I never said that medicare patients were overcharged. *All* patients are overcharged, and portions of bills are waived for all *insured* patients, whether they are covered by Medicare or private insurance.
You basically make my point for me. Certain classes of patients shouldn't be billed excessively to make up for other classes of patients. There should be one, true fair price. Which should be what Medicare and private insurers reimburse, and what an uninsured patient would have to pay. Having every patient incur different charges for the same procedure, with the highest charges accruing to an uninsured patient (who is not indigent or bankrupt), is absurd. And frankly, having private insured patients subsidize Medicare patients and uninsured patients subsidize everybody (until they go bankrupt, in which case they are getting subsidized) is just ridiculous.
If you force fair billing practices along the lines I suggest, you certainly don't fix all or even a majority of the problems with hospitals or with our healthcare system in general, you just reduce the penalties for the uninsured, force some transparency into the system, and provide strong incentives for cost containment and make possible better alignment of agency (i.e. principal-agent problem) issues than is currently possible.
Sorry, but you are not correct in the general case. Within a very constrained problem space, you can have formal, verifiable proofs that are turned into programs, yes. But in the broader context of Turing-complete programming languages, you deal with the halting problem. As soon as you add unlimited recursion into the mix, you throw out complete verification.
Which of these paradigms is more appropriate really depends on the scale of the input space and the complexity of the problem you are trying to solve, and how well you can express the requirements formally.
Ummm, nobody has ever suggested or run a system like that. Single payer systems that are taxpayer bankrolled in other countries simply don't do that. They have a finite budget to cover the population of their country and they have to allocate care as efficiently and cost-effectively as they can. In most cases they do a better job than the US at that, in the sense that they provide comparable outcomes at much lower cost. I've never heard of a government-funded healthcare system that freely lets physicians spend millions of dollars on a terminal patient's last weeks of life - they'd drive their system bankrupt in no time that way.
I mean, I'm happy to have a debate about the merit of different systems for funding healthcare, but you have to at least make a sensible argument for people to take you seriously.
You do realize that in your country, somebody asks this question too. Assuming you live in a country with a single payer system, the people who run your single payer system have already decided what they are willing to pay and for which procedures. The way they do that is generally looking at dollars spent vs. quality-adjusted-life-years purchased for their taxpayer citizens, and similar health economics measures. I agree that the system in the US is fucked up in many many ways, but having to consider costs in medical treatment is a reality of finite resources and it happens everywhere.
You are 100% absolutely correct. I have no idea why such a law hasn't already been passed. The practice of negotiated billing is there strictly because hospitals think they can extract more from insurance companies that way, but the net result is to completely fuck over uninsured and underinsured patients, and result in general unfairness and disparity and dishonest billing practices.
Medicare reimbursement should be contingent on a hospitals *overall* billing practices. Medicare should reimburse the lesser of their reimbursement rate or the published price of a procedure. Any remainder MUST be paid for by a patient or insurance company and cannot legally be waived. And if a hospital is caught billing other patients unfairly, all medicare reimbursement should cease for the hospital, driving it out of business to be seized and placed under new management.
Very simple - make medicare reimbursement legally dependent on eliminating the disgusting practice of overbilling uninsured patients. Legally mandate the same price for a procedure for everybody. The problem is right now they bill a theoretical price of $3000 for an X-ray, as somebody else just posted in this thread, but an insured patient gets $2200 of that price "waived by agreement" on their insurance statement, the hospital gets a $700 reimbursement from the insurance company, and ends up with a $100 bill to pay out of pocket.
A medicare or medicaid patient will be billed whatever the legally reimburseable and billable amount for the procedure under those programs.
The amazing part is only the uninsured patient, who is likely either young or poor or simply unlucky, is the only yutz who ever gets billed $3000. That is a made-up number. NOBODY else pays $3000. I promise you. My mother was hospitalized for a long period of time and I used to get these bills all the time for $2k-$5k procedures done while she was there. Reimbursement was generally between 20% and 40% of the theoretical billed amount. Even when a procedure was not reimbursed at all by the insurance company, they often would waive 60-70% of that theoretical cost "by agreement with insurance company" so I'd end up owing 500-600 bucks instead of thousands.
This practice should be made illegal. It's really despicable and punitive to the uninsured. If the hospital knew that medicare would immediate cease all reimbursements if they discovered this practice occurring, they'd suddenly find a way to bill a true, common price for the same procedure, not a hypothetical maximum which represents the most they think they could ever extort from any insurance provider or individual payer.
One thing I never really figured out is why mega-content-networks never sprouted up to put huge volumes of online content, ad-free, behind paywalls. Or micro-paywalls. The point is if you had a common subscription or micropayment framework and the people producing this content all banded together, they could make money off it without the awful advertisements that none of their customers want, or at least a more modest form of advertising that wouldn't be so repugnant we all ad-block it away.
