So far you have not file any large claim [*], and so you really don't know they would not cancel your policy or refuse to pay for care. You might be willing to take huge risks, but there is no way to limit the loss of the bets going wrong for large number of people to just themselves. We are the ones left to pick up the pieces when things blow up on the faces of such people. So we have decided to force you pay for reasonable coverage.
[*] One thing I must concede is that, you are not taking the attitude of "heck, no one can check, so let me just say I filed large claims and they paid". You have that integrity, I appreciate that. People with such levels of ethical standards would not reject reasonable proposals. I really believe if you listen to the arguments from the people who disagree with you, people with better communication skills than I have, you might be persuaded to reconsider your positions.
You are being subsidized by the women in your pool. Contraceptives and breast cancer screenings are cheap compared to the cost of treating hyper tension and heart attacks are typical male diseases quite rare among women, especially under 50. If you split the under 50 age group into males and females, males will pay a higher rate. Women can get hyper tension and heart attacks but it is much less compared to the males. Have you wondered why female life insurance rates are lower that of males?
Well, I hack c++ for a living in my day job, and don't have the time to hack out apps. Wish I have the time to hack out a code to let users launch an app, that will silently log into facebook, and then browse all the high brow, high income indicating sites in the background, without ever displaying anything on screen. It should also have random delays, and estimated time to read a page to create proper dwell times on pages. Or write a random web crawling app whose main job is to cover so much of the internet there is no effective pattern.
If enough users launch it, it will completely mess up all these statistical correlations and eventually provide anonymity by increasing the noise.
Selling insurance across state lines is a good idea, but we should make sure it does not trigger a race to the bottom, companies shopping for lax enforcers.
Look at credit card companies, why are they all headquartered in Delaware? Why are they charging 40$ late fees and two cycle finance charges? Before the federal truth in lending and disclosure laws were enacted, how much they got away with? Basically Delaware is more interested in protecting their credit card company jobs rather than protecting your rights as a credit card consumer. If you really want to hear horror stories and abuse bordering in illegality, listen to the merchants. The Visa Mastercard duopoly is making the merchants pay the same commission whether the money is coming out of checking/saving accounts (debit cards) or via totally unsecured loans advanced by the credit card companies. This is where you would be with insurance across state lines without a standard comparable package and federal minimum standards. Now that they are there, thanks to ACA, there is no need to prohibit it. In fact federal government can set up a health insurance regulator and companies coming under that agency's jurisdiction should be able to sell in all fifty states.
Tort reform is unconnected to ACA. There is no reason to do tort reform and ACA.
Yes, Bartles, you are also taking a huge risk because the old insurance company could drop you anytime. And most likely, when they do drop you, you would have pre existing conditions at that point and found it impossible to get coverage at any price. Of course you were free to take such risk.
That is the problem talking about insurance based on anecdotes. Insurance is statistics, actuaries and collections. People like you who are willing to take the risk rake up bills that are denied by insurance companies. And half the people who file for bankruptcy due to medical costs, have had health insurance. Except the coverage was inadequate or was not renewed. And who picked up those costs my friend? It is us, who were in other plans, our premium went up because of people who were taking risks far beyond reasonable levels.
In the end, it would have been nice, if we could come up with a system that would saddle all costs of your bet going bad to you. But we don't have such a system. It would be nice, if the free market supporting Republicans came up with a system that would allow people to take such risks, and face the consequences when their bets go bad. But there is no political appetite for it. Yes, it is true, a large number of Republicans shouted "YES" when asked "should people without health insurance die if they get sick?" in the 2012 Republican primaries. But they are such a microscopic minority of even the Republican party. It is far easier to let the other guy go on stage and criticize the action.
Yes, Americans used to be very self reliant and eschew public assistance and it was considered to be a taboo to take in government assistance.
You see, for the last 30 years both Republicans with ample aiding and abetting from the Democrats, have systematically transferred income and wealth from people who spend 90% to 100% of their income to people who save/invest 90% to 99% of their income.
The result is too much of capital, and people have been cutting back on consumption. The "fix" we have been pushing for the last 30 years is to reduce the interest rate. People facing loss of income (after adjusting for inflation) made up for the loss by borrowing. But eventually that ran out of steam as debt service load increased and people maxed out their borrowing ability. The low interest rate also allowed corporations to borrow cheaply and distort the market leading bubble after bubble. Now we have capital markets sloshing around with 2 trillion dollars of excess cash they don't know what to do with. Now these jokers are wondering why we are on the verge of deflation, why there is no improvement in economic activity.
