Since you are being so specific on unintentional injury deaths from firearms, what is the number of people effectively disabling an attacker to prevent their own bodily harm through the use of a firearm? What is the number of people killed with stolen guns?
There are about 15,000 homicides in the US a year. In cities with populations over 250,000, there are 5-6 cities with over 200 homicides per year. Tourist-adjusted, St. Louis looks the worst by rate at 40.5/100,000 people. That puts your chances of actually defending yourself from such a crime at the noise floor, even if you carry your firearm with you at all times. Reliability of the weapon plays no role in its efficacy in scaring someone away.
In rural communities though, where everybody has a gun loaded and on their person at all times... maybe the math is different. But I don't think math is the problem there.
The removable SD card uses FAT so it can be used on 90% of the computers out there. There are other ones, but that is apparently the hardest one to work around.
The homicide rate in the US is about 5/100,000, so making a whole lot of sweeping assumptions, you would expect to see 9 homicides per year in airports and on airplanes past the security checkpoints. There are about 330 primary airports, so maybe 1,000 checkpoints active on average. That gives each checkpoint a 1% chance of finding a "bad guy" per year.
If on the other hand, you did absolutely no security screening, what would the mortality rate be? Let's just say there were just police officers walking around the airport. Statistically, one plane will go down every ~15 years. Add in metal detectors, and the rate likely is cut in half. Check for boarding passes and you likely drop it in half again. I don't think full body cavity searches is going to provide much in the way of marginal security improvements.
There are different reasons why you don't get paid. Sometimes it is the client themselves, sometimes it is part of their process/accounting/politics. We do work for a few clients that are very slow to pay. We build that into our fees; if their average invoice sits six months we charge them about 15% extra for "financing" under our negotiated price. If you aren't cashflow constrained, sometimes it is actually nice to have slow payments as it provides a longer-term income (assuming the job is profitable factoring in cost of capital).
Other clients we bill in advance on credit cards...
I agree in concept, and I hate the PC movement. At the same time, I have a hard time classifying anything that Fred Phelps says as an informed, insightful, or worthy of constitutional protection.
The reality is they are a bunch of opportunistic lawyers trying to sue people, so Anonymous, have at 'em!!!
Lien threats generally get things paid quickly. Unfortunately, there are several limits on what and when you are allowed to file a lien. You burn bridges... But you get your money.
My suggestion is to warn of a lien if payment in full is not received within 30 days. You have to follow through though.
Gross receipts taxes are easier to levy, but can have unintended consequences. You can operate a company at near-zero profit for a long time in a bad economy with profit based taxes, but when you switch to revenue based, you are forced to cut costs immediately to sustain profit and the ability to pay taxes, or you are out of business. It might make for a healthier climate for the survivors that way, but it will reduce employment.
Quite frankly, the employment pool can't absorb everybody. The people on a two year "vacation" are going to have a harder time finding work, unless they are truly exceptional at what they do. It will be assumed that nobody else wanted to hire them, so why should they... or simply that they are lazy.
I actually took a two year "retirement" in 2000 (no unemployment benefits though), and was lucky to have multiple offers when I returned to the US. I still get jibes for having looked like a hobo for the job I took (and people I still work with). Today, reviewing resumes, someone with 3-5 years of experience and two years off would not likely be considered. (Single employer maybe, but 2-3 jobs in that timeframe and no.)
But that gets back to the Razor vs Razor Blades argument; the true cost is the total cost. 30% Retail market is very reasonable for things sold at retail. You get into a legitimate beef though when you talk about what is essentially a wholesale transaction, or where there is other sales commission responsible for making the actual sale and Apple is just a gatekeeper.
In fairness, the 30% is essentially three roughly equal parts: sales transaction cost, marketing/infrastructure/platform cost, and profit.
In a 10 minute search there were no records of coal power plant deaths, nor were there records of uranium mining deaths. The miners of both coal and uranium have a high rate of lung cancer, but normalizing back to deaths per GWh electrical energy will still heavily favor nuclear. The point remains, there is no perfect source of power, and we are stuck choosing between some bad sources. In the balance, nuclear is clearly no worse than coal. An honest case can even be made for nuclear being only slightly more dangerous than wind power (on a GWh base).
So, are we left with burning wood for heat and light? But what will that do for air quality?!
Back to the OP, from a statistical risk perspective, fast dispatch resources can provide better safety and contingency response at a lower cost than each facility having the resources on-site where they may be damaged in the "event" that needs to be addressed, given the low frequency of events and the high level of resources to address a statistically unlikely event.
Given the consequences of an accident, the safety record of nuclear power is appalling.
