Silicon Valley has decided to offer them on a regular basis to tech workers as a job perk, thereby filling a glaring gap in SF's public transit system.
this so called gap is *because* companies built their "campuses" away from existing public transit infrastructure as it was much cheaper to do so
There probably was not a bus stop next to a vacant field before the campus was built. Because it wouldn't have made an ounce of sense. However, Silicon Valley public transit agencies perpetually revise routes and schedules to accommodate rider demand. Most or all major corporate campuses have at least one bus stop right beside them.
The hard part is that the Bay Area's geography and historical development focus are not based on high density and urban cores, but on preservation of open spaces, family farms, large lots, a car culture, etc. which all mean that people commute in all directions, a difficult thing for mass transit to effectively and profitably support. Development is helter-skelter around here, because whoever sells a large piece of low-density land sees instant high-density redevelopment, but the plot across the street remains low-density. Plus, the Bay Area is as many as 9 counties, each with their own transit agency, and multi-county routes are pretty much limited to two semi-linear rail lines, CalTrain and BART. A San Francisco to Mountain View bus crosses three counties, so no agency offers it.
The difference is owning vs renting. If you own and prices double, you can cash out if you want to. If you rent and prices double, no soup for you. Maybe you pay the extra; maybe you move and take a longer commute and find a new daycare and relocate your kids to a new school and say goodbye to the neighbors you've gotten to know and love. It can be very disruptive to community and continuity, and I understand the concern.
50 miles south of San Francisco, there are discussions about whether the owner of a mobile home community can decide to sell the land to a big housing developer. The senior citizens who live there know that if he is able to sell, they'll have to move out of the area because there are no affordable alternatives, and good luck taking your manufactured home with you.
California adds an interesting wrinkle with its Prop 13, a 1979 law saying that housing values for tax purposes can only rise 2% each year if you don't sell your home and property tax is capped at ~1% of housing value, so property tax bills are pretty stable compared to other places. That law was partly to keep elderly from being pushed out of their homes by skyrocketing property taxes. However, properties are reassessed at market value upon sale, so if these folks have to move, their new home may carry a hefty tax increase without necessarily being any nicer of a place to live.
I for one would add "a cure for having to go potty" to that list.
Yes. Cure/speed the bodily excretions, nose-blowing included. And add a fix for showering/grooming. Would like a Dyson device that I could walk thru once a day and get fully clean in 15 seconds. I spend the time cleaning myself, and I think cleanliness is valuable, but I would like to save the time and spend it on sleep, or something enjoyable of my choosing.
Private buses may be decreasing the number of public transit riders, but our local transit system is already 85% subsidized, which is about the highest in the nation. Almost none of the lines are profitable ever, before or after Google. So while I welcome more folks riding transit, and think that a public system that helps non-car-owning (generally low-income or student) populations to get around is a good thing, putting every Google and Apple and Genentech employee on the buses won't do much to the subsidy level.
How broad geographically is CTA/RTA's scope? I'm curious because this sounds like a completely logical and intelligent idea.
The main challenge I can see in Google's case is that these buses would run through 3 counties (San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara), each with its own transit authority, and CalTrain and BART are two additional transit authorities. There is a visible lack of coordination between these agencies, and funding is uneven. With one joint overall authority, greater alignment might be possible.
Apart from the airplanes, those situations are closed systems, where those who own the vehicles also own and secure the transportation surface. If something went wrong, there are fewer places to point fingers. Non-mass transit is about having a mixed-breed situation, with some automated and others manually controlled, on a roadway that is not owned by the vehicle operator, passenger, or manufacturer, on which non-vehicle humans and non-human lifeforms can appear as well. The options and scenarios that non-mass-transit vehicles need to consider are far greater, and the liability in event of an accident is much more complex to sort out.
Wrong. Flat tax is a bullshit idea that benefits the rich the most. Money's value to an individual is logarithmic, not linear. Taxing a billionaire 10% and a homeless man 10% is NOT fair, and it's simplistic to think it is.
