HBO knows that people would pay them directly. HBO has said as much. HBO also knows that it has the largest sales force in the country and it doesn't have to pay them. Every cable and satellite provider is selling HBO. If HBO decided to start selling on it's own, those cable and satellite partners wouldn't have the same incentive to keep pushing HBO in their packages. HBO has decided they get more money from the current arrangement.
I think the nice thing is not that any one of those things works, but rather that they can all run at once. An off-site backup doesn't drop your Netflix quality, etc.
The limitations of the device stops it from being luxury
That never stopped Apple./Cheap_shot
There are limitations, but there were also limitations between Apple and Windows and Linux in any direction. The important question is, are the limitations important enough. This community is power users. But for average users, a generally web based experience may be fine, nay, better. I can't remember how many times people have lost all the digital photos they ever took because backup (to the cloud) didn't happen by default. With this device its built in, etc.
It's very normal for the brain to substitute homophones. It isn't some horrible indictment of the person's intelligence. I'm willing to bet this guy knows the difference between waist and waste. It's the equivalent of a typo.
The only other problem with the temperature is that creating heat in an electric car is expensive. If he spent a lot of time in the stop and go traffic and spent a lot of that time heating the car, he may have used considerable additional energy for relatively few miles traveled as a direct result of the temperature.
I agree with the principle of what you're saying, but I do think people miss out on certain longer term opportunities. For example, I could do any number of home improvement tasks and save some significant amount of money. Probably $1000 - $3000/year depending on what I chose to have others do (lawn care, house cleaning, gutters, etc.). But I have to weigh that against potential opportunities. If I spend that $1000 - $3000/year and take that time and invest it in learning something relevant to my career, or networking, or some other career related activity, it's very conceivable that I could increase my salary to compensate for the cost of outsourcing those services.
Just like the local computer repair shop keeps a mechanic on staff just in case the company truck breaks down, right? And the dentist keeps a roofer on staff in case the roof leaks, right? Or he keeps a handy man on staff to handle the truck and the roof, but probably doesn't do either particularly well, because he doesn't do any particular thing all that often. This is the same thing. We have a commodity service that we can outsource for less money and almost certainly get better service. Not everything can be managed remotely, and there are concerns about quality of outsourced services vs. insourced services, but this isn't new. Humans have been "outsourcing" forever. It's called a business relationship, we do it all the time. The "cloud" just gives us a more standard and reliable framework for doing it relative to IT tasks.
You make a fair observation, but, while the free form paper based input method is easier, faster, and potentially clearer, it's also way more difficult to get that information out. So, if the next physician happens to find that one page in the patients stack of 400 documents, then it's probably super useful. But, being able to put a flag in the providers face that the patient has a drug allergy, or that the list of particular symptoms are indicative of rare disease-x which the physician wouldn't normally think of are things you can't do with unstructured data. Further, unstructured data makes abstracting and reporting really difficult as well. That's where we lose our ability to aggregate population data and find information on which interventions work, and which don't. It's a balancing match, but I think we need to remember to balance in favor of utility over ease.
64% of physicians hold no ownership stake in their practice. Which means they either work for a large physician group owned by a corporation or a hospital, or they work in a hospital. The reasons sited in that article are exactly the concerns mentioned in the comments here. Regulations and overhead are too much for the independent physician.
It's not the numbers, it's the specific employees. These were key employees in leadership positions. These are the kind of employees HP doesn't want to leave. Further, HP is afraid these employees will siphon away more of the good staff still at HP. It turns out downsizing often works this way. You tend to lose the good people and get left with the chaff.
Except a per mile tax isn't a true use tax. Heavier vehicles cause more damage to roads. Until recently, a gas tax generally did a pretty good job of distributing cost by use (miles x weight of vehicle) since heavier vehicles usually require more gas. Quite frankly, I think the vehicles getting better MPGs should be encouraged to do so. Raise the gas taxes if they aren't meeting demand. The only concern I would have is people with things like plug-in hybrids. They are "getting their gas" from home and aren't paying a gas tax on it. That's the only loop hole I see from a true use perspective though.