Well, we actually have enough time to have real statistics and not fear-mongering. There have been ~4,000 deaths due to nuclear power accidents, with all but 60 being long-term cancers. Maybe Fukishima will prove to cause an additional 2,000 deaths in 20 years, so lets call it 6k.
In the US in the past 100 years there have been over 100k coal mining deaths. China alone had 6k coal mining deaths in 2004! Wind power (based on available records) has actually had more deaths in the past 20 years (80) than direct deaths related to nuclear power. On a per-GWh basis, wind power would be considerably worse than nuclear, for the exact fact that the long-term safety record is well understood.
Nothing is "safe." You prepare for contingencies and understand acceptable losses. The problem right now is that we aren't building newer reactors from the lessons of the old designs and phasing out aging plants.
So, figure $1200 per household. Amortized over 5 years it is $25/month.
The bigger problem is that it would require 250,000 man-years and a whole lot of trenchers, directional boring, and boom trucks to complete according to my napkin. Optimistically you could get 50,000 people up in running in 12 months, but I don't think you could have all the resources needed in less than 10 years. Hand tools would be about 1.2 million man years.
Credit subsidy cost is a reserve established by the U.S. government to cover the risk of estimated shortfalls in loan repayments. It was established by the Federal Credit Reform Act of 1990 (“FCRA”) and represents the net present value of the estimated long-term cost to the U.S. government of the loan guarantee. Credit subsidy cost is primarily influenced by two key variables:
Probability of default; and
The “recovery” after default.
These variables are used to “risk adjust” the borrower’s principal and interest payments to the government, and provide an estimate of payment shortfalls.
Section 1702(b) of Title XVII provides that DOE must receive either an appropriation for the credit subsidy cost of a loan guarantee or, in lieu of an appropriation, a cash payment of such cost directly from the applicant.
So, at least in theory, the loan guarantee program is self-funding, paid for by the loan applicants. The caveat is when the credit subsidy cost comes from a government appropriation; in that case the government is investing a very small percentage of the loan value into the default pool. I'm sure major defaults hit the budget, but I doubt this is anything compared to the guarantees provided for nuclear power.
Wow. You are missing the whole concept of Risk and Return on Investment.
Simple example is a SBA loan for a small company to buy a building for their operations (or other capital investment). The bank would normally require 30% down payment to mitigate risks; the SBA loan basically provides a 40% guarantee so the business only needs to put down 10%. The SBA provides that guarantee to help small businesses grow in ways that would otherwise be impractical at best. In return, the small business (hopefully) can grow, hiring people and stimulating the economy. Risk for the SBA loan is first taken by the business, then the government, and then the lender. SBA loans have interest rates about 0.75% above what a well qualified homeowner could get, rather than the 7-10% that might otherwise be required.
The bank is going to need that 7-10% interest to absorb the risk of a 90% loan, which simply takes money away from the small business and their growth opportunities.
Which again gets to declining or flat salaries in maturing industries. We went from the era of "windows for workgroups" to the Internet in the course of five years; we went from fully siloed departments, systems, and applications to interoperable standards. We got past the betas, past the 1.0s, and on to stable products. We even got GUIs that worked!
I remember the joy of my first Linux install. Joy might not be the right word. Today you can get a VM up and running in no time to try different permutations to see what works best.
No, the hipsters use Dropbox for storage so that their portable device isn't the only place where the file resides. SD cards fail, get lost, and over all just get in the way.
I am pretty sure the sensor package would be different too, but my main point was that the level of security on the commercial vs military versions is (hopefully) quite different.
It is almost always a mistake to do your own payroll. It is a shame, but the ease and cost of using Paychex (or ADP when they know you are shopping) just makes it hard to justify the risks. Sure, it adds a man day of effort every pay period to get transfer data each direction, but for that you don't have to deal with withholding at all.
I had looked into OpenERP when we were making our decision, and it didn't look quite as polished as it does today; they have made some strides in the last couple years. The professional version is cost-competitive with what we bought and looks close to being feature competitive with our industry-specific needs.
Hadn't stumbled across that one in my research before. Our need is more of a project-ERP than a product-ERP, and we do need a bit of an industry-specific solution, but it looks like it is in a good state of development.
Aren't several tankers using these systems to provide advanced warning on Somali pirates? I would be much more curious if it is a military version or a commercial version...
Try and find an enterprise grade accounting/erp system for a 20-200 person company that doesn't rely on Windows. There are some GPL projects, but they are far from the same level of completeness.
We will likely switch from gmail to Exchange (at a mere 30 people) due to limits of Google's systems and the costs to overcome them. You can get about halfway there with Linux for about half the cost.
