There was clearly a tank crew that did something very terrible some 8 years ago, killing two children (and most likely not in a completely accidental incident).
That's awful and those people should be in jail.
But unfortunately for your inane argument, it has nothing to do with your original statement. At all. You could point to dozens of incidents in Afghanistan over the last few years where children have been killed by US soldiers. Some where accidental, some might have been less so. Only a couple have resulted in criminal convictions.
Can you then make the absurdly broad generalization "America doesn't value non-American lives"? Of course not. It's not true. Do Americans get more upset when Americans die than when foreigners die? Probably true, but it's true of almost any tribal, national or ethnic group on earth and your extension of that to an absurdity creates a straw man that's trivial to beat down.
Furthermore, you have now changed your original statement around, from referring to all non-Jews, to referring to "an Arab or a Moslem".
Finally, you cite the existence of settlements as evidence, when the majority of Israelis *oppose* the creation of new settlements in the West Bank. And in fact, 46% of Israelis oppose the expansion of settlements within East Jerusalem too (a more contentious issue than the West Bank settlements). Furthermore, since 2001 the majority of Israelis have supported the dismantling of most West Bank settlements in exchange for a peace agreement. See, for example, here for some recent poll results.
In short, presenting Israel as a monolithic entity with a single view on settlements or with a uniform view attributing no value to non-Jewish lives is absurd. You are wrong and you won't get anywhere in discussion with rational people until you tone down the nonsensical rhetoric.
Please, point me to your reasonably unbiased resources on the history of Israel. Cite some links to your historical documents, because you are making an exceptional claim that needs evidence. I mean, not just that one dude or a particular military general disregarded the lives of some civilians on the opposing side. But that the majority of citizens have the utmost contempt for a non-Jew's life and/or rights, and that the government has consistently reflected that, as you claim.
You can't. Because it's an obviously untrue statement.
Thank you. This is the kind of post that convinces me that it's still worth reading (and posting) on Slashdot. I love learning something new from somebody who's incredibly knowledgeable about an area that I am not, especially in a completely unexpected thread.
Yeah, I think it's more like the cost of industrial espionage damages from being hacked and infiltrated by Chinese government-backed hackers is greater than the present value of their Chinese business. The ethical argument is nice, but it clearly never outweighed the potential profits from the Chinese market until they became aware of the industrial espionage and hacking issues.
I mean, I am sure Brin believes what he is saying, and that is a personal motivator for him - I'm not saying he's lying. But that clearly isn't what has motivated the rest of the Board or the executive team. They just decided to let Brin have his way, and realized that it was a convenient ethical framework for explaining what was fundamentally a business decision and could be exploited for positive PR. The media seems to have missed that entirely (major woosh). It sounds like you understand that, but are still acting as a Google apologist.
I don't really care, because the outcome is an ethical good in my personal framework, but I think we'd all be better served by dropping the bullshit about Google, the publicly traded firm, having high-minded ethical motivations which just doesn't jibe at all with the fact that they've been conducting business and censoring search results in China for over 4 years now.
So, you're telling me I'm dishonest because I'm honestly reporting the way health insurance works in New York State, the third most populous state in the union. And while it's probably among the worst of states in this regard (I don't claim detailed knowledge of health insurance premiums in all 50 states), it's hardly the only state with such issues.
I can speak from personal experience to the fact that New Jersey and Massachusetts aren't far behind (my company got comparison quotes between Horizon Blue Cross in NJ and Empire Blue Cross in NY for a small business plan when we were relocating from NYC, and while we saved a bit, it was only about 15% less in New Jersey for a comparable plan - about $420 per employee per month vs. $500 per employee per month) - that was 2 years ago. And in Massachusetts (the other state I've lived in over the last 10 years) health insurance prices were significantly lower than New York back around 2000, but increasing even faster and had done quite a bit of catching up as of a few years ago (not sure where they are now).
Since I offered no attribution or analysis of the causes for state by state differences in insurance premiums in my post, to call me dishonest or ignorant is just purely made-up shit. Congratulations on the false dichotomy you've set up. You fail.
In the state of New York, I had to purchase health insurance for my mother at one point in time. She was 52 years old, and based solely on that fact, I had to pay about $9000 a year for Blue Cross/Blue Shield coverage for her. That was back in the early '90s.
Just looked up the current rates. As of mid-2009, the Direct Pay HMO rates are $1110 per month and the Direct Pay POS plan rates are $1400 per month. That is in the range of $13,000 to $17,000 per year, for an individual plan, if you live in New York City.
A family plan is $3500-$4500 per month.
