My Note 8 cost as much as an iPhone. I like being able to actually use a pen for sketching, annotating PDFs, and scrolling around an RDP session (makes clicking small buttons easier, given my largish fingers). I also like being able to load up 50 GB of music from my laptop, straight to a microSD card - and then pop that card into the phone. Fast - really fast - transfer of a ton of music. Too bad iPhones don't allow either option...
About an 11:1 ratio of Windows to OSX. It's not like people have NOT heard of OSX or Macs, they have exposure. It's just that so much works well on Windows. Yes, yes - heretic and all - but try to do advanced engineering on a Mac and NOT run Bootcamp or parallels. 3D parametric CAD, schematic capture/PCB layout, embedded dev kits for DSPs - all run on Windows, not OSX.
How about we use a map that shows where people live? For example, half the US population lives in the blue counties identified on this map. Now look at how a lot of the population lives in those counties. For HALF the people in the US, high-priced condos and townhomes are the norm. There is a LOT of empty land where 1+ acre lots are normal, but very few people actually live there. HALF the population lives in those few counties. For vast swaths of people - that is the norm.
OK, you made a claim and failed to cite any data. You claimed people are going more - anything to back that up? As far as "Romneycare" - I don't care. The ACA was 100% written and passed by the Democrats - name a SINGLE GOP member that supported it. And remember it was forced though with a filibuster-proof majority. You cannot spread the blame for it....
Yeah. Costs increased because people who long delayed treatment for existing conditions could finally SEE A DOCTOR at an affordable price.
Actual facts say otherwise. People are going to the doctor LESS.
As far as what you pay, I agree, it's too much. There should have been a public option charging people say 8% of their income (plus 2% per child covered or something) for an acceptable level of insurance, capped at a certain amount.
Simple to pay for and calculate cost, portable between jobs within the state of California, gets employers out of the benefits-admin business, and cuts out much of the profit-taking middlemen. But noooo, the private insurers wouldn't stand for being relegated to second-class providers of "Medigap."
Blame the insurance lobby and low-information voters for not having a public option like 90% of developed places have.
And blame President Obama and the Democratic leadership for forcing the ACA on us, which forces purchase of a product from a private corporation and fines you if you choose not to buy. It's a tax, through and through - but one that goes predominantly straight to corporations.
That is reality. There are ~100 million people living in Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou. Hong Kong, Beijing. Add in other big cities in Asia (Tokyo, Seoul, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, etc.) and you'll probably find close to 300 million people living with those kinds of realities. Life is not at all like you portray, for a large segment of the population. Even NYC, LA, and SF have that same issue - and that's "only" 50 million people (1/6th of the US). A lot of people buy property for speculative reasons, rent out to cover some of the costs - then sell when they figure the return is big enough.
Santa Monica, San Francisco, downtown Seattle, downtown LA, I could go on and on. Lots of places have a high demand for multi-million dollar condos and townhouses. For people who do NOT have vacation homes in the Hamptons (the person I know who owns a flat in Chelsea in Manhattan doesn't have a vacation home). High density is pretty common for a vast swath of the US, and in those areas if you DO have a standalone home it is often like those in LA or SF or Miami - effectively a zero-lot-line, with at most 3-4 feet between homes. Essentially shared space anyway (check a lot of the places in Boston, SF, DC, Chicago - standalone buildings with 2" of space between them).
No, see it's GOOD to regulate all things in your life! Government can do no bad, only good! Taking from some (like you, like me) to give to others (like corporations) is a good thing! You just don't understand!
And of course the ACA was a handout to the insurance companies. You are compelled under threat of penalties to give money to a private corporation, whether you want to or not. If you choose not to, then the Government would forcibly take the money from you and hand it over. You were forced to buy a product whether you intended to use it or not. Yes, people talk about car insurance - but you do not need to own or drive a car. If you choose to not purchase or use health insurance (for whatever reason) - you have to pay for it no matter what.
As far as your friend goes, here's another anecdote. I was paying $112 per month for a catastrophic plan, back in 2008. 40-something, fair health. I have a $12,000 HSA I had built up - and my insurance plan was $10,000 deductible (I cover everything up to that point) and 100% coverage above that level. However, the ACA essentially banned that plan, and the next lowest cost I could get was $455 per month. With a $6500 deductible. Now? Well, I used to have Blue Cross of CA - but they no longer offer plans to self-employed people, so I had to switch to Blue Shield and my premiums are now at $590 per month. Again, for something I do not use because I am in good health. Would love to have kept the catastrophic plan ("If you like your plan you can keep it") but since it was deemed unacceptable, I have paid about $30,000 more in insurance costs than I should have, over the last 8 years...