Cable TV still has ads, admittedly, but my premium channels don't and my on demand content doesn't. I pay for all that through the cable company, which acts as a common provider of content (they also provide the pipe, and it's not a great overall analogy, just making a general point). The reason you don't want to sign up for 50 different subscriptions is that 1) the prices are too high because all these sites know they get a tiny, tiny fraction of viewers to sign up so they price accordingly and 2) the effort to enter all your credit card information and set up and manage monthly billing from all these different entities is a huge pain in the ass (and you know once you sign up, de-signing up will usually be impossible).
The obvious solution is a common content network that lets you easily manage your subscription to all the sites you pay for online. You might not be willing to pay 20 bucks a month for Ars Technica, but you might be willing to pay 20 bucks a month for a mega content network that gave you paid, ad-free, full subscription access to New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Slashdot, Ars Technica, and tons of other sites you visit.
Content doesn't have to be free and content doesn't have to be solely supported by godawful advertising that everybody eventually will block. Somebody just has to put together a network of content providers that creates enough value to create critical mass.
That's not usual. I've ordered at least a dozen hard drives from Newegg over the last 5 years, and I've had exactly one DOA drive and zero failures. Well, one that failed after several years of constant use, but we won't count that.
In fact, I never even bothered RMAing the DOA drive. It was a 1TB WD green. Bought a 750GB WD Black to replace it that is flawless.
What you probably saw was a bad batch of drives with some quality issues, and when you got the replacements, they were still from the bad batch and thus still had the quality issues.
Charlie Nesson is widely known among Harvard Law School students for being fucking brilliant, and being something of a proponent of and enjoying the use of cannabis (and the occasional hit of acid too). I think he also married a student of his, but hey, can't really blame a man for that.
Allow me to suggest that perhaps all that marijuana and acid doesn't do such wonderful things for one's ability to put together a cogent defense for a court.
I knew there was a reason I gave that shit up in college.
This is nonsense, at least with respect to New York. I live in New York and have for years, so I can speak with some authority about it.
We used to have groups of "feral youth" back in the 90s, when I recall friends of mine getting mugged and beaten up. But then a funny thing happened. The cops started taking this shit seriously. I was in college (around '99 or '00) when two friends who went to Dartmouth College were walking through Riverdale (the nice northern part of the Bronx) to one of their apartments, and they were jumped and mugged by 5 or 6 14 or 15 year old kids, beaten in their faces and their wallets stolen. And they called a friend and they called the cops. The friend pulled up with his car, and they chased down those fucking kids with the cops on the phone, and the cops showed up in a few minutes and caught the kids (or at least a few of them, who ratted the rest out).
Those kids all went to jail and did several years in juvenile detention. Five years earlier, the cops would just not have cared.
And in recent years I haven't seen this kind of shit any more. Because we enforce laws of public order in New York now. Maybe not in the ghetto of the South Bronx, or in parts of Brooklyn, but by and large, the parts of New York that a regular person would frequent are safe from this sort of crime these days.
And no, I don't live in a gated community. Nobody in New York does, though we do have doormen in our apartment buildings. I live in downtown Manhattan, and have lived either here or the Upper West Side of Manhattan for years now.
We all share this city, that's why we take public order fucking seriously here. We basically don't have drive-by shootings (wouldn't really make sense to drive-by an apartment building and shoot anyway), and shooting murders are so rare now that there's usually an article in the newspaper when they happen in Manhattan.
Seriously - the island of Manhattan, the heart of New York City, had 58 murders in 2009. NYC as a whole had something like 460 murders (half of those apparently in Brooklyn). This is with a population of something like 8.5 million! Back around 1990 that number was well over 2000 every year. Violent crime in general has dropped a similar amount here.
So yeah, back in 1990, we did have bands of feral youth wandering around, killing and maiming and stealing with impunity. This just isn't the case any more.
Just a quick note - Mozart never published the "Lick Me In the Arse" piece while he was alive. He widow sent a manuscript to a publisher, which "cleaned up" the lyrics prior to publishing. And the "Lick Me In the Arse Nice and Clean" piece is no longer believed to have been written by Mozart. A quick trip to Wikipedia would have revealed this. Sort of undercuts your argument a bit. Mozart may have been rebellious in certain ways, but it was hard to be so egregious and be successful in an era when you required patronage and support from the upper echelons of society to make it as an artist.
Dude - 90% of these posters are American. They wouldn't know a chav if one hit them over a head with their goldie lookin chain.
Seriously though, your post eeks out a bit of the classism that people argue underlies the chav stereotype. Here in New York we have our guidos, but they mostly do us the favor of localizing themselves to Long Island and Jersey, so we can simply be regionalist and simply call them the "bridge and tunnel crowd".
You are right, I just think it was awkward phrasing on my part. My implication was that the weak-form school of thought agrees that public and private ownership prices could be different, but that the existence of such discrepancies (or rather, the ability of people to capitalize on them and earn excess returns through simple changes of ownership) seems out of line with strong-form efficiency.