Which is why there's a flat refund element in there, so that the poor are essentially not taxed, or even given some money. This system would benefit them financially; today's Earned Income Tax Credit also benefits folks. Note that in the AC's post, there is no mention of deductions. Rich people can hire fancy tax accountants to guide them into tax-saving investment strategies with fancy deductions and investments. General Electric paid 7.4% of pretax income in taxes in a recent year; in all my working years, I've never been that low.
I'm not saying that a flat tax with a flat refund is perfect. I haven't thought thru all the ins and outs. Without the mortgage interest deduction, for one, housing prices would readjust. H&R Block and Intuit's Turbotax employees would be job-hunting too. But that flat tax would make the tax calculation, collection, and audit process a lot faster and cleaner. People could easily visualize what their taxes would be, and could use their free time to be productive, poets, painters, or just catch up on lost sleep. Which is valuable to both the poor working-class folks and the billionaires.
Back in Kodak's heyday, they employed over a hundred thousand people.
All of the companies you mentioned have at most a few hundred each. So the net employment is negative.
Folks love to point out at how well Google, Yahoo, etc.. are adding to the economy, but they only have a few thousand employees.
Being slightly pedantic, Google has >46,000 employees (as of Q3'13) and Yahoo! >12,000 employees. Even Groupon has >10,000 employees. Groupon! And that's without considering all the companies they contract with, which I know from their privacy agreements which tell me how all their subcontractors will properly handle my data. Your argument is stronger if you avoid claiming that these tech companies "only have a few thousand employees."
We can publish your Content in your neighborhood website or to nearby neighborhoods as described in our privacy policy.
they grant themselves an unlimited, irrevocable, non-exclusive license to use it
Almost. They specify where and how they will use it. Content written in Los Angeles will not show up in New York City. And the decision to post to your neighborhood website or to multiple (within a radius of a mile or so) is made by the user at the time of the post. This isn't nearly as awful as Facebook letting companies stick your name and face next to their product.
Full Disclosure: I use Nextdoor. I have my own issues with parts of it, but I overall like the product. And I did receive a free t-shirt from them last year.
I RTFA. Since a quick free automated process resolved 27% of their 5000 records, they decided to see what a little human time and money could do. They sampled 100 of the 5000, and found data for 91 of them (91%). The sample might not be fully representative of the larger set, or of data in general.
Even if this law were to pass in your jurisdiction and be effective immediately, think it over from another angle: Start a VERY small business. If you're the sole employee, then you can pay yourself 12x what you pay yourself. Your salary is now unlimited, which sounds like a recipe for success to me!
Humor aside, best wishes for the biz, the house, and the baby.
No, it limits the pay of CEOs. And even they can get more pay simply by paying their underlings more.
Or by outsourcing the janitors and secretaries and keeping the programmers. Gone will be the opportunities to work your way up thru a company from the mailroom to the boardroom.
PBS and NPR are not saints, but I think they are better than the alternatives I know of. This Old House has product placements, but they're far more realistic than Extreme Home Makeover. All commentators have biases, but The News Hour with Jim Lehrer and BBC News tell me something of what's going on in Washington and globally, while my local station seems to drool over an individual car crash or apartment fire.
But you've piqued my curiosity: given the flaws in each of these, where/how do you get your news? Is it a scalable solution that I could start using? Ultimately I keep wanting to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of my information without subjecting myself to confirmation bias. Thanks in advance for your suggestions.
They make money by getting people to read their advertisements.... It could not be different.
It could be different, but it would require us to pay the news services ourselves instead of asking someone else to do it. In business, the golden rule is "He who has the gold makes the rules." As a result, I get better (my subjective judgment) news from public radio and public television, because they don't need to drag out minimal news across four commercial breaks but can instead present more thoughtful in-depth material about things other than celebrities and tragedies.
Yes, people often choose ignorance. But most of the time, most people do so rationally. Does each of us know who won each college football game this past weekend, and which players contributed what to the results? We could... but odds are, many of us "don't feel like it," and are therefore ignorant about who's up or down in the BCS standings.