You can cobble together systems with GPL solutions, but the dollar cost ends up being in-line with MS stuff once you need more than 40 hours to install and configure. Samba, Asterisk, backups, LAMP are all easy to justify going Linux, but I have not had much luck justifying more complex projects going that route.
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Since you are being so specific on unintentional injury deaths from firearms, what is the number of people effectively disabling an attacker to prevent their own bodily harm through the use of a firearm? What is the number of people killed with stolen guns?
There are about 15,000 homicides in the US a year. In cities with populations over 250,000, there are 5-6 cities with over 200 homicides per year. Tourist-adjusted, St. Louis looks the worst by rate at 40.5/100,000 people. That puts your chances of actually defending yourself from such a crime at the noise floor, even if you carry your firearm with you at all times. Reliability of the weapon plays no role in its efficacy in scaring someone away.
In rural communities though, where everybody has a gun loaded and on their person at all times... maybe the math is different. But I don't think math is the problem there.
The removable SD card uses FAT so it can be used on 90% of the computers out there. There are other ones, but that is apparently the hardest one to work around.
The homicide rate in the US is about 5/100,000, so making a whole lot of sweeping assumptions, you would expect to see 9 homicides per year in airports and on airplanes past the security checkpoints. There are about 330 primary airports, so maybe 1,000 checkpoints active on average. That gives each checkpoint a 1% chance of finding a "bad guy" per year.
If on the other hand, you did absolutely no security screening, what would the mortality rate be? Let's just say there were just police officers walking around the airport. Statistically, one plane will go down every ~15 years. Add in metal detectors, and the rate likely is cut in half. Check for boarding passes and you likely drop it in half again. I don't think full body cavity searches is going to provide much in the way of marginal security improvements.
There are different reasons why you don't get paid. Sometimes it is the client themselves, sometimes it is part of their process/accounting/politics. We do work for a few clients that are very slow to pay. We build that into our fees; if their average invoice sits six months we charge them about 15% extra for "financing" under our negotiated price. If you aren't cashflow constrained, sometimes it is actually nice to have slow payments as it provides a longer-term income (assuming the job is profitable factoring in cost of capital).
Other clients we bill in advance on credit cards...
It isn't a religion. It is a way to sue communities that block them to make themselves rich.
I agree in concept, and I hate the PC movement. At the same time, I have a hard time classifying anything that Fred Phelps says as an informed, insightful, or worthy of constitutional protection.
The reality is they are a bunch of opportunistic lawyers trying to sue people, so Anonymous, have at 'em!!!
Lien threats generally get things paid quickly. Unfortunately, there are several limits on what and when you are allowed to file a lien. You burn bridges... But you get your money.
My suggestion is to warn of a lien if payment in full is not received within 30 days. You have to follow through though.
Gross receipts taxes are easier to levy, but can have unintended consequences. You can operate a company at near-zero profit for a long time in a bad economy with profit based taxes, but when you switch to revenue based, you are forced to cut costs immediately to sustain profit and the ability to pay taxes, or you are out of business. It might make for a healthier climate for the survivors that way, but it will reduce employment.
Quite frankly, the employment pool can't absorb everybody. The people on a two year "vacation" are going to have a harder time finding work, unless they are truly exceptional at what they do. It will be assumed that nobody else wanted to hire them, so why should they... or simply that they are lazy.
I actually took a two year "retirement" in 2000 (no unemployment benefits though), and was lucky to have multiple offers when I returned to the US. I still get jibes for having looked like a hobo for the job I took (and people I still work with). Today, reviewing resumes, someone with 3-5 years of experience and two years off would not likely be considered. (Single employer maybe, but 2-3 jobs in that timeframe and no.)
But that gets back to the Razor vs Razor Blades argument; the true cost is the total cost. 30% Retail market is very reasonable for things sold at retail. You get into a legitimate beef though when you talk about what is essentially a wholesale transaction, or where there is other sales commission responsible for making the actual sale and Apple is just a gatekeeper.
In fairness, the 30% is essentially three roughly equal parts: sales transaction cost, marketing/infrastructure/platform cost, and profit.
More useful than opening Zillow or RedFin, getting a GPS fix, and immediately having all the MLS data?! Not quite sure how, but to each his own.
So then only the HFT companies will compete in the non-exchange trades. That, or someone desperate to buy or sell at an unfavorable price.
In a 10 minute search there were no records of coal power plant deaths, nor were there records of uranium mining deaths. The miners of both coal and uranium have a high rate of lung cancer, but normalizing back to deaths per GWh electrical energy will still heavily favor nuclear. The point remains, there is no perfect source of power, and we are stuck choosing between some bad sources. In the balance, nuclear is clearly no worse than coal. An honest case can even be made for nuclear being only slightly more dangerous than wind power (on a GWh base).