Much of this is borrowed money, so, for right now, to the economy, it looks like magic money. It will be noticed if this magic money goes away. I'm not saying it's a solution, but it does need to be handled delicately.
You're right, they are still bloody expensive. It is also a convenience factor of always having hot water. Solar is even worse, and, my house isn't well setup for solar anything. My roofs are sloped toward the east and west, and I have decent tree cover, and I live in Michigan where snow and cold weather reduce the use of solar hot water. I like the idea of each person capturing a little bit of the free solar energy though. We'll get there, prices have been coming down across the board for energy efficient products.
Good and bad. My current tank is as far as possible from every potential use of hot water, which means it takes my shower 3+ minutes to heat up, and about an equal time to get hot water at the kitchen sink. The tankless is smaller and will allow me to put it into the basement without affecting the potential to finish the basement. I have city water, so pressure differentials shouldn't hurt, but I have heard of people getting frustrated with edge case uses like men who use a trickle of hot water for shaving. This is often not enough hot water to activate the hot water heater. I fill the sink with hot water for shaving, so that shouldn't be a problem. It turns out, given the cost, a tankless won't likely break even before the warranty runs out. But, it's awfully nice to still have hot water after 3 women get done in the bathrooms.
The top 1% control 43% of the wealth of the nation....gosh, that's awfully close to the amount of income tax they pay. Shit, don't let that get out, it might hurt their pity party.
The GDP of the US is 15 trillion. Cutting 1 trillion would definitely be noticed. We are currently borrowing that money and pumping it into the economy through the government. Eliminating that is the equivalent of eliminating the share of the economy born by 20 MILLION people. Or, to think of it another way, it would be like raising the unemployment from it's current 8.2% to almost 15%.
Note, I think there is value in moving toward a balanced budget, but it needs to be done carefully and deliberately. For example, it would be much less painful if many of those cuts came from over seas spending, like foreign wars and military bases. But that doesn't account for a trillion dollars. So, reductions beyond that really do take that money out of the economy (albeit in the short term, because it's debt, we are definitely taking that money out of the economy, we're just doing it in the future, rather than now).
You're right. I think both sides are bit blind. I personally think the right is more blind than the left, and grossly unrealistic about what taxes are currently, and have been historically. We pay relatively low taxes for a first world country. But I do agree, this wouldn't be dragged out this way if there weren't people on both sides screaming in the ears of the legislators that they won't accept one inch of compromise.
We are actually lucky Obama is in his second term, it historically gives him more leeway to compromise because he doesn't have to prepare for another election. There is speculation that both sides, but the repubs especially would like to see the tax cuts expire, because then they wouldn't have voted for a tax increase and therefore wouldn't have violated their blood pact never to ever even think about once raising taxes (or Jesus might hate them), which they can then cut after the fact and call it a compromise, blame the big bad dems, and never had to violate the letter of their little agreement.
Agreed, we could all due to pay higher taxes to pay for the services we get. The Bush tax cuts weren't paid for. It was assumed that the magic Reagan sauce (which didn't work for Reagan either) would invent magical dollars and trickle down and all that. It didn't. So, yes, we need to increase taxes across the board. But, I think it would be way more palatable if we dealt with the inequities first. I think 250k is too low a threshold. Those people make their money from payroll generally, and are paying a progressive rate. It's people like the Buffets, and the Romneys, who are making 1 million+ generally from investment income who are paying 10% or less. That's a gap, that's a failure. But, of course, they are the noble job creators, right?
And that's why we need to balance out the tax system first. The dems aren't proposing a tax increase on couples making less than 250k/year. I think thats a bit low. When you start looking at the super rich like Romney who pays ~10%/year, and since social security and medicare cap, he pays marginally more for that, it seems a bit unfair that he's paying 10% in taxes while you and I pay 30%. But, he's a job creator, right? Apparently, we're just scum. That's the sticking point. The republicans have refused to discuss, until the very last moment, anything that even smelled like more revenues. Yes, we need to cut spending, but we also need to balance revenues, and having a temper tantrum and saying they refuse to play isn't productive. WORSE, the repubs cry for decreased spending, but the moment anyone proposes cuts to their major donors, I mean military, they throw another tantrum cry 'terrorists!'.
