Right now faceless nameless executives in private sector whose bonus depends on you not getting the care make the decisions for you. Nameless faceless bureaucrats, inefficient may be, but no conflict of interest either, making the decisions for you is really an improvement.
Ok you seem to be a tea party ideologue. So let me throw this bone for you. If federal government runs healthcare, you can use just 40 senators to deny abortion coverage nationwide. How about that! Do you like federalized healthcare now?
Buddy, gimme a break. I know the difference between the employee contribution to the healthcare premium and the total cost. My witholding is about 120$ a month, 1440$ a year for medical, and about 400$ or so for dental. The total cost to the company is a separate info line in W2, added after a long drawn fight about reporting it in W2. That number is around 10K per year. My company is about 5 billion market cap, 800 million revenue.
If the company says, "ok, here, take this 10K I am spending on healthcare as pay raise, let me get out of buying healthcare for you and concentrate on our
core mission of building better products" there will be a revolt. We have no chance of buying that insurance for 10K in the private market.
Companies do have a choice in selecting providers and they do switch providers. And what is the criterion? Cost is the only thing they look at. Quality of service? Should not be so bad people switch jobs because of healthcare. If that minimum standard is met companies don't care about the quality of service and actually do not want to pay for more than that level of quality.
Private sector is efficient. If it can lower the health care costs, by sacrificing the quality of service the employees get, it has to cut the cost and sacrifice the quality. Else the market will punish it. Only when the quality has fallen so low that people quit, they will stop cutting the quality. Private sector has engaged in this race to the bottom. Then they will break through that level too. If the number of employers offering healthcare reaches a critical mass, they can cut healthcare completely without affecting hiring and retention. When that happens, they will promptly cut healthcare.
Good points. But Microsoft has a proven track record of not being able to compete in a level playing field. Even if all the revenue streams open up, its competitors, will run circles around it and eat its lunch. List one instance where Microsoft went into a market without a monopoly and dominated. And every time competition showed up, it failed miserably.
It bundled Microsoft Money for free for ages. Still could not kill Quicken because, Intuit had an equally strong cash cow in the form of TurboTax. Every company it killed, Netscape, Word Perfect, Lotus, Borland, all of them did not have independent revenue stream. Any time the other side had a revenue strem, Intuit, Oracle, Google, Apple, it failed to make any dent.
It ain't a "free market," and it can't become a "Free market" in the foreseeable future. Get back to me if mankind can evolve out of mortal fear for his own existence to the point where he can "shop around" for the cheapest E.R. after he breaks a leg, gets hit by a car, or has an appendix attack.
I agree with you. It is not a free market. At this point the rational thing to do is either support a single payer healthcare system, or let poor people who can't pay for their healthcare suffer without bothering our conscience.
Steve Balmer is doing his job.
on
Microsoft CFO Quits
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· Score: 3, Insightful
He wears a suit, collects big pay check every month and takes home a big bonus, and is seen in his office once in a while. As a CEO he has done all that is expected of him. It is upto rest of the company to make progress and earn enough money to continue to pay him his exalted benefits. What more can he do? The raison d`etre for private companies is to earn money to pay their top executives. What part of that private enterprise you guys dont get?
Sir, I do understand the powers of actuarial sciences. In fact I know its history without going to wiki. What the insurance companies know is statistically how many houses are expected to burn down in their insured risk pool. But they do not know which specific ones. Nor do the home owners. So all home owners voluntarily buy insurance, and are relieved their houses are standing the end of the coverage period, see the peace of mind worth the cost and buy the insurance again. But if you know for sure you house is going to burn down, the insurance companies will refuse to cover you. In fact if there is substantial chance it will burn down, they will refuse to cover you or write riders excluding it. Look at the number of insurance companies operating within 10 miles of Atlantic coast in Florid or how many sand bar islands are "no coverage area" in the Carolinas.
Insurance works, only when it is operating on large sample sizes and liklihood estimates and expected values and statistics. If it is specific and individualized, they stop working. A diabetic knows exactly how much his insulin is going to cost. And will buy insurance only if the premium is less than the expected claims. The insurance company will not insure him for less than the cost of claims known `a priori. This is a deadlock.