Fully agree. It's why I also believe that we should NOT have a national "minimum wage", nor nationalized health care. Diversity of the nation pretty much prevents us from having a system that will service everyone efficiently. We can have a wide disparity in costs/users just within a 5 hour drive. Back to the concept of "50 experiments running in parallel" would probably suit our nation much better.
An interesting take on Southern California's school districts. Note that Imperial United, with a $177K average house value and ~24 students per teach outperforms Beverly Hills Unified with $1,000,000+ average house value and 17 students per teacher.
Speculation. Check out Shanghai, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and to a lesser extent Bangkok and Singapore. Even Santa Monica suffers from it today (as does a portion of San Francisco). People buy properties based upon speculation that the value will grow at 10-15% per year (or more), and thus consider it an investment. They will rent just to defray some of the costs and keep insurance rates down - better to lose a little money than a lot of money. But the thinking is, if you can afford to swing the mortgage, and are looking for a short-term (2-5 year) ownership to gain equity, then buy the most you can afford, and rent it out for whatever you can get, even if it doesn't cover costs.
Go to Shanghai. Apartments sell for 3MM RMB, and with a 40% down payment (required), you end up with a 40,000 RMB/month mortgage. Those apartments typically rent out for 12,000 to 15,000 RMB per month. Most of this is driven by speculation, where the purchaser hopes that the prices keep skyrocketing at 8-10% per year, so they can sell in a few years and walk out with a million RMB. It is an interesting dynamic - more supply than renters, but more demand than supply for buyers.
Apparently you've never been to Manhattan, and seen the condos and townhomes of the well-to-do... For example, 15 Central Park West has a starting price around $8 million.
Government regulation and standards allow for prosperity.
However, Government largesse and mandatory wealth redistribution (not just from Government to individuals, but often from individual to corporation, like the Obamacare mandate) does not.
You know, we spend more on education than just about any other country. There is always a hue-and-cry for single-payer medicine to control costs, but we have, essentially, single-payer education, and costs are high - and the results aren't very promising. Maybe those poor school results aren't a result of "gutted budgets" (even though they tend to be the highest in the world), but a bankrupt mentality of how to educate, and what forms the basis of a good education?
Hi there, I live just South of Ventura, where the Thomas fire started, and we get to see the brown smoke to the North. So far, about 800 homes have burned. That's not a big number at all, given the affected areas (NW Ventura County/SW Santa Barbara County) have somewhere around 150,000 homes. And I just watched a new development of townhomes, about 80 units, go up within 6 months. That is just one company. It'll take probably 1 year at most to replace those homes lost. Yes, the fire is huge and yes it is terrible, but 99% of the area it's burned is basically vacant State land.
It works for California... After all, didn't we just have an article here at/. about cell phones and cancer and California, based upon wishful thinking/community standards?
Bitcoin mining is estimated toconsume around 34 TWh of power. Sort this list by TWh consumption and you'll find that BTC mining consumes more power than 75% of all the nations on the face of the Earth. More power than places like Denmark, Ireland, Serbia, Myanmar. It's not sustainable - and I'm surprised so many strong climate-change proponents are accepting of this clear waste of energy (note that most of those countries are poor, and get a majority of their power from coal and other fossil fuels).
Actually, the bigger question is, how much of that BTC will you be willing to part with in order to cash out? Remember, the system is massively overloaded right now to process transactions, and you have to pay quite a bit to get "priority" processing. When the bubble pops, and everyone wants to cash out - what will be the price to process? How much would you be willing to lose in order to get your transaction processed now, not 3 days from now (when the price could be 3 times lower)?
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My Note 8 cost as much as an iPhone. I like being able to actually use a pen for sketching, annotating PDFs, and scrolling around an RDP session (makes clicking small buttons easier, given my largish fingers). I also like being able to load up 50 GB of music from my laptop, straight to a microSD card - and then pop that card into the phone. Fast - really fast - transfer of a ton of music. Too bad iPhones don't allow either option...
