I didn't get involved or create the thinking - the tax incentives are created by states to foster nascent markets so they can (theoretically) get to the scale where they can be profitable without subsidization. Whether or not this will ever happen is certainly up for debate, but I wasn't taking a position on the matter, just pointing out that it is microeconomically relevant in that it clearly will influence purchase decisions, regardless of the macroeconomic reality of where that money comes from.
The missing piece in your math is government subsidization. In California, apparently there is a 20% direct government subsidy and a 30% tax credit, according to TFA on cbsnews.com, so the effective cost incurred to a company is only half the purchase price. If that means more like $350-$400k, that would be more like a 15 year payoff, which while still long, is definitely closer to being an attractive proposition for a business that can afford that kind of time horizon and can get asset-based financing at an attractive rate.
All true, and don't forget about adverse selection costs - as health insurance premiums have *doubled* over the last decade, more and more individuals and small businesses that have healthy, young employees opt out of health insurance entirely. Since this removes relatively healthy people from the pool, only the sicker and more costly insured parties retain their insurance, driving per capita costs of insured persons up. The numbers of uninsured are now significant, but there are tons of *less* insured people as well, or rather, those who have switched or been switched by their employers to high deductible plans.
Together, this is the health insurance death spiral that Paul Krugman wrote about this week in his NY Times Op-Ed. Though this doesn't really increase total costs directly, it clearly reduces the amount of preventative care younger, healthier people receive and probably eventually decreases aggregate health levels and will eventually increase systemic cost. It also causes the overuse of emergency rooms as clinics by the uninsured.
Then there's the costs of defensive medicine - though I've seen estimates that these are only something like 5% of total health care system costs, other estimates show they may be higher.
I'm sure we could come up with several more items like this if we tried.
Okay, so your point is a family of four's total cost to the system is about $1600 per month in Canada. That's about $400 per person. In 2009, US healthcare spending was about $8300 per person per year, or about $33,200 for a family of four, or about $2770 a month. So we're still spending about 73% more per capita (and clearly don't get 73% better results than Canada).
The average health insurance plan in the US has increased to almost $5000 for an individual (see this article, for example), approximately doubling over the last 9 years, while average deductibles and out of pocket expenses have increased massively as well.
And while Canada's income tax rates are modestly higher than in the US, I don't think the difference is particularly startling - see, for example, the chart here.
And the studies seem to indicate that the quality of health care in Canada is at least as good as that provided in the US as in this study.
None of this is exhaustive, and I agree with your point that the OP was comparing apples and oranges, but it doesn't take rocket science to conclude that Canada's health care system is significantly more efficient than the US system at providing health care, and that their system works far better for the average taxpaying citizen than our system here in the US.
Oh, and some states are seeing 40-50% premium increases for individual and small business health insurance plans for 2010. Even mid-sized corporations are seeing rate hikes of 20-30% for 2010 and being forced to make tough choices, cut workforce numbers, and move jobs overseas to remain competitive in the face of the drag on their bottom line that health insurance costs are creating. All of this makes the comparison with countries like Canada that much less favorable.
Well, the only material difference is the time dilation factor for the person in the spaceship. At 99.9% the speed of light, that factor is about 22 - i.e. the 4.4 years seems to take only about 0.2 years, or 10 weeks. At 99.999998% of the speed of light, it is almost exactly 5000 - which means the trip would seem to pass in about 7 hours. This is ignoring the general relativistic effects of acceleration and deceleration.
So, it's a material difference to the person traveling, but not so material to the observer stationary relative to Alpha Centauri.
And a loan guarantee simply means that a company can get a lower interest rate because investors know that in the event of default, the government will take over servicing the bond.
However, the actual value of such a guarantee is far, far less than the principal value of those bonds. In fact, it can be treated as a put option on the assets of the firm that is being financed with the bonds (calculating that value required making a number of assumptions about those assets and their value to another firm, their alternative uses, ongoing income generation capabilities and so on).
The value of this guarantee in this case is probably no more than a few hundred million dollars (i.e. a few percentage points of the principal amount). You can also simply estimate it by looking at the difference between the interest a similar firm would pay and what a government bond would pay, since that reflects the market's valuation of the default risk inherent in a firm like this.