By no means do I give dems a pass.They refuse to consider anything that even looks like a reform in medicare or social security. Some people need to pull out Simpson-Bowles and have a real discussion about long-term deficit and tell people to take the giant wet teats of lobbyists out of their mouths and do their jobs.
Mod this man up. Thank you Bert. This is exactly what I need. I live in Michigan and we have very cold groundwater. It makes tankless hot water heaters a tough sell up here. But this just might be the thing to put me over the edge to buying one.
Spaces like train stations are usually over heated, so they generally need to be cooled. Instead of using the outside air as your heat sink, you are using a building across the street, who happens to want the heat. The train station becomes more comfortable, and a building gets heat without expending more carbon.
Devils advocate and all. But the world was not better off when several countries all thought that they had a chance to be dominent or grow by force. That's happened over and over again. See the Persians, Romans, Greeks, Ottomans, the great empires of Europe and of course World Wars I and II were everyone wanted to try and establish their place. The US causes a ton of problems with their imperial tactics and lame attempts at king-making (which it sucks at). But the thinking goes that the world has generally prospered because no one is all too worried about trying to be a military force, so they can focus on economic growth because the US generally guarantees some semblance of worldwide peace. I don't buy it entirely, but it would be interesting to see if China decided to start invading neighboring countries for resources if the US decided to cut it's military spending to something like that of China and the US wasn't as easily able to intervene. Or maybe it would be worth it for Russia to start taking on former Soviet states?
Slashdot Mirror
HBO knows that people would pay them directly. HBO has said as much. HBO also knows that it has the largest sales force in the country and it doesn't have to pay them. Every cable and satellite provider is selling HBO. If HBO decided to start selling on it's own, those cable and satellite partners wouldn't have the same incentive to keep pushing HBO in their packages. HBO has decided they get more money from the current arrangement.
Fair. Sorry. Then the kids in the next room watching hulu housing the other bandwidth, etc.
I think the nice thing is not that any one of those things works, but rather that they can all run at once. An off-site backup doesn't drop your Netflix quality, etc.
The limitations of the device stops it from being luxury
That never stopped Apple. /Cheap_shot
There are limitations, but there were also limitations between Apple and Windows and Linux in any direction. The important question is, are the limitations important enough. This community is power users. But for average users, a generally web based experience may be fine, nay, better. I can't remember how many times people have lost all the digital photos they ever took because backup (to the cloud) didn't happen by default. With this device its built in, etc.
This was addressed in the comments on the article. He offered to make the change, the agent informed him he wasn't allowed to change the form.
It's very normal for the brain to substitute homophones. It isn't some horrible indictment of the person's intelligence. I'm willing to bet this guy knows the difference between waist and waste. It's the equivalent of a typo.
The only other problem with the temperature is that creating heat in an electric car is expensive. If he spent a lot of time in the stop and go traffic and spent a lot of that time heating the car, he may have used considerable additional energy for relatively few miles traveled as a direct result of the temperature.
I agree with the principle of what you're saying, but I do think people miss out on certain longer term opportunities. For example, I could do any number of home improvement tasks and save some significant amount of money. Probably $1000 - $3000/year depending on what I chose to have others do (lawn care, house cleaning, gutters, etc.). But I have to weigh that against potential opportunities. If I spend that $1000 - $3000/year and take that time and invest it in learning something relevant to my career, or networking, or some other career related activity, it's very conceivable that I could increase my salary to compensate for the cost of outsourcing those services.