Think this is crazy? See here. Individual health insurance plans have increased by an insane amount in the last 10-15 years. The cheapest, crappiest HMO plan where you have limited doctor choice, etc. is $750-$800 a month, more than $9,000 per year. And if you go with the cheapest possible option, you know it will suck.
So basically, you don't know what you are talking about.
That's pathetic. Regardless of the letter of the law, if the guy didn't do anything that should amount to criminal behavior, and his behavior was reactive - a response to being unjustly assaulted - then the jury failed utterly to do its job. If the law is being applied unjustly or unfairly in a case, as it seems to have been here (the assault was committed by an officer, not by the defendant), then jury nullification is a justifiable, and in fact morally obligatory, response.
His blog entry seems to suggest that the question the jury considered was whether his failure to comply with a command was sufficient to warrant his conviction. In other words, the issue wasn't who slugged whom first, because it was conceded that the border guard hit him in the face first. The issue was after that, he failed to comply with the border guard's order promptly and that was what he was convicted for, not for assaulting the border guard, which was disproven in court.
If his account is honest, it seems like something of a travesty of our legal system. If you are punched in the face by a border guard, how can YOU be the one who committed an assault? I still doubt slightly whether his account leaves something out of what went on in court.
And I remember the voice acting in Wing Commander (don't remember which one specifically) because they had Mark Hamill (AKA Luke Skywalker) doing voice work for it. It was memorable in a time when the idea of a real actor, even a has-been, in a video game was sort of mind-blowing.
Orthodox Jews have a legalistic interpretation of their holy writings, i.e. principally the Old Testament. This leads them to look for loopholes within their own religious writings. This search for loopholes isn't a characteristic of rich and arrogant Jews, but rather of Orthodox Jews, perhaps specifically those who are arrogant enough to think that what man wrote in a book is more important that the intentions that an omniscient God should be fully aware of. This seems very silly to me, but I'm a scientist and a geek.
Other sects of Judaism, such as the Reform and Conservative movements in the US that represent a majority of American Jews, tend to look at their holy writings as part of their culture, not writings to be interpreted literally. These groups view God through a more modern lens and tend to put aside some or all of the legalistic framework in favor of a more charitable interpretation of God as distinct from the writings of man in the Bible. These groups aren't so obsessed about finding loopholes in their religious texts, since they acknowledge that ancient practices have to be adapted to modern life.
You can't paint all Jews with one brush on these sorts of things, just like you can't with all Christians. In fact, because Judaism is considered to be "born in" to those born Jewish, many people are considered Jews by the Jewish faith who are for all intents and purposes agnostic or atheistic.
I'd lump myself into the boat of "American cultural Jews" - I practice the culture of my religion, have passover dinners, tell the stories, can read Hebrew and speak a bit of Yiddish passably, and plan on passing that culture down to my children. But I don't believe in an omnipotent God, or believe that if there is such a God he is disjoint from our universe and unknowable to us, and that good and bad behavior should be motivated by a working ethical framework, not religious fear.
And I am an organ donor. Because it's the right thing to do and because when I'm dead I won't need 'em no more. Even if I believed in God, I see no reason he would object to organ donation. In any case, the question the Orthodox Jews are dealing with seems to be about when a person can be considered dead - I fail to see why their religious scholars don't admit the limits of their expertise and acknowledge that this is a question better determined by medical science and the families of the deceased than by themselves.
I don't think you've spent much time here if you actually think that. First of all, I would say less than 5% of cabbies are native-born New Yorkers based on my experiences living here since the mid-90s. In fact, I'd say the significant majority are recent immigrants with modest English language skills. I don't think they have suddenly absorbed their ethical code from New York City.
Unfortunately, there are a non-negligible percentage of people in the world that are dishonest. They will take advantage of somebody if they think they can to make a few bucks. This will happen in any city on the planet. The fact that it's only happened to me a few times here in New York actually shows that it's more uncommon than common. The vast majority of these instances from the data in this story seem to be perpetrated by a minority of cab drivers - the significant number of cabbies who did this once or twice probably did it by accident. The small number who did it hundreds of times are complete scumbags, sure.
Such is the way of the world. It really has zip-all to do with New York or the East Coast.
You are so spot on with the general comment. The reason health care doesn't work in this country is because we have all been raised to believe that "competition is good" and that "the more competition, the lower prices will be, the better the outcome for everyone". The problem is this only works when the basic economic forces of rational decision-making and desire to maximize value for a dollar spent are working. When the whole thing is a nest of principal-agent problems in a fragmented market with minimal information available to consumers, then competition doesn't occur based on price at all and the market mechanism is just broken.
We basically have the worst aspects of a free market economy at play in the US's medical system with none of the positive market pressures that make most working markets relatively efficient. Instead, as you point out, there is no incentive to save money for most consumers because you know your insurance company is going to fuck you with a price increase next year, or alternatively, fuck your employer (resulting in no raise for you next year, since your employer spent those funds on a 15% hike in their health insurance costs).