If you want to talk about the educated populace, scientists often choose to stick with what they know or believe, as documented in Thomas Kuhn's "Theory of Scientific Revolutions," which noted that sometimes new scientific theories could not come into prominence until the highly-entrenched supporters of the old theories had died out. For scientists looking at competing theories in their field, this should be inexcusable. But educating oneself can be highly time-consuming and costly.
For the average Joe, keeping up on all the options, facts and alternatives for all the possible opinions they could hold would easily be several full-time jobs, and that presumes they have the scientific training to read between the lines on the write-ups of medical studies and identify whether the experiments had hidden biases or poor controls that might skew the results. Or they can just keep their "ignorant" beliefs about things which don't matter too much to them on a daily basis and focus their education and attention on the things that matter to them. If fingers are pointed anywhere, Elon Musk is right: they should point at the journalists who are paid to research and write about these things so that they can inform us accurately.
Given a limited amount of time in my day, I'm not going to be researching car accident rates, adjusting for the age/reliability of the technologies chosen, the skill of the driver, the road conditions, the vehicle age/reliability, etc. I already have to research and decide where to invest my savings, research and decide the best route home after a long day at the office, and choose which of 70 cereals (let alone other breakfast products) to pick up at the store.
Both parent and grandparent are correct. Sovereign currency issuers can give away newly-printed money and tax receipts (other people's money). But if they give away too much "new" money too often, the result is to decrease the purchasing power of everyone else's money, so this too is taking away "other people's" money. One example is in American higher education: it has been shown that when federal tuition assistance increases, colleges raise tuition. So if you get the maximum federal aid possible, you still pay about the same as pre-aid programs, and if you don't, you're paying more than before. My alma mater does not turn out students twice as smart as a decade ago, though tuition has doubled over that timeframe.
There are at least two categories of midwives in the US. There are home-birth midwives, and registered nurse midwives. The latter have just about every power that an Ob-Gyn has, with the exception of surgery and maybe a few other things. And the benefit to delivering at a hospital with a RN midwife is that they are experienced in normal births and how those are supposed to progress, the range of variations possible, and methods for encouraging the birth process without jumping straight to drugs and knives.
By contrast, many OBs are highly experienced in all the possible situations where major complications arise, and are more comfortable in those settings than a natural but slow labor process. At least some OBs are more comfortable delivering via C-section because its duration is better controlled than natural labor. (Some allege that the increased cost of a C-section, and the ability to make one's tee time or opera concert also play a role in OBs encouraging or pressuring for pitocin, epidurals, and major abdominal surgery.)
Bottom line: UK-level midwives do exist in the US too, and I can recommend some fantastic ones in Silicon Valley if you're reading this and looking for one.
I think there is room for us to disagree about the interpretation of what GP said. Based on the SJMN article, I think GP is saying it should rise by $7k per annum, over a period of time. I've added the link to the SJMN article for your information, and note that today Matt Drudge linked to it on his home page: http://www.mercurynews.com/nation-world/ci_24248486/obamacares-winners-and-losers-bay-area
Then again, such mug shots are public records. Banning photos of people proven innocent or even perpetrators of non-heinous crimes is a good start though.
So is how much I paid for my house and where I live, my voting registration, every federal license I've been granted and a variety of other things. But I don't want this all over the Internet accessible to everyone; the professional Big Data corporations are scary enough without having every Tom, Dick, and Harry being able to find out exactly where I live right after I pay for lunch with my credit card, and deciding to raid my house while I'm back at work. Or other crazy-but-plausible hypotheticals.
Sorry to be a math stickler, but a $7k increase for a family of four is $145.83 per person per month, and looking at it per person is not realistic with a family, as it is likely a $583-per-month change for a single wage earner.
The San Jose (California) Mercury News's top headline today was "Health law's reality sets in," and quotes a 60-year-old retired teacher whose individual annual insurance rate is rising by $1800. She says tellingly, "Of course, I want people to have health care. I just didn't realize I would be the one who was going to pay for it personally." (emphasis mine) Another 52-year-old self-employed engineer's coverage for a family of four will rise by $10,000, and he says, "I really don't like the Republican tactics, but at least now I can understand why they are so pissed about this. When you take $10,000 out of my family's pocket each year, that's otherwise disposable income or retirement savings that will not be going into our local economy."