So, are we left with burning wood for heat and light? But what will that do for air quality?!
Back to the OP, from a statistical risk perspective, fast dispatch resources can provide better safety and contingency response at a lower cost than each facility having the resources on-site where they may be damaged in the "event" that needs to be addressed, given the low frequency of events and the high level of resources to address a statistically unlikely event.
Well, we actually have enough time to have real statistics and not fear-mongering. There have been ~4,000 deaths due to nuclear power accidents, with all but 60 being long-term cancers. Maybe Fukishima will prove to cause an additional 2,000 deaths in 20 years, so lets call it 6k.
In the US in the past 100 years there have been over 100k coal mining deaths. China alone had 6k coal mining deaths in 2004! Wind power (based on available records) has actually had more deaths in the past 20 years (80) than direct deaths related to nuclear power. On a per-GWh basis, wind power would be considerably worse than nuclear, for the exact fact that the long-term safety record is well understood.
Nothing is "safe." You prepare for contingencies and understand acceptable losses. The problem right now is that we aren't building newer reactors from the lessons of the old designs and phasing out aging plants.
So, figure $1200 per household. Amortized over 5 years it is $25/month.
The bigger problem is that it would require 250,000 man-years and a whole lot of trenchers, directional boring, and boom trucks to complete according to my napkin. Optimistically you could get 50,000 people up in running in 12 months, but I don't think you could have all the resources needed in less than 10 years. Hand tools would be about 1.2 million man years.
From DOE's loan program page:
So, at least in theory, the loan guarantee program is self-funding, paid for by the loan applicants. The caveat is when the credit subsidy cost comes from a government appropriation; in that case the government is investing a very small percentage of the loan value into the default pool. I'm sure major defaults hit the budget, but I doubt this is anything compared to the guarantees provided for nuclear power.
Wow. You are missing the whole concept of Risk and Return on Investment.
Simple example is a SBA loan for a small company to buy a building for their operations (or other capital investment). The bank would normally require 30% down payment to mitigate risks; the SBA loan basically provides a 40% guarantee so the business only needs to put down 10%. The SBA provides that guarantee to help small businesses grow in ways that would otherwise be impractical at best. In return, the small business (hopefully) can grow, hiring people and stimulating the economy. Risk for the SBA loan is first taken by the business, then the government, and then the lender. SBA loans have interest rates about 0.75% above what a well qualified homeowner could get, rather than the 7-10% that might otherwise be required.
The bank is going to need that 7-10% interest to absorb the risk of a 90% loan, which simply takes money away from the small business and their growth opportunities.
Which again gets to declining or flat salaries in maturing industries. We went from the era of "windows for workgroups" to the Internet in the course of five years; we went from fully siloed departments, systems, and applications to interoperable standards. We got past the betas, past the 1.0s, and on to stable products. We even got GUIs that worked!
I remember the joy of my first Linux install. Joy might not be the right word. Today you can get a VM up and running in no time to try different permutations to see what works best.
No, the hipsters use Dropbox for storage so that their portable device isn't the only place where the file resides. SD cards fail, get lost, and over all just get in the way.
I am pretty sure the sensor package would be different too, but my main point was that the level of security on the commercial vs military versions is (hopefully) quite different.
It is almost always a mistake to do your own payroll. It is a shame, but the ease and cost of using Paychex (or ADP when they know you are shopping) just makes it hard to justify the risks. Sure, it adds a man day of effort every pay period to get transfer data each direction, but for that you don't have to deal with withholding at all.
I had looked into OpenERP when we were making our decision, and it didn't look quite as polished as it does today; they have made some strides in the last couple years. The professional version is cost-competitive with what we bought and looks close to being feature competitive with our industry-specific needs.
Hadn't stumbled across that one in my research before. Our need is more of a project-ERP than a product-ERP, and we do need a bit of an industry-specific solution, but it looks like it is in a good state of development.
Aren't several tankers using these systems to provide advanced warning on Somali pirates? I would be much more curious if it is a military version or a commercial version...
Try and find an enterprise grade accounting/erp system for a 20-200 person company that doesn't rely on Windows. There are some GPL projects, but they are far from the same level of completeness.
We will likely switch from gmail to Exchange (at a mere 30 people) due to limits of Google's systems and the costs to overcome them. You can get about halfway there with Linux for about half the cost.
You can cobble together systems with GPL solutions, but the dollar cost ends up being in-line with MS stuff once you need more than 40 hours to install and configure. Samba, Asterisk, backups, LAMP are all easy to justify going Linux, but I have not had much luck justifying more complex projects going that route.