This is a drop in the bucket from a stimulus perspective, and a drop in the bucket of our nation's energy infrastructure.
I knew we weren't crazy - my wife and I had this feeling it was just turning off the UI without actually opting you out of Buzz. Anybody who considers this an honest, straightforward product launch is out of their fucking mind.
Of course you can *attempt* to sue for anything anytime. The question was about in what sorts of cases can shareholders bring suit against a company's executives or Board - presumably with any hope of winning whatsoever. If you just want to commit barratry, be my fucking guest, moron, you'll piss away lots of money and get nowhere trying to sue America's largest corporations with no knowledge of what you are talking about.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, but there are actually rather specific requirements for a shareholder class action lawsuit to go anywhere. Simply disagreeing with corporate strategy is not one of them. Evidence of some fradulent intent is required. Simply arguing that a flawed company strategy is causing the shareholder's economic loss is insufficient grounds for a case.
How about you go to that link, and read the page several time, slowly, until *you* get a clue.
For years now, it's been "Gmail is so great", "why don't you use Gmail?" I've been that curmudgeon who has these strange ideas about privacy and not entrusting too much data to one company.
I felt vindicated the other day when my wife freaked out upon seeing people she had emailed with on gmail sudden on her new friends list in the Google Buzz system that she never signed up for, along with the suggestion that she share photos with them and other private data about every action she takes on any system owned by Google.
On Facebook, at least you went into it *knowing* that everything you post there gets shared with every person you once spoke to in a grad school class who friended you randomly three years later. Google has insidiously roped you into using a bunch of disconnected services that were great and generally free and all the while, you've known that sure, they collect data they can use for advertising to you, but it's all so goddamned warm and fuzzy, what's there to worry about?
Suddenly, you find that Google Reader, Picasa, Gmail, etc. are all part of a social networking service you didn't intend to sign up for and Google is trying to push you into sharing everything you do with everybody you email with.
I consider this utterly, well, evil. Deceitful. Sketchy. This stuff needs to be totally opt-in.
I helped my wife turn off all the "sharing" features of Buzz. But could not find any way to completely opt-out of Buzz. There didn't seem to be a way, other than to cease using Gmail entirely. I consider that vile.
The short answer is no, you can't do that - they aren't losing the profits, they just may be investing them in other projects that have created business lines that aren't so profitable. That isn't illegal, it's a strategy, and it may eventually pay out or it may not.
Now, there are tools like filing proxies, or getting your own board members put in place, that are possible for groups of shareholders working together which can put significant pressure on companies to change their capital structure, dividend policies, share buyback plans and so on. And those have worked to some extent with Microsoft, which was pressured into paying out a huge one-time cash dividend 4 or 5 years ago.
Actually, they did have a license - but there was litigation on the matter because they apparently sampled "too much" of the source track, and now the Rolling Stones get all the royalties from that track. So it's not a good example, as it's more a question of whether their use of the sample was so extensive as to not make it an original work at all.
If we really can build human-intelligence equivalent AI, then presumably we can also build human physical-equivalent robots. At that point, we have the laborers and the thinkers. As long as they can keep the electricity generation going and the food harvesting, we can all live lives of leisure, right? I mean, what need is there for a capitalist system to motivate and direct human output when we don't need human output any more.
Just an interesting question to ponder. I think the basic point is the world would probably end up looking very different than it does today. I don't think we're going to end up with an AI lord overclass and a bunch of human underlings turning wrenches for them, since nobody has any incentive to let that happen. We'd probably have a "Butlerian jihad" (pardon the Dune reference) before we'd let ourselves end up that way.
I don't have any objection to a successful company generating lots of cash wanting to expand into new markets. But to try to expand in so many directions at the same time seems to risk completely losing their focus and the special factors that made them successful in the first place.
Red herring. Coercive shock sites may be bad, but they have nothing to do with this case. If you passed a law making it illegal for people to post links to pornography under false pretenses, and forcing internet forums to filter them, I may not agree with you, but we could at least have an intelligent conversation about it. Unfortunately, the ability of some people to abuse their speech (or forum posting) should not eliminate the rights of others to have that speech in the first place.