No, the insane implementation of laissez faire market-centrism in health care results in every doctor's office handles its own billing, has its own medical assistants, and its own overhead, and has separate relationships with each major insurer, and every procedure is performed by a separate business, imaging down the hall, Hospital Radiology Inc. bills you for the doctor that looks at the scan, then the diagnostic test you need after the scan indicates something is yet another business with another billing system. The doctor's incentives are 1) to process as many patients as possible without making any major errors that would open them up to liability claims and 2) to come up with as many scans and procedures as necessary to bill you for from their office, and you have little incentive to say no since largely, you don't incur the costs directly, only indirectly through higher premiums (which you may not even see, since your employer pays for them).
I'm all for some market mechanism if it actually increases efficiency, improves results, and lowers costs. We obviously don't have that in the US. A system in which every doctor is affiliated with a medical center where all billing is centralized, you get all your procedures done in a single facility or set of facilities, and everything is billed through one system would be a nice start. That and a system that rewarded you with reduced premiums or cash back on your premium payments for reducing utilization of expensive procedures, and that rewarded you for getting proper preventative medical care rather than waiting until you're really sick and showing up at an emergency room. You know, a system that used incentives in the *correct* way.
Alas, nobody in our legislature is thinking about this at all the right way. Instead they are trying to bandaid the insurance industry. As much as I'd like to blame the insurance industry, it's not really their fault that insurance premiums are skyrocketing - it's a consequence of adverse selection due to price increases and the resulting vicious cycle effect, the constant rollout of more and more expensive treatments for major illnesses, cross-subsidization of government-insured patients who are reimbursed at a lower rate, as well as the huge systemic cost issues and semi-fradulent billing practices touched on above.
As I recall, it was proven that Microsoft arranged the Baystar investment by eWeek.
As for whose money sits in the Baystar Capital investment pool, there is no public disclosure requirement of such things for private equity firms and hedge funds. And it's a large fund, so it's clearly not just Microsoft people's money, but given the nature of the relationship documented between Baystar and the Microsoft people who brought this deal to them, I can assure you there's some money from senior Microsoft people there, at the very least.
In any case, the guys at Baystar realized they were pawns in a big game after a short while and pulled out what they could. See this story.
Basically they wrote off $37M of their investment for some common stock in SCO (hahaha). Which went on to finance SCO's legal actions for several more years before they finally went kaput.
Baystar, having invested over $1.5B in equity deals since inception, this was a relatively small write-off. Probably an annoying blip in their overall results, part of the price of cultivating their relationships with Microsoft senior executives.
I'd guess that it's either for security of Department of Education facilities (i.e. government offices in Washington DC) or for training exercises involving police and other security personnel that are run by the Department of Education (i.e. training for disaster preparedness, bomb threats, school shooters and things that are relevant to schools in the US).
Your definition of comfortable is different from other people's. Let me guess, you were young and single and living in a studio apartment or pseudo-1 bedroom in a walk-up building, or something similar. Or you lived in an illegally subletted rent-controlled apartment. Or you lived in Brooklyn or Queens. Because those are the only things you can afford on a $45k a year salary. And those only barely - after taxes, you have what, $30k?
My rent in NYC is over $5k a month. That may sound like a lot to some of you, but we live in a nice 2 bedroom apartment in a modern doorman building, but it's nothing extravagant by NYC standards. Very nice views and about 1100 square feet of space. In other parts of the country that would be considered a fair amount of space for a single person, here in NYC that's considered medium-sized for a couple. I'm married, though my wife and I don't have kids yet. I could never live in this little space with kids running around, it would drive me nuts.
A mediocre 1-bedroom apartment in a doorman building on a low floor is about $2500-$3000 in most decent residential neighborhoods. That's *after* rents have dropped 10-20% over the last 18 months. My friend recently got married and is trying to move out of her dump of a studio (probably 400 square feet, $1550 a month) that she and her husband are living in together now, but their combined income is only about $75k and though they think they can afford a nicer 1 bedroom in the $2500 range, but they can't get approved by any buildings to rent there - most modern buildings require an annual income of 42 times the monthly rent to be proved. This is standardized because almost all modern rental buildings are built under a tax-subsidization program with the city that requires them to reserve 20% of units for low-income tenants (which they stick on the first 4-5 floors) and the rest of the tenants to essentially be high income. Getting into those low- and mid- income designated units is nearly impossible, so forget about that.
So yeah, living in New York on less than $100k will keep you locked out of the modern rental buildings, forget about affording to rent a place in a condo building. You will be stuck in rooms in old, un-updated brownstones and grungy old apartment buildings.