But someone has to start. And if you move your business away from the crap companies, they won't even notice. But if a thousand people like you do it, they'll start to notice. And if ten or a hundred thousand do it, they just might smarten up. And if they don't, they might go belly up and good riddance. But someone has to start, so be that someone.
Brought Arlo Guthrie to mind:
You know, if one person, just one person does it, they may think he's really sick and they won't take him.
And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them.
And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singing a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out.
They may think it's an organization.
And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in, singing a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out.
And friends they may think it's a movement.
You make some very good points. And if college is measured solely as a step to professional careers and higher wages, then these three did not do well. By that measure too, many majors of study should be disbanded or moved to community colleges because their likely ROI is negative. Another/. story covered the dearth of jobs available for newly-minted Physics Ph.D.s. And if you measure education primarily on its financial ROI, I'd argue that high school curriculum needs revamping: more home economics and less world history, more budgeting and less Advanced Algebra, more wood shop and less drama.
Things have changed a lot, for a variety of reasons, and I don't know all of why, though part of it had to do with our manufacturing strength following the destruction of other countries in WWII, and those countries' recoveries.
I do think that social mobility will decrease, not increase, if we tell students at Ball High and others, "You started here -- there is no point in going to college -- by virtue of living on Galveston Island, your future in low-wage jobs has been pre-written for you." Is college a losing proposition? So then is starting a business -- 8 of 10 fail in the first couple years. The odds are stacked against us in so many ways, it's a wonder we don't all off ourselves one morning. Thank you for some thoughts on what makes the system work better, and I hope that we can help steer the country in some of those directions.
All 3 got into college, but 4 years later, none has a 4 year degree. [...] Angela Gonzales went to Emory, but her financial aid got screwed up. She dropped out after 3 years with $61,000 debt. Melissa O'Neal went to Texas State University. Her high-school boyfriend ran up $4,000 on her credit card and never got a job. Melissa got depressed, skipped classes, and failed some, but is now a 5th-year senior with an engineering student boyfriend and $44,000 in loans. Bianca Gonzales enrolled in community college to be near her boyfriend and dying grandfather. She finished her associate degree, and now works as a beach-bar cashier and spa receptionist.
I see brighter lights of hope than the reporter does. Student 1 hit a bad spot, yes, and the article's details of how that happened are heart-rending. But Student 2 is on track to graduate in 5 years, even after skipping and failing some classes. She's sticking with it. Heck, in some State Universities you have to plan on 5+ years to graduate even without skipping or failing, due to availability of some classes. $44k debt? I've seen double that for undergraduate alone. She's a winner in my eyes. Student 3 never aimed for a 4-year degree, but got the degree she sought. Would love for her to aim high, but we should give her credit for moving a step up even while caring about family.
So the reporter scores these 3 as a big fat zero, while I score them as 50% successful.
The money situation is tough. Since our laws fine you a fixed dollar amount for certain minor crimes (traffic violations for example), it's become a calculus for well-off folks about whether they want to obey the law or not. Carpool lanes give high-earners the chance to drive faster than all the rest of us: they can have a chauffeur, or buy an electric vehicle with special carpool stickers, or take the route of one scofflaw who wrote publicly in the local newspaper that the time he saved by cheating in the carpool lane made the occasional traffic ticket well worth it; he asked if he could purchase a lifetime pass!
Money can create such a divide between classes, letting the well-off get ahead faster while the poor are stuck in traffic and therefore unable to make the leaps and bounds to free themselves. I still hold each person responsible to do their best to improve their situation and think that a nation of victims is no nation at all, but I see the struggles of folks being snowballed by debts upon debts, where a couple dumb or unfortunate choices have ruined their future.
It makes me wonder how I can help to improve the stability and the opportunities for others. Getting a couple bills paid for someone in need could give them that lift to catch up on other things, and pull out of the pit. As long as they have that motivation, we should be seeking to give them the first step or two up.
