A primary-school level of research would yield the intuitively obvious result that these are excerpts of the fictional writing of Edward Ellis and Luis Sernaren.
And in case you think that Maureen Stapleton is really an android "Electric Grandmother," you can look here to reassure yourself that in fact she is a human actor, not a robot:
It would take a monumental amount of hubris to think it possible to identify and drop any and all encrypted traffic without severely limiting the functioning of a given node. I suppose if you were an email administrator you would know the contents of every PGP encrypted message, uuencoded file etc. that passed through your server(s)?
Come on, fess. You wouldn't, would you? It's practically impossible and you'd have to be really bored, disturbingly paranoid, or perhaps very stupid to bother.
The MT-32 was hardly a "high-end" device, nor was it the beginning of PC music, certainly by 1988. 1984 saw the Amiga which had extraordinary sound. I had one and by 1988 I had it jacked into a Korg M1, which was, to greatly understate things, slightly "higher-end" than the MT-32, which was never marketed as anything but a toy.
As for being a rival to today's sound cards, there simply is no comparison. For less than $150, you can get a SB Audigy with eight-channel Dolby Surround output, 10hz-46khz range, 64 voice polyphony on the 32 midi channels and sound recording at 24-bit/96khz. That's a TAD more than you could get for $550 out of the MT-32. Accounting for inflation, the MT-32 actually cost the equivalent of $900 today, which would buy a brand new Korg MS2000BR, which IS a professional synth module. For half again as much, you could buy a TritonRack, which is a damned amazing little box. Regardless, even the lowest end $20 SB knock-off cards out there now exceed the MT-32.
It's interesting that you assume I have not simply because I stated a series of facts reported in the owner's manual. Operation in Death Valley in high summer is an activity repeatedly advised against, so given out-of-spec operation, one might think your experience is more an example of good luck than good engineering.
Personally, the 20% additional power suck and resultant additional heat generated (and lack of internal ventilation) within my E10 was enough for me to opt for a larger, hand-held drive that would rip directly from CF and SM cards. Admittedly, that was over two years ago, but by design the issues are still there and other storage options are still more attractive to some people.
It won't. Current pricing of compact flash memory in the 1GB range is about $300. At 10Y:1$, getting twice the space but on rapidly spinning disks on a handheld device prone to frequent bumps and drops is not going to be very attractive--especially as if you need that extra space, you can buy whatever sized CF Card suits you, so if you really only need 64MB, it'll cost you thirty bucks instead of three-hundred. In my digital photography experience, I found it MUCH more convenient to buy a couple 256 and 512MB CF cards and dump them to a 6GB hand-held drive when necessary, considering it would have cost about $4000 to get the necessary space in flash cards. That camera would accept the 1GB MicroDrive, but the power consumption was ridiculous and you had to be insanely careful handling it as an accidental pinch or abrupt bump would nuke it completely. I'd much rather see them throw a large-capacity CF card in the phones, since I could just pop it out of the phone and into any other device, or my pocket. Better yet, they could do like the higher quality cameras and PDAs and let you use CF/SM/SD media interchangeably.
Regardless, with 100G hard drives going for roughly $100, this works out to over 30 times the price and on size, it's actually seven times larger physical displacement for equal capacity. Maybe when they get it to 4X the price for 1/4 the size at the same capacity, but not now. Really, would you pay $3,333 for 100G of space? Ok, maybe if it was Raid-5 Ultra-320 SCSI, but still.
Perhaps this is just a vast conspiracy to get out of consumers in storage media the lost revenues on CD sales.
Let's see, slavishly embracing tedious, obscure and/or unnecessarily complex technologies that the masses are uninterested in, unaware of or wholly incapable of understanding while not gaining any functional (or indeed, technical) advantage in an ongoing effort to justify elitist pride?
Hmm.. Yep, score one. DJs can be "Geeks."
Seeming as Finland is so overrun by dark-skinned people--97% are ethnic Swedes or Finns, with the remainder being distinctly non-african in origin, but for a few thousand Somali refugees--I think they can be forgiven for a little bit of improvising on racial representation.
Making this piece of crap in the first place, however, remains unforgivable. What more could they say that has not already been said better by Sigourney Weaver and Alan Rickman?