Language is descriptive, not proscriptive - the words mean what they mean, not what we try to define them forcefully to mean. Nobody is ever going to use the words kibibyte/mebibyte/gibibyte because they are the geekiest sounding things imaginable. They aren't usable English words. Until somebody comes up with a better system of nomenclature that is actually usable English that people are willing to adopt, we are going to just have to deal with the ambiguous meanings of kilobyte/megabyte/gigabyte (power-of-twos vs. power-of-tens values). The fact that nobody uses the "bibyte" versions of these words nor has adopted an alternative indicates that this ambiguity is less of a practical problem than the sticklers seem to think.
I would think the primary issue with using civilian GPS for an application like this is that it is a degradable, government-controlled signal. A warning of a terrorist attack could suddenly lead to the signal turning to degraded mode, and then a plane in process of landing might think it's several meters away from where it actually is. That could lead to something bad happening I imagine.
I don't think they addressed the "no answer" vs. "B", however, they did assess the patients' ability to answer a series of factual questions about the patient's life prior to whatever put them where they were - I think that pretty much shows that there is something non-spurious being measured here and it's not just the dead salmon fMRI effect as another reply suggested - the probability of random readings matching up with the correct answers to a series of such questions seems very minute.
And 4 out of 23 is not a success rate - it's a misdiagnosis rate! Nobody in their right mind is claiming that *all* patients in persistent vegetative states have meaningful cognition occurring (except the EXTREMELY inaccurate and misleading Slashdot article title). Rather, some patients who failed the standard tests to assess consciousness levels are perhaps more conscious than was previously detectable.
Really, why do people think Dune was such a great novel in the first place? I wouldn't even rank it in the top 10 sci-fi books I've read. There were some cool elements of the universe, some cool plot points, and that's sort of it. The Lynch movie had some great visual elements, some very cool moments, and was otherwise kind of "meh" - I mean, I enjoyed it, but wouldn't rush to watch it again.
Maybe I just didn't get Frank Herbert. Oh yeah, and the other Dune books just got worse after the first one (I think I read one or two more).
Most American businesses get screwed by the court system more often than they benefit wildly from it. The number of groundless wrongful-termination and product liability lawsuits that companies face drive costs way up for companies that are barely squeaking by with modest profits in the face of global competition from companies in countries that *don't* have such fucked up legal systems and thus aren't dragged down by these costs.
This is part of the reason that in many, many consumer product categories nobody manufactures in the US anymore (labor costs are part of the reason, obviously, and health insurance costs are the other part - the latter of which is also somewhat linked to medical malpractice and frictional costs of the legal system, as well as a bunch of other factors that have been conspiring to drive these costs up in the last few years).
I think ZipCar and Tesla are actually very complementary businesses for this reason - if an electric car meets 90%-95% of your driving needs (I wouldn't say it meets 100% of driving needs for 95% of the population, as the GP poster suggested - that's just wrong), then the other occasional long distance road trip can be easily handled by driving down to the local ZipCar station to take out a gasoline powered car for the long haul.
Of course, depending on where you live, a lot of families might have reason to keep both a gas and electric vehicle around as another reply suggests too.
You know what's really funny - I was in junior high school, 8th grade to be exact, and living in Fremont, CA when we had a school field trip to... you guessed it, Lawrence Livermore Labs.
That would have been around 1990 or thereabouts. And I'll be damned if they didn't give us a tour of a many-laser fuel pellet ignition fusion system that I thought was frigging cool at the time (I swear it was something like 40 or 60 pulsed lasers), though I recall wondering how they were ever going to get it to keep releasing energy in a way that could be sustained.
Apparently, that must have been the earlier version of the current system, which they apparently started work on in 1997 and just completed in 2009.
Just gives you a sense of the absolutely, horrendously glacial pace of fusion research. They have spent at *least* the last 19 years, and in all likelihood more like 30+ years, i.e. the entire career of many scientists and engineers, working on essentially the same technique, that nobody really knows how it would be used to create a sustained fusion reaction that produces net energy.
I find this incredibly sad. Aren't there any better, new ideas in fusion research to invest money and time into for experimental purposes?