Slashdot Mirror
Silicon Valley has decided to offer them on a regular basis to tech workers as a job perk, thereby filling a glaring gap in SF's public transit system.
this so called gap is *because* companies built their "campuses" away from existing public transit infrastructure as it was much cheaper to do so
There probably was not a bus stop next to a vacant field before the campus was built. Because it wouldn't have made an ounce of sense. However, Silicon Valley public transit agencies perpetually revise routes and schedules to accommodate rider demand. Most or all major corporate campuses have at least one bus stop right beside them.
The hard part is that the Bay Area's geography and historical development focus are not based on high density and urban cores, but on preservation of open spaces, family farms, large lots, a car culture, etc. which all mean that people commute in all directions, a difficult thing for mass transit to effectively and profitably support. Development is helter-skelter around here, because whoever sells a large piece of low-density land sees instant high-density redevelopment, but the plot across the street remains low-density. Plus, the Bay Area is as many as 9 counties, each with their own transit agency, and multi-county routes are pretty much limited to two semi-linear rail lines, CalTrain and BART. A San Francisco to Mountain View bus crosses three counties, so no agency offers it.
The difference is owning vs renting. If you own and prices double, you can cash out if you want to. If you rent and prices double, no soup for you. Maybe you pay the extra; maybe you move and take a longer commute and find a new daycare and relocate your kids to a new school and say goodbye to the neighbors you've gotten to know and love. It can be very disruptive to community and continuity, and I understand the concern.
50 miles south of San Francisco, there are discussions about whether the owner of a mobile home community can decide to sell the land to a big housing developer. The senior citizens who live there know that if he is able to sell, they'll have to move out of the area because there are no affordable alternatives, and good luck taking your manufactured home with you.
California adds an interesting wrinkle with its Prop 13, a 1979 law saying that housing values for tax purposes can only rise 2% each year if you don't sell your home and property tax is capped at ~1% of housing value, so property tax bills are pretty stable compared to other places. That law was partly to keep elderly from being pushed out of their homes by skyrocketing property taxes. However, properties are reassessed at market value upon sale, so if these folks have to move, their new home may carry a hefty tax increase without necessarily being any nicer of a place to live.
I for one would add "a cure for having to go potty" to that list.
Yes. Cure/speed the bodily excretions, nose-blowing included. And add a fix for showering/grooming. Would like a Dyson device that I could walk thru once a day and get fully clean in 15 seconds. I spend the time cleaning myself, and I think cleanliness is valuable, but I would like to save the time and spend it on sleep, or something enjoyable of my choosing.
Private buses may be decreasing the number of public transit riders, but our local transit system is already 85% subsidized, which is about the highest in the nation. Almost none of the lines are profitable ever, before or after Google. So while I welcome more folks riding transit, and think that a public system that helps non-car-owning (generally low-income or student) populations to get around is a good thing, putting every Google and Apple and Genentech employee on the buses won't do much to the subsidy level.
How broad geographically is CTA/RTA's scope? I'm curious because this sounds like a completely logical and intelligent idea.
The main challenge I can see in Google's case is that these buses would run through 3 counties (San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara), each with its own transit authority, and CalTrain and BART are two additional transit authorities. There is a visible lack of coordination between these agencies, and funding is uneven. With one joint overall authority, greater alignment might be possible.
Apart from the airplanes, those situations are closed systems, where those who own the vehicles also own and secure the transportation surface. If something went wrong, there are fewer places to point fingers. Non-mass transit is about having a mixed-breed situation, with some automated and others manually controlled, on a roadway that is not owned by the vehicle operator, passenger, or manufacturer, on which non-vehicle humans and non-human lifeforms can appear as well. The options and scenarios that non-mass-transit vehicles need to consider are far greater, and the liability in event of an accident is much more complex to sort out.
Wrong. Flat tax is a bullshit idea that benefits the rich the most. Money's value to an individual is logarithmic, not linear. Taxing a billionaire 10% and a homeless man 10% is NOT fair, and it's simplistic to think it is.