My coffeehouse is still free and I make it abundantly clear to them that the -only- reason I drink their motor-oil excuse for coffee is that I value their internet service enough to kick them back a few bucks every day that would otherwise be spent on better coffee elsewhere. Their own computers are rented out all day long at a huge profit, so there's little reason to charge the constant crowd of laptop users. Really, at $6/hour for a machine that probably costs $25/month, how could they NOT be raking it in?
What I -would- like to see is more places putting in place is some sort of authenticated access to limit access to customers who actually buy something so that the @$$h013 across the street downloading Divx copies of LOTR is blocked out. I've seen a few projects out there for that purpose, but they're hardly at the stage of development that the average barrista could work with.
Oh I agree completely. However, the problem isn't a lack of government subsidy. Not by a long shot. The United States spends $1.4 Trillion on healthcare. That's 13.3% of GNP, fully 4.2% of GNP greater than Canada or 84% more in terms of PPP adjusted dollars. Roughly a trillion of that $1.4T comes out of the federal budget of $2.2T, including the $307B deficit, leaving $400B to the market, or about $2285 per taxpayer annually in private healthcare related spending. As a comparison, the entire Department of Defense and Homeland Security combined cost $396 billion. DoD alone covers the healthcare costs of 9 million people for a total cost of $2800 each, or $4000 per patient per year. The average taxpayer coughs up $6200 per year to public health as a whole--$2887 per year to the Department of Health and Human Services alone--plus $2800 in private expenditures.**(if this sounds astronomical see the note at the end of this post)
At the end of the day, we aren't covering 40 million people--that's NO private insurance, NO Medicaid, NO Medicare. Nearly half of those 40 million are above poverty and 3.3 million are at or above the median income (about $28k). Legally mandated emergency medical treatment for all 40 million of those people goes completely unpaid, despite the fact that that at least 3.3 million of them pay $2000 per year or more into the public health budget (in my case, nearly four times that). Before someone screams "but, but, the poor get Medicaid," yes, I know, and these figures exclude the 25 million people under 65 who receive various forms of Medicaid/SSI/CHAMPAS/WIC/AFDC/Disability etc. Those are completely different stories.
Personally, without factoring in the actual hospital bill, in two years I paid $10k in insurance plus $15k to the public health budget, roughly $12,500 per year--and neither I nor the hospital received a penny from the government (or, obviously, the expired private insurance) for the subsequent $27k bill, which was my only charge in that period. If I were to also skip out on the bill, the only recourse for the hospital would be a lawsuit or a tax write-off, which under the current structure would yield about $8k in actual recovery, thus the other $16k would have to be made up somewhere, like maybe higher costs. Taking the military budget figures, the average $2800 (which doesn't account for the MUCH higher cost of emergency care) over 40 million yields a total charge-off of approximately $112 billion. It has to come from somewhere, people, to the tune of $422 per year for every human being alive in the United States, but since only 70% have health insurance, it's probably more like $603 pushed off on the insured population. If you have a wife/husband and two kids, that charge-off is costing your family $2415 every year. Just think, after ten years of that it could pay for one patient to spend three days in cardiac care or you could have purchased a new car or maybe made a down payment on a three bedroom house in the suburbs.
But should we change? Heck no! o/~ Blame Canada! with all their cheap prescription drugs and their hockey hullabaloo! o/~
YAY America.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/hinsure.htm htt p://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2004/hhs.ht ml http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2004/va.htm l http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2004/ssa.ht ml http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2004/de fens e.html http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy200 4/tables.html
** Keep in mind the differences between average, median, GNP per capita and actual real-life:"average income" (i.e. $5.6T/130M) works out to about $43k, with an "average" tax liability of about $11k at a rate of roughly 24%. The "median" income is literally the 65-millionth return out of 130 million, and it is valued at roughly $28k/year. Yes, half of the tax-paying population earns $28k or less and the "average income" is damn near twice that.
You incorrectly presuppose that dime one was paid by an insurance company. As my income that year was quite generous for a single 29yo male with no dependants (put another way, the difference between my income and the median income exceeded the bill), the state was not about to pick up the tab either. Welcome to the wonderful world of missing your COBRA deadline by three days and becoming a "Cash Pay" customer. Rather like forgetting to put a stamp on the car insurance payment the day before you drive into a brick wall. Also a slim chance, but as odds go, that one in a billion is still a one, not a zero.