We need to realize the rich people are NOT the job creators. Calling them job creators is as idiotic as calling the hamburgers hunger creators. It is because of the hunger of the people the hamburger gets created. Hunger is the cause, and the hamburger is the effect. It is the need for goods and services, the consumption by ordinary people, that creates jobs. Need is the cause, jobs are the effect. If you systematically drain their income, systematically tax physical labor income at twice the rate of investment income, you are distorting the fundamentals of the economy.
We have to tax the investment income at the same rate as earned income, spend the tax dollars within USA, realize every dollar spent by the government is a dollar earned by someone, make sure these expenditures end up in the pockets of people who would spend the money, not put it back in treasury bonds, and we would revitalize this country and this economy. We have to reserve a well deserved place for trickle-down-economics and other such failed economic policies right next to Communism in the garbage dump of history.
In hindsight, the biggest mistake Obama did was not doing the subsidy eligibility work before Oct 1. They could have rolled out the subsidy, income verification and identify verification etc way before Oct 1. They only thing that has to wait for Oct 1 was the actual plans, their prices and their provider directory. If they had done that they Oct 1 will simply be a window shopping comparison site. With eligibility certificate in hand, they would not be affected by the sticker shock. So the web site would have played its original role: be a simple window shopping and referral service. Subsidy and eligibility would have been a different separate part, with longer baking in period and testing period. They screwed by not doing that.
This also would have given a lot of supporters with subsidy eligibility certificate in hand, willing to contact their senators and representatives asking them to support ACA. This is a grave and stupid political mistake by the Democrats. And they are paying the price for it.
But in the long run, people already having medical coverage through employer or through medicare would not change their vote because of ACA. Democrats would continue to support it, probably bemoaning not implementing single payer or public option. Republicans won't gain too many votes from that group. But from the 40 million people without health care, people eligible for medicare and people below 400% of poverty level (that is nearly 90K AGI for a family of four) eligible for subsidies, there is going to be solid vote gain for Democrats. And most of it will happen in solidly red states because they have the largest percentage of poor people.
No matter how flawed the law is, no matter how expensive it is going to be, no matter how many fumbles the administration makes, there is this huge hunger for healthcare by a very large section of America. Mostly poor, mostly concentrated on the Red states. Democrats are dangling this carrot in front of them. Republicans are squarely between this stampeding crowd and the carrot they are chasing.
But don't despair, Democrats fumbled by not ramming down single payer or medicare for all, that would have been much simpler to implement. You are going to see the Republicans threading the needle to switch their stand from "repeal" to "fix it". More and more employers are going to follow the lead of Walgreens and Sears. Give a fixed sum of money to their employees and get out of managing a group plan, as Walgreens and Sears have announced already. You will be shopping in the exchange and demanding ACA to be expanded in the coming years my friend. Churches are going to discover they could, for ridiculously small donations from their wealthier congregants, pay the premium for the poorer congregants and "lock" them into their church instead of the competing church. Fundamentally Christianity is socialistic in its ideals. It is an historic anomaly that Church is aligned with the capitalists and not marxists. It will get corrected eventually. Hospitals and providers are going to lobby their state governments to get their hands on the federal money by expanding medicare.
It is going to be very difficult for the Republicans to stand on the side lines and praying for the failure of the program. It ain't gonna happen.
Despite all the glitches, and blotched roll out, persistent technical difficulties, constant negative news from every source, there is still fundamental support for ACA. "Keep it or Expand it" even more people out number the "cut back or repeal" people.
The root cause of the problem is that Republicans dominate very small states with very large percentage of poor people. For example South Carolina had about 150K people already eligible for medicaid but were unaware of it. Even though the Republicans refused to expand medicare, the medicare rolls are expected to swell by 150K, because they are just finding out that they are actually eligible, and if they don't enroll for free healthcare, they would end up paying a fine! There are another 350K people who would know that they are within 400% of the poverty level, eligible for subsidies, and the Governor refused to give them access to that money. The hospitals and providers are going to lose about a billion dollars of federal money. Romney won that state by a margin of 2.2%. NC has 4.7 million registered voters, Romney's margin in raw votes is just 100K. If the potential loss of medical coverage or the possibility of getting subsidy impels a fraction of this 500K who are not already voting Democrat to register to vote, or actually show up to vote or switch from R to D, that would be disastrous to the Republicans.