Which is why there's a flat refund element in there, so that the poor are essentially not taxed, or even given some money. This system would benefit them financially; today's Earned Income Tax Credit also benefits folks. Note that in the AC's post, there is no mention of deductions. Rich people can hire fancy tax accountants to guide them into tax-saving investment strategies with fancy deductions and investments. General Electric paid 7.4% of pretax income in taxes in a recent year; in all my working years, I've never been that low.
I'm not saying that a flat tax with a flat refund is perfect. I haven't thought thru all the ins and outs. Without the mortgage interest deduction, for one, housing prices would readjust. H&R Block and Intuit's Turbotax employees would be job-hunting too. But that flat tax would make the tax calculation, collection, and audit process a lot faster and cleaner. People could easily visualize what their taxes would be, and could use their free time to be productive, poets, painters, or just catch up on lost sleep. Which is valuable to both the poor working-class folks and the billionaires.
Back in Kodak's heyday, they employed over a hundred thousand people.
All of the companies you mentioned have at most a few hundred each. So the net employment is negative.
Folks love to point out at how well Google, Yahoo, etc.. are adding to the economy, but they only have a few thousand employees.
Being slightly pedantic, Google has >46,000 employees (as of Q3'13) and Yahoo! >12,000 employees. Even Groupon has >10,000 employees. Groupon! And that's without considering all the companies they contract with, which I know from their privacy agreements which tell me how all their subcontractors will properly handle my data. Your argument is stronger if you avoid claiming that these tech companies "only have a few thousand employees."
they grant themselves an unlimited, irrevocable, non-exclusive license to use it
Almost. They specify where and how they will use it. Content written in Los Angeles will not show up in New York City. And the decision to post to your neighborhood website or to multiple (within a radius of a mile or so) is made by the user at the time of the post. This isn't nearly as awful as Facebook letting companies stick your name and face next to their product.
Full Disclosure: I use Nextdoor. I have my own issues with parts of it, but I overall like the product. And I did receive a free t-shirt from them last year.
I RTFA. Since a quick free automated process resolved 27% of their 5000 records, they decided to see what a little human time and money could do. They sampled 100 of the 5000, and found data for 91 of them (91%). The sample might not be fully representative of the larger set, or of data in general.
Even if this law were to pass in your jurisdiction and be effective immediately, think it over from another angle: Start a VERY small business. If you're the sole employee, then you can pay yourself 12x what you pay yourself. Your salary is now unlimited, which sounds like a recipe for success to me!
Humor aside, best wishes for the biz, the house, and the baby.
No, it limits the pay of CEOs. And even they can get more pay simply by paying their underlings more.
Or by outsourcing the janitors and secretaries and keeping the programmers. Gone will be the opportunities to work your way up thru a company from the mailroom to the boardroom.
PBS and NPR are not saints, but I think they are better than the alternatives I know of. This Old House has product placements, but they're far more realistic than Extreme Home Makeover. All commentators have biases, but The News Hour with Jim Lehrer and BBC News tell me something of what's going on in Washington and globally, while my local station seems to drool over an individual car crash or apartment fire.
But you've piqued my curiosity: given the flaws in each of these, where/how do you get your news? Is it a scalable solution that I could start using? Ultimately I keep wanting to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of my information without subjecting myself to confirmation bias. Thanks in advance for your suggestions.
They make money by getting people to read their advertisements. ... It could not be different.
It could be different, but it would require us to pay the news services ourselves instead of asking someone else to do it. In business, the golden rule is "He who has the gold makes the rules." As a result, I get better (my subjective judgment) news from public radio and public television, because they don't need to drag out minimal news across four commercial breaks but can instead present more thoughtful in-depth material about things other than celebrities and tragedies.
Yes, people often choose ignorance. But most of the time, most people do so rationally. Does each of us know who won each college football game this past weekend, and which players contributed what to the results? We could ... but odds are, many of us "don't feel like it," and are therefore ignorant about who's up or down in the BCS standings.