All that aside, healthcare costs are directly related to the financial structure behind the industry, for which no other country in the world has such high costs for the same level of treatment. Really. I had three bouts of cutaneous strep infections over a few years and received a higher quality of care, not just cheaper care, in rural South Africa than I have ever received in the United States (through indemnity, various PPOs and one very brief experience in an HMO)--and at about 1/75th the cost. It cost me a hundred bucks there, including the cost of prescription drugs, versus over $7,500 here for treatment of exactly the same condition--and after treatment in SA, the condition never returned. Hmmmmm.
Note: the per capita GDP of South Africa adjusted for purchasing-power-parity is not 1/75th that of the United States, so we can rule out basic macroeconomics as the cause. Yes, it has a place, but not remotely to the degree that the price difference reflects.
Hey, sure, Doctors have "greater than seven years of training." Well, guess what, so do all of the other professions that afford an individual the title "Doctor" and most of them pay crap even though they cost every single penny as much to acquire. So yes, we're all thankful that Doctors are there to save our sorry butts, but please respect those who are at just as highly trained, but don't charge usurious rates for their services.
Re:Sad state of affairs...
on
Stealth Inflation
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, at 29 years old complaining of chest pain, I was given a toxicology panel, several EKGs, a trip into the MRI, a heart catheter, a shitload of morphine, several in-patient days in a telemetry unit and a $27,000 bill. None of this was at my request. All of it was on medical advice....and then I was sent home on a mega-dose of ibuprophen. The real rub? I started taking it on my own just prior to going to the hospital. The only real benefit I got for that $27,000 was the knowledge of the true safe dosage. Actually, the morphine was good shit, man, but still.
Now, I realize that "it could have been something much worse." Sure. However, as half the country earns less than $27,000 per year, it should NOT under any circumstances cost an entire years' salary to determine that you need to take an Advil, even if it's a really fucking big Advil.
I think the point about the other poster was that he was pulling numbers out of his ass and billing companies with whom he had no relationship whatsoever.
The point here is that you can bill anyone for any goddamned thing you want as long as you don't misrepresent the facts and an actual "service" has been provided. Considering the volume of nickel-dime-and-fifty-dollar crap that is now considered "usual and customary," you've pretty much got free reign. I mean, really, if companies can charge you purely for the privilege of being billed--in addition to the actual bill- there should be nothing wrong with charging them purely for the privilege of being paid.
Next, how to report those collection accounts to credit reporting agencies... hmmmmmm.
or, more likely, they might think 'hey, look at that dusty disk around that star. I bet it looks a lot like our system' or, if they're really advanced something like 'ooh, some of them are blue.' Really, if the average American can't tell a Moi-Moi from a Paw-paw, why the hell do you think something 25 light years away would care about politics, assuming the concept has any meaning beyond humans in the first place?
Yessss, we have for a long time been developing a device, a moving coil if you will, based on advanced principles of magnetic induction by which we transform soundwaves into electrical current. We call this device a "m i c r o p h o n e." Our scientists have managed to reverse this process in similar device we call a "l o u d s p e a k e r." These devices can be combined into a single destructive device we refer to as a "h e a d s e t."
We will require you to provide us with one MEEEELION dollars lest we will be forced to unleash these powerful devices on your populations.
If you resist, we will be forced to also unveil our deathray "e l e c t r o n g u n" that when paired with our "h e a d s e t" will be sure to cause mass chaos, death and destruction.
Really, people, whose going to be afraid of a fricking walkman and a television? Really. Didn't anyone make it out of junior high science class? Anyone?
That's as much as a problem here in the good 'ol USA. It's called "micromanagement," where the "knowledge workers" we've now been conditioned by management consultants to view as "internal customers" of our cost-centers are so impatient with their own incompetence that their "internal vendors" become so sick of their constant imperiousness that they start producing exactly the quality of dog shit they have specified so that fault lies entirely with the moron who couldn't effectively communicate a functional specification for toilet-paper, with the desired result of that idiot being terminated in the strongest sense of the word.