If a dilettante like me crunches numbers like this, the politicians have at least semi or deci Nate Silvers in their pay roll. They know what is coming down the pike. Sure you could decry it as a simple vote getting ploy by the Democrats. And you could rail about the unfunded expansion and the effect it is going to have in the deficits etc etc. You could shout till cow comes home, "if people vote themselves benefits without worrying about the costs, Democracy will die". But if Republicans do not find a way to pacify that section of the population, none of these intellectual arguments are going to sway the people who are sick and tired of being sick and tired.
Drop in the bucket. Especially compared to the Iraq invasion, Afghan war, Medicare Part D, farm subsidies to millionaire farmers, bank bailout... At least here some 40 million Americans have a chance to get some healthcare. Where are those anti-abortion people who keep saying, " if it saves one child, one life it is worth it.."?
My only regret is, if we are going to face this level of intransigence and non-coopeation, we Dems should have rammed down a single payer or public option instead of this Republican plan of questionable constitutionality.
The healthcare.gov website is being maligned more than it deserves to be. Buying healthcare is not going to be as easy as buying iTunes, or even booking hotels. Further it did not have the option of growing slowly with extensive beta period. How many years Gmail was in beta, don't we remember? Add to it the complexities of providing subsidy, that requires income verification, that requires... And the majority of the users it targets are from the demographic that is least likely to be familiar with internet and least likely to be educated.
We don't have to excuse them, we can demand they anticipate these things and provide for it. They seems to have an idea of these issues, with their plans to create a cadre of "navigators" to help people with internet access and web site help. But the plan and law was heavily politicized, 36 states refused to set up their own exchanges and dumped all of them on the federal exchange. Millions of people who would have gone to medicaid are dumped into exchanges because they refused to expand medicaid.
No doubt there were self inflicted wounds. Politicians scared of people getting sticker shock, insisted on disabling the window shop and see full price option at roll out, That was the root cause of disaster. The first thing the "tech surge" did was to enable window shopping. It was enabled as early as Oct 15, I tested it then, They could not have done it that soon if it was fresh code. Window shopping was the original code, They just disabled the meddling by the politicians and went on the original code path.
Still they are doing it in the right order. Get people to commit to a plan before the dead line. Errors on the back end can be sorted out when they actually file claims,
Indian cities are teeming with cars, schooters, motorcycles now after the economic expansion. Back in my days public transport was the only option for some 90% of the city dwellers, even for such a large city like Bombay. It has (had) some 1000 or so bus routes , two huge train systems To give you an idea of the size of the operation, some five to eight people get run over by the trains and die everyday and it does not even make it to news.
I know people who know this system like the back of their hands. Would say things like, "I can take bus XYZ, get out when the bus stops at the signal at MG Road, run through the alleyway and catch bus ABC to Kurla. I can get there faster in the bus than those who ride the train". They seem to have a complete intersection graph of all the busses that ply any part of their commute. They solve a multiple traveling salesmen problem in an abstract space designated by bus routes, the intersection graph and time cost. The drivers have maps and a ready way to visualize their routes. These commuters operate in abstract space. It is probably why this urban planning institute does not even know the metrics by which one can measure the commuter's mind space.
We need more such research. We might find that people who cook their own meals know more about the cooking process (boiling vs baking vs frying) and are more likely to include ingredients of the dishes they consume than the passive people who just order off the menu.
Heck, we might even find out that Fix-it-yourselfers know more about plumbing, wiring, door knobs etc and tend to name the tools to be used compared to people who just hire handymen.
There is even a possibility home schooling parents know in detail the lessons, the syllabus, how long it takes to cover a unit etc and even name the actual lessons to be taught compared to people who simply send their children to school.
Sorry buddy. I realized you were talking about a full battery vehicle just as I hit the submit button. Should have posted a follow up retracting my statement. Sorry.
Electric cars have super long durability. Battery is designed to be swapped. Electric motors run for decades, sometime continuously, without servicing. Make it of a non rusting material, keep swapping out the batteries, these cars can last for millions of miles. The electric traction motors of locomotives go for decades without even being opened and rewound.
The first car I owned was a 1986 Nissan Pulsar. Those days retractable headlights were much in vogue. Toyota Celica, Mazda Miata and some of these Nissans had them. There was a switch to disable the retraction and leave it permanently up. I used that to leave it up all the time based on a simple logic. "This car is old, and this damned retraction thingie is going to fail someday. When it does, I want it fail with the lights up not lights down". My logic was impeccable and all the PIGS (poor indian grad students) left their headlights up if they had retractable head lights.
I wonder if Tesla has a switch to leave its door handles out.