Just like the local computer repair shop keeps a mechanic on staff just in case the company truck breaks down, right? And the dentist keeps a roofer on staff in case the roof leaks, right? Or he keeps a handy man on staff to handle the truck and the roof, but probably doesn't do either particularly well, because he doesn't do any particular thing all that often. This is the same thing. We have a commodity service that we can outsource for less money and almost certainly get better service. Not everything can be managed remotely, and there are concerns about quality of outsourced services vs. insourced services, but this isn't new. Humans have been "outsourcing" forever. It's called a business relationship, we do it all the time. The "cloud" just gives us a more standard and reliable framework for doing it relative to IT tasks.
You make a fair observation, but, while the free form paper based input method is easier, faster, and potentially clearer, it's also way more difficult to get that information out. So, if the next physician happens to find that one page in the patients stack of 400 documents, then it's probably super useful. But, being able to put a flag in the providers face that the patient has a drug allergy, or that the list of particular symptoms are indicative of rare disease-x which the physician wouldn't normally think of are things you can't do with unstructured data. Further, unstructured data makes abstracting and reporting really difficult as well. That's where we lose our ability to aggregate population data and find information on which interventions work, and which don't. It's a balancing match, but I think we need to remember to balance in favor of utility over ease.
http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2012/11/19/bil21119.htm
64% of physicians hold no ownership stake in their practice. Which means they either work for a large physician group owned by a corporation or a hospital, or they work in a hospital. The reasons sited in that article are exactly the concerns mentioned in the comments here. Regulations and overhead are too much for the independent physician.
It's not the numbers, it's the specific employees. These were key employees in leadership positions. These are the kind of employees HP doesn't want to leave. Further, HP is afraid these employees will siphon away more of the good staff still at HP. It turns out downsizing often works this way. You tend to lose the good people and get left with the chaff.
Except a per mile tax isn't a true use tax. Heavier vehicles cause more damage to roads. Until recently, a gas tax generally did a pretty good job of distributing cost by use (miles x weight of vehicle) since heavier vehicles usually require more gas. Quite frankly, I think the vehicles getting better MPGs should be encouraged to do so. Raise the gas taxes if they aren't meeting demand. The only concern I would have is people with things like plug-in hybrids. They are "getting their gas" from home and aren't paying a gas tax on it. That's the only loop hole I see from a true use perspective though.
Much of this is borrowed money, so, for right now, to the economy, it looks like magic money. It will be noticed if this magic money goes away. I'm not saying it's a solution, but it does need to be handled delicately.
You're right, they are still bloody expensive. It is also a convenience factor of always having hot water. Solar is even worse, and, my house isn't well setup for solar anything. My roofs are sloped toward the east and west, and I have decent tree cover, and I live in Michigan where snow and cold weather reduce the use of solar hot water. I like the idea of each person capturing a little bit of the free solar energy though. We'll get there, prices have been coming down across the board for energy efficient products.
Good and bad. My current tank is as far as possible from every potential use of hot water, which means it takes my shower 3+ minutes to heat up, and about an equal time to get hot water at the kitchen sink. The tankless is smaller and will allow me to put it into the basement without affecting the potential to finish the basement. I have city water, so pressure differentials shouldn't hurt, but I have heard of people getting frustrated with edge case uses like men who use a trickle of hot water for shaving. This is often not enough hot water to activate the hot water heater. I fill the sink with hot water for shaving, so that shouldn't be a problem. It turns out, given the cost, a tankless won't likely break even before the warranty runs out. But, it's awfully nice to still have hot water after 3 women get done in the bathrooms.
The top 1% control 43% of the wealth of the nation. ...gosh, that's awfully close to the amount of income tax they pay. Shit, don't let that get out, it might hurt their pity party.
The GDP of the US is 15 trillion. Cutting 1 trillion would definitely be noticed. We are currently borrowing that money and pumping it into the economy through the government. Eliminating that is the equivalent of eliminating the share of the economy born by 20 MILLION people. Or, to think of it another way, it would be like raising the unemployment from it's current 8.2% to almost 15%.
