The website crashed.
Interesting!
375 karma · joined August 16, 2016
Interesting!
I'm only anecdotal, but by comparison, prior the ACA, my insurance for a family of 3 was $300/month with a $2500/year deductible. That $300/$5000 plan was considered predatory and high deductible.
The first plan offered to me under the ACA was something like $700/month with an $8000 deductible. Plans this year were ~$950/month with a ~$15,000 deductible. It's Cadillac pricing and one-star benefits.
Meanwhile, my "non-compliant, high deductible" plan from a private market is $400/month with a $5000/deductible.
I opted out of ACA - it made sense to opt out even when I had to pay the $2100/year penalty, because the premiums and the deductible were still less. I qualify as "underinsured", but that couldn't be farther from the truth. My plan can be irritating to use, but they have online self-service tools for providing healthcare, and I have never been questioned about paying for necessary treatments. I pay them, they pay the doc. Very simple.
For people who relied on private insurance and weren't destitute, the ACA has been a shit-show from day one.
The only highlight to the ACA for me is the hundreds of thousands in billables I've accrued helping institutions become "compliant" with the ACA.
I guess I'm not clear on what detail you think is missing. To me, their objections and actions are very clearly worded.
I believe they pointed out that they regularly pay taxes, that the tax rate for that year was due to accelerating depreciation, and the NYT is engaged in the same accounting strategies.
Accelerating depreciation has no net tax benefit over the full depreciation period. If the depreciation period is 10 years, but they accelerate in the first year, their net tax rate is the same over the 10 years as if they did not accelerate. They are simply moving their tax burden to the future.
They also took other current expenses to charge their pension, but again, these are expenses that they cannot take in the future - they will pay additional tax on future incomes. The net is the same.
Following the tutorials is a lesson in futility. The UI is clunky and small mistakes can have catastrophic outcomes for new users. Undo works in mysterious ways.
When I found myself stuck on a tutorial, a google search rewarded me with the phrase "pary designer workflow has changed substantially in 0.17." I followed a second tutorial on the wiki. Whatever eas changed - it's worse. I considered installing an older version.
Instead, I dropped FreeCAD, installed OpenSCAD, and had my part drawn in a couple hours.
Also, we should eliminate fancy restaurants, because that's where rich people meet other rich people.
And nice houses! Housing advantage is a clear indicator of classism.
Now that I think of it, pretty much everyone in the US does better than rural Somalis. We should equalize the class divide by reducing the US standard of living until we're all equal.
But even basic amenities that could be easily built in this time period were difficult to come by. Entire villages might have to share a few pieces of furniture, like a stool.
These people may have had a lot of "time off", but they spent it in horrible poverty, many months of the year near starvation, even within the context of what was available to them in their own time.
I would hazard to say that many modern office workers rarely actually accomplish 40 hours of productive work in a given week. They may be physically present, but how often are they chatting, goofing off, or standing around waiting for an interaction. Modern business is built upon availability, not necessarily toil.
European socialism is "not so bad" compared to North Korea, until you learn that Europeans on the whole are also significantly poorer than those in the US.
The arguments for capitalism are not sexy, but the ramifications of socialism are profoundly harmful.
Savings have been systematically eroded for 50+ years. Total taxation is now 40+% of GDP. Private sector workforce participation is dropping. Regulatory burden dramatically increases health care, housing, and transportation costs.
All of these policies have worked to keep you in the office.
Low interest rates are the key factor in driving demand for borrowing. Low interest rates signal a healthy supply of savings from which to borrow. So, low interest rates naturally match a large supply to a healthy demand. Such a scenario would create a market for investment-led expansion.
High interest rates signal the opposite. Either the supply of available savings is insufficient, or relative demand is high enough to drive out uncompetitive demands for savings.
If California would pass legislation radically limiting regulatory burdens that municipalities and other legislative bodies could pass, this problem would disappear within a year or two.
The same way JSON is better in practicum than XML, despite missing some key tooling, JSON RPC 2 is better than SOAP or REST in practicum because it was designed by someone with experience who had to actually get shit done.
Every time someone tells me that I don't get REST and links me to Fieldings dissertation, all I hear is the bleating of goats and the peals of Dunning-Kruger.
My contract is 100% commission, because it aligns performance with business requirements. Good sales is every bit as difficult as good dev, maybe harder.
The only people who think devs are not well compensated are devs who can't negotiate or are marginal.
If you've never told an interviewer to go fuck themselves over stupid questions or whiteboarding in an interview, you're probably not making an effort.
The best solution is to simply eliminate the agency.
The purpose of a regulatory committee is to be the creature of a specific industry.
Kolko gives a history of the regulatory movement and it's role in "The Triumph of the New Conservatism".
It is a must-read foranyone dealing with a regulatory body.
This is saying that overtraining prevents revision of existing skills, as if the learning process is interrupted.
He was general counsel for Verizon, which is typical for regulatory capture stooges as far as career choices go, but worked for Jenner & Block, who's primary public record is heavily left-leaning. He's an Obama appointee, but on the recommendation of McConnell.
My guess is that Jenner & Block probably fronts a lot of left-leaning legal cases outside of their bread & butter, which is telco, giving them a good face across the board with Congress. Meanwhile, his prior appointment to the FCC was almost certainly a horse trade between McConnell and Obama.
Pai has been more or less a telco puppet for the last 15 years in one role or another.
The interesting thing about this is that regulatory capture is generally in support of further regulation rather than against. This implies that net neutrality is actually either a grass-roots regulation (highly unlikely), or there is an inversion of concern over the general case. My guess is that the monopoly positions that telcos hold has inverted the normal regulatory capture process at the FCC, and that the primary consumers of the content (Amazon, Netflix, etc) are very shrewd operators who can see through regulatory rhetoric.