The share price jumped *because* of the takeover offer. The market valued the company at less than the takeover offer until the offer came in. There's nothing inherently wrong with a fund offering to buy out the minority shareholders if they think they can see a way to make the company worth more by owning it all themselves (perhaps they intend to break it up and sell the products off to people who would value them more highly in their enterprises, perhaps they just think management sucks and the best way to replace them is to take over the firm in its entirely, then flip it to a private equity firm or strategic buyer).
The point is the market was already saying the enterprise value of Novell was less than $1B. Some guy who runs a fund thinks that's overly pessimistic and made an offer to buy out the firm.
The fact that the market price for the shares jumped higher than the offer price only means that the market, on average, thinks this is the first offer in a potential bidding war and the price is likely to go higher than that before a deal closes. That is also very common in the case of an unsolicited offer when nobody was thinking "this company is for sale" prior to that offer coming in.
BTW, nobody in the finance industry really thinks the market always offers a fair estimate of a company's worth to all potential owners. Even believers in the weak-form efficient market hypothesis wouldn't state that - they would acknowledge that the value to a private market buyer might be higher than the public market value, which more likely represents the market's estimate of future discounted cash flows to equity owners of the company. Actually, to be more accurate, the public market value represents a consensus estimate of what people think *other* people would estimate the future discounted cash flows to equity owners of the company would be.
If you find that confusing, welcome to the science and art of valuation.
I don't know, if they were extracting the sewage waste from the pipe that came out of my house directly and then assuring me that they were "anonymizing" all the data, I'd be fucking up in arms. If they are looking at the mixed sewage that comes out of thousands or tens of thousands of houses, that's pretty much physically as "anonymized" as you can get.
Of course, that's assuming they are just studying general eating habits in an area.
If they were able to extract DNA from sewage and sequence the genomes of all the people that lived in a given area so they could use that to track people down by DNA samples in the future, I'd say there are some major privacy issues there too ("well we don't know who robbed the back, but we know they live on West Third Street since their DNA shows up in our sewage database").
Seriously... could he not have conveyed the same question without dropping the word "penthouse" into the equation? If he had just said "apartment", you wouldn't see all the snarkiness in the replies.
Well, in part, there were a plethora of retailers. Without huge amounts of retailer concentration, manufacturers were in a significantly stronger position to squeeze enough gross margin in that they could turn a profit. These days any industry that sells products principally at retail has to deal with the massive amount of retailer concentration we now have in the US, and increasingly, in most of the developed world, and the retailers can essentially beat the profit out of the manufacturers by simply threatening to go to an alternative source. This even seems to apply if you've got a strong brand in your product category - because the retailers will say "fuck you, we'll just put our own brand on a product made by some Chinese no-name manufacturer if you don't give us the price we demand and give up any profits".
This leaves manufacturers today to make a profit on the ever-shrinking segment of business that isn't large, consolidated retailers.
And your fallacy is assuming that manufacturing companies are behind the push to make stuff in other countries. In some industries that may be the case, but in many cases, the retailers have pushed it down their throats ("if we can't buy it from you in China, we'll buy it from a Chinese company in China").
Companies like Apple, of course, defy this trend because they simply reject doing business with the big box retailers out there and sell directly. Yes, and now Apple has their own retail channel too in the Apple Stores.
But you have to have a REALLY strong brand and a REALLY differentiated product to just bypass retailers entirely. Apple can do that, most other products in most other consumer-focused industry segments can't.
Read my post again, and you'll see I mentioned what sort of manufacturing *does* occur in the US. I do have some experience with manufacturing for big box retailers in the US, and know what companies and segments still make stuff here in the US. Of all the consumer goods out there, it's basically niches. Most mass market retailers buy stuff in Asia and don't even want to talk to you if you make stuff in the US anymore. Buyers want to meet with their suppliers in China. Hell, if you want to buy plastic molding machinery or any number of other major manufacturing equipment types in the US, you basically have to get second hand equipment because the people who used to make the manufacturing equipment have gone out of business and the market has been so flooded recently with second hand equipment that you have to go that route to be competitive.
And as for automation, yes, the only companies that manufacture in the US rely heavily on automation. However, you have to generally load up with debt to finance all that equipment for automation, and you still have very carefully cost out automation investments relative to what an Asian competitor spends on labor. In other words, your volume has to be high enough for the allocated cost per unit added by your automation machinery is less than the labor cost of a Chinese guy turning a wrench, or else Chinese competition will put you out of business. So yes, automation works, but it works much better in some industries than in others.
Furthermore, I have seen these statistics before and I highly suspect that they vastly misrepresent the amount of manufacturing activity going on in the US relative to a place like China. If manufacturing output in measured in dollars, but every dollar spent here on manufacturing could be replaced by 10-20 cents spent in Asia, the measure will be inherently distortive.
