And when the FDA came out I'm sure that there were people complaining that they couldn't buy the cheap sausage that was 30% sawdust anymore either. The policies that were cancelled - according to that article - were ones sold to people with pre-existing conditions; as someone who's been in that boat before, those policies are inexpensive because they have a clause in them that doesn't cover you for the sickness that you already know that you have.
Anyone with an insurance policy that meets the (really quite reasonable) minimum standards of care guidelines should be able to keep it - and, for the most part, has been able to as well.
Would you say the "Management" Costs of Great Britain's Single-Payer System are: a) Minimal and fair b)More than they probably should be compensated for a fair and equitable system
If you answered b than you are correct. Wait? Doesn't that mean that it doesn't matter which economic system we use cronies will find a way to pay themselves too much? Gee, that sounds like an inherent problem anthropologically not economically.
And yet even with that fact, they're half of the US system's costs. What does that imply, do you think?
Last time I ran the numbers (a year or so ago), the combination of US income and payroll taxes for someone making 80K USD were approximately equal to the income and NHS taxes for someone making 50K GBP (basically equivalent). That's including the employer portion of both, of course. IIRC the UK taxes were about 500USD over the US ones - but, of course, they included full health care (including copays and deductibles) for a family, whereas the US ones didn't.
The way to make up for that is by allowing customers to know the outcomes for various surgeries in the hospital. Once customers know the price and the outcomes, they can make informed decisions.
No, they won't. When you're working at $25K/yr, comparing surgeries that have costs of $250K (10% survival rate) vs $500K (12% survival rate) makes no difference whatsoever. You can't afford either one, so either you get nothing at all or you go for the expensive one (since you'll be bankrupt after either).
Yup. OSX does all of those things too - and yet, running on the same hardware with the same battery as the MSFT guys, still gets better batty life. As you'd know if you (quaint, I know) RTFA.
Completely agree with you on the TV side though. That shit's terrible.
Except for those lucky few (sorry, the unlucky 1.6 million) people who'll get cancer next year. Or break a bone. Or get any one of a large number of additional diseases that are moderately or completely treatable with insurance but will totally fuck up your life if you get them without.
How much does increasing the cost of running a business cost us in the global economy?
Tons.
Oh, unless you're running any business that requires higher-compensated staff than a McDonalds does. You see, when I hire someone, I have to pick up the remarkably large tab for their healthcare anyway, but as a small business I pay way more than (for example) IBM would, and often get an inferior product. Makes it much trickier to compete with them, don't'cha know.
Yes, the ACA is far more expensive than having free healthcare from the mystical medical fairy. But that's not what it should be compared to - decent cost with a good plan costs most companies $500+/month already - if an employee chooses to cover their spouse and kids you can triple that (whether paid by the employer or the employee, its still a cost).
The thing is that the ACA helps to level the field somewhat. If someone wants to start their own business they can pay lower big-company rates for a real plan, and not lose it when they leave their employer. Same if a small company wants to buy competitive insurance for their employees.
In many ways it substantially lowers the cost of running a business. Single payer like most other countries have would lower it more, of course - making it far more reasonable to go off and be entrepreneurial without risking the life of your family (pre-ACA, if someone got cancer when they were uninsured, even if they kicked it, they'd never get private insurance again).
Thank you - this is a very real point that's often missed.
Also, people rarely make rational decisions about long-term problems with short-term costs. Its the same reason that a few people save $30/yr by never changing their oil and run into engine problems 5 years down the road with mid-four-figure pricetags.
Try replacing the above areas of expertise with: brain surgeon, rocket scientist, or hell if you don't want to be intellectually elitist race car driver and you see just how ridiculous this is and why MBAs are treated with such contempt by technies. (Well that and they've lived through their dreams and work being ruined by inane decisions).
I think that a lot of that feeling comes from not actually understanding business - many techies don't, I know that I didn't when I was younger.
The business professional may be able to look at a situation and say, "You're building the wrong product, it won't help any of our customers or prospects so it won't sell." To which the techie may respond, "But look, its twice as fast as its competition!"
Both are right - it may be amazingly good software - but that doesn't mean that the company for which they work should pay the developer to keep writing it.
A little OT, but they do this in the 'States as well. When they're measuring for the new speed limit though they station a small trailer with a huge sign posting the current speed limit, a radar gun, and a readout of your current speed. If they really don't want to raise it they'll station a police officer there (or sometimes park an empty cruiser noticeably behind the mobile sign).
Oddly enough, most speed limits end up being "correct" when traffic is measured this way.
but by the rules everything that could fly off your hands should be stowed away during takeoff and landing.
Bullshit. My Kindle ways less than a paperback, yet you're allowed hardback books and children up to 2 years old, which are far heavier. What you propose might make sense, but its not a rule.
