The studies show that early development is when it is easiest, with the most progress taking place from age 2-6. 2nd grade is far too late for the "automatic" learning that infants and toddlers enjoy. I have relatives that are raising their children bilingually. Anecdotally, the kids speak 2 languages fluently at ages 5 and 7 and learned them both without the kind of effort adults are required to make. If you are interested, you can read more about it here
You aren't hip, you're just old. Maybe not in years on this planet, but attitude. My grandpa was the same way: always wore a watch, shaved with a straight edge. I thought he was incredibly cool.
I used to carry a pocketwatch and use a straight edge even though it was more work. I thought it was cool. Now, I use a phone and a combination of disposables and electric razors because I am lazy. If I shave with a hair trimmer to get my week's worth of stubble down to a manageable size the disposable will deal with it OK.
Cutting welfare is something I don't think is a good idea, but I wanted to correct your numbers. According to this welfare is $700b, 11% of total spending, making it the 5th largest category, behind Health Care, Pensions, Education, Defense.
It is amazing how much the data varies seasonally to this day. Check out the chart here and the fascinating ones here It is also surprising how much weekends matter; more than anything else. I suppose few people or hospitals schedule a birth on the weekend, but I always thought of birth happening on its own schedule. According to the data, that is very much not true.
From year to year the weekends would shift around, but you still end up with uneven seasonal distribution as well as the weekends piling up on different days.
All true. Birthdays are not evenly distributed, however. There is a fairly strong seasonal variation and an increasing amount of intentional birthdays due to superstition, convenience, etc.
Do you have a source for that? Every car company I am aware of makes money on its small cars. Here is an article about Ford making their Focus even more profitable after standardizing globally on a common chassis. There are companies selling profitably in the sub $5k market in China and India.
I know the transition was painful for many domestic carmakers because they ended up with a lot of SUV stock and plants that weren't needed, and the profit on an expensive SUV is larger than on an inexpensive compact.
I think you are looking at it from a young and healthy perspective. In fact, everybody is going to hit their deductible more and more until age and failing health ensure they hit their deductible every year. So far I have hit the deductible twice, both due to injuries. If I don't kill myself biking or hiking someday I will need chronic routine expensive care.
I am around 40 and have a few friends that will hit the deductible every year for the rest of their lives. HSA doesn't help control spending for chronic lingering health problems (diabetes, heart disease, cancer)
It would be nice for health care to become more like other services, but it isn't there yet. It is impossible to get an estimate on what a medical issue will cost. If you call around to find a good deal, you have no helpful numbers to work with, either for cost or for quality. Doctors have no idea of cost or effectiveness when comparing treatment plans. I joke about how nobody would accept a mechanic saying he would try to fix your car, but couldn't give you any idea of how much it would cost, how long it would take, and you are paying for his time whether or not he fixes the problem.
I don't have any good answers. I liked the idea of high deductible insurance a lot better before I started getting old.
You missed my point. Once anyone hits the deductible, there is no incentive to ration care until next year. This happens to everyone at some point. Hitting your deductible is not an outlier. I can't think of a good way to keep the incentive to ration care without allowing big expenses to be crippling. I guess some kind of asymmetrical copay might work if you fiddled the numbers, but when million dollar years are a possibility I don't see real incentives working out.
Avoiding preventative care is a temptation for everyone every year they don't hit the deductible. Should I get that mole checked? It is looking a bit weird lately. I did get it checked, and it cost me about $600 out of pocket. Next time I might be less eager to do the right thing, even if it might minimize total healthcare spending. This temptation to cheap out in the short term applies to everyone.
I don't see my HSA ever being self sufficient. I contribute the max every year and barely have $5k in there. At this rate I will have about $30k in there at retirement, but I expect my health care needs to increase as I age. I am invested in index funds within the HSA, it is configured for anything above the annual deductible to get funneled into the fund. If I get 7.5% that will be $2250/year at retirement. Numbers work better for someone who gets a HSA when they are 18, but many young people can't afford to sock away several thousand a year into a healthcare bucket.