Well, we had a good run. 99% of the computing needs of 99% of the people can be met by the existing chips electronics. For most people network and bandwidth limits their ability to do things, not raw computing power or memory. So Moore's observation (it ain't no law) running out of steam is no big deal. Of course the tech companies need to transition from selling shiny new things every two years to a more sedate pace of growth.
So why wouldn't the So Cal companies pack up and move to Alabama or Mississippi with low taxes and unabridged second amendment rights and FREEDOM? Oh, yes, taxes are low but the quality of the work force is lower. All in all SoCal companies would rather pay high taxes and high salaries than move to these low tax states.
It really sucks when the politicians sell you "cut taxes, cut services, make the government smaller, unshackle the job creators, prosperity will follow, it has to, it is supply side, rising tide yada yada yada". You believe them and turn around and see only old scoots in riding medicare provided scooters, living on Federal flood insurance properties, carrying huge placards saying, "Get the Government off my medicare" "Get a brain Morans!". And all the high paying jobs are created in high tax places like Mass, CA and NY!
It bothers me people easily cast aside traditions and commonly accepted norms and blithely and almost nonchalantly use new yardsticks. There is a 3000 year old tradition to describe un-powered floating tubs by saying how many cubits long, how many cubits wide and how many cubits tall these tubs are.
Well, at least they could have used the next best length unit, football fields. But, no, they would not use something so familiar to us and readily imaginable by all of us as the lengths football fields. True, I concede, using how many skyscrapers it would dwarf once you image it standing on its end or how big a building it could enclose in its shell, etc would somewhat ameliorate the use of such abstruse exotic and non standard units as meters.
There is some historical precedence for this this thing. One boss caught the employee using company electricity for personal purposes, and the employee explained that he had his friend fax in a wad of electricity. Oh, yeah, here is the citation for you.
Slashdot Mirror
[*] One thing I must concede is that, you are not taking the attitude of "heck, no one can check, so let me just say I filed large claims and they paid". You have that integrity, I appreciate that. People with such levels of ethical standards would not reject reasonable proposals. I really believe if you listen to the arguments from the people who disagree with you, people with better communication skills than I have, you might be persuaded to reconsider your positions.
You are being subsidized by the women in your pool. Contraceptives and breast cancer screenings are cheap compared to the cost of treating hyper tension and heart attacks are typical male diseases quite rare among women, especially under 50. If you split the under 50 age group into males and females, males will pay a higher rate. Women can get hyper tension and heart attacks but it is much less compared to the males. Have you wondered why female life insurance rates are lower that of males?
If enough users launch it, it will completely mess up all these statistical correlations and eventually provide anonymity by increasing the noise.
Look at credit card companies, why are they all headquartered in Delaware? Why are they charging 40$ late fees and two cycle finance charges? Before the federal truth in lending and disclosure laws were enacted, how much they got away with? Basically Delaware is more interested in protecting their credit card company jobs rather than protecting your rights as a credit card consumer. If you really want to hear horror stories and abuse bordering in illegality, listen to the merchants. The Visa Mastercard duopoly is making the merchants pay the same commission whether the money is coming out of checking/saving accounts (debit cards) or via totally unsecured loans advanced by the credit card companies. This is where you would be with insurance across state lines without a standard comparable package and federal minimum standards. Now that they are there, thanks to ACA, there is no need to prohibit it. In fact federal government can set up a health insurance regulator and companies coming under that agency's jurisdiction should be able to sell in all fifty states.
Tort reform is unconnected to ACA. There is no reason to do tort reform and ACA.
As the anonymous coward suggested, run for an office somewhere run something and then complain. It is a lot harder than it looks.
That is the problem talking about insurance based on anecdotes. Insurance is statistics, actuaries and collections. People like you who are willing to take the risk rake up bills that are denied by insurance companies. And half the people who file for bankruptcy due to medical costs, have had health insurance. Except the coverage was inadequate or was not renewed. And who picked up those costs my friend? It is us, who were in other plans, our premium went up because of people who were taking risks far beyond reasonable levels.
In the end, it would have been nice, if we could come up with a system that would saddle all costs of your bet going bad to you. But we don't have such a system. It would be nice, if the free market supporting Republicans came up with a system that would allow people to take such risks, and face the consequences when their bets go bad. But there is no political appetite for it. Yes, it is true, a large number of Republicans shouted "YES" when asked "should people without health insurance die if they get sick?" in the 2012 Republican primaries. But they are such a microscopic minority of even the Republican party. It is far easier to let the other guy go on stage and criticize the action.