About an 11:1 ratio of Windows to OSX. It's not like people have NOT heard of OSX or Macs, they have exposure. It's just that so much works well on Windows. Yes, yes - heretic and all - but try to do advanced engineering on a Mac and NOT run Bootcamp or parallels. 3D parametric CAD, schematic capture/PCB layout, embedded dev kits for DSPs - all run on Windows, not OSX.
How about we use a map that shows where people live? For example, half the US population lives in the blue counties identified on this map. Now look at how a lot of the population lives in those counties. For HALF the people in the US, high-priced condos and townhomes are the norm. There is a LOT of empty land where 1+ acre lots are normal, but very few people actually live there. HALF the population lives in those few counties. For vast swaths of people - that is the norm.
OK, you made a claim and failed to cite any data. You claimed people are going more - anything to back that up? As far as "Romneycare" - I don't care. The ACA was 100% written and passed by the Democrats - name a SINGLE GOP member that supported it. And remember it was forced though with a filibuster-proof majority. You cannot spread the blame for it....
Yeah. Costs increased because people who long delayed treatment for existing conditions could finally SEE A DOCTOR at an affordable price.
Actual facts say otherwise. People are going to the doctor LESS.
As far as what you pay, I agree, it's too much. There should have been a public option charging people say 8% of their income (plus 2% per child covered or something) for an acceptable level of insurance, capped at a certain amount.
Simple to pay for and calculate cost, portable between jobs within the state of California, gets employers out of the benefits-admin business, and cuts out much of the profit-taking middlemen. But noooo, the private insurers wouldn't stand for being relegated to second-class providers of "Medigap."
Blame the insurance lobby and low-information voters for not having a public option like 90% of developed places have.
And blame President Obama and the Democratic leadership for forcing the ACA on us, which forces purchase of a product from a private corporation and fines you if you choose not to buy. It's a tax, through and through - but one that goes predominantly straight to corporations.
That is reality. There are ~100 million people living in Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou. Hong Kong, Beijing. Add in other big cities in Asia (Tokyo, Seoul, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, etc.) and you'll probably find close to 300 million people living with those kinds of realities. Life is not at all like you portray, for a large segment of the population. Even NYC, LA, and SF have that same issue - and that's "only" 50 million people (1/6th of the US). A lot of people buy property for speculative reasons, rent out to cover some of the costs - then sell when they figure the return is big enough.
Santa Monica, San Francisco, downtown Seattle, downtown LA, I could go on and on. Lots of places have a high demand for multi-million dollar condos and townhouses. For people who do NOT have vacation homes in the Hamptons (the person I know who owns a flat in Chelsea in Manhattan doesn't have a vacation home). High density is pretty common for a vast swath of the US, and in those areas if you DO have a standalone home it is often like those in LA or SF or Miami - effectively a zero-lot-line, with at most 3-4 feet between homes. Essentially shared space anyway (check a lot of the places in Boston, SF, DC, Chicago - standalone buildings with 2" of space between them).
No, see it's GOOD to regulate all things in your life! Government can do no bad, only good! Taking from some (like you, like me) to give to others (like corporations) is a good thing! You just don't understand!
/sarc
Costs seem to be increasing from ~7% of income to 10.1% of income, after the ACA passed.
And of course the ACA was a handout to the insurance companies. You are compelled under threat of penalties to give money to a private corporation, whether you want to or not. If you choose not to, then the Government would forcibly take the money from you and hand it over. You were forced to buy a product whether you intended to use it or not. Yes, people talk about car insurance - but you do not need to own or drive a car. If you choose to not purchase or use health insurance (for whatever reason) - you have to pay for it no matter what.
As far as your friend goes, here's another anecdote. I was paying $112 per month for a catastrophic plan, back in 2008. 40-something, fair health. I have a $12,000 HSA I had built up - and my insurance plan was $10,000 deductible (I cover everything up to that point) and 100% coverage above that level. However, the ACA essentially banned that plan, and the next lowest cost I could get was $455 per month. With a $6500 deductible. Now? Well, I used to have Blue Cross of CA - but they no longer offer plans to self-employed people, so I had to switch to Blue Shield and my premiums are now at $590 per month. Again, for something I do not use because I am in good health. Would love to have kept the catastrophic plan ("If you like your plan you can keep it") but since it was deemed unacceptable, I have paid about $30,000 more in insurance costs than I should have, over the last 8 years...