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't get involved or create the thinking - the tax incentives are created by states to foster nascent markets so they can (theoretically) get to the scale where they can be profitable without subsidization. Whether or not this will ever happen is certainly up for debate, but I wasn't taking a position on the matter, just pointing out that it is microeconomically relevant in that it clearly will influence purchase decisions, regardless of the macroeconomic reality of where that money comes from.
The missing piece in your math is government subsidization. In California, apparently there is a 20% direct government subsidy and a 30% tax credit, according to TFA on cbsnews.com, so the effective cost incurred to a company is only half the purchase price. If that means more like $350-$400k, that would be more like a 15 year payoff, which while still long, is definitely closer to being an attractive proposition for a business that can afford that kind of time horizon and can get asset-based financing at an attractive rate.
All true, and don't forget about adverse selection costs - as health insurance premiums have *doubled* over the last decade, more and more individuals and small businesses that have healthy, young employees opt out of health insurance entirely. Since this removes relatively healthy people from the pool, only the sicker and more costly insured parties retain their insurance, driving per capita costs of insured persons up. The numbers of uninsured are now significant, but there are tons of *less* insured people as well, or rather, those who have switched or been switched by their employers to high deductible plans.
Together, this is the health insurance death spiral that Paul Krugman wrote about this week in his NY Times Op-Ed. Though this doesn't really increase total costs directly, it clearly reduces the amount of preventative care younger, healthier people receive and probably eventually decreases aggregate health levels and will eventually increase systemic cost. It also causes the overuse of emergency rooms as clinics by the uninsured.
Then there's the costs of defensive medicine - though I've seen estimates that these are only something like 5% of total health care system costs, other estimates show they may be higher.
I'm sure we could come up with several more items like this if we tried.
Okay, so your point is a family of four's total cost to the system is about $1600 per month in Canada. That's about $400 per person. In 2009, US healthcare spending was about $8300 per person per year, or about $33,200 for a family of four, or about $2770 a month. So we're still spending about 73% more per capita (and clearly don't get 73% better results than Canada).
The average health insurance plan in the US has increased to almost $5000 for an individual (see this article, for example), approximately doubling over the last 9 years, while average deductibles and out of pocket expenses have increased massively as well.
And while Canada's income tax rates are modestly higher than in the US, I don't think the difference is particularly startling - see, for example, the chart here.
And the studies seem to indicate that the quality of health care in Canada is at least as good as that provided in the US as in this study.
None of this is exhaustive, and I agree with your point that the OP was comparing apples and oranges, but it doesn't take rocket science to conclude that Canada's health care system is significantly more efficient than the US system at providing health care, and that their system works far better for the average taxpaying citizen than our system here in the US.
Oh, and some states are seeing 40-50% premium increases for individual and small business health insurance plans for 2010. Even mid-sized corporations are seeing rate hikes of 20-30% for 2010 and being forced to make tough choices, cut workforce numbers, and move jobs overseas to remain competitive in the face of the drag on their bottom line that health insurance costs are creating. All of this makes the comparison with countries like Canada that much less favorable.
Well, the only material difference is the time dilation factor for the person in the spaceship. At 99.9% the speed of light, that factor is about 22 - i.e. the 4.4 years seems to take only about 0.2 years, or 10 weeks. At 99.999998% of the speed of light, it is almost exactly 5000 - which means the trip would seem to pass in about 7 hours. This is ignoring the general relativistic effects of acceleration and deceleration.
So, it's a material difference to the person traveling, but not so material to the observer stationary relative to Alpha Centauri.
And a loan guarantee simply means that a company can get a lower interest rate because investors know that in the event of default, the government will take over servicing the bond.
However, the actual value of such a guarantee is far, far less than the principal value of those bonds. In fact, it can be treated as a put option on the assets of the firm that is being financed with the bonds (calculating that value required making a number of assumptions about those assets and their value to another firm, their alternative uses, ongoing income generation capabilities and so on).
The value of this guarantee in this case is probably no more than a few hundred million dollars (i.e. a few percentage points of the principal amount). You can also simply estimate it by looking at the difference between the interest a similar firm would pay and what a government bond would pay, since that reflects the market's valuation of the default risk inherent in a firm like this.
This is a drop in the bucket from a stimulus perspective, and a drop in the bucket of our nation's energy infrastructure.