Additionally, if you look at the National Association of Manufacturer's data, the largest manufacturing industries in the US as of 2007 are Chemical and Food/Beverage/Tobacco products. Not what you traditionally think of as manufacturing at all. The chemical industry has no assembly work to speak of and is very automatable (thus its strength in the US). Food/Beverage/Tobacco has fairly strong economic barriers to import (not that there aren't plenty of imported foods and beverages, it's just hard to import cost effectively to compete with bulk market goods). The next category down is computer and electronics - which has gone from 14% to 8% of the US manufacturing output in the last 7 years. After that is fabricated metal products, then machinery, then motor vehicles. And I'd be willing to guess fabricated metal products and machinery consists in large part of companies that service the defense, aerospace and automative industries (which are highly protected industries), however I haven't been able to find information on that.
Finally, we are now only the 3rd largest manufacturing exporter in the world, after the EU (combined exports out of EU) and China.
Anyway, the basic difference in interpretation is that I don't believe that all manufacturing in the US has magically become super-efficient. Rather, it's that only the manufacturing that was easy to automate or legally or structually protected has stayed here in the US, and I think the statistics seem to back me up on this. The stuff that couldn't be easily automated has moved to places with lower labor costs.
No, I was talking about the *average*, *fully laden* cost of your staff in a manufacturing operation. I'm assuming an average salary of something like $35k. By the time you finish paying payroll taxes, health insurance, benefits, and so on, you are easily at $50k. The standard practice is to add about 50% to the base salary to account for these other costs when doing budgeting, probably slightly more now that health insurance costs have gone up so much.
Even in rural areas where manufacturing still occurs in the US, I'd say $25-30k is the minimum you can pay a semi-skilled, decent factory worker. And you need a mix to make a factory run of manufacturing engineers, skilled technicians, HR personnel, managers and the like who all get paid more like $45k-$75k depending on their background (again, not including benefits, etc.). So that's where I get $35k as an average figure.
Maybe the average would be slightly lower in Canada, but I'm not really confident that's the case when taxes and everything else are taken into account. And in any case, the point here was about US labor costs vs. Asia labor costs and what it would cost a company to move this scale of manufacturing to the US.
Shouldn't the appropriate measure of "greenness" also include quality of life as a factor? The real goal should be maximizing the ratio of quality of life to resources consumed, not just minimizing resources consumed.
Yes, living in the slums may be really "green", but it generally sucks as a place to live and surely anybody there would choose to live in a nicer house, in a neighborhood with greenery and proper sewage, and jobs, and electricity, and health care providers, and so on. As you point out, being dead minimizes resource use entirely, but no sane person would choose that state over living.
I'd be much more impressed by a description of a community that achieves low resource use with an excellent modern standard of life.
Ummm, seriously? Assuming the average fully laden cost of a US worker is $50,000 a year, you are talking about $6-$7 billion dollars in direct labor costs here in the US. But now your factories need to be built here in the US, you need US land, factory equipment and machines sourced in the US (these can be 3-4 times more expensive than the equivalent sourced in China), you raw materials have to be sourced here, and you need to maintain larger inventories of components that are still only made in Asia. I would imagine that this would add at least $12-15 billion dollars in total cost to Apple's business, perhaps even more (direct labor costs usually are less than half the cost difference between manufacturing in the US and manufacturing in Asia). Their EBITDA is currently around $14B, and net income is about $9B. You have now taken a highly profitable company and made it into another large American manufacturing company selling lots of product but hemorrhaging *billions* of dollars a year. Just like our auto industry.
Anyway, just pointing out how the economics work. There's a reason relatively little manufacturing is done in the US anymore, except for highly taxed and protected industries like defense or aerospace, high end or luxury niches, and products where the value/volume ratio makes it unprofitable to manufacture abroad and ship to the US.
That's a violation of an employment law, but it's not an egregious child slavery operation. 15 year olds working when the minimum employment age is 16 is very different from putting 8 year olds in effective slavery in factories. I think that was the GP poster's point.
As far as I understand, all these issues are with automatic cars. I doubt the Toyotas in question even come in a manual version. I agree that with a manual, this behavior would be highly undesireable - if BMW did it to my M3, you just wouldn't be able to drive it the same way. With an automatic, I don't think it's a big deal - I dunno if you've noticed, but they don't roll backwards on hills unless you actively put them in neutral. And you aren't gonna be doing heel-to-toe or performance driving on one of these anyway. In fact, a significant number of modern drive-by-wire automatic cars already have this behavior.
Many credit card processors require this information to be posted in a visible place on your website. If you are a company the size of Amazon, you aren't working through some credit card processing company, you probably own your own credit card processor, or rather have your own in-house processing service.
Then again, I've never heard of a *bank* requiring you post an address on a website, but perhaps if you use your bank for web-related merchant processing services, they might have that requirement.
It still has a real effect on people's decision-making so it's relevant from an economic perspective on how a purchaser would view time to payoff an investment. In any case, clearly you disagree with these subsidies, but some government entities see that subsidizing now will allow companies to sell small numbers of products profitably and build a market up so they can sell in large enough quantity to be profitable without government subsidy. I don't know how often this actually works out that way, but it's not fair to pretend the tax credits aren't there from the perspective of a given company just because the money for that credit comes from everybody's tax dollars (and other sources of government income and debt issuance).