The result is too much of capital, and people have been cutting back on consumption. The "fix" we have been pushing for the last 30 years is to reduce the interest rate. People facing loss of income (after adjusting for inflation) made up for the loss by borrowing. But eventually that ran out of steam as debt service load increased and people maxed out their borrowing ability. The low interest rate also allowed corporations to borrow cheaply and distort the market leading bubble after bubble. Now we have capital markets sloshing around with 2 trillion dollars of excess cash they don't know what to do with. Now these jokers are wondering why we are on the verge of deflation, why there is no improvement in economic activity.
We need to realize the rich people are NOT the job creators. Calling them job creators is as idiotic as calling the hamburgers hunger creators. It is because of the hunger of the people the hamburger gets created. Hunger is the cause, and the hamburger is the effect. It is the need for goods and services, the consumption by ordinary people, that creates jobs. Need is the cause, jobs are the effect. If you systematically drain their income, systematically tax physical labor income at twice the rate of investment income, you are distorting the fundamentals of the economy.
We have to tax the investment income at the same rate as earned income, spend the tax dollars within USA, realize every dollar spent by the government is a dollar earned by someone, make sure these expenditures end up in the pockets of people who would spend the money, not put it back in treasury bonds, and we would revitalize this country and this economy. We have to reserve a well deserved place for trickle-down-economics and other such failed economic policies right next to Communism in the garbage dump of history.
What? Flamebait? Pity, whoever modded it flamebait would not be able to post a follow up explaining why.
This also would have given a lot of supporters with subsidy eligibility certificate in hand, willing to contact their senators and representatives asking them to support ACA. This is a grave and stupid political mistake by the Democrats. And they are paying the price for it.
But in the long run, people already having medical coverage through employer or through medicare would not change their vote because of ACA. Democrats would continue to support it, probably bemoaning not implementing single payer or public option. Republicans won't gain too many votes from that group. But from the 40 million people without health care, people eligible for medicare and people below 400% of poverty level (that is nearly 90K AGI for a family of four) eligible for subsidies, there is going to be solid vote gain for Democrats. And most of it will happen in solidly red states because they have the largest percentage of poor people.
But don't despair, Democrats fumbled by not ramming down single payer or medicare for all, that would have been much simpler to implement. You are going to see the Republicans threading the needle to switch their stand from "repeal" to "fix it". More and more employers are going to follow the lead of Walgreens and Sears. Give a fixed sum of money to their employees and get out of managing a group plan, as Walgreens and Sears have announced already. You will be shopping in the exchange and demanding ACA to be expanded in the coming years my friend. Churches are going to discover they could, for ridiculously small donations from their wealthier congregants, pay the premium for the poorer congregants and "lock" them into their church instead of the competing church. Fundamentally Christianity is socialistic in its ideals. It is an historic anomaly that Church is aligned with the capitalists and not marxists. It will get corrected eventually. Hospitals and providers are going to lobby their state governments to get their hands on the federal money by expanding medicare.
It is going to be very difficult for the Republicans to stand on the side lines and praying for the failure of the program. It ain't gonna happen.
The root cause of the problem is that Republicans dominate very small states with very large percentage of poor people. For example South Carolina had about 150K people already eligible for medicaid but were unaware of it. Even though the Republicans refused to expand medicare, the medicare rolls are expected to swell by 150K, because they are just finding out that they are actually eligible, and if they don't enroll for free healthcare, they would end up paying a fine! There are another 350K people who would know that they are within 400% of the poverty level, eligible for subsidies, and the Governor refused to give them access to that money. The hospitals and providers are going to lose about a billion dollars of federal money. Romney won that state by a margin of 2.2%. NC has 4.7 million registered voters, Romney's margin in raw votes is just 100K. If the potential loss of medical coverage or the possibility of getting subsidy impels a fraction of this 500K who are not already voting Democrat to register to vote, or actually show up to vote or switch from R to D, that would be disastrous to the Republicans.
If a dilettante like me crunches numbers like this, the politicians have at least semi or deci Nate Silvers in their pay roll. They know what is coming down the pike. Sure you could decry it as a simple vote getting ploy by the Democrats. And you could rail about the unfunded expansion and the effect it is going to have in the deficits etc etc. You could shout till cow comes home, "if people vote themselves benefits without worrying about the costs, Democracy will die". But if Republicans do not find a way to pacify that section of the population, none of these intellectual arguments are going to sway the people who are sick and tired of being sick and tired.
Half a billion dollars.