There's nothing wrong with this if you are young and single, but if you make $50k-$60k a year, you'll eventually realize you are much better off living elsewhere, in a place where you can afford to buy a house and renovate it and live like a real human being on that income, go out to nice restaurants, and not be constantly strapped for cash. And visit NYC when you want! But don't expect to live well here with a modest income.
Posting anon because I don't want to sound like a jerk, just trying to provide a more realistic counterpoint. I love NYC very much, but after college when I was making $60k a year, I was living like a king in Boston (shared a great 2 bedroom apartment with my roommate right in the middle of Harvard Square that cost me $1200 a month for my half the rent). Moving back to NYC was a rude, rude awakening in comparison.
I agree with most of what you are saying, but a minor point - I don't think the reduction in carbohydrate intake directly impacted your blood pressure (it clearly did impact blood glucose and triglycerides, and I'm guessing cholesterol too since I've seen a similar effect when I cut out refined carbs). I think it led to the drastic weight loss you describe, which was the primary factor in lowering your blood pressure.
Just my best guess though, since I'm not aware of a direct link between carbohydrate metabolism and blood pressure, other than as mediated through weight. If I'm wrong, please correct me.
But in general, yeah, the link between salt and blood pressure is way overplayed, just like the link between fat intake and cholesterol levels, or weight gain. And a much lower refined carbohydrate diet than the American norm is a good thing for basically everybody, especially overweight people or those with diabetes or metabolic syndrome.
Eh, Einstein really was a pretty damn great scientist though and made a bunch of critical contributions to our understanding of the world (from the quantum nature of light/photoelectric effect, to special relativity, to general relativity, to founding condensed matter physics). If you want something to get up in arms about, the worshipfulness of Stephen Hawking is probably more annoying since his contributions to physics are really fairly minor compared to his media portrayal. Not to say they are totally insignificant, just that he is breathlessly referred to as the greatest living scientist today in programs on the Discovery channel, when in reality, he's a good scientist who just happens to be physically disabled and a good popular science writer. The public fascination is more related to the latter two facts than the former.
Oh come on. It does matter. Speaks to a possible motive, if there is something truly sick that went on here.
And if the GP poster is wrong and this was accidental, it still matters - ever notice how often these "accidental" deaths of children that you read about seem to involve a step-parent? In many cases, step-parents just don't exercise the same kind of caution with somebody else's kid that they do with their own. I saw that myself growing up.
Newegg isn't just an individual online store. They are a very large operation. Estimated revenues of over $2B and over 2000 employees. The question is why should a multi-billion dollar retailer purchase through a distributor rather than direct, not why Joe's Mom and Pop Online Shop does so. And clearly processors are one of their major products (they must sell several hundred million dollars a year of Intel processors). Intel's revenues are something like $40B a year, but even so, a company that sells something on the order of 1% of their total product isn't tiny.
One possible answer is that this is because new products get allocated and there is scarcity of high end processors and video cards (often due to yield issues with new products). Newegg can't afford to be out of inventory, they have to both buy directly and buy on the open market from distributors to get enough supply.
Or maybe it's just that Newegg relies on these distributors for a lot of their lower volume products that they can't really buy directly, and they have to funnel their processor purchases through these distributors to keep the relationships intact.
A) Your post is incoherent. B) You posted as an anonymous coward making an ad hominem instead of addressing any issues of relevance. C) I have worked as a health care investor and my family owns several health care related businesses. I am 100% certain I have more skin in the industry than any 100 anonymous cowards on Slashdot do. D) Everybody in the United States agrees that the health care industry is fucked up, from the richest industrialist to the poorest McDonald's worker. E) Hospitals aren't arbitrary businesses, they serve a critical role in our nation's health care system and the stuff that goes on in hospitals accounts for a huge portion of our nation's GDP, with an awful fucking lot of it already coming from taxpayer money. I'm just happy to suggest ideas when our elected representatives shit out absolute garbage bills that apparently have had no input from ANYBODY with a background in economics as to how to contain costs. F) There is regulation in every business. Suck it up and deal with it - capitalism is a good organizing principle for many industries but unfettered capitalism ain't what we practice in the US. And our healthcare industry is already way, way far from it and thank god for that.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Marry chick with high IQ
2) Train her to do whatever you tell her
3) ???
4) Profit!
Gentlemen, I think we've figured out what to put in step 3. Harvest away!!!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2102081.stm
There was clearly a tank crew that did something very terrible some 8 years ago, killing two children (and most likely not in a completely accidental incident).
That's awful and those people should be in jail.