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I never said that medicare patients were overcharged. *All* patients are overcharged, and portions of bills are waived for all *insured* patients, whether they are covered by Medicare or private insurance.
You basically make my point for me. Certain classes of patients shouldn't be billed excessively to make up for other classes of patients. There should be one, true fair price. Which should be what Medicare and private insurers reimburse, and what an uninsured patient would have to pay. Having every patient incur different charges for the same procedure, with the highest charges accruing to an uninsured patient (who is not indigent or bankrupt), is absurd. And frankly, having private insured patients subsidize Medicare patients and uninsured patients subsidize everybody (until they go bankrupt, in which case they are getting subsidized) is just ridiculous.
If you force fair billing practices along the lines I suggest, you certainly don't fix all or even a majority of the problems with hospitals or with our healthcare system in general, you just reduce the penalties for the uninsured, force some transparency into the system, and provide strong incentives for cost containment and make possible better alignment of agency (i.e. principal-agent problem) issues than is currently possible.
Sorry, but you are not correct in the general case. Within a very constrained problem space, you can have formal, verifiable proofs that are turned into programs, yes. But in the broader context of Turing-complete programming languages, you deal with the halting problem. As soon as you add unlimited recursion into the mix, you throw out complete verification.
Which of these paradigms is more appropriate really depends on the scale of the input space and the complexity of the problem you are trying to solve, and how well you can express the requirements formally.
Ummm, nobody has ever suggested or run a system like that. Single payer systems that are taxpayer bankrolled in other countries simply don't do that. They have a finite budget to cover the population of their country and they have to allocate care as efficiently and cost-effectively as they can. In most cases they do a better job than the US at that, in the sense that they provide comparable outcomes at much lower cost. I've never heard of a government-funded healthcare system that freely lets physicians spend millions of dollars on a terminal patient's last weeks of life - they'd drive their system bankrupt in no time that way.
I mean, I'm happy to have a debate about the merit of different systems for funding healthcare, but you have to at least make a sensible argument for people to take you seriously.
You do realize that in your country, somebody asks this question too. Assuming you live in a country with a single payer system, the people who run your single payer system have already decided what they are willing to pay and for which procedures. The way they do that is generally looking at dollars spent vs. quality-adjusted-life-years purchased for their taxpayer citizens, and similar health economics measures. I agree that the system in the US is fucked up in many many ways, but having to consider costs in medical treatment is a reality of finite resources and it happens everywhere.
You are 100% absolutely correct. I have no idea why such a law hasn't already been passed. The practice of negotiated billing is there strictly because hospitals think they can extract more from insurance companies that way, but the net result is to completely fuck over uninsured and underinsured patients, and result in general unfairness and disparity and dishonest billing practices.
Medicare reimbursement should be contingent on a hospitals *overall* billing practices. Medicare should reimburse the lesser of their reimbursement rate or the published price of a procedure. Any remainder MUST be paid for by a patient or insurance company and cannot legally be waived. And if a hospital is caught billing other patients unfairly, all medicare reimbursement should cease for the hospital, driving it out of business to be seized and placed under new management.
Very simple - make medicare reimbursement legally dependent on eliminating the disgusting practice of overbilling uninsured patients. Legally mandate the same price for a procedure for everybody. The problem is right now they bill a theoretical price of $3000 for an X-ray, as somebody else just posted in this thread, but an insured patient gets $2200 of that price "waived by agreement" on their insurance statement, the hospital gets a $700 reimbursement from the insurance company, and ends up with a $100 bill to pay out of pocket.
A medicare or medicaid patient will be billed whatever the legally reimburseable and billable amount for the procedure under those programs.
The amazing part is only the uninsured patient, who is likely either young or poor or simply unlucky, is the only yutz who ever gets billed $3000. That is a made-up number. NOBODY else pays $3000. I promise you. My mother was hospitalized for a long period of time and I used to get these bills all the time for $2k-$5k procedures done while she was there. Reimbursement was generally between 20% and 40% of the theoretical billed amount. Even when a procedure was not reimbursed at all by the insurance company, they often would waive 60-70% of that theoretical cost "by agreement with insurance company" so I'd end up owing 500-600 bucks instead of thousands.
This practice should be made illegal. It's really despicable and punitive to the uninsured. If the hospital knew that medicare would immediate cease all reimbursements if they discovered this practice occurring, they'd suddenly find a way to bill a true, common price for the same procedure, not a hypothetical maximum which represents the most they think they could ever extort from any insurance provider or individual payer.
One thing I never really figured out is why mega-content-networks never sprouted up to put huge volumes of online content, ad-free, behind paywalls. Or micro-paywalls. The point is if you had a common subscription or micropayment framework and the people producing this content all banded together, they could make money off it without the awful advertisements that none of their customers want, or at least a more modest form of advertising that wouldn't be so repugnant we all ad-block it away.