Unfortunately, this same culture has produced the budgetary language of "man-months" and "FTEs" with the result that anything below executive management turns into a collection of interchangeable proles, thus until every "internal vendor" is outsourced with the same result, not much will change. Hopefully, the failures of transnational outsourcing will make it a bit more obvious where the lay-offs, outsourcing and salary slashing should really be taking place before the oldspeak is speedwise upsubbed fullwise to doubleplus crimethink by the current blackwhite bellyfeel duckspeak.
Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me There lie they, and here lie we Under the spreading chestnut tree
I find this blatant attack on the SM community offensive, particularly in light of the recent sexual orientation anti-discrimination laws passed in California. What happens behind closed doors between me and my hard drive should not be subject to government approval.
Come, Slave.
---Je-je---Jesus Christ...
You are wrong. Children generally don't work. I suggest you check the statistics before you pull numbers out of your butt. The fact remains that 99.56% of Americans earn less than $500k. Sure, if you stupidly apply that percent to all 275M, you magically find 500,000 toddlers filing tax returns.
You don't even need to analyze the wiley super-genius to get it. Just walk around a university and observe the behavior. You have a population presented with every environment from cubicle to bull-pen, indoors/outdoors, social/anti-social, highly personalized/utterly sterile as well as, in many cases, the bar.
Guess what? People use every space depending on need, mood and appropriateness to the task. However, undisturbed, quiet solitude is where most will perform the tasks that require concentration and accuracy especially under pressure.
Lesson: To ensure maximum productivity, provide access to all of the above.
There are scarcely 550,000 people in the US whose incomes exceed $500k. That's equivalent to half the population of Rhode Island and would yield 50k people in California--a state home to 27 million. These are the people who are making judgements about offshore outsourcing. I hardly think the opinions of 0.44% of the population represents 'the American Way.' Does it wholly escape people how close, yet how few, 'the superrich' are? Their lives and their interests are by definition NOT 'the American Way' any more than any other group of 0.44% can catagorically represent an entire population unless 'the American Way' is some begging Dickensian euphemism for willingly being walked on and thrown out with the trash.
First, gain fluency in your favorite second language at a university level of reading, writing and conversation.
Second, finish a master's degree (hey, howzabout in that language?) or better so you can enter the government (the only entity bar the military likely to send you overseas anytime soon) at a salary level that won't make you cry.
Third, apply for any reasonable job that will provide you with a TS/SCI with full lifestyle polygraph.
Fourth, finish 3-year compulsory stint in non-excepted service to have first $20k in student loans paid off. (read: accept it, buddy, everyone else 'pays their dues' and that process begins AFTER college, so start planning your cube decor now.)
Fifth, voila, choose your favorite international superspy job with the realization that A) now you're sitting in Oaugoudougu--in a cubicle, and B) if you really wanted to get out, travel and not be stuck in a cube, you should have joined the damned Marines, studied theatre or maybe been a cowboy, baby.
There were a few other instances of Igor, although some slightly modified from the original adaptation. Really, how could you forget such monumental cultural contributions as She-Demons, Monsters Crash the Pajaman Party and La Orgia des los Muertos?
House of Wax, 1953 Frankenchicken, 1995 Frankenstein all'italiana, 1975 Flesh for Frankenseitn, 1985 Mistress Frankenstein, 2000 Monsters Crash the Pajama Party, 1965 Frankensteins Tante, 1990 Toonsylvania, 1998 Son of Dracula, 1974 Les Charlots contre Dracula, 1980 Count Duckula, 1988 La Orgia des los Muertos, 1973 The Munster's Revenge, 1981 Inspector Gadget, 1999 Van Helsing, 2004 History of Frankenstein, 1995 Hilarious House of Frankenstein, 1971 She-Demons, 1958 Dr. Krankenstein, 1987 Little Dracula, 1991 Everything you always wanted to know about sex but were afraid to ask, 1972
Slashdot Mirror
Just imagine all /. users replaced by very small shell scripts and you've got it. I'm suspicious the that process was begun long ago.
Don't throw stones inside your modded linux box?
Right, Check.
As for security, that would explain why my Linux boxes have for years been under constant attack from compromised Windows machines without incident.