I'm not missing the point that I am funding my medical expenses with my HSA. It isn't cheap, and my incentives aren't lined up very well, and I don't know why you can't understand my complaints.
I've had a HSA for about 5 years now. There are some big problems with them. I will point out 3 I have encountered personally.
Once you know you will hit your deductible you are given perverse incentives. I broke my foot in late December, so I waited until January to have expensive care given. This ended up costing more than prompt treatment. And, since I hit my deductible for the year in the first week of January I felt compelled to use as much health care as possible in order to get my moneys worth. I'm not the type to go to the doc for any old thing, but there are plenty of people who would have seriously abused the situation. As it was, I got everything done that had been ignored the other years.
It is tempting to put off preventative care even if it saves money overall.
The insurer doesn't cover everything. My surgery had many excluded items and I ended up paying about double my deductible. I contested many of the items but most of them were rejected. It is sort of strange that things like crutches and ruined toenail removal weren't covered. I don't have much faith that it will cover something truly serious like heart surgery or cancer treatment.
When you vote you provide an offset value. The offset value is applied to your vote. When you verify your vote the offset is not revealed. When votes are counted the offsets are revealed but the identities are not. The man with the pipe will have to believe me when I say my offset is X. I could say a different offset to indicate the desired vote.
Re:Loans with negative interest? I don't think so.
on
Bitcoin Price Crashes
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· Score: 1
Think of a radioactive isotope with a half-life of 1 year, e.g. if you have 1g in a year you will have half a gram.
Now it makes sense to loan out some at a negative interest rate. If you "charge" -25% interest, the lendee will have to pay back.75g. The bank ends up with more than they would have if they just sat on it.
I put my tax returns encrypted in DropBox so they are handy and for backups. I never know when I'll need my return (I just bought a house, and it was helpful) and if my computer explodes I won't lose them.
In fact, I've only used db for sharing files with others or for long term safe storage so far. I haven't bothered setting up the sync-everywhere stuff yet, although it seems handy.
I wouldn't live there, but you said it was $1000 minimum for a rathole in a bad part of town.
I lived in some pretty shady situations when I was putting myself through college in Santa Barbara. When I couldn't handle sharing a bedroom anymore I had a 100sf room with its own bathroom for a couple years, it was all I could afford, $300. I wasn't allowed to go inside the main house, so I cooked on a camp stove. There was a hobo that lived in the crawlspace, he paid $100/month. I've always been fascinated by the options at the bottom of the scale.
You're wrong about living expenses. Rent is $450, you can go cheaper if you want to make serious sacrifices. Here is one I found in 10 seconds, it looks like an 25 minute walk or a 15 minute bus ride to my old job location downtown.
I lived in LA for a few years, and never owned a car. Working downtown and living in Koreatown a car was a serious inconvenience and expense. I could hop on a wilshire bus and be home in 10 minutes. Of course, I planned where to live based on it being easy to bus. My neighbors and coworkers bitched constantly about parking, getting towed, tickets, wrecks, etc.
You're right about pay. I hope that things pick up and it becomes easier to make decent money.
When I lived in LA I budgeted $1000/month for living expenses (rent, utilities, groceries) and another $1000/month for drinking, restaurants, concerts, etc. I wasn't saving a lot of money, but I sure had fun. These numbers are from a while ago, but things haven't changed much from then.
Many people who want to commit suicide do not have the freedom to find a straight razor or a bottle of aspirin. I have seen people want to die in nursing homes where there is no way for them to make it happen. Remember people don't want to kill themselves when they are healthy.
If the patient is too feeble to set things up why force them to live in suffering for however long it takes to die? Why force them to resort to messy, failure prone, painful methods?
I'm a fellow self-appointed film etiquette enforcer. There are a few around. I hope to educate people, including bystanders, that other people care and will speak up about it.
Once, a person rudely refused to stop making calls so I grabbed his phone. It was not smart and I probably won't do it again, but the look on his face was priceless. I told him I'd give it back when the movie was over. He threatened to get an usher, which I welcomed. His wife and children begged him to let it go, so he sulked for the movie and I gave him his phone afterwards. He wanted to fight me until I stood up, then he lost interest when I stood a foot taller than him.