But unfortunately for your inane argument, it has nothing to do with your original statement. At all. You could point to dozens of incidents in Afghanistan over the last few years where children have been killed by US soldiers. Some where accidental, some might have been less so. Only a couple have resulted in criminal convictions.
Can you then make the absurdly broad generalization "America doesn't value non-American lives"? Of course not. It's not true. Do Americans get more upset when Americans die than when foreigners die? Probably true, but it's true of almost any tribal, national or ethnic group on earth and your extension of that to an absurdity creates a straw man that's trivial to beat down.
Furthermore, you have now changed your original statement around, from referring to all non-Jews, to referring to "an Arab or a Moslem".
Finally, you cite the existence of settlements as evidence, when the majority of Israelis *oppose* the creation of new settlements in the West Bank. And in fact, 46% of Israelis oppose the expansion of settlements within East Jerusalem too (a more contentious issue than the West Bank settlements). Furthermore, since 2001 the majority of Israelis have supported the dismantling of most West Bank settlements in exchange for a peace agreement. See, for example, here for some recent poll results.
In short, presenting Israel as a monolithic entity with a single view on settlements or with a uniform view attributing no value to non-Jewish lives is absurd. You are wrong and you won't get anywhere in discussion with rational people until you tone down the nonsensical rhetoric.
Please, point me to your reasonably unbiased resources on the history of Israel. Cite some links to your historical documents, because you are making an exceptional claim that needs evidence. I mean, not just that one dude or a particular military general disregarded the lives of some civilians on the opposing side. But that the majority of citizens have the utmost contempt for a non-Jew's life and/or rights, and that the government has consistently reflected that, as you claim.
You can't. Because it's an obviously untrue statement.
Thank you. This is the kind of post that convinces me that it's still worth reading (and posting) on Slashdot. I love learning something new from somebody who's incredibly knowledgeable about an area that I am not, especially in a completely unexpected thread.
Yeah, I think it's more like the cost of industrial espionage damages from being hacked and infiltrated by Chinese government-backed hackers is greater than the present value of their Chinese business. The ethical argument is nice, but it clearly never outweighed the potential profits from the Chinese market until they became aware of the industrial espionage and hacking issues.
I mean, I am sure Brin believes what he is saying, and that is a personal motivator for him - I'm not saying he's lying. But that clearly isn't what has motivated the rest of the Board or the executive team. They just decided to let Brin have his way, and realized that it was a convenient ethical framework for explaining what was fundamentally a business decision and could be exploited for positive PR. The media seems to have missed that entirely (major woosh). It sounds like you understand that, but are still acting as a Google apologist.
I don't really care, because the outcome is an ethical good in my personal framework, but I think we'd all be better served by dropping the bullshit about Google, the publicly traded firm, having high-minded ethical motivations which just doesn't jibe at all with the fact that they've been conducting business and censoring search results in China for over 4 years now.
So, you're telling me I'm dishonest because I'm honestly reporting the way health insurance works in New York State, the third most populous state in the union. And while it's probably among the worst of states in this regard (I don't claim detailed knowledge of health insurance premiums in all 50 states), it's hardly the only state with such issues.
I can speak from personal experience to the fact that New Jersey and Massachusetts aren't far behind (my company got comparison quotes between Horizon Blue Cross in NJ and Empire Blue Cross in NY for a small business plan when we were relocating from NYC, and while we saved a bit, it was only about 15% less in New Jersey for a comparable plan - about $420 per employee per month vs. $500 per employee per month) - that was 2 years ago. And in Massachusetts (the other state I've lived in over the last 10 years) health insurance prices were significantly lower than New York back around 2000, but increasing even faster and had done quite a bit of catching up as of a few years ago (not sure where they are now).
Since I offered no attribution or analysis of the causes for state by state differences in insurance premiums in my post, to call me dishonest or ignorant is just purely made-up shit. Congratulations on the false dichotomy you've set up. You fail.
In the state of New York, I had to purchase health insurance for my mother at one point in time. She was 52 years old, and based solely on that fact, I had to pay about $9000 a year for Blue Cross/Blue Shield coverage for her. That was back in the early '90s.
Just looked up the current rates. As of mid-2009, the Direct Pay HMO rates are $1110 per month and the Direct Pay POS plan rates are $1400 per month. That is in the range of $13,000 to $17,000 per year, for an individual plan, if you live in New York City.
A family plan is $3500-$4500 per month.
Think this is crazy? See here. Individual health insurance plans have increased by an insane amount in the last 10-15 years. The cheapest, crappiest HMO plan where you have limited doctor choice, etc. is $750-$800 a month, more than $9,000 per year. And if you go with the cheapest possible option, you know it will suck.
So basically, you don't know what you are talking about.