A primary-school level of research would yield the intuitively obvious result that these are excerpts of the fictional writing of Edward Ellis and Luis Sernaren.
f _f ictional_robotst erature
This list may prove useful:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/encyclopedia/List_o
duplicated here:
http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_in_li
And in case you think that Maureen Stapleton is really an android "Electric Grandmother," you can look here to reassure yourself that in fact she is a human actor, not a robot:
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0083876/
It would take a monumental amount of hubris to think it possible to identify and drop any and all encrypted traffic without severely limiting the functioning of a given node. I suppose if you were an email administrator you would know the contents of every PGP encrypted message, uuencoded file etc. that passed through your server(s)? Come on, fess. You wouldn't, would you? It's practically impossible and you'd have to be really bored, disturbingly paranoid, or perhaps very stupid to bother.
The MT-32 was hardly a "high-end" device, nor was it the beginning of PC music, certainly by 1988. 1984 saw the Amiga which had extraordinary sound. I had one and by 1988 I had it jacked into a Korg M1, which was, to greatly understate things, slightly "higher-end" than the MT-32, which was never marketed as anything but a toy.
As for being a rival to today's sound cards, there simply is no comparison. For less than $150, you can get a SB Audigy with eight-channel Dolby Surround output, 10hz-46khz range, 64 voice polyphony on the 32 midi channels and sound recording at 24-bit/96khz. That's a TAD more than you could get for $550 out of the MT-32. Accounting for inflation, the MT-32 actually cost the equivalent of $900 today, which would buy a brand new Korg MS2000BR, which IS a professional synth module. For half again as much, you could buy a TritonRack, which is a damned amazing little box. Regardless, even the lowest end $20 SB knock-off cards out there now exceed the MT-32.
It's interesting that you assume I have not simply because I stated a series of facts reported in the owner's manual. Operation in Death Valley in high summer is an activity repeatedly advised against, so given out-of-spec operation, one might think your experience is more an example of good luck than good engineering.
Personally, the 20% additional power suck and resultant additional heat generated (and lack of internal ventilation) within my E10 was enough for me to opt for a larger, hand-held drive that would rip directly from CF and SM cards. Admittedly, that was over two years ago, but by design the issues are still there and other storage options are still more attractive to some people.
It won't. Current pricing of compact flash memory in the 1GB range is about $300. At 10Y:1$, getting twice the space but on rapidly spinning disks on a handheld device prone to frequent bumps and drops is not going to be very attractive--especially as if you need that extra space, you can buy whatever sized CF Card suits you, so if you really only need 64MB, it'll cost you thirty bucks instead of three-hundred. In my digital photography experience, I found it MUCH more convenient to buy a couple 256 and 512MB CF cards and dump them to a 6GB hand-held drive when necessary, considering it would have cost about $4000 to get the necessary space in flash cards. That camera would accept the 1GB MicroDrive, but the power consumption was ridiculous and you had to be insanely careful handling it as an accidental pinch or abrupt bump would nuke it completely. I'd much rather see them throw a large-capacity CF card in the phones, since I could just pop it out of the phone and into any other device, or my pocket. Better yet, they could do like the higher quality cameras and PDAs and let you use CF/SM/SD media interchangeably.
Regardless, with 100G hard drives going for roughly $100, this works out to over 30 times the price and on size, it's actually seven times larger physical displacement for equal capacity. Maybe when they get it to 4X the price for 1/4 the size at the same capacity, but not now. Really, would you pay $3,333 for 100G of space? Ok, maybe if it was Raid-5 Ultra-320 SCSI, but still.
Perhaps this is just a vast conspiracy to get out of consumers in storage media the lost revenues on CD sales.
Let's see, slavishly embracing tedious, obscure and/or unnecessarily complex technologies that the masses are uninterested in, unaware of or wholly incapable of understanding while not gaining any functional (or indeed, technical) advantage in an ongoing effort to justify elitist pride? Hmm.. Yep, score one. DJs can be "Geeks."
Great. A gift certificate to Amoeba. Just stuff that in the envelope with a pair of JetBlue tickets and a rental car and I'm there.