Every car I've owned I have been able to exhaust friction, skidding/triggering ABS, when doing a panic stop. When I say I am doubling minimum stopping distance, that is braking as hard as is possible without skidding or triggering ABS. I do this occasionally on an empty road in order to keep my skills and assumptions sharp, or to evaluate a rental car or new car, or to estimate the increased distance needed when hauling extra weight.
My brother in law is a trucker, and he is very familiar with the increased stopping distance needed when hauling a load. A fully loaded rig requires over 10x the distance as an empty one. The limiting factor for him is similarly friction.
I'm not sure why you are so confident that vehicle mass doesn't affect stopping distance. It is a simple enough experiment, and the physics are basic.
My sedan weighs 2,050 lbs. A Ford Expedition weighs 5,801 lbs. That is nearly triple the weight! Obviously, the heavier vehicle would require much more stopping distance.
I buy heavy items a lot and the difference in stopping distance is amazing. I notice the difference when I have a lot of passengers in my car. I can easily double my minimum stopping distance when heavily loaded.
How much you spend can bump you up or down a level or two. I know people with 2 6-figure incomes that worry about money constantly. They are underwater on a massive house, have numerous expensive vehicles, carry debt of various sorts, and support several children lavishly. They think of themselves as barely getting by.
You have to show your ID to buy a ticket, even if you pay with cash. Your name is printed on your ticket. We stopped being able to fly anonymously shortly after 9/11/2001
I won about $600 on a slot machine, and the attendant came over to cash me out. I won a similar amount a bit later on the same machine, and they said the machine had malfunctioned and refused to pay it. I tried to complain but no dice.
I was dirty from a road trip, so maybe they just wanted me to leave. I was buying drinks and tipping, so that wasn't it.
Casinos routinely will ban people who are good gamblers, and the gaming money geyser controls state legislature so don't expect house unfriendly laws.
Slashdot Mirror
The studies show that early development is when it is easiest, with the most progress taking place from age 2-6. 2nd grade is far too late for the "automatic" learning that infants and toddlers enjoy. I have relatives that are raising their children bilingually. Anecdotally, the kids speak 2 languages fluently at ages 5 and 7 and learned them both without the kind of effort adults are required to make. If you are interested, you can read more about it here
You aren't hip, you're just old. Maybe not in years on this planet, but attitude. My grandpa was the same way: always wore a watch, shaved with a straight edge. I thought he was incredibly cool.
I used to carry a pocketwatch and use a straight edge even though it was more work. I thought it was cool. Now, I use a phone and a combination of disposables and electric razors because I am lazy. If I shave with a hair trimmer to get my week's worth of stubble down to a manageable size the disposable will deal with it OK.
I thought I liked Lindeman's until I found Lindeman's on tap. That stuff is incredible! There is a pub near me that serves Framboise.
Cutting welfare is something I don't think is a good idea, but I wanted to correct your numbers. According to this welfare is $700b, 11% of total spending, making it the 5th largest category, behind Health Care, Pensions, Education, Defense.
It is amazing how much the data varies seasonally to this day. Check out the chart here and the fascinating ones here It is also surprising how much weekends matter; more than anything else. I suppose few people or hospitals schedule a birth on the weekend, but I always thought of birth happening on its own schedule. According to the data, that is very much not true.
From year to year the weekends would shift around, but you still end up with uneven seasonal distribution as well as the weekends piling up on different days.
All true. Birthdays are not evenly distributed, however. There is a fairly strong seasonal variation and an increasing amount of intentional birthdays due to superstition, convenience, etc.
Do you have a source for that? Every car company I am aware of makes money on its small cars. Here is an article about Ford making their Focus even more profitable after standardizing globally on a common chassis. There are companies selling profitably in the sub $5k market in China and India.
I know the transition was painful for many domestic carmakers because they ended up with a lot of SUV stock and plants that weren't needed, and the profit on an expensive SUV is larger than on an inexpensive compact.
Your logic is impeccable. Cryptochrome is also found in plants, so human magnetic sensors imply photosynthesis ability.
Everything checks out.