That's pathetic. Regardless of the letter of the law, if the guy didn't do anything that should amount to criminal behavior, and his behavior was reactive - a response to being unjustly assaulted - then the jury failed utterly to do its job. If the law is being applied unjustly or unfairly in a case, as it seems to have been here (the assault was committed by an officer, not by the defendant), then jury nullification is a justifiable, and in fact morally obligatory, response.
His blog entry seems to suggest that the question the jury considered was whether his failure to comply with a command was sufficient to warrant his conviction. In other words, the issue wasn't who slugged whom first, because it was conceded that the border guard hit him in the face first. The issue was after that, he failed to comply with the border guard's order promptly and that was what he was convicted for, not for assaulting the border guard, which was disproven in court.
If his account is honest, it seems like something of a travesty of our legal system. If you are punched in the face by a border guard, how can YOU be the one who committed an assault? I still doubt slightly whether his account leaves something out of what went on in court.
And I remember the voice acting in Wing Commander (don't remember which one specifically) because they had Mark Hamill (AKA Luke Skywalker) doing voice work for it. It was memorable in a time when the idea of a real actor, even a has-been, in a video game was sort of mind-blowing.
Orthodox Jews have a legalistic interpretation of their holy writings, i.e. principally the Old Testament. This leads them to look for loopholes within their own religious writings. This search for loopholes isn't a characteristic of rich and arrogant Jews, but rather of Orthodox Jews, perhaps specifically those who are arrogant enough to think that what man wrote in a book is more important that the intentions that an omniscient God should be fully aware of. This seems very silly to me, but I'm a scientist and a geek.
Other sects of Judaism, such as the Reform and Conservative movements in the US that represent a majority of American Jews, tend to look at their holy writings as part of their culture, not writings to be interpreted literally. These groups view God through a more modern lens and tend to put aside some or all of the legalistic framework in favor of a more charitable interpretation of God as distinct from the writings of man in the Bible. These groups aren't so obsessed about finding loopholes in their religious texts, since they acknowledge that ancient practices have to be adapted to modern life.
You can't paint all Jews with one brush on these sorts of things, just like you can't with all Christians. In fact, because Judaism is considered to be "born in" to those born Jewish, many people are considered Jews by the Jewish faith who are for all intents and purposes agnostic or atheistic.
I'd lump myself into the boat of "American cultural Jews" - I practice the culture of my religion, have passover dinners, tell the stories, can read Hebrew and speak a bit of Yiddish passably, and plan on passing that culture down to my children. But I don't believe in an omnipotent God, or believe that if there is such a God he is disjoint from our universe and unknowable to us, and that good and bad behavior should be motivated by a working ethical framework, not religious fear.
And I am an organ donor. Because it's the right thing to do and because when I'm dead I won't need 'em no more. Even if I believed in God, I see no reason he would object to organ donation. In any case, the question the Orthodox Jews are dealing with seems to be about when a person can be considered dead - I fail to see why their religious scholars don't admit the limits of their expertise and acknowledge that this is a question better determined by medical science and the families of the deceased than by themselves.
I don't think you've spent much time here if you actually think that. First of all, I would say less than 5% of cabbies are native-born New Yorkers based on my experiences living here since the mid-90s. In fact, I'd say the significant majority are recent immigrants with modest English language skills. I don't think they have suddenly absorbed their ethical code from New York City.
Unfortunately, there are a non-negligible percentage of people in the world that are dishonest. They will take advantage of somebody if they think they can to make a few bucks. This will happen in any city on the planet. The fact that it's only happened to me a few times here in New York actually shows that it's more uncommon than common. The vast majority of these instances from the data in this story seem to be perpetrated by a minority of cab drivers - the significant number of cabbies who did this once or twice probably did it by accident. The small number who did it hundreds of times are complete scumbags, sure.
Such is the way of the world. It really has zip-all to do with New York or the East Coast.
You are so spot on with the general comment. The reason health care doesn't work in this country is because we have all been raised to believe that "competition is good" and that "the more competition, the lower prices will be, the better the outcome for everyone". The problem is this only works when the basic economic forces of rational decision-making and desire to maximize value for a dollar spent are working. When the whole thing is a nest of principal-agent problems in a fragmented market with minimal information available to consumers, then competition doesn't occur based on price at all and the market mechanism is just broken.
We basically have the worst aspects of a free market economy at play in the US's medical system with none of the positive market pressures that make most working markets relatively efficient. Instead, as you point out, there is no incentive to save money for most consumers because you know your insurance company is going to fuck you with a price increase next year, or alternatively, fuck your employer (resulting in no raise for you next year, since your employer spent those funds on a 15% hike in their health insurance costs).