Cable TV still has ads, admittedly, but my premium channels don't and my on demand content doesn't. I pay for all that through the cable company, which acts as a common provider of content (they also provide the pipe, and it's not a great overall analogy, just making a general point). The reason you don't want to sign up for 50 different subscriptions is that 1) the prices are too high because all these sites know they get a tiny, tiny fraction of viewers to sign up so they price accordingly and 2) the effort to enter all your credit card information and set up and manage monthly billing from all these different entities is a huge pain in the ass (and you know once you sign up, de-signing up will usually be impossible).
The obvious solution is a common content network that lets you easily manage your subscription to all the sites you pay for online. You might not be willing to pay 20 bucks a month for Ars Technica, but you might be willing to pay 20 bucks a month for a mega content network that gave you paid, ad-free, full subscription access to New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Slashdot, Ars Technica, and tons of other sites you visit.
Content doesn't have to be free and content doesn't have to be solely supported by godawful advertising that everybody eventually will block. Somebody just has to put together a network of content providers that creates enough value to create critical mass.
That's not usual. I've ordered at least a dozen hard drives from Newegg over the last 5 years, and I've had exactly one DOA drive and zero failures. Well, one that failed after several years of constant use, but we won't count that.
In fact, I never even bothered RMAing the DOA drive. It was a 1TB WD green. Bought a 750GB WD Black to replace it that is flawless.
What you probably saw was a bad batch of drives with some quality issues, and when you got the replacements, they were still from the bad batch and thus still had the quality issues.
Charlie Nesson is widely known among Harvard Law School students for being fucking brilliant, and being something of a proponent of and enjoying the use of cannabis (and the occasional hit of acid too). I think he also married a student of his, but hey, can't really blame a man for that.
Allow me to suggest that perhaps all that marijuana and acid doesn't do such wonderful things for one's ability to put together a cogent defense for a court.
I knew there was a reason I gave that shit up in college.
This is nonsense, at least with respect to New York. I live in New York and have for years, so I can speak with some authority about it.
We used to have groups of "feral youth" back in the 90s, when I recall friends of mine getting mugged and beaten up. But then a funny thing happened. The cops started taking this shit seriously. I was in college (around '99 or '00) when two friends who went to Dartmouth College were walking through Riverdale (the nice northern part of the Bronx) to one of their apartments, and they were jumped and mugged by 5 or 6 14 or 15 year old kids, beaten in their faces and their wallets stolen. And they called a friend and they called the cops. The friend pulled up with his car, and they chased down those fucking kids with the cops on the phone, and the cops showed up in a few minutes and caught the kids (or at least a few of them, who ratted the rest out).
Those kids all went to jail and did several years in juvenile detention. Five years earlier, the cops would just not have cared.
And in recent years I haven't seen this kind of shit any more. Because we enforce laws of public order in New York now. Maybe not in the ghetto of the South Bronx, or in parts of Brooklyn, but by and large, the parts of New York that a regular person would frequent are safe from this sort of crime these days.
And no, I don't live in a gated community. Nobody in New York does, though we do have doormen in our apartment buildings. I live in downtown Manhattan, and have lived either here or the Upper West Side of Manhattan for years now.
We all share this city, that's why we take public order fucking seriously here. We basically don't have drive-by shootings (wouldn't really make sense to drive-by an apartment building and shoot anyway), and shooting murders are so rare now that there's usually an article in the newspaper when they happen in Manhattan.
Seriously - the island of Manhattan, the heart of New York City, had 58 murders in 2009. NYC as a whole had something like 460 murders (half of those apparently in Brooklyn). This is with a population of something like 8.5 million! Back around 1990 that number was well over 2000 every year. Violent crime in general has dropped a similar amount here.
So yeah, back in 1990, we did have bands of feral youth wandering around, killing and maiming and stealing with impunity. This just isn't the case any more.
Just a quick note - Mozart never published the "Lick Me In the Arse" piece while he was alive. He widow sent a manuscript to a publisher, which "cleaned up" the lyrics prior to publishing. And the "Lick Me In the Arse Nice and Clean" piece is no longer believed to have been written by Mozart. A quick trip to Wikipedia would have revealed this. Sort of undercuts your argument a bit. Mozart may have been rebellious in certain ways, but it was hard to be so egregious and be successful in an era when you required patronage and support from the upper echelons of society to make it as an artist.
Dude - 90% of these posters are American. They wouldn't know a chav if one hit them over a head with their goldie lookin chain.
Seriously though, your post eeks out a bit of the classism that people argue underlies the chav stereotype. Here in New York we have our guidos, but they mostly do us the favor of localizing themselves to Long Island and Jersey, so we can simply be regionalist and simply call them the "bridge and tunnel crowd".
You are right, I just think it was awkward phrasing on my part. My implication was that the weak-form school of thought agrees that public and private ownership prices could be different, but that the existence of such discrepancies (or rather, the ability of people to capitalize on them and earn excess returns through simple changes of ownership) seems out of line with strong-form efficiency.
