on individual liberties, the law is still wrong. If elected officials want to enact legislation to ban something alright democracy at work I guess but all the exceptions are terrible. The law should apply to everyone equally. If large sugary beverages are such a health hazard than nobody should be selling them. This law picks winners and loosers, one class of business is favored over others with the right to sell a high margin product denied to everyone else. It is arbitrary as well 7-11 cannot control risks better than a cinema. This is not like saying you have to be a licensed pharmacy to dispense certain classes of drugs or something.
If this is the way our society is going to keep moving we might as well just move to a completely command economy, freedom and capitalism are all but dead.
Yes it does. SeaMonkey uses 13% less memory on my system with the same three tabs, slashdot, slate, and LQ open as does FireFox. Which is funny considering FF was started to be lighter weight than SeaMonkey. SeaMonkey is far and away the better browser now in terms of UI as well.
Well yes and know. Authentication, Confidentiality, and forms of integrity are session or higher layer problems. Availability is also a key component of security. You can't tell me issues like ye'old LAND attack, tear drop, ping of death, negative sequence numbers etc don't cause Availability problems and they are decidedly network and transport layer. If I can cut your wire to jam your airwaves thats a physical layer issue.
No its not fine as a layer, and yes if you rely on it you are most certainly doing it wrong. While I'll agree it might be best not publish you network diagrams and similar as that might just be inviting trouble your components should not be secret.
It can take way less time than you might be inclined to think for skilled cracker to develop a vulnerability. If they get their foot in the door anywhere, that obscure device or software component might well be their easiest path to escalated privileges. Since few use it and few have access the weakness have not been exposed, patches and mitigation strategies not developed. It ends up in many cases being easy prey for a 0-day.
I'd hate to imagine the outrage on Slashdot if folks here learned how mushrooms are produced, right here in the good old USA. Hint: Chickens play an important role.
And why would they do otherwise? Food poising is not going to kill you. It makes perfect economic sense to risk food poisoning for a little cheaper fish when Medicaid, your employers group plan, and now your highly subsidized Obama Health Exchange plan is going to pick up the bill for the antibiotics, bed time, and bag of saline solution to fix it, should it happen.
We take away peoples incentive to protect themselves, when we socialize the costs to fix it. The result trickle down government ends up raining shit on Chinese fish.
Yes it probably will. It will cause customers who are worried to avoid Chinese sea food, might even put the producers or the importers out of business.
Looks what some of the contaminated vegetable scares have done to certain groups of farmers in our nation. They have driven them out of business and forced others to take elaborate measures to ensure and convince customers of the safety of their product.
With "openness" the market will do the job just fine. As long as people know where their sea food product is coming from and what the methods of production are I don't see any problem.
voting involving several nations..
and that would be far less democratic (at least for us in the USA) than it is now. Just look at what happens with the EC.
Trust me Washing politicians would love nothing more than to be able to shield themselves from accountability to their electorate, by hiding behind the actions of some politician appointee at the UN, they can pretend to disagree with later.
No there is no gradient here. I don't think any information or expression should be subject to censorship ever. Which is not to suggest the government can't or should not try and keep some state secrets.
Even things like CP should not be restricted. Now the production of it should be illegal. It should constitute "rape of child" and it should probably be a capital crime; but the mere possession of a photo should not be.
You are talking about attempts to manipulate prices, which there very much are rules against. That is not exactly the same thing as HFT which seeks to try and profit from tiny fluctuations in price but is not specifically geared toward moving the price.
I know its split hairs to so degree, because and HFT player is likely a market mover in terms of quantity all by themselves and the algorithms take that into account but what you are describing falls outside of what most people think of as "just HFT".
Nobody has made a compelling case that HFT has any real net impact on retail investors or anyone making an IPO or issuance. Look to my other post in this discussion but by and large HFT is just Wall Street Banks pirating from each other.
The liquidity argument aside, the HFT guys are the ones who drove the technology that has enable you and I to trade online for low fixed prices, rather than the bad old days where you had to find a broker who would bother with you in the first place and then put up with his 3+% commission.
It is transfer but its really only transfer between Wall Street Entities. There is a great deal of hand ringing about HFT but I don't see much evidence it does anything to your typical retail investor.
Look if your timescales are weeks,months,years and likely even intra-day its hard for me to see how HFT harms you. In the 2500ms it takes your brain to click the mouse, your online broker to process your web post and execute your transaction the HFT machines may have moved the share price up or down a few pennies. That might just as easily work for your as against you, and keep in mind its going to happen on the other side of the trade too, so over even over just a handful of trades it more than likely washes out.
If you are worried the "flash crash" or "melt up" might happen just as you click, you can protect yourself easily just use limit orders (you should almost always anyway). I don't know about others but the brokerage I use charges the same commission for both limit and market orders, so I always just enter a value a few pennies more than my bid prices or a few less than my ask, that way I don't get burned, if the bizarre happens.
Finally what if you hold positions in a "flash crash" or "melt up" depending on what your position is and if you have any cash on hand it might be an INCREDIBLE opportunity for you. You might have a shot out buying or selling at 1000 times the margin you otherwise hoped to get. If you are long wait a day. If it was really a good company it should recover most of its share price in that time, no need to panic.
They know they just have NDA's and similar that don't let them disclose that information. You can't even make a 10K cash withdraw without the FED and Treasury being informed. You bet the exchange knows who did this, and there is a good chance the SEC does too. Unless they are confident that a criminal prosecution is going to happen the names will never be made public, it would only invite a tsunami of lawsuits.
Forever is a long time, and there are major events like if quantum computing suddenly became a mass market reality but baring something like that:
The humble project box style PC remains the most powerful, inexpensive, and flexible personal computer device you can get. Even if we get to the point where its not the center of our day to day computing tasks (and some folks may be there already) there is just nothing like for trying out new ideas.
Any software project, hardware peripheral, interface, network architecture you can image can at least be experimented with on PC. There is just no platform like it. I am including things like ARM boards etc in this, basically anything you can stuff in in a industry standard project box style case, run with one of the common standard power supply types etc.
Ask yourself how much would traction would the environmental movement have received if you had to convince people barely making enough to get by to support those higher costs? Answer none. The environment movement exists precisely because people are/were affluent enough to try and clean up and live more cleanly.
You don't see people in impoverished nations stopping the use of wood as a primary heating and cooking fuel. They just walk farther as the forest retreats. The are not stupid either they know they risking the future habitability of their land, they'd use something better if it cost more to get it, would they could afford it at all, but they *need* to be warm and fed today.