No, the insane implementation of laissez faire market-centrism in health care results in every doctor's office handles its own billing, has its own medical assistants, and its own overhead, and has separate relationships with each major insurer, and every procedure is performed by a separate business, imaging down the hall, Hospital Radiology Inc. bills you for the doctor that looks at the scan, then the diagnostic test you need after the scan indicates something is yet another business with another billing system. The doctor's incentives are 1) to process as many patients as possible without making any major errors that would open them up to liability claims and 2) to come up with as many scans and procedures as necessary to bill you for from their office, and you have little incentive to say no since largely, you don't incur the costs directly, only indirectly through higher premiums (which you may not even see, since your employer pays for them).
I'm all for some market mechanism if it actually increases efficiency, improves results, and lowers costs. We obviously don't have that in the US. A system in which every doctor is affiliated with a medical center where all billing is centralized, you get all your procedures done in a single facility or set of facilities, and everything is billed through one system would be a nice start. That and a system that rewarded you with reduced premiums or cash back on your premium payments for reducing utilization of expensive procedures, and that rewarded you for getting proper preventative medical care rather than waiting until you're really sick and showing up at an emergency room. You know, a system that used incentives in the *correct* way.
Alas, nobody in our legislature is thinking about this at all the right way. Instead they are trying to bandaid the insurance industry. As much as I'd like to blame the insurance industry, it's not really their fault that insurance premiums are skyrocketing - it's a consequence of adverse selection due to price increases and the resulting vicious cycle effect, the constant rollout of more and more expensive treatments for major illnesses, cross-subsidization of government-insured patients who are reimbursed at a lower rate, as well as the huge systemic cost issues and semi-fradulent billing practices touched on above.
As I recall, it was proven that Microsoft arranged the Baystar investment by eWeek.
As for whose money sits in the Baystar Capital investment pool, there is no public disclosure requirement of such things for private equity firms and hedge funds. And it's a large fund, so it's clearly not just Microsoft people's money, but given the nature of the relationship documented between Baystar and the Microsoft people who brought this deal to them, I can assure you there's some money from senior Microsoft people there, at the very least.
In any case, the guys at Baystar realized they were pawns in a big game after a short while and pulled out what they could. See this story.
Basically they wrote off $37M of their investment for some common stock in SCO (hahaha). Which went on to finance SCO's legal actions for several more years before they finally went kaput.
Baystar, having invested over $1.5B in equity deals since inception, this was a relatively small write-off. Probably an annoying blip in their overall results, part of the price of cultivating their relationships with Microsoft senior executives.
I'd guess that it's either for security of Department of Education facilities (i.e. government offices in Washington DC) or for training exercises involving police and other security personnel that are run by the Department of Education (i.e. training for disaster preparedness, bomb threats, school shooters and things that are relevant to schools in the US).
Ooops, epic anonymous posting fail. Oh well, I suck. It's the truth anyway, no real secrets there.
Your definition of comfortable is different from other people's. Let me guess, you were young and single and living in a studio apartment or pseudo-1 bedroom in a walk-up building, or something similar. Or you lived in an illegally subletted rent-controlled apartment. Or you lived in Brooklyn or Queens. Because those are the only things you can afford on a $45k a year salary. And those only barely - after taxes, you have what, $30k?
My rent in NYC is over $5k a month. That may sound like a lot to some of you, but we live in a nice 2 bedroom apartment in a modern doorman building, but it's nothing extravagant by NYC standards. Very nice views and about 1100 square feet of space. In other parts of the country that would be considered a fair amount of space for a single person, here in NYC that's considered medium-sized for a couple. I'm married, though my wife and I don't have kids yet. I could never live in this little space with kids running around, it would drive me nuts.
A mediocre 1-bedroom apartment in a doorman building on a low floor is about $2500-$3000 in most decent residential neighborhoods. That's *after* rents have dropped 10-20% over the last 18 months. My friend recently got married and is trying to move out of her dump of a studio (probably 400 square feet, $1550 a month) that she and her husband are living in together now, but their combined income is only about $75k and though they think they can afford a nicer 1 bedroom in the $2500 range, but they can't get approved by any buildings to rent there - most modern buildings require an annual income of 42 times the monthly rent to be proved. This is standardized because almost all modern rental buildings are built under a tax-subsidization program with the city that requires them to reserve 20% of units for low-income tenants (which they stick on the first 4-5 floors) and the rest of the tenants to essentially be high income. Getting into those low- and mid- income designated units is nearly impossible, so forget about that.
So yeah, living in New York on less than $100k will keep you locked out of the modern rental buildings, forget about affording to rent a place in a condo building. You will be stuck in rooms in old, un-updated brownstones and grungy old apartment buildings.