Seeming as Finland is so overrun by dark-skinned people--97% are ethnic Swedes or Finns, with the remainder being distinctly non-african in origin, but for a few thousand Somali refugees--I think they can be forgiven for a little bit of improvising on racial representation.
Making this piece of crap in the first place, however, remains unforgivable. What more could they say that has not already been said better by Sigourney Weaver and Alan Rickman?
My coffeehouse is still free and I make it abundantly clear to them that the -only- reason I drink their motor-oil excuse for coffee is that I value their internet service enough to kick them back a few bucks every day that would otherwise be spent on better coffee elsewhere. Their own computers are rented out all day long at a huge profit, so there's little reason to charge the constant crowd of laptop users. Really, at $6/hour for a machine that probably costs $25/month, how could they NOT be raking it in?
What I -would- like to see is more places putting in place is some sort of authenticated access to limit access to customers who actually buy something so that the @$$h013 across the street downloading Divx copies of LOTR is blocked out. I've seen a few projects out there for that purpose, but they're hardly at the stage of development that the average barrista could work with.
Oh I agree completely. However, the problem isn't a lack of government subsidy. Not by a long shot. The United States spends $1.4 Trillion on healthcare. That's 13.3% of GNP, fully 4.2% of GNP greater than Canada or 84% more in terms of PPP adjusted dollars. Roughly a trillion of that $1.4T comes out of the federal budget of $2.2T, including the $307B deficit, leaving $400B to the market, or about $2285 per taxpayer annually in private healthcare related spending. As a comparison, the entire Department of Defense and Homeland Security combined cost $396 billion. DoD alone covers the healthcare costs of 9 million people for a total cost of $2800 each, or $4000 per patient per year. The average taxpayer coughs up $6200 per year to public health as a whole--$2887 per year to the Department of Health and Human Services alone--plus $2800 in private expenditures.**(if this sounds astronomical see the note at the end of this post)
.htm l .ht ml .html
At the end of the day, we aren't covering 40 million people--that's NO private insurance, NO Medicaid, NO Medicare. Nearly half of those 40 million are above poverty and 3.3 million are at or above the median income (about $28k). Legally mandated emergency medical treatment for all 40 million of those people goes completely unpaid, despite the fact that that at least 3.3 million of them pay $2000 per year or more into the public health budget (in my case, nearly four times that). Before someone screams "but, but, the poor get Medicaid," yes, I know, and these figures exclude the 25 million people under 65 who receive various forms of Medicaid/SSI/CHAMPAS/WIC/AFDC/Disability etc. Those are completely different stories.
Personally, without factoring in the actual hospital bill, in two years I paid $10k in insurance plus $15k to the public health budget, roughly $12,500 per year--and neither I nor the hospital received a penny from the government (or, obviously, the expired private insurance) for the subsequent $27k bill, which was my only charge in that period. If I were to also skip out on the bill, the only recourse for the hospital would be a lawsuit or a tax write-off, which under the current structure would yield about $8k in actual recovery, thus the other $16k would have to be made up somewhere, like maybe higher costs. Taking the military budget figures, the average $2800 (which doesn't account for the MUCH higher cost of emergency care) over 40 million yields a total charge-off of approximately $112 billion. It has to come from somewhere, people, to the tune of $422 per year for every human being alive in the United States, but since only 70% have health insurance, it's probably more like $603 pushed off on the insured population. If you have a wife/husband and two kids, that charge-off is costing your family $2415 every year. Just think, after ten years of that it could pay for one patient to spend three days in cardiac care or you could have purchased a new car or maybe made a down payment on a three bedroom house in the suburbs.
But should we change? Heck no! o/~ Blame Canada! with all their cheap prescription drugs and their hockey hullabaloo! o/~
YAY America.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/hinsure.htm
htt p://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2004/hhs.ht ml
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2004/va
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2004/ssa
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2004/de fens e.html
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy200 4/tables
**
Keep in mind the differences between average, median, GNP per capita and actual real-life:"average income" (i.e. $5.6T/130M) works out to about $43k, with an "average" tax liability of about $11k at a rate of roughly 24%. The "median" income is literally the 65-millionth return out of 130 million, and it is valued at roughly $28k/year. Yes, half of the tax-paying population earns $28k or less and the "average income" is damn near twice that.