I think you are looking at it from a young and healthy perspective. In fact, everybody is going to hit their deductible more and more until age and failing health ensure they hit their deductible every year. So far I have hit the deductible twice, both due to injuries. If I don't kill myself biking or hiking someday I will need chronic routine expensive care.
I am around 40 and have a few friends that will hit the deductible every year for the rest of their lives. HSA doesn't help control spending for chronic lingering health problems (diabetes, heart disease, cancer)
It would be nice for health care to become more like other services, but it isn't there yet. It is impossible to get an estimate on what a medical issue will cost. If you call around to find a good deal, you have no helpful numbers to work with, either for cost or for quality. Doctors have no idea of cost or effectiveness when comparing treatment plans. I joke about how nobody would accept a mechanic saying he would try to fix your car, but couldn't give you any idea of how much it would cost, how long it would take, and you are paying for his time whether or not he fixes the problem.
I don't have any good answers. I liked the idea of high deductible insurance a lot better before I started getting old.
You missed my point. Once anyone hits the deductible, there is no incentive to ration care until next year. This happens to everyone at some point. Hitting your deductible is not an outlier. I can't think of a good way to keep the incentive to ration care without allowing big expenses to be crippling. I guess some kind of asymmetrical copay might work if you fiddled the numbers, but when million dollar years are a possibility I don't see real incentives working out.
Avoiding preventative care is a temptation for everyone every year they don't hit the deductible. Should I get that mole checked? It is looking a bit weird lately. I did get it checked, and it cost me about $600 out of pocket. Next time I might be less eager to do the right thing, even if it might minimize total healthcare spending. This temptation to cheap out in the short term applies to everyone.
I don't see my HSA ever being self sufficient. I contribute the max every year and barely have $5k in there. At this rate I will have about $30k in there at retirement, but I expect my health care needs to increase as I age. I am invested in index funds within the HSA, it is configured for anything above the annual deductible to get funneled into the fund. If I get 7.5% that will be $2250/year at retirement. Numbers work better for someone who gets a HSA when they are 18, but many young people can't afford to sock away several thousand a year into a healthcare bucket.
I'm not missing the point that I am funding my medical expenses with my HSA. It isn't cheap, and my incentives aren't lined up very well, and I don't know why you can't understand my complaints.
That is a cool site. Thank you for linking it.
I've had a HSA for about 5 years now. There are some big problems with them. I will point out 3 I have encountered personally.
Once you know you will hit your deductible you are given perverse incentives. I broke my foot in late December, so I waited until January to have expensive care given. This ended up costing more than prompt treatment. And, since I hit my deductible for the year in the first week of January I felt compelled to use as much health care as possible in order to get my moneys worth. I'm not the type to go to the doc for any old thing, but there are plenty of people who would have seriously abused the situation. As it was, I got everything done that had been ignored the other years.
It is tempting to put off preventative care even if it saves money overall.
The insurer doesn't cover everything. My surgery had many excluded items and I ended up paying about double my deductible. I contested many of the items but most of them were rejected. It is sort of strange that things like crutches and ruined toenail removal weren't covered. I don't have much faith that it will cover something truly serious like heart surgery or cancer treatment.
When you vote you provide an offset value. The offset value is applied to your vote. When you verify your vote the offset is not revealed. When votes are counted the offsets are revealed but the identities are not. The man with the pipe will have to believe me when I say my offset is X. I could say a different offset to indicate the desired vote.
Think of a radioactive isotope with a half-life of 1 year, e.g. if you have 1g in a year you will have half a gram.
.75g. The bank ends up with more than they would have if they just sat on it.
Now it makes sense to loan out some at a negative interest rate. If you "charge" -25% interest, the lendee will have to pay back
I put my tax returns encrypted in DropBox so they are handy and for backups. I never know when I'll need my return (I just bought a house, and it was helpful) and if my computer explodes I won't lose them.
In fact, I've only used db for sharing files with others or for long term safe storage so far. I haven't bothered setting up the sync-everywhere stuff yet, although it seems handy.
I wouldn't live there, but you said it was $1000 minimum for a rathole in a bad part of town.