All I have used is picasa. And I have been impressed by its ability. It might have fizzled out in this instance, but this technology has real potential.
I have loaded some 45000 pictures, almost all family pics, on to Picasa. Once I identify a face and tag it, it finds the same face in other photos. And as I mark yes/no for its findings, it improves remarkably. It is not confused by heavy make up worn by Bharatnatyam dancers. It is finding the correct faces of 20 such dancers lined up facing the camera. It picks faces obscured in dark backgrounds, in out of focus pictures, faces occupying hardly 50 x 50 pixels. Faces at all orientations, including upside down. Half faces, faces with just one eye... It is really amazing.
What is amazing is its mistakes. It mistakes mother for daughter and vice versa. Confuses brothers with sisters when they are toddlers but not when they are teens or adults.
But this is forward match, going from a known face and looking for it in a crowd. Boston police is trying the reverse look up on a massive scale. It failed today. But like Lycos and webcrawler being upstaged when Google solved the reverse look up problem, some day the reverse look up problem will be solved. With parallel technology? Through GPU's running million forward searches simultaneously? But someday soon, the reverse look up will be solved and the automatic photo identification will work.
I maintain my own insurance and everyone else should do the same.
Really? You are buying private health insurance as an individual? Either you are crazy or you are swimming in money or you are being swindled.
My W2 shows how much my company has been paying for my health care. Works out to 10K a year for a family. My brother is an independent contractor. He cant buy anything for less than 20K for equivalent coverage. By joining some network of independents he is buying it for some 14K.
It is very much possible to buy the same coverage for as little as 8K. But the moment you file a claim, they jack up your rates, and if you have chronic conditions they bump you off and do not renew. All the premia you have paid all these years thinking you have coverage? Sit down, it might come as a shock to you. The private health care companies that you are so vociferously defending anonymously, will dump you in a second.
But I could be wrong. You could be one of the shills hired by the private health care companies to get on early on the threads and defend health care companies. You might simply be doing your job.
You should first understand what you mean by "efficiency". Efficiency in private sector is making maximum possible money for private companies. If providing goods and services at the lowest price to the consumer is the only way to make money, they will do so. All the benefits of private sector comes only when there is high degree of competition between the private companies and there is an informed consumers making rational choices to provide feedback. In the present private sector health care, people are not free to switch their health care providers, it is being bundled with their employment. The moment the customers are not able to switch the competition disappears. At this point private sector will continually sacrifice service for profits. It is as simple as that.
If Dzhokhar is deemed an enemy combatant, all the victims would lose their health insurance coverage. Most insurance does not cover Acts of War. When Bush declared 9/11 attacks as an act of war in his original speech, insurance companies invoked the exception and refused to pay WTC building insurance. Then they claimed both plane crashes actually constitute a "single instance" and reduced the claims by half. So don't put anything past our vaunted private health insurance companies.
Health insurance will not work in a free market. Insurance works only when the claimants and the insurer does not know who will file a claim and whose policies will expire without any claims. You don't know when/if your house will burn down or your car will be totaled. Nor do insurance companies. This model will work in free market.
In health care, diabetics, heart disease patients, cancer surviors, transplant recipients know how much they are going claim for sure. So does the insurer. Free market will force companies to refuse to insure them. People without chronic condition will refuse to buy policies.
For health care, single payer is the only system that will work. The savings from paperwork and preventive treatment will be enough to pay for the people currently without insurance and to contain the growth of health care costs.
We should petition the whitehouse to include all the victims of the bombing without health insurance to buy into medicare/medicaid or federal employees health insurace scheme. The premia to join may be paid from the general accident victims compensation fund or through donations.
BTW if we have a single payer health insurance system, this would not even be an issue.
Really? 8% yoy? no wonder the stock has been flat lining for a decade now. It is too little too late to save the company.
Everytime a younger more enterprising team came up with anything innovative, the higher ups, partner level executives raking in cash from existing product lines saw it as a threat to their personal income. The way they killed it is by mission creep. "Windows is our premier product. Must support windows". "Office is our cash cow. Must support Office". And the lean and mean OS meant to run just puny little phones of 2005 died under the weight of the API.