You incorrectly presuppose that dime one was paid by an insurance company. As my income that year was quite generous for a single 29yo male with no dependants (put another way, the difference between my income and the median income exceeded the bill), the state was not about to pick up the tab either. Welcome to the wonderful world of missing your COBRA deadline by three days and becoming a "Cash Pay" customer. Rather like forgetting to put a stamp on the car insurance payment the day before you drive into a brick wall. Also a slim chance, but as odds go, that one in a billion is still a one, not a zero.
All that aside, healthcare costs are directly related to the financial structure behind the industry, for which no other country in the world has such high costs for the same level of treatment. Really. I had three bouts of cutaneous strep infections over a few years and received a higher quality of care, not just cheaper care, in rural South Africa than I have ever received in the United States (through indemnity, various PPOs and one very brief experience in an HMO)--and at about 1/75th the cost. It cost me a hundred bucks there, including the cost of prescription drugs, versus over $7,500 here for treatment of exactly the same condition--and after treatment in SA, the condition never returned. Hmmmmm.
Note: the per capita GDP of South Africa adjusted for purchasing-power-parity is not 1/75th that of the United States, so we can rule out basic macroeconomics as the cause. Yes, it has a place, but not remotely to the degree that the price difference reflects.
"Smashing. Yay, capitalism!" -- Austin Powers.
Hey, sure, Doctors have "greater than seven years of training." Well, guess what, so do all of the other professions that afford an individual the title "Doctor" and most of them pay crap even though they cost every single penny as much to acquire. So yes, we're all thankful that Doctors are there to save our sorry butts, but please respect those who are at just as highly trained, but don't charge usurious rates for their services.
Well, at 29 years old complaining of chest pain, I was given a toxicology panel, several EKGs, a trip into the MRI, a heart catheter, a shitload of morphine, several in-patient days in a telemetry unit and a $27,000 bill. None of this was at my request. All of it was on medical advice. ...and then I was sent home on a mega-dose of ibuprophen. The real rub? I started taking it on my own just prior to going to the hospital. The only real benefit I got for that $27,000 was the knowledge of the true safe dosage. Actually, the morphine was good shit, man, but still.
Now, I realize that "it could have been something much worse." Sure. However, as half the country earns less than $27,000 per year, it should NOT under any circumstances cost an entire years' salary to determine that you need to take an Advil, even if it's a really fucking big Advil.
Brilliant.
I think the point about the other poster was that he was pulling numbers out of his ass and billing companies with whom he had no relationship whatsoever.
The point here is that you can bill anyone for any goddamned thing you want as long as you don't misrepresent the facts and an actual "service" has been provided. Considering the volume of nickel-dime-and-fifty-dollar crap that is now considered "usual and customary," you've pretty much got free reign. I mean, really, if companies can charge you purely for the privilege of being billed--in addition to the actual bill- there should be nothing wrong with charging them purely for the privilege of being paid.
Next, how to report those collection accounts to credit reporting agencies... hmmmmmm.
or, more likely, they might think 'hey, look at that dusty disk around that star. I bet it looks a lot like our system' or, if they're really advanced something like 'ooh, some of them are blue.' Really, if the average American can't tell a Moi-Moi from a Paw-paw, why the hell do you think something 25 light years away would care about politics, assuming the concept has any meaning beyond humans in the first place?
Yessss, we have for a long time been developing a device, a moving coil if you will, based on advanced principles of magnetic induction by which we transform soundwaves into electrical current. We call this device a "m i c r o p h o n e." Our scientists have managed to reverse this process in similar device we call a "l o u d s p e a k e r." These devices can be combined into a single destructive device we refer to as a "h e a d s e t."
We will require you to provide us with one MEEEELION dollars lest we will be forced to unleash these powerful devices on your populations.
If you resist, we will be forced to also unveil our deathray "e l e c t r o n g u n" that when paired with our "h e a d s e t" will be sure to cause mass chaos, death and destruction.
Really, people, whose going to be afraid of a fricking walkman and a television? Really. Didn't anyone make it out of junior high science class? Anyone?