I knew we weren't crazy - my wife and I had this feeling it was just turning off the UI without actually opting you out of Buzz. Anybody who considers this an honest, straightforward product launch is out of their fucking mind.
Of course you can *attempt* to sue for anything anytime. The question was about in what sorts of cases can shareholders bring suit against a company's executives or Board - presumably with any hope of winning whatsoever. If you just want to commit barratry, be my fucking guest, moron, you'll piss away lots of money and get nowhere trying to sue America's largest corporations with no knowledge of what you are talking about.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, but there are actually rather specific requirements for a shareholder class action lawsuit to go anywhere. Simply disagreeing with corporate strategy is not one of them. Evidence of some fradulent intent is required. Simply arguing that a flawed company strategy is causing the shareholder's economic loss is insufficient grounds for a case.
How about you go to that link, and read the page several time, slowly, until *you* get a clue.
For years now, it's been "Gmail is so great", "why don't you use Gmail?" I've been that curmudgeon who has these strange ideas about privacy and not entrusting too much data to one company.
I felt vindicated the other day when my wife freaked out upon seeing people she had emailed with on gmail sudden on her new friends list in the Google Buzz system that she never signed up for, along with the suggestion that she share photos with them and other private data about every action she takes on any system owned by Google.
On Facebook, at least you went into it *knowing* that everything you post there gets shared with every person you once spoke to in a grad school class who friended you randomly three years later. Google has insidiously roped you into using a bunch of disconnected services that were great and generally free and all the while, you've known that sure, they collect data they can use for advertising to you, but it's all so goddamned warm and fuzzy, what's there to worry about?
Suddenly, you find that Google Reader, Picasa, Gmail, etc. are all part of a social networking service you didn't intend to sign up for and Google is trying to push you into sharing everything you do with everybody you email with.
I consider this utterly, well, evil. Deceitful. Sketchy. This stuff needs to be totally opt-in.
I helped my wife turn off all the "sharing" features of Buzz. But could not find any way to completely opt-out of Buzz. There didn't seem to be a way, other than to cease using Gmail entirely. I consider that vile.
And the farters. There's nothing worse than somebody who *keeps* farting on a plane, when they are stinky ones. Take some Gas-X you fucking slobs.
The short answer is no, you can't do that - they aren't losing the profits, they just may be investing them in other projects that have created business lines that aren't so profitable. That isn't illegal, it's a strategy, and it may eventually pay out or it may not.
Now, there are tools like filing proxies, or getting your own board members put in place, that are possible for groups of shareholders working together which can put significant pressure on companies to change their capital structure, dividend policies, share buyback plans and so on. And those have worked to some extent with Microsoft, which was pressured into paying out a huge one-time cash dividend 4 or 5 years ago.
Actually, they did have a license - but there was litigation on the matter because they apparently sampled "too much" of the source track, and now the Rolling Stones get all the royalties from that track. So it's not a good example, as it's more a question of whether their use of the sample was so extensive as to not make it an original work at all.
If we really can build human-intelligence equivalent AI, then presumably we can also build human physical-equivalent robots. At that point, we have the laborers and the thinkers. As long as they can keep the electricity generation going and the food harvesting, we can all live lives of leisure, right? I mean, what need is there for a capitalist system to motivate and direct human output when we don't need human output any more.
Just an interesting question to ponder. I think the basic point is the world would probably end up looking very different than it does today. I don't think we're going to end up with an AI lord overclass and a bunch of human underlings turning wrenches for them, since nobody has any incentive to let that happen. We'd probably have a "Butlerian jihad" (pardon the Dune reference) before we'd let ourselves end up that way.
I don't have any objection to a successful company generating lots of cash wanting to expand into new markets. But to try to expand in so many directions at the same time seems to risk completely losing their focus and the special factors that made them successful in the first place.
Red herring. Coercive shock sites may be bad, but they have nothing to do with this case. If you passed a law making it illegal for people to post links to pornography under false pretenses, and forcing internet forums to filter them, I may not agree with you, but we could at least have an intelligent conversation about it. Unfortunately, the ability of some people to abuse their speech (or forum posting) should not eliminate the rights of others to have that speech in the first place.