Fully agree. It's why I also believe that we should NOT have a national "minimum wage", nor nationalized health care. Diversity of the nation pretty much prevents us from having a system that will service everyone efficiently. We can have a wide disparity in costs/users just within a 5 hour drive. Back to the concept of "50 experiments running in parallel" would probably suit our nation much better.
An interesting take on Southern California's school districts. Note that Imperial United, with a $177K average house value and ~24 students per teach outperforms Beverly Hills Unified with $1,000,000+ average house value and 17 students per teacher.
Speculation. Check out Shanghai, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and to a lesser extent Bangkok and Singapore. Even Santa Monica suffers from it today (as does a portion of San Francisco). People buy properties based upon speculation that the value will grow at 10-15% per year (or more), and thus consider it an investment. They will rent just to defray some of the costs and keep insurance rates down - better to lose a little money than a lot of money. But the thinking is, if you can afford to swing the mortgage, and are looking for a short-term (2-5 year) ownership to gain equity, then buy the most you can afford, and rent it out for whatever you can get, even if it doesn't cover costs.
Go to Shanghai. Apartments sell for 3MM RMB, and with a 40% down payment (required), you end up with a 40,000 RMB/month mortgage. Those apartments typically rent out for 12,000 to 15,000 RMB per month. Most of this is driven by speculation, where the purchaser hopes that the prices keep skyrocketing at 8-10% per year, so they can sell in a few years and walk out with a million RMB. It is an interesting dynamic - more supply than renters, but more demand than supply for buyers.
You have a bag and money? Look at the rich snob...
Apparently you've never been to Manhattan, and seen the condos and townhomes of the well-to-do... For example, 15 Central Park West has a starting price around $8 million.
It's why it's smart to pay a 5-8% commission to a rental management company, and portray yourself as another dissatisfied renter...
Government regulation and standards allow for prosperity.
However, Government largesse and mandatory wealth redistribution (not just from Government to individuals, but often from individual to corporation, like the Obamacare mandate) does not.
You know, we spend more on education than just about any other country. There is always a hue-and-cry for single-payer medicine to control costs, but we have, essentially, single-payer education, and costs are high - and the results aren't very promising. Maybe those poor school results aren't a result of "gutted budgets" (even though they tend to be the highest in the world), but a bankrupt mentality of how to educate, and what forms the basis of a good education?
Someone should look at a map and realize just how BIG Texas really is. Dallas doesn't get too much in the way of hurricane activity...
No, not just illegals. Hollywood hyped up California as a magical utopia where ... unicorns fart glitter
See, that's the problem. It's about education. Not enough people realize that unicorn farts twinkle, they don't fart "glitter".
Hi there, I live just South of Ventura, where the Thomas fire started, and we get to see the brown smoke to the North. So far, about 800 homes have burned. That's not a big number at all, given the affected areas (NW Ventura County/SW Santa Barbara County) have somewhere around 150,000 homes. And I just watched a new development of townhomes, about 80 units, go up within 6 months. That is just one company. It'll take probably 1 year at most to replace those homes lost. Yes, the fire is huge and yes it is terrible, but 99% of the area it's burned is basically vacant State land.
You obviously never saw the movie Falling Down...
It's good enough for California to tell you to keep cellphones away from your bed because "there are concerns among some public health professionals and members of the public regarding long-term, high use exposure to the energy emitted by cell phones". No data, just a feeling and irrational fear.
It works for California... After all, didn't we just have an article here at /. about cell phones and cancer and California, based upon wishful thinking/community standards?
Bitcoin mining is estimated toconsume around 34 TWh of power. Sort this list by TWh consumption and you'll find that BTC mining consumes more power than 75% of all the nations on the face of the Earth. More power than places like Denmark, Ireland, Serbia, Myanmar. It's not sustainable - and I'm surprised so many strong climate-change proponents are accepting of this clear waste of energy (note that most of those countries are poor, and get a majority of their power from coal and other fossil fuels).
Actually, the bigger question is, how much of that BTC will you be willing to part with in order to cash out? Remember, the system is massively overloaded right now to process transactions, and you have to pay quite a bit to get "priority" processing. When the bubble pops, and everyone wants to cash out - what will be the price to process? How much would you be willing to lose in order to get your transaction processed now, not 3 days from now (when the price could be 3 times lower)?