Note, I think there is value in moving toward a balanced budget, but it needs to be done carefully and deliberately. For example, it would be much less painful if many of those cuts came from over seas spending, like foreign wars and military bases. But that doesn't account for a trillion dollars. So, reductions beyond that really do take that money out of the economy (albeit in the short term, because it's debt, we are definitely taking that money out of the economy, we're just doing it in the future, rather than now).
You're right. I think both sides are bit blind. I personally think the right is more blind than the left, and grossly unrealistic about what taxes are currently, and have been historically. We pay relatively low taxes for a first world country. But I do agree, this wouldn't be dragged out this way if there weren't people on both sides screaming in the ears of the legislators that they won't accept one inch of compromise.
We are actually lucky Obama is in his second term, it historically gives him more leeway to compromise because he doesn't have to prepare for another election. There is speculation that both sides, but the repubs especially would like to see the tax cuts expire, because then they wouldn't have voted for a tax increase and therefore wouldn't have violated their blood pact never to ever even think about once raising taxes (or Jesus might hate them), which they can then cut after the fact and call it a compromise, blame the big bad dems, and never had to violate the letter of their little agreement.
Agreed, we could all due to pay higher taxes to pay for the services we get. The Bush tax cuts weren't paid for. It was assumed that the magic Reagan sauce (which didn't work for Reagan either) would invent magical dollars and trickle down and all that. It didn't. So, yes, we need to increase taxes across the board. But, I think it would be way more palatable if we dealt with the inequities first. I think 250k is too low a threshold. Those people make their money from payroll generally, and are paying a progressive rate. It's people like the Buffets, and the Romneys, who are making 1 million+ generally from investment income who are paying 10% or less. That's a gap, that's a failure. But, of course, they are the noble job creators, right?
And that's why we need to balance out the tax system first. The dems aren't proposing a tax increase on couples making less than 250k/year. I think thats a bit low. When you start looking at the super rich like Romney who pays ~10%/year, and since social security and medicare cap, he pays marginally more for that, it seems a bit unfair that he's paying 10% in taxes while you and I pay 30%. But, he's a job creator, right? Apparently, we're just scum. That's the sticking point. The republicans have refused to discuss, until the very last moment, anything that even smelled like more revenues. Yes, we need to cut spending, but we also need to balance revenues, and having a temper tantrum and saying they refuse to play isn't productive. WORSE, the repubs cry for decreased spending, but the moment anyone proposes cuts to their major donors, I mean military, they throw another tantrum cry 'terrorists!'.
By no means do I give dems a pass.They refuse to consider anything that even looks like a reform in medicare or social security. Some people need to pull out Simpson-Bowles and have a real discussion about long-term deficit and tell people to take the giant wet teats of lobbyists out of their mouths and do their jobs.
Mod this man up. Thank you Bert. This is exactly what I need. I live in Michigan and we have very cold groundwater. It makes tankless hot water heaters a tough sell up here. But this just might be the thing to put me over the edge to buying one.
Spaces like train stations are usually over heated, so they generally need to be cooled. Instead of using the outside air as your heat sink, you are using a building across the street, who happens to want the heat. The train station becomes more comfortable, and a building gets heat without expending more carbon.
Which is why they aren't pumping the air directly, but instead, they are using the body heat to heat water tanks, and sending the water across.
Devils advocate and all. But the world was not better off when several countries all thought that they had a chance to be dominent or grow by force. That's happened over and over again. See the Persians, Romans, Greeks, Ottomans, the great empires of Europe and of course World Wars I and II were everyone wanted to try and establish their place. The US causes a ton of problems with their imperial tactics and lame attempts at king-making (which it sucks at). But the thinking goes that the world has generally prospered because no one is all too worried about trying to be a military force, so they can focus on economic growth because the US generally guarantees some semblance of worldwide peace. I don't buy it entirely, but it would be interesting to see if China decided to start invading neighboring countries for resources if the US decided to cut it's military spending to something like that of China and the US wasn't as easily able to intervene. Or maybe it would be worth it for Russia to start taking on former Soviet states?