Both extremes miss the mark. No Windows is not going to go kaput like blackberry. But nor is it going to have a long life in the corporate world without problems.
Root cause of the problem for Microsoft is that the truly committed talented players of the early 1990s, working hard to win marketshare and who had to implement just good enough software on puny little machines, have either burned out, or cashed out. Leaving behind mainly empire builders, insecure pointy haired bosses. These guys were promoted to high positions commensurate with their political abilities. Company is too big to manage, and there too many incompetent managers.
Add to it the most screwed up compensation model. People who get promoted beyond level 64 are termed partner level, according to my sources. They get paid a fraction of the revenue stream of the product lines they manage. So partners often have a fundamental conflict of interest. Sacrificing a little bit of revenue in a product line like Office may be needed to squelch the upstart competition, but some partner level managers planning early retirement would rather squeeze what they can for the next three years instead of taking the long term approach. That is why they kept sticking the windows os everywhere. It is Rahul xyz or Sergey ABC who gets a cut from windows stream who sabotaged all competition from the inside.
The Office/Exchange monopoly exists because they remain the king of the hill and all others work around the bugs, restrictions and the lack of features. But continually changing api, file formats security model, OS support etc to keep the upgrade treadmill going is going to grind to a halt soon. At some point people are going to say, if the next version of Exchange server can not be supported by Android XYZ or iOS ABC version, we are not going to upgrade. Already it is facing a severe revenue crunch due to the proliferation of Google Apps and other services. If the next version of Word does not work with Google Apps, guess what?, they are not going to upgrade.
Microsoft has fundamental problems. But it is too big to fail immediately. It will wallow, evaporate and decay into irrelevance in its own sweet time.
I am very glad at least you took me seriously. There are folk out there who might mistake my posting as a thinly veiled suggestion to add Dunderdale to all kinds of facebook groups. But your posting shows that I was seen to be very serious. Thanks buddy
Please do not add Dunderdale into every vile racist, misogynistic, gambling websites. Though it would teach her a valuable lesson on what is controllable and what is not in the internet, such thing could technically be illegal.
I compared my pay with the median reported in IEEE and concluded I got the top dollar. I was lucky, the company was run by really kind and gentle folks.
Please compare potentials to potentials, actuals to actuals. Comparing 10% potential of something with 10% actual of something that has some 40% or so potential is just plain wrong.
I came in as F1, got a H1B, got green card and got citizenship just in time to vote against Rick Santorum. Hip hip hurrey! But not all H1Bs are good like me. Some of them, gasp, become Republicans.
It is illegal to pad the requirements or to tailor it for a pre selected individual. But the companies don't ask for general things like degree in computational physics or chemical engineering. It is always, "Masters in Aerospace engg or equivalent + C++ and/or Java + computational fluid dynamics + navier stokes equation + k-epsilon turbuence modeling + unstructured tetrahedral mesh + time marching" At this point, people who know know it is a tailored requirement. But the dept of labor bureaucrat does not know.
We have been denigrating, insulting and making fun of civil servants for some 30 years now. "Govt is the problem" "Most dangerous seven words in english". Now we have a completely demoralized and underqualified unmotivated civil service tackling unwieldy rules and regulations.
There are very strict rules about advertising in USA and demonstrate that there are no qualified Americans for the job before the employer gets an H1B. The pay should be in par with smiliar skill levels, You can not tailor the requirement to fit a candidate you have in mind or the candidate who is already working for you (in practical training).
Having said that, many companies find ways to work around this and there are lawyers who specilize in crafting the requirements that pass the muster with the government while still filtering out American applicants. Some Indian companies are notorious for this.
The main problem is skill fragmentation. The supply and demand fluctuates a lot. While there is an oversupply of C++ and Chem engg one year, the next year it would be Java and UI design etc etc. So at any given time there is always an excess of Americans with some skills and excess of jobs with a different skill set. Places like India have such a large and hungry population they have the capacity to fill any shortage quickly. Add to it some less than honest interviews, resume padding, American applicants get the short end of the stick. If H1B is not available the companies will hire all smart guys and train them for the job. But with H1B available it is always tempting for the companies to go for instant appeasement. They would be better off to hire smart locals and train them. But the corporate America somehow finds that an unappealing solution.