Language is descriptive, not proscriptive - the words mean what they mean, not what we try to define them forcefully to mean. Nobody is ever going to use the words kibibyte/mebibyte/gibibyte because they are the geekiest sounding things imaginable. They aren't usable English words. Until somebody comes up with a better system of nomenclature that is actually usable English that people are willing to adopt, we are going to just have to deal with the ambiguous meanings of kilobyte/megabyte/gigabyte (power-of-twos vs. power-of-tens values). The fact that nobody uses the "bibyte" versions of these words nor has adopted an alternative indicates that this ambiguity is less of a practical problem than the sticklers seem to think.
I would think the primary issue with using civilian GPS for an application like this is that it is a degradable, government-controlled signal. A warning of a terrorist attack could suddenly lead to the signal turning to degraded mode, and then a plane in process of landing might think it's several meters away from where it actually is. That could lead to something bad happening I imagine.
I don't think they addressed the "no answer" vs. "B", however, they did assess the patients' ability to answer a series of factual questions about the patient's life prior to whatever put them where they were - I think that pretty much shows that there is something non-spurious being measured here and it's not just the dead salmon fMRI effect as another reply suggested - the probability of random readings matching up with the correct answers to a series of such questions seems very minute.
And 4 out of 23 is not a success rate - it's a misdiagnosis rate! Nobody in their right mind is claiming that *all* patients in persistent vegetative states have meaningful cognition occurring (except the EXTREMELY inaccurate and misleading Slashdot article title). Rather, some patients who failed the standard tests to assess consciousness levels are perhaps more conscious than was previously detectable.
Really, why do people think Dune was such a great novel in the first place? I wouldn't even rank it in the top 10 sci-fi books I've read. There were some cool elements of the universe, some cool plot points, and that's sort of it. The Lynch movie had some great visual elements, some very cool moments, and was otherwise kind of "meh" - I mean, I enjoyed it, but wouldn't rush to watch it again.
Maybe I just didn't get Frank Herbert. Oh yeah, and the other Dune books just got worse after the first one (I think I read one or two more).
Most American businesses get screwed by the court system more often than they benefit wildly from it. The number of groundless wrongful-termination and product liability lawsuits that companies face drive costs way up for companies that are barely squeaking by with modest profits in the face of global competition from companies in countries that *don't* have such fucked up legal systems and thus aren't dragged down by these costs.
This is part of the reason that in many, many consumer product categories nobody manufactures in the US anymore (labor costs are part of the reason, obviously, and health insurance costs are the other part - the latter of which is also somewhat linked to medical malpractice and frictional costs of the legal system, as well as a bunch of other factors that have been conspiring to drive these costs up in the last few years).
According to this source, about 19% of private schools in the US are religiously unaffiliated.
Doesn't sound like he's an idiot to me.
I laughed so hard I shat. And let me tell you, it smelled in a way that was not relevant to life.
I think ZipCar and Tesla are actually very complementary businesses for this reason - if an electric car meets 90%-95% of your driving needs (I wouldn't say it meets 100% of driving needs for 95% of the population, as the GP poster suggested - that's just wrong), then the other occasional long distance road trip can be easily handled by driving down to the local ZipCar station to take out a gasoline powered car for the long haul.
Of course, depending on where you live, a lot of families might have reason to keep both a gas and electric vehicle around as another reply suggests too.
You know what's really funny - I was in junior high school, 8th grade to be exact, and living in Fremont, CA when we had a school field trip to ... you guessed it, Lawrence Livermore Labs.
That would have been around 1990 or thereabouts. And I'll be damned if they didn't give us a tour of a many-laser fuel pellet ignition fusion system that I thought was frigging cool at the time (I swear it was something like 40 or 60 pulsed lasers), though I recall wondering how they were ever going to get it to keep releasing energy in a way that could be sustained.
Apparently, that must have been the earlier version of the current system, which they apparently started work on in 1997 and just completed in 2009.
Just gives you a sense of the absolutely, horrendously glacial pace of fusion research. They have spent at *least* the last 19 years, and in all likelihood more like 30+ years, i.e. the entire career of many scientists and engineers, working on essentially the same technique, that nobody really knows how it would be used to create a sustained fusion reaction that produces net energy.
I find this incredibly sad. Aren't there any better, new ideas in fusion research to invest money and time into for experimental purposes?