There's nothing wrong with this if you are young and single, but if you make $50k-$60k a year, you'll eventually realize you are much better off living elsewhere, in a place where you can afford to buy a house and renovate it and live like a real human being on that income, go out to nice restaurants, and not be constantly strapped for cash. And visit NYC when you want! But don't expect to live well here with a modest income.
Posting anon because I don't want to sound like a jerk, just trying to provide a more realistic counterpoint. I love NYC very much, but after college when I was making $60k a year, I was living like a king in Boston (shared a great 2 bedroom apartment with my roommate right in the middle of Harvard Square that cost me $1200 a month for my half the rent). Moving back to NYC was a rude, rude awakening in comparison.
Except that it uses Wordpress rather than PHPSolar or whatever it's called. Thus having no bearing whatsoever on the discussion.
Epic fail.
I agree with most of what you are saying, but a minor point - I don't think the reduction in carbohydrate intake directly impacted your blood pressure (it clearly did impact blood glucose and triglycerides, and I'm guessing cholesterol too since I've seen a similar effect when I cut out refined carbs). I think it led to the drastic weight loss you describe, which was the primary factor in lowering your blood pressure.
Just my best guess though, since I'm not aware of a direct link between carbohydrate metabolism and blood pressure, other than as mediated through weight. If I'm wrong, please correct me.
But in general, yeah, the link between salt and blood pressure is way overplayed, just like the link between fat intake and cholesterol levels, or weight gain. And a much lower refined carbohydrate diet than the American norm is a good thing for basically everybody, especially overweight people or those with diabetes or metabolic syndrome.
Eh, Einstein really was a pretty damn great scientist though and made a bunch of critical contributions to our understanding of the world (from the quantum nature of light/photoelectric effect, to special relativity, to general relativity, to founding condensed matter physics). If you want something to get up in arms about, the worshipfulness of Stephen Hawking is probably more annoying since his contributions to physics are really fairly minor compared to his media portrayal. Not to say they are totally insignificant, just that he is breathlessly referred to as the greatest living scientist today in programs on the Discovery channel, when in reality, he's a good scientist who just happens to be physically disabled and a good popular science writer. The public fascination is more related to the latter two facts than the former.
Gotta love that the guy who's so stressed his nick on Slashdot is "Zantac" is running around Atlanta with a piece.
Time to reiterate what the other poster said to Grimbleton about dying from a heart attack or stroke, not a home invasion.
Sort of goes in line with this study, doesn't it?
Oh come on. It does matter. Speaks to a possible motive, if there is something truly sick that went on here.
And if the GP poster is wrong and this was accidental, it still matters - ever notice how often these "accidental" deaths of children that you read about seem to involve a step-parent? In many cases, step-parents just don't exercise the same kind of caution with somebody else's kid that they do with their own. I saw that myself growing up.
4 birds, 1 stone
The new shock video sweeping the internet...
Ew.
Newegg isn't just an individual online store. They are a very large operation. Estimated revenues of over $2B and over 2000 employees. The question is why should a multi-billion dollar retailer purchase through a distributor rather than direct, not why Joe's Mom and Pop Online Shop does so. And clearly processors are one of their major products (they must sell several hundred million dollars a year of Intel processors). Intel's revenues are something like $40B a year, but even so, a company that sells something on the order of 1% of their total product isn't tiny.
One possible answer is that this is because new products get allocated and there is scarcity of high end processors and video cards (often due to yield issues with new products). Newegg can't afford to be out of inventory, they have to both buy directly and buy on the open market from distributors to get enough supply.
Or maybe it's just that Newegg relies on these distributors for a lot of their lower volume products that they can't really buy directly, and they have to funnel their processor purchases through these distributors to keep the relationships intact.
A) Your post is incoherent. B) You posted as an anonymous coward making an ad hominem instead of addressing any issues of relevance. C) I have worked as a health care investor and my family owns several health care related businesses. I am 100% certain I have more skin in the industry than any 100 anonymous cowards on Slashdot do. D) Everybody in the United States agrees that the health care industry is fucked up, from the richest industrialist to the poorest McDonald's worker. E) Hospitals aren't arbitrary businesses, they serve a critical role in our nation's health care system and the stuff that goes on in hospitals accounts for a huge portion of our nation's GDP, with an awful fucking lot of it already coming from taxpayer money. I'm just happy to suggest ideas when our elected representatives shit out absolute garbage bills that apparently have had no input from ANYBODY with a background in economics as to how to contain costs. F) There is regulation in every business. Suck it up and deal with it - capitalism is a good organizing principle for many industries but unfettered capitalism ain't what we practice in the US. And our healthcare industry is already way, way far from it and thank god for that.