If you want to talk about the educated populace, scientists often choose to stick with what they know or believe, as documented in Thomas Kuhn's "Theory of Scientific Revolutions," which noted that sometimes new scientific theories could not come into prominence until the highly-entrenched supporters of the old theories had died out. For scientists looking at competing theories in their field, this should be inexcusable. But educating oneself can be highly time-consuming and costly.
For the average Joe, keeping up on all the options, facts and alternatives for all the possible opinions they could hold would easily be several full-time jobs, and that presumes they have the scientific training to read between the lines on the write-ups of medical studies and identify whether the experiments had hidden biases or poor controls that might skew the results. Or they can just keep their "ignorant" beliefs about things which don't matter too much to them on a daily basis and focus their education and attention on the things that matter to them. If fingers are pointed anywhere, Elon Musk is right: they should point at the journalists who are paid to research and write about these things so that they can inform us accurately.
Given a limited amount of time in my day, I'm not going to be researching car accident rates, adjusting for the age/reliability of the technologies chosen, the skill of the driver, the road conditions, the vehicle age/reliability, etc. I already have to research and decide where to invest my savings, research and decide the best route home after a long day at the office, and choose which of 70 cereals (let alone other breakfast products) to pick up at the store.
"If you like your operating system, you can keep your operating system."
Both parent and grandparent are correct. Sovereign currency issuers can give away newly-printed money and tax receipts (other people's money). But if they give away too much "new" money too often, the result is to decrease the purchasing power of everyone else's money, so this too is taking away "other people's" money. One example is in American higher education: it has been shown that when federal tuition assistance increases, colleges raise tuition. So if you get the maximum federal aid possible, you still pay about the same as pre-aid programs, and if you don't, you're paying more than before. My alma mater does not turn out students twice as smart as a decade ago, though tuition has doubled over that timeframe.
There are at least two categories of midwives in the US. There are home-birth midwives, and registered nurse midwives. The latter have just about every power that an Ob-Gyn has, with the exception of surgery and maybe a few other things. And the benefit to delivering at a hospital with a RN midwife is that they are experienced in normal births and how those are supposed to progress, the range of variations possible, and methods for encouraging the birth process without jumping straight to drugs and knives.
By contrast, many OBs are highly experienced in all the possible situations where major complications arise, and are more comfortable in those settings than a natural but slow labor process. At least some OBs are more comfortable delivering via C-section because its duration is better controlled than natural labor. (Some allege that the increased cost of a C-section, and the ability to make one's tee time or opera concert also play a role in OBs encouraging or pressuring for pitocin, epidurals, and major abdominal surgery.)
Bottom line: UK-level midwives do exist in the US too, and I can recommend some fantastic ones in Silicon Valley if you're reading this and looking for one.
I think there is room for us to disagree about the interpretation of what GP said. Based on the SJMN article, I think GP is saying it should rise by $7k per annum, over a period of time. I've added the link to the SJMN article for your information, and note that today Matt Drudge linked to it on his home page: http://www.mercurynews.com/nation-world/ci_24248486/obamacares-winners-and-losers-bay-area
Then again, such mug shots are public records. Banning photos of people proven innocent or even perpetrators of non-heinous crimes is a good start though.
So is how much I paid for my house and where I live, my voting registration, every federal license I've been granted and a variety of other things. But I don't want this all over the Internet accessible to everyone; the professional Big Data corporations are scary enough without having every Tom, Dick, and Harry being able to find out exactly where I live right after I pay for lunch with my credit card, and deciding to raid my house while I'm back at work. Or other crazy-but-plausible hypotheticals.
Sorry to be a math stickler, but a $7k increase for a family of four is $145.83 per person per month, and looking at it per person is not realistic with a family, as it is likely a $583-per-month change for a single wage earner.
The San Jose (California) Mercury News's top headline today was "Health law's reality sets in," and quotes a 60-year-old retired teacher whose individual annual insurance rate is rising by $1800. She says tellingly, "Of course, I want people to have health care. I just didn't realize I would be the one who was going to pay for it personally." (emphasis mine) Another 52-year-old self-employed engineer's coverage for a family of four will rise by $10,000, and he says, "I really don't like the Republican tactics, but at least now I can understand why they are so pissed about this. When you take $10,000 out of my family's pocket each year, that's otherwise disposable income or retirement savings that will not be going into our local economy."