They are still bitter that they had the idea for a tablet long before Apple, but when they announced it, it was to a big yawn.
Having the idea is, sadly, the easy part (and Microsoft was far from the first - check out Sun's future doodles from a few decades ago). Its getting all the pesky details right and having a solid combination of hardware, software, and demand that's tricky. That's what Apple is far better at than the current Microsoft.
The real issue is that voters don't actually pick their candidates anymore; its the other way around. Every 10 years when the census is done, all the states have to redraw their congressional districts. What happens in most states is that whoever controls the state legislature gets to do the drawing. They get maps and their state's entire voter registration database out, and make a modern computer-aided science of drawing things so that as many districts as possible are packed full of their party's registered voters
While your concern is valid your math is a little odd. When you're drawing the districts you want - as much as possible - to get slight wins everywhere. If you have 45 voters to your opponents 54, and there are 10 9-person districts, you want 9 of them to go 5-4 your way and have the last be 10-0 for your opponent.
"Everyone" used to do this kind of gerrymandering - a bit. It wasn't until the last 10-15 years when the RNC started breaking all the unwritten "gentlemen's agreement" rules (including triggering our current shutdown situation) that it became a massive rights issue instead of simply a "perk" of being an incumbent.
Oh, let's cut America some slack. Name one other country that has as many ethnic groups and is diverse as the U.S.
This as a defense of a two-party system that can't even get anything done? Most other 1st world countries have governing bodies far more diverse than that of the US.
Sadly, the GOP alternative is "The free market solution which we have and which has no problems whatsoever." When you point out the problems, they ignore you and assume that since THEY have enough money to afford health insurance or get government health care by virtue of being a member of Congress, nobody else has problems ever.
Now that I mention it, all of those Congress folks who say how government run health care is evil and we should go free market... Are any of them waiving their Congressional health care in favor of purchasing their own health care plans? I'd think they were being hypocritical if they didn't.
Well, yes and no. Ted Cruz has made a big deal about waiving his benefits. Of course, he's been quieter about the fact that he also gets premium coverage from Goldman Sachs to the tune of ~$40k/yr, or approximately one median household's income, purely because he's married to a successful woman.
Considering the fact that I was never paid for the pole in my front yard or their adding of wires to it. I tend to see it in a rather bleak light. They have too many rights already.
That pole is almost certainly in the public Right of Way for your street. Most cities allow people to extend their yards well into the right of way up to the sidewalk or edge of the currently paved road; decorating it with grass or flowers does not make it your exclusive property.
Take web services, for example. The web server ends up launching PHP or Java interpreters, which in turn launch shell commands and access databases.
Wow... really? I supposed that's one way of doing it. Most Java webservice providers just listen for network connections and do everything themselves rather than spawning new executables, but if you're truly nostalgic for old-school CGI I guess you could spin everything up and down all the time.
All this is easily attainable with a few scripts on modern operating systems, Bitcoin, TOR and maybe some VPN accounts
If I had the resources and was really interested, I'd just make sure to run a large Bitcoin exchange and a ton of TOR endpoints. Just saying. Why try to hack it in code when you can set something up really simply and have malefactors come to you?
The one key to Java that most people don't seem to understand is that its designed for longevity. It was one of the first massively used languages to come with a functional style guide, for example. If you're not going out of your way to obfuscate it, Java is very easy to read. Almost any Java developer can drop into a brand new codebase and read new Java code and know what's going on.
You need to have gone through that a few times in other languages to really appreciate how damned rare that is.
Are there things that they could and should fix? Absolutely. They could actually be done very easily. Allowing some type inference the way that Scala does (only when there's only one option) would be a good start. Better support for small anonymous classes would really add a lot of functional capabilities at very little cost. Property access to javabean standard getters and setters would eliminate tons of IDE generated crap while still allowing overrides. That would cover quite a lot.
As languages go though, you can actually use even Java 1.6 to build out things like JSON-backed RESTful APIs that talk to databases and queues spending 98% of your time writing business logic. For most real-world problems its hard to get much better than that.
That's very much an American attitude, though. Its why our "experienced professional" vacation standard of 3 weeks is half what any reasonable white-collar worker would get in much of Europe, for example.
Granting your main point, many countries also recognize this as an area where government oversight is needed to counterbalance the company's tendencies and help to restore that balance between owners and workers. Notice that in legislation the US, again, is vastly more willing to favor the owners than their employees than basically anyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure Obamacare will work out fine...except for these people and many others like them.
If you like you plan, you can keep it...NOT.
And when the FDA came out I'm sure that there were people complaining that they couldn't buy the cheap sausage that was 30% sawdust anymore either. The policies that were cancelled - according to that article - were ones sold to people with pre-existing conditions; as someone who's been in that boat before, those policies are inexpensive because they have a clause in them that doesn't cover you for the sickness that you already know that you have.