Drop in the bucket. Especially compared to the Iraq invasion, Afghan war, Medicare Part D, farm subsidies to millionaire farmers, bank bailout... At least here some 40 million Americans have a chance to get some healthcare. Where are those anti-abortion people who keep saying, " if it saves one child, one life it is worth it.."?
My only regret is, if we are going to face this level of intransigence and non-coopeation, we Dems should have rammed down a single payer or public option instead of this Republican plan of questionable constitutionality.
We don't have to excuse them, we can demand they anticipate these things and provide for it. They seems to have an idea of these issues, with their plans to create a cadre of "navigators" to help people with internet access and web site help. But the plan and law was heavily politicized, 36 states refused to set up their own exchanges and dumped all of them on the federal exchange. Millions of people who would have gone to medicaid are dumped into exchanges because they refused to expand medicaid.
No doubt there were self inflicted wounds. Politicians scared of people getting sticker shock, insisted on disabling the window shop and see full price option at roll out, That was the root cause of disaster. The first thing the "tech surge" did was to enable window shopping. It was enabled as early as Oct 15, I tested it then, They could not have done it that soon if it was fresh code. Window shopping was the original code, They just disabled the meddling by the politicians and went on the original code path.
Still they are doing it in the right order. Get people to commit to a plan before the dead line. Errors on the back end can be sorted out when they actually file claims,
I know people who know this system like the back of their hands. Would say things like, "I can take bus XYZ, get out when the bus stops at the signal at MG Road, run through the alleyway and catch bus ABC to Kurla. I can get there faster in the bus than those who ride the train". They seem to have a complete intersection graph of all the busses that ply any part of their commute. They solve a multiple traveling salesmen problem in an abstract space designated by bus routes, the intersection graph and time cost. The drivers have maps and a ready way to visualize their routes. These commuters operate in abstract space. It is probably why this urban planning institute does not even know the metrics by which one can measure the commuter's mind space.
Heck, we might even find out that Fix-it-yourselfers know more about plumbing, wiring, door knobs etc and tend to name the tools to be used compared to people who just hire handymen.
There is even a possibility home schooling parents know in detail the lessons, the syllabus, how long it takes to cover a unit etc and even name the actual lessons to be taught compared to people who simply send their children to school.
Sorry buddy. I realized you were talking about a full battery vehicle just as I hit the submit button. Should have posted a follow up retracting my statement. Sorry.
30K? More like 3K for Prius and Insight. That is the current price using current technology. They would be cheaper in 10 years, not costlier. Recently there was a news item that some survey showed that there are people who are less likely to buy a product if it claims to be green or earth friendly. You one of them? http://www.tirebusiness.com/article/20121120/NEWS/121129994/replacing-hybrids-battery-not-as-costly-as-you-think
Electric cars have super long durability. Battery is designed to be swapped. Electric motors run for decades, sometime continuously, without servicing. Make it of a non rusting material, keep swapping out the batteries, these cars can last for millions of miles. The electric traction motors of locomotives go for decades without even being opened and rewound.
I wonder if Tesla has a switch to leave its door handles out.
Well, we had a good run. 99% of the computing needs of 99% of the people can be met by the existing chips electronics. For most people network and bandwidth limits their ability to do things, not raw computing power or memory. So Moore's observation (it ain't no law) running out of steam is no big deal. Of course the tech companies need to transition from selling shiny new things every two years to a more sedate pace of growth.
It really sucks when the politicians sell you "cut taxes, cut services, make the government smaller, unshackle the job creators, prosperity will follow, it has to, it is supply side, rising tide yada yada yada". You believe them and turn around and see only old scoots in riding medicare provided scooters, living on Federal flood insurance properties, carrying huge placards saying, "Get the Government off my medicare" "Get a brain Morans!". And all the high paying jobs are created in high tax places like Mass, CA and NY!
I am going to stencil "Cobalt-60" on every thing that I own that could be of interest to the thieves.
Well, at least they could have used the next best length unit, football fields. But, no, they would not use something so familiar to us and readily imaginable by all of us as the lengths football fields. True, I concede, using how many skyscrapers it would dwarf once you image it standing on its end or how big a building it could enclose in its shell, etc would somewhat ameliorate the use of such abstruse exotic and non standard units as meters.
It was vatican library? Did not realize that. Gee! I feel like a total idiot now. Thanks. Obama.
There is some historical precedence for this this thing. One boss caught the employee using company electricity for personal purposes, and the employee explained that he had his friend fax in a wad of electricity. Oh, yeah, here is the citation for you.