That's as much as a problem here in the good 'ol USA. It's called "micromanagement," where the "knowledge workers" we've now been conditioned by management consultants to view as "internal customers" of our cost-centers are so impatient with their own incompetence that their "internal vendors" become so sick of their constant imperiousness that they start producing exactly the quality of dog shit they have specified so that fault lies entirely with the moron who couldn't effectively communicate a functional specification for toilet-paper, with the desired result of that idiot being terminated in the strongest sense of the word.
Unfortunately, this same culture has produced the budgetary language of "man-months" and "FTEs" with the result that anything below executive management turns into a collection of interchangeable proles, thus until every "internal vendor" is outsourced with the same result, not much will change. Hopefully, the failures of transnational outsourcing will make it a bit more obvious where the lay-offs, outsourcing and salary slashing should really be taking place before the oldspeak is speedwise upsubbed fullwise to doubleplus crimethink by the current blackwhite bellyfeel duckspeak.
Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me
There lie they, and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree
--George Orwell, 1984
I find this blatant attack on the SM community offensive, particularly in light of the recent sexual orientation anti-discrimination laws passed in California. What happens behind closed doors between me and my hard drive should not be subject to government approval. Come, Slave. ---Je-je---Jesus Christ...
You are wrong. Children generally don't work. I suggest you check the statistics before you pull numbers out of your butt. The fact remains that 99.56% of Americans earn less than $500k. Sure, if you stupidly apply that percent to all 275M, you magically find 500,000 toddlers filing tax returns.
You don't even need to analyze the wiley super-genius to get it. Just walk around a university and observe the behavior. You have a population presented with every environment from cubicle to bull-pen, indoors/outdoors, social/anti-social, highly personalized/utterly sterile as well as, in many cases, the bar. Guess what? People use every space depending on need, mood and appropriateness to the task. However, undisturbed, quiet solitude is where most will perform the tasks that require concentration and accuracy especially under pressure. Lesson: To ensure maximum productivity, provide access to all of the above.
There are scarcely 550,000 people in the US whose incomes exceed $500k. That's equivalent to half the population of Rhode Island and would yield 50k people in California--a state home to 27 million. These are the people who are making judgements about offshore outsourcing. I hardly think the opinions of 0.44% of the population represents 'the American Way.' Does it wholly escape people how close, yet how few, 'the superrich' are? Their lives and their interests are by definition NOT 'the American Way' any more than any other group of 0.44% can catagorically represent an entire population unless 'the American Way' is some begging Dickensian euphemism for willingly being walked on and thrown out with the trash.
First, gain fluency in your favorite second language at a university level of reading, writing and conversation. Second, finish a master's degree (hey, howzabout in that language?) or better so you can enter the government (the only entity bar the military likely to send you overseas anytime soon) at a salary level that won't make you cry. Third, apply for any reasonable job that will provide you with a TS/SCI with full lifestyle polygraph. Fourth, finish 3-year compulsory stint in non-excepted service to have first $20k in student loans paid off. (read: accept it, buddy, everyone else 'pays their dues' and that process begins AFTER college, so start planning your cube decor now.) Fifth, voila, choose your favorite international superspy job with the realization that A) now you're sitting in Oaugoudougu--in a cubicle, and B) if you really wanted to get out, travel and not be stuck in a cube, you should have joined the damned Marines, studied theatre or maybe been a cowboy, baby.
There were a few other instances of Igor, although some slightly modified from the original adaptation. Really, how could you forget such monumental cultural contributions as She-Demons, Monsters Crash the Pajaman Party and La Orgia des los Muertos?
House of Wax, 1953
Frankenchicken, 1995
Frankenstein all'italiana, 1975
Flesh for Frankenseitn, 1985
Mistress Frankenstein, 2000
Monsters Crash the Pajama Party, 1965
Frankensteins Tante, 1990
Toonsylvania, 1998
Son of Dracula, 1974
Les Charlots contre Dracula, 1980
Count Duckula, 1988
La Orgia des los Muertos, 1973
The Munster's Revenge, 1981
Inspector Gadget, 1999
Van Helsing, 2004
History of Frankenstein, 1995
Hilarious House of Frankenstein, 1971
She-Demons, 1958
Dr. Krankenstein, 1987
Little Dracula, 1991
Everything you always wanted to know about sex but were afraid to ask, 1972