Ph D in STEM can already do that. Science Tech Engg and Math grads can jus apply for green card based on their degree. No employer sponsorship is needed. No offer of employment is needed. They already have full bargaining power.
STEM Masters get an additional 15 months of post completion practical training on top of 12 months of practical training period of other fields, They can work legally for any employer for 27 months. Then the employer has to sponsor them for Green card. The masters come in EB2 category. Waiting period is practically nil for all countries except for India. Chinese need to wait a little not as much as Indians
The STEM grads with bachelors get the same 27 months. But they come in EB3 category. The one I am pushing got his job one week after 9/11. 2001. Still standing in queue. The one I hired joined first and then completed his masters thesis a month or quarter later. That put him in EB3 (bachelors) because degrees acquired after the job does not count. Poor guy.
Look, guys, I have been anti-Microsoft to the point of being accused of being a fanboi.
But, again this report under estimates the staying power of PC in the corporate world. Very systematically they MS neutralized Unix and usurped all the corporate intranet. Exchange server has become the de-facto authentication server even for companies that use Google Apps to reduce their MS-Office/Outlook/SharePoint costs. It is well entrenched in the corporations. Home users and younger generation have stopped buying PCs/Laptops and are increasingly using pads, tablets and smartphones. Having to interoperate with all these devices have cut the traditional advantage MS had with its monoculture.
MS is on its way of becoming the son of IBM. Lots of well funded research projects, and stranglehold on some sectors, mostly staying in business world and staying away from personal and entertainment world. It will sell X-Box someday to concentrate on its "core mission".
Apple is NOT the new Microsoft. Apple is probably the new Sony. Google is probably the new Microsoft. Let us see if it can avoid following the same path as IBM and Microsoft.
The Gastropod Americans who might have entered the country without proper documentation should not be discriminated against, and they deserve a path to citizenship too.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok you seem to be a tea party ideologue. So let me throw this bone for you. If federal government runs healthcare, you can use just 40 senators to deny abortion coverage nationwide. How about that! Do you like federalized healthcare now?
mod parent up.
If the company says, "ok, here, take this 10K I am spending on healthcare as pay raise, let me get out of buying healthcare for you and concentrate on our core mission of building better products" there will be a revolt. We have no chance of buying that insurance for 10K in the private market.
Private sector is efficient. If it can lower the health care costs, by sacrificing the quality of service the employees get, it has to cut the cost and sacrifice the quality. Else the market will punish it. Only when the quality has fallen so low that people quit, they will stop cutting the quality. Private sector has engaged in this race to the bottom. Then they will break through that level too. If the number of employers offering healthcare reaches a critical mass, they can cut healthcare completely without affecting hiring and retention. When that happens, they will promptly cut healthcare.
It bundled Microsoft Money for free for ages. Still could not kill Quicken because, Intuit had an equally strong cash cow in the form of TurboTax. Every company it killed, Netscape, Word Perfect, Lotus, Borland, all of them did not have independent revenue stream. Any time the other side had a revenue strem, Intuit, Oracle, Google, Apple, it failed to make any dent.
It ain't a "free market," and it can't become a "Free market" in the foreseeable future. Get back to me if mankind can evolve out of mortal fear for his own existence to the point where he can "shop around" for the cheapest E.R. after he breaks a leg, gets hit by a car, or has an appendix attack.
I agree with you. It is not a free market. At this point the rational thing to do is either support a single payer healthcare system, or let poor people who can't pay for their healthcare suffer without bothering our conscience.
He wears a suit, collects big pay check every month and takes home a big bonus, and is seen in his office once in a while. As a CEO he has done all that is expected of him. It is upto rest of the company to make progress and earn enough money to continue to pay him his exalted benefits. What more can he do? The raison d`etre for private companies is to earn money to pay their top executives. What part of that private enterprise you guys dont get?
Insurance works, only when it is operating on large sample sizes and liklihood estimates and expected values and statistics. If it is specific and individualized, they stop working. A diabetic knows exactly how much his insulin is going to cost. And will buy insurance only if the premium is less than the expected claims. The insurance company will not insure him for less than the cost of claims known `a priori. This is a deadlock.