Anyone with an insurance policy that meets the (really quite reasonable) minimum standards of care guidelines should be able to keep it - and, for the most part, has been able to as well.
Would you say the "Management" Costs of Great Britain's Single-Payer System are:
a) Minimal and fair
b)More than they probably should be compensated for a fair and equitable system
If you answered b than you are correct. Wait? Doesn't that mean that it doesn't matter which economic system we use cronies will find a way to pay themselves too much? Gee, that sounds like an inherent problem anthropologically not economically.
And yet even with that fact, they're half of the US system's costs. What does that imply, do you think?
Don't forget somewhat better outcomes too :)
Last time I ran the numbers (a year or so ago), the combination of US income and payroll taxes for someone making 80K USD were approximately equal to the income and NHS taxes for someone making 50K GBP (basically equivalent). That's including the employer portion of both, of course. IIRC the UK taxes were about 500USD over the US ones - but, of course, they included full health care (including copays and deductibles) for a family, whereas the US ones didn't.
The way to make up for that is by allowing customers to know the outcomes for various surgeries in the hospital. Once customers know the price and the outcomes, they can make informed decisions.
No, they won't. When you're working at $25K/yr, comparing surgeries that have costs of $250K (10% survival rate) vs $500K (12% survival rate) makes no difference whatsoever. You can't afford either one, so either you get nothing at all or you go for the expensive one (since you'll be bankrupt after either).
Yup. OSX does all of those things too - and yet, running on the same hardware with the same battery as the MSFT guys, still gets better batty life. As you'd know if you (quaint, I know) RTFA.
Completely agree with you on the TV side though. That shit's terrible.
Pity you didn't RTFA which already answered all of the serious questions in that list.
...employees are getting hit pretty hard...
Except for those lucky few (sorry, the unlucky 1.6 million) people who'll get cancer next year. Or break a bone. Or get any one of a large number of additional diseases that are moderately or completely treatable with insurance but will totally fuck up your life if you get them without.
They're probably doing better overall.
How much does increasing the cost of running a business cost us in the global economy?
Tons.
Oh, unless you're running any business that requires higher-compensated staff than a McDonalds does. You see, when I hire someone, I have to pick up the remarkably large tab for their healthcare anyway, but as a small business I pay way more than (for example) IBM would, and often get an inferior product. Makes it much trickier to compete with them, don't'cha know.
Yes, the ACA is far more expensive than having free healthcare from the mystical medical fairy. But that's not what it should be compared to - decent cost with a good plan costs most companies $500+/month already - if an employee chooses to cover their spouse and kids you can triple that (whether paid by the employer or the employee, its still a cost).
The thing is that the ACA helps to level the field somewhat. If someone wants to start their own business they can pay lower big-company rates for a real plan, and not lose it when they leave their employer. Same if a small company wants to buy competitive insurance for their employees.
In many ways it substantially lowers the cost of running a business. Single payer like most other countries have would lower it more, of course - making it far more reasonable to go off and be entrepreneurial without risking the life of your family (pre-ACA, if someone got cancer when they were uninsured, even if they kicked it, they'd never get private insurance again).
Thank you - this is a very real point that's often missed.
Also, people rarely make rational decisions about long-term problems with short-term costs. Its the same reason that a few people save $30/yr by never changing their oil and run into engine problems 5 years down the road with mid-four-figure pricetags.
Try replacing the above areas of expertise with: brain surgeon, rocket scientist, or hell if you don't want to be intellectually elitist race car driver and you see just how ridiculous this is and why MBAs are treated with such contempt by technies. (Well that and they've lived through their dreams and work being ruined by inane decisions).
I think that a lot of that feeling comes from not actually understanding business - many techies don't, I know that I didn't when I was younger.
The business professional may be able to look at a situation and say, "You're building the wrong product, it won't help any of our customers or prospects so it won't sell." To which the techie may respond, "But look, its twice as fast as its competition!"
Both are right - it may be amazingly good software - but that doesn't mean that the company for which they work should pay the developer to keep writing it.
See also: bridge to nowhere, Alaska.
Interesting stories. The correct link for part four is http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N19/dubai.html by the way.
A little OT, but they do this in the 'States as well. When they're measuring for the new speed limit though they station a small trailer with a huge sign posting the current speed limit, a radar gun, and a readout of your current speed. If they really don't want to raise it they'll station a police officer there (or sometimes park an empty cruiser noticeably behind the mobile sign).
Oddly enough, most speed limits end up being "correct" when traffic is measured this way.
but by the rules everything that could fly off your hands should be stowed away during takeoff and landing.