The share price jumped *because* of the takeover offer. The market valued the company at less than the takeover offer until the offer came in. There's nothing inherently wrong with a fund offering to buy out the minority shareholders if they think they can see a way to make the company worth more by owning it all themselves (perhaps they intend to break it up and sell the products off to people who would value them more highly in their enterprises, perhaps they just think management sucks and the best way to replace them is to take over the firm in its entirely, then flip it to a private equity firm or strategic buyer).
The point is the market was already saying the enterprise value of Novell was less than $1B. Some guy who runs a fund thinks that's overly pessimistic and made an offer to buy out the firm.
The fact that the market price for the shares jumped higher than the offer price only means that the market, on average, thinks this is the first offer in a potential bidding war and the price is likely to go higher than that before a deal closes. That is also very common in the case of an unsolicited offer when nobody was thinking "this company is for sale" prior to that offer coming in.
BTW, nobody in the finance industry really thinks the market always offers a fair estimate of a company's worth to all potential owners. Even believers in the weak-form efficient market hypothesis wouldn't state that - they would acknowledge that the value to a private market buyer might be higher than the public market value, which more likely represents the market's estimate of future discounted cash flows to equity owners of the company. Actually, to be more accurate, the public market value represents a consensus estimate of what people think *other* people would estimate the future discounted cash flows to equity owners of the company would be.
If you find that confusing, welcome to the science and art of valuation.
I don't know, if they were extracting the sewage waste from the pipe that came out of my house directly and then assuring me that they were "anonymizing" all the data, I'd be fucking up in arms. If they are looking at the mixed sewage that comes out of thousands or tens of thousands of houses, that's pretty much physically as "anonymized" as you can get.
Of course, that's assuming they are just studying general eating habits in an area.
If they were able to extract DNA from sewage and sequence the genomes of all the people that lived in a given area so they could use that to track people down by DNA samples in the future, I'd say there are some major privacy issues there too ("well we don't know who robbed the back, but we know they live on West Third Street since their DNA shows up in our sewage database").
Seriously... could he not have conveyed the same question without dropping the word "penthouse" into the equation? If he had just said "apartment", you wouldn't see all the snarkiness in the replies.
Well, in part, there were a plethora of retailers. Without huge amounts of retailer concentration, manufacturers were in a significantly stronger position to squeeze enough gross margin in that they could turn a profit. These days any industry that sells products principally at retail has to deal with the massive amount of retailer concentration we now have in the US, and increasingly, in most of the developed world, and the retailers can essentially beat the profit out of the manufacturers by simply threatening to go to an alternative source. This even seems to apply if you've got a strong brand in your product category - because the retailers will say "fuck you, we'll just put our own brand on a product made by some Chinese no-name manufacturer if you don't give us the price we demand and give up any profits".
This leaves manufacturers today to make a profit on the ever-shrinking segment of business that isn't large, consolidated retailers.
And your fallacy is assuming that manufacturing companies are behind the push to make stuff in other countries. In some industries that may be the case, but in many cases, the retailers have pushed it down their throats ("if we can't buy it from you in China, we'll buy it from a Chinese company in China").
Companies like Apple, of course, defy this trend because they simply reject doing business with the big box retailers out there and sell directly. Yes, and now Apple has their own retail channel too in the Apple Stores.
But you have to have a REALLY strong brand and a REALLY differentiated product to just bypass retailers entirely. Apple can do that, most other products in most other consumer-focused industry segments can't.
Read my post again, and you'll see I mentioned what sort of manufacturing *does* occur in the US. I do have some experience with manufacturing for big box retailers in the US, and know what companies and segments still make stuff here in the US. Of all the consumer goods out there, it's basically niches. Most mass market retailers buy stuff in Asia and don't even want to talk to you if you make stuff in the US anymore. Buyers want to meet with their suppliers in China. Hell, if you want to buy plastic molding machinery or any number of other major manufacturing equipment types in the US, you basically have to get second hand equipment because the people who used to make the manufacturing equipment have gone out of business and the market has been so flooded recently with second hand equipment that you have to go that route to be competitive.
And as for automation, yes, the only companies that manufacture in the US rely heavily on automation. However, you have to generally load up with debt to finance all that equipment for automation, and you still have very carefully cost out automation investments relative to what an Asian competitor spends on labor. In other words, your volume has to be high enough for the allocated cost per unit added by your automation machinery is less than the labor cost of a Chinese guy turning a wrench, or else Chinese competition will put you out of business. So yes, automation works, but it works much better in some industries than in others.
Furthermore, I have seen these statistics before and I highly suspect that they vastly misrepresent the amount of manufacturing activity going on in the US relative to a place like China. If manufacturing output in measured in dollars, but every dollar spent here on manufacturing could be replaced by 10-20 cents spent in Asia, the measure will be inherently distortive.