But someone has to start. And if you move your business away from the crap companies, they won't even notice. But if a thousand people like you do it, they'll start to notice. And if ten or a hundred thousand do it, they just might smarten up. And if they don't, they might go belly up and good riddance. But someone has to start, so be that someone.
Brought Arlo Guthrie to mind:
You know, if one person, just one person does it, they may think he's really sick and they won't take him.
And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them.
And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singing a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out.
They may think it's an organization.
And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in, singing a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out.
And friends they may think it's a movement.
You make some very good points. And if college is measured solely as a step to professional careers and higher wages, then these three did not do well. By that measure too, many majors of study should be disbanded or moved to community colleges because their likely ROI is negative. Another /. story covered the dearth of jobs available for newly-minted Physics Ph.D.s. And if you measure education primarily on its financial ROI, I'd argue that high school curriculum needs revamping: more home economics and less world history, more budgeting and less Advanced Algebra, more wood shop and less drama.
Things have changed a lot, for a variety of reasons, and I don't know all of why, though part of it had to do with our manufacturing strength following the destruction of other countries in WWII, and those countries' recoveries.
I do think that social mobility will decrease, not increase, if we tell students at Ball High and others, "You started here -- there is no point in going to college -- by virtue of living on Galveston Island, your future in low-wage jobs has been pre-written for you." Is college a losing proposition? So then is starting a business -- 8 of 10 fail in the first couple years. The odds are stacked against us in so many ways, it's a wonder we don't all off ourselves one morning. Thank you for some thoughts on what makes the system work better, and I hope that we can help steer the country in some of those directions.
All 3 got into college, but 4 years later, none has a 4 year degree. [...] Angela Gonzales went to Emory, but her financial aid got screwed up. She dropped out after 3 years with $61,000 debt. Melissa O'Neal went to Texas State University. Her high-school boyfriend ran up $4,000 on her credit card and never got a job. Melissa got depressed, skipped classes, and failed some, but is now a 5th-year senior with an engineering student boyfriend and $44,000 in loans. Bianca Gonzales enrolled in community college to be near her boyfriend and dying grandfather. She finished her associate degree, and now works as a beach-bar cashier and spa receptionist.
I see brighter lights of hope than the reporter does. Student 1 hit a bad spot, yes, and the article's details of how that happened are heart-rending. But Student 2 is on track to graduate in 5 years, even after skipping and failing some classes. She's sticking with it. Heck, in some State Universities you have to plan on 5+ years to graduate even without skipping or failing, due to availability of some classes. $44k debt? I've seen double that for undergraduate alone. She's a winner in my eyes. Student 3 never aimed for a 4-year degree, but got the degree she sought. Would love for her to aim high, but we should give her credit for moving a step up even while caring about family.
So the reporter scores these 3 as a big fat zero, while I score them as 50% successful.
The money situation is tough. Since our laws fine you a fixed dollar amount for certain minor crimes (traffic violations for example), it's become a calculus for well-off folks about whether they want to obey the law or not. Carpool lanes give high-earners the chance to drive faster than all the rest of us: they can have a chauffeur, or buy an electric vehicle with special carpool stickers, or take the route of one scofflaw who wrote publicly in the local newspaper that the time he saved by cheating in the carpool lane made the occasional traffic ticket well worth it; he asked if he could purchase a lifetime pass!
Money can create such a divide between classes, letting the well-off get ahead faster while the poor are stuck in traffic and therefore unable to make the leaps and bounds to free themselves. I still hold each person responsible to do their best to improve their situation and think that a nation of victims is no nation at all, but I see the struggles of folks being snowballed by debts upon debts, where a couple dumb or unfortunate choices have ruined their future.
It makes me wonder how I can help to improve the stability and the opportunities for others. Getting a couple bills paid for someone in need could give them that lift to catch up on other things, and pull out of the pit. As long as they have that motivation, we should be seeking to give them the first step or two up.