I have loaded some 45000 pictures, almost all family pics, on to Picasa. Once I identify a face and tag it, it finds the same face in other photos. And as I mark yes/no for its findings, it improves remarkably. It is not confused by heavy make up worn by Bharatnatyam dancers. It is finding the correct faces of 20 such dancers lined up facing the camera. It picks faces obscured in dark backgrounds, in out of focus pictures, faces occupying hardly 50 x 50 pixels. Faces at all orientations, including upside down. Half faces, faces with just one eye... It is really amazing.
What is amazing is its mistakes. It mistakes mother for daughter and vice versa. Confuses brothers with sisters when they are toddlers but not when they are teens or adults.
But this is forward match, going from a known face and looking for it in a crowd. Boston police is trying the reverse look up on a massive scale. It failed today. But like Lycos and webcrawler being upstaged when Google solved the reverse look up problem, some day the reverse look up problem will be solved. With parallel technology? Through GPU's running million forward searches simultaneously? But someday soon, the reverse look up will be solved and the automatic photo identification will work.
I maintain my own insurance and everyone else should do the same.
Really? You are buying private health insurance as an individual? Either you are crazy or you are swimming in money or you are being swindled.
My W2 shows how much my company has been paying for my health care. Works out to 10K a year for a family. My brother is an independent contractor. He cant buy anything for less than 20K for equivalent coverage. By joining some network of independents he is buying it for some 14K.
It is very much possible to buy the same coverage for as little as 8K. But the moment you file a claim, they jack up your rates, and if you have chronic conditions they bump you off and do not renew. All the premia you have paid all these years thinking you have coverage? Sit down, it might come as a shock to you. The private health care companies that you are so vociferously defending anonymously, will dump you in a second.
But I could be wrong. You could be one of the shills hired by the private health care companies to get on early on the threads and defend health care companies. You might simply be doing your job.
You should first understand what you mean by "efficiency". Efficiency in private sector is making maximum possible money for private companies. If providing goods and services at the lowest price to the consumer is the only way to make money, they will do so. All the benefits of private sector comes only when there is high degree of competition between the private companies and there is an informed consumers making rational choices to provide feedback. In the present private sector health care, people are not free to switch their health care providers, it is being bundled with their employment. The moment the customers are not able to switch the competition disappears. At this point private sector will continually sacrifice service for profits. It is as simple as that.
Health insurance will not work in a free market. Insurance works only when the claimants and the insurer does not know who will file a claim and whose policies will expire without any claims. You don't know when/if your house will burn down or your car will be totaled. Nor do insurance companies. This model will work in free market.
In health care, diabetics, heart disease patients, cancer surviors, transplant recipients know how much they are going claim for sure. So does the insurer. Free market will force companies to refuse to insure them. People without chronic condition will refuse to buy policies.
For health care, single payer is the only system that will work. The savings from paperwork and preventive treatment will be enough to pay for the people currently without insurance and to contain the growth of health care costs.
BTW if we have a single payer health insurance system, this would not even be an issue.
Everytime a younger more enterprising team came up with anything innovative, the higher ups, partner level executives raking in cash from existing product lines saw it as a threat to their personal income. The way they killed it is by mission creep. "Windows is our premier product. Must support windows". "Office is our cash cow. Must support Office". And the lean and mean OS meant to run just puny little phones of 2005 died under the weight of the API.
Root cause of the problem for Microsoft is that the truly committed talented players of the early 1990s, working hard to win marketshare and who had to implement just good enough software on puny little machines, have either burned out, or cashed out. Leaving behind mainly empire builders, insecure pointy haired bosses. These guys were promoted to high positions commensurate with their political abilities. Company is too big to manage, and there too many incompetent managers.
Add to it the most screwed up compensation model. People who get promoted beyond level 64 are termed partner level, according to my sources. They get paid a fraction of the revenue stream of the product lines they manage. So partners often have a fundamental conflict of interest. Sacrificing a little bit of revenue in a product line like Office may be needed to squelch the upstart competition, but some partner level managers planning early retirement would rather squeeze what they can for the next three years instead of taking the long term approach. That is why they kept sticking the windows os everywhere. It is Rahul xyz or Sergey ABC who gets a cut from windows stream who sabotaged all competition from the inside.