Additionally, if you look at the National Association of Manufacturer's data, the largest manufacturing industries in the US as of 2007 are Chemical and Food/Beverage/Tobacco products. Not what you traditionally think of as manufacturing at all. The chemical industry has no assembly work to speak of and is very automatable (thus its strength in the US). Food/Beverage/Tobacco has fairly strong economic barriers to import (not that there aren't plenty of imported foods and beverages, it's just hard to import cost effectively to compete with bulk market goods). The next category down is computer and electronics - which has gone from 14% to 8% of the US manufacturing output in the last 7 years. After that is fabricated metal products, then machinery, then motor vehicles. And I'd be willing to guess fabricated metal products and machinery consists in large part of companies that service the defense, aerospace and automative industries (which are highly protected industries), however I haven't been able to find information on that.
Finally, we are now only the 3rd largest manufacturing exporter in the world, after the EU (combined exports out of EU) and China.
See the NAM's report for the source of my statistics.
Anyway, the basic difference in interpretation is that I don't believe that all manufacturing in the US has magically become super-efficient. Rather, it's that only the manufacturing that was easy to automate or legally or structually protected has stayed here in the US, and I think the statistics seem to back me up on this. The stuff that couldn't be easily automated has moved to places with lower labor costs.
No, I was talking about the *average*, *fully laden* cost of your staff in a manufacturing operation. I'm assuming an average salary of something like $35k. By the time you finish paying payroll taxes, health insurance, benefits, and so on, you are easily at $50k. The standard practice is to add about 50% to the base salary to account for these other costs when doing budgeting, probably slightly more now that health insurance costs have gone up so much.
Even in rural areas where manufacturing still occurs in the US, I'd say $25-30k is the minimum you can pay a semi-skilled, decent factory worker. And you need a mix to make a factory run of manufacturing engineers, skilled technicians, HR personnel, managers and the like who all get paid more like $45k-$75k depending on their background (again, not including benefits, etc.). So that's where I get $35k as an average figure.
Maybe the average would be slightly lower in Canada, but I'm not really confident that's the case when taxes and everything else are taken into account. And in any case, the point here was about US labor costs vs. Asia labor costs and what it would cost a company to move this scale of manufacturing to the US.
Shouldn't the appropriate measure of "greenness" also include quality of life as a factor? The real goal should be maximizing the ratio of quality of life to resources consumed, not just minimizing resources consumed.
Yes, living in the slums may be really "green", but it generally sucks as a place to live and surely anybody there would choose to live in a nicer house, in a neighborhood with greenery and proper sewage, and jobs, and electricity, and health care providers, and so on. As you point out, being dead minimizes resource use entirely, but no sane person would choose that state over living.
I'd be much more impressed by a description of a community that achieves low resource use with an excellent modern standard of life.
Ummm, seriously? Assuming the average fully laden cost of a US worker is $50,000 a year, you are talking about $6-$7 billion dollars in direct labor costs here in the US. But now your factories need to be built here in the US, you need US land, factory equipment and machines sourced in the US (these can be 3-4 times more expensive than the equivalent sourced in China), you raw materials have to be sourced here, and you need to maintain larger inventories of components that are still only made in Asia. I would imagine that this would add at least $12-15 billion dollars in total cost to Apple's business, perhaps even more (direct labor costs usually are less than half the cost difference between manufacturing in the US and manufacturing in Asia). Their EBITDA is currently around $14B, and net income is about $9B. You have now taken a highly profitable company and made it into another large American manufacturing company selling lots of product but hemorrhaging *billions* of dollars a year. Just like our auto industry.
Anyway, just pointing out how the economics work. There's a reason relatively little manufacturing is done in the US anymore, except for highly taxed and protected industries like defense or aerospace, high end or luxury niches, and products where the value/volume ratio makes it unprofitable to manufacture abroad and ship to the US.
That's a violation of an employment law, but it's not an egregious child slavery operation. 15 year olds working when the minimum employment age is 16 is very different from putting 8 year olds in effective slavery in factories. I think that was the GP poster's point.
As far as I understand, all these issues are with automatic cars. I doubt the Toyotas in question even come in a manual version. I agree that with a manual, this behavior would be highly undesireable - if BMW did it to my M3, you just wouldn't be able to drive it the same way. With an automatic, I don't think it's a big deal - I dunno if you've noticed, but they don't roll backwards on hills unless you actively put them in neutral. And you aren't gonna be doing heel-to-toe or performance driving on one of these anyway. In fact, a significant number of modern drive-by-wire automatic cars already have this behavior.
Many credit card processors require this information to be posted in a visible place on your website. If you are a company the size of Amazon, you aren't working through some credit card processing company, you probably own your own credit card processor, or rather have your own in-house processing service.
Then again, I've never heard of a *bank* requiring you post an address on a website, but perhaps if you use your bank for web-related merchant processing services, they might have that requirement.
It still has a real effect on people's decision-making so it's relevant from an economic perspective on how a purchaser would view time to payoff an investment. In any case, clearly you disagree with these subsidies, but some government entities see that subsidizing now will allow companies to sell small numbers of products profitably and build a market up so they can sell in large enough quantity to be profitable without government subsidy. I don't know how often this actually works out that way, but it's not fair to pretend the tax credits aren't there from the perspective of a given company just because the money for that credit comes from everybody's tax dollars (and other sources of government income and debt issuance).