Bullshit. My Kindle ways less than a paperback, yet you're allowed hardback books and children up to 2 years old, which are far heavier. What you propose might make sense, but its not a rule.
They are still bitter that they had the idea for a tablet long before Apple, but when they announced it, it was to a big yawn.
Having the idea is, sadly, the easy part (and Microsoft was far from the first - check out Sun's future doodles from a few decades ago). Its getting all the pesky details right and having a solid combination of hardware, software, and demand that's tricky. That's what Apple is far better at than the current Microsoft.
My car is also almost sold out! In fact, its no longer on the market due to forecast internal demand. Wow! It must be amazing1111!!!!1!
Yeah, I can't do math. You get the idea though.
The real issue is that voters don't actually pick their candidates anymore; its the other way around. Every 10 years when the census is done, all the states have to redraw their congressional districts. What happens in most states is that whoever controls the state legislature gets to do the drawing. They get maps and their state's entire voter registration database out, and make a modern computer-aided science of drawing things so that as many districts as possible are packed full of their party's registered voters
While your concern is valid your math is a little odd. When you're drawing the districts you want - as much as possible - to get slight wins everywhere. If you have 45 voters to your opponents 54, and there are 10 9-person districts, you want 9 of them to go 5-4 your way and have the last be 10-0 for your opponent.
"Everyone" used to do this kind of gerrymandering - a bit. It wasn't until the last 10-15 years when the RNC started breaking all the unwritten "gentlemen's agreement" rules (including triggering our current shutdown situation) that it became a massive rights issue instead of simply a "perk" of being an incumbent.
Oh, let's cut America some slack. Name one other country that has as many ethnic groups and is diverse as the U.S.
This as a defense of a two-party system that can't even get anything done? Most other 1st world countries have governing bodies far more diverse than that of the US.
Sadly, the GOP alternative is "The free market solution which we have and which has no problems whatsoever." When you point out the problems, they ignore you and assume that since THEY have enough money to afford health insurance or get government health care by virtue of being a member of Congress, nobody else has problems ever.
Now that I mention it, all of those Congress folks who say how government run health care is evil and we should go free market... Are any of them waiving their Congressional health care in favor of purchasing their own health care plans? I'd think they were being hypocritical if they didn't.
Well, yes and no. Ted Cruz has made a big deal about waiving his benefits. Of course, he's been quieter about the fact that he also gets premium coverage from Goldman Sachs to the tune of ~$40k/yr, or approximately one median household's income, purely because he's married to a successful woman.
Considering the fact that I was never paid for the pole in my front yard or their adding of wires to it. I tend to see it in a rather bleak light. They have too many rights already.
That pole is almost certainly in the public Right of Way for your street. Most cities allow people to extend their yards well into the right of way up to the sidewalk or edge of the currently paved road; decorating it with grass or flowers does not make it your exclusive property.
Take web services, for example. The web server ends up launching PHP or Java interpreters, which in turn launch shell commands and access databases.
Wow... really? I supposed that's one way of doing it. Most Java webservice providers just listen for network connections and do everything themselves rather than spawning new executables, but if you're truly nostalgic for old-school CGI I guess you could spin everything up and down all the time.
All this is easily attainable with a few scripts on modern operating systems, Bitcoin, TOR and maybe some VPN accounts
If I had the resources and was really interested, I'd just make sure to run a large Bitcoin exchange and a ton of TOR endpoints. Just saying. Why try to hack it in code when you can set something up really simply and have malefactors come to you?
The one key to Java that most people don't seem to understand is that its designed for longevity. It was one of the first massively used languages to come with a functional style guide, for example. If you're not going out of your way to obfuscate it, Java is very easy to read. Almost any Java developer can drop into a brand new codebase and read new Java code and know what's going on.
You need to have gone through that a few times in other languages to really appreciate how damned rare that is.
Are there things that they could and should fix? Absolutely. They could actually be done very easily. Allowing some type inference the way that Scala does (only when there's only one option) would be a good start. Better support for small anonymous classes would really add a lot of functional capabilities at very little cost. Property access to javabean standard getters and setters would eliminate tons of IDE generated crap while still allowing overrides. That would cover quite a lot.
As languages go though, you can actually use even Java 1.6 to build out things like JSON-backed RESTful APIs that talk to databases and queues spending 98% of your time writing business logic. For most real-world problems its hard to get much better than that.
That's very much an American attitude, though. Its why our "experienced professional" vacation standard of 3 weeks is half what any reasonable white-collar worker would get in much of Europe, for example.
Granting your main point, many countries also recognize this as an area where government oversight is needed to counterbalance the company's tendencies and help to restore that balance between owners and workers. Notice that in legislation the US, again, is vastly more willing to favor the owners than their employees than basically anyone else.