The Office/Exchange monopoly exists because they remain the king of the hill and all others work around the bugs, restrictions and the lack of features. But continually changing api, file formats security model, OS support etc to keep the upgrade treadmill going is going to grind to a halt soon. At some point people are going to say, if the next version of Exchange server can not be supported by Android XYZ or iOS ABC version, we are not going to upgrade. Already it is facing a severe revenue crunch due to the proliferation of Google Apps and other services. If the next version of Word does not work with Google Apps, guess what?, they are not going to upgrade.
Microsoft has fundamental problems. But it is too big to fail immediately. It will wallow, evaporate and decay into irrelevance in its own sweet time.
I am very glad at least you took me seriously. There are folk out there who might mistake my posting as a thinly veiled suggestion to add Dunderdale to all kinds of facebook groups. But your posting shows that I was seen to be very serious. Thanks buddy
Please do not add Dunderdale into every vile racist, misogynistic, gambling websites. Though it would teach her a valuable lesson on what is controllable and what is not in the internet, such thing could technically be illegal.
I compared my pay with the median reported in IEEE and concluded I got the top dollar. I was lucky, the company was run by really kind and gentle folks.
Please compare potentials to potentials, actuals to actuals. Comparing 10% potential of something with 10% actual of something that has some 40% or so potential is just plain wrong.
I came in as F1, got a H1B, got green card and got citizenship just in time to vote against Rick Santorum. Hip hip hurrey! But not all H1Bs are good like me. Some of them, gasp, become Republicans.
We have been denigrating, insulting and making fun of civil servants for some 30 years now. "Govt is the problem" "Most dangerous seven words in english". Now we have a completely demoralized and underqualified unmotivated civil service tackling unwieldy rules and regulations.
Having said that, many companies find ways to work around this and there are lawyers who specilize in crafting the requirements that pass the muster with the government while still filtering out American applicants. Some Indian companies are notorious for this.
The main problem is skill fragmentation. The supply and demand fluctuates a lot. While there is an oversupply of C++ and Chem engg one year, the next year it would be Java and UI design etc etc. So at any given time there is always an excess of Americans with some skills and excess of jobs with a different skill set. Places like India have such a large and hungry population they have the capacity to fill any shortage quickly. Add to it some less than honest interviews, resume padding, American applicants get the short end of the stick. If H1B is not available the companies will hire all smart guys and train them for the job. But with H1B available it is always tempting for the companies to go for instant appeasement. They would be better off to hire smart locals and train them. But the corporate America somehow finds that an unappealing solution.
STEM Masters get an additional 15 months of post completion practical training on top of 12 months of practical training period of other fields, They can work legally for any employer for 27 months. Then the employer has to sponsor them for Green card. The masters come in EB2 category. Waiting period is practically nil for all countries except for India. Chinese need to wait a little not as much as Indians
The STEM grads with bachelors get the same 27 months. But they come in EB3 category. The one I am pushing got his job one week after 9/11. 2001. Still standing in queue. The one I hired joined first and then completed his masters thesis a month or quarter later. That put him in EB3 (bachelors) because degrees acquired after the job does not count. Poor guy.
But, again this report under estimates the staying power of PC in the corporate world. Very systematically they MS neutralized Unix and usurped all the corporate intranet. Exchange server has become the de-facto authentication server even for companies that use Google Apps to reduce their MS-Office/Outlook/SharePoint costs. It is well entrenched in the corporations. Home users and younger generation have stopped buying PCs/Laptops and are increasingly using pads, tablets and smartphones. Having to interoperate with all these devices have cut the traditional advantage MS had with its monoculture.
MS is on its way of becoming the son of IBM. Lots of well funded research projects, and stranglehold on some sectors, mostly staying in business world and staying away from personal and entertainment world. It will sell X-Box someday to concentrate on its "core mission".
Apple is NOT the new Microsoft. Apple is probably the new Sony. Google is probably the new Microsoft. Let us see if it can avoid following the same path as IBM and Microsoft.
The Gastropod Americans who might have entered the country without proper documentation should not be discriminated against, and they deserve a path to citizenship too.