I lived in some pretty shady situations when I was putting myself through college in Santa Barbara. When I couldn't handle sharing a bedroom anymore I had a 100sf room with its own bathroom for a couple years, it was all I could afford, $300. I wasn't allowed to go inside the main house, so I cooked on a camp stove. There was a hobo that lived in the crawlspace, he paid $100/month. I've always been fascinated by the options at the bottom of the scale.
You're wrong about living expenses. Rent is $450, you can go cheaper if you want to make serious sacrifices. Here is one I found in 10 seconds, it looks like an 25 minute walk or a 15 minute bus ride to my old job location downtown.
I lived in LA for a few years, and never owned a car. Working downtown and living in Koreatown a car was a serious inconvenience and expense. I could hop on a wilshire bus and be home in 10 minutes. Of course, I planned where to live based on it being easy to bus. My neighbors and coworkers bitched constantly about parking, getting towed, tickets, wrecks, etc.
You're right about pay. I hope that things pick up and it becomes easier to make decent money.
When I lived in LA I budgeted $1000/month for living expenses (rent, utilities, groceries) and another $1000/month for drinking, restaurants, concerts, etc. I wasn't saving a lot of money, but I sure had fun. These numbers are from a while ago, but things haven't changed much from then.
Many people who want to commit suicide do not have the freedom to find a straight razor or a bottle of aspirin. I have seen people want to die in nursing homes where there is no way for them to make it happen. Remember people don't want to kill themselves when they are healthy.
If the patient is too feeble to set things up why force them to live in suffering for however long it takes to die? Why force them to resort to messy, failure prone, painful methods?
I'm a fellow self-appointed film etiquette enforcer. There are a few around. I hope to educate people, including bystanders, that other people care and will speak up about it.
Once, a person rudely refused to stop making calls so I grabbed his phone. It was not smart and I probably won't do it again, but the look on his face was priceless. I told him I'd give it back when the movie was over. He threatened to get an usher, which I welcomed. His wife and children begged him to let it go, so he sulked for the movie and I gave him his phone afterwards. He wanted to fight me until I stood up, then he lost interest when I stood a foot taller than him.
Every car I've owned I have been able to exhaust friction, skidding/triggering ABS, when doing a panic stop. When I say I am doubling minimum stopping distance, that is braking as hard as is possible without skidding or triggering ABS. I do this occasionally on an empty road in order to keep my skills and assumptions sharp, or to evaluate a rental car or new car, or to estimate the increased distance needed when hauling extra weight.
My brother in law is a trucker, and he is very familiar with the increased stopping distance needed when hauling a load. A fully loaded rig requires over 10x the distance as an empty one. The limiting factor for him is similarly friction.
I'm not sure why you are so confident that vehicle mass doesn't affect stopping distance. It is a simple enough experiment, and the physics are basic.
My sedan weighs 2,050 lbs. A Ford Expedition weighs 5,801 lbs. That is nearly triple the weight! Obviously, the heavier vehicle would require much more stopping distance.
I buy heavy items a lot and the difference in stopping distance is amazing. I notice the difference when I have a lot of passengers in my car. I can easily double my minimum stopping distance when heavily loaded.
How much you spend can bump you up or down a level or two. I know people with 2 6-figure incomes that worry about money constantly. They are underwater on a massive house, have numerous expensive vehicles, carry debt of various sorts, and support several children lavishly. They think of themselves as barely getting by.
That's fortunate. If we used all the water on this planet to make humans there is only enough for 3.4 × 10^19.
1,360,000,000 km^3 / 40 l per human
You have to show your ID to buy a ticket, even if you pay with cash. Your name is printed on your ticket. We stopped being able to fly anonymously shortly after 9/11/2001
I won about $600 on a slot machine, and the attendant came over to cash me out. I won a similar amount a bit later on the same machine, and they said the machine had malfunctioned and refused to pay it. I tried to complain but no dice.
I was dirty from a road trip, so maybe they just wanted me to leave. I was buying drinks and tipping, so that wasn't it.
Casinos routinely will ban people who are good gamblers, and the gaming money geyser controls state legislature so don't expect house unfriendly laws.