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Comment Re:Elections have consequences (Score 1) 421

You'll bitch and moan too, because your retirement benefits are taxed with the same tax: higher capital gains taxes means less money for you, whether you have a defined benefit plan or a 401k.

See, you need to get a financial education. Neither defined benefit, nor defined contribution plan distributions are taxed via capital gains. It's all ordinary income. That's one of the trade-offs for tax free growth pre-distribution phase.

Also, in case the abstract thinking is too much, A society in which one day you have 100% employment and X production, is no more productive the day after 20% of the workers are laid off. Sure, an individual company may be, but the society... no. Not unless those workers actual get another job. Idle workers are not productive, whether they are on someone's payroll, receiving unemployment, or begging in the streets.

Meanwhile, based upon my interactions with actual companies, I'd say that their 'products' (physical or non-physical) have lower quality due to their lack of employees, so their production value has probably gone down in real terms.

Comment Re:not a question (Score 1) 716

When I do use Hulu, I get a screen that says "Sorry, we're unable to load a message from our sponsors."

Which is much better than the experience I had the other day on ADC (I think?) where I was tormented with 4 sets of 3 back-to-back copies of Microsoft's PC + Xbox360 back to school ad.

Comment Re:Plain text (Score 1) 271

And no numbers that could be letter substitutes.
So no 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 or 9 is allowed. You must include numbers not in this set. (Also please remember that NaN is not a number and thus does not satisfy the numeric requirement).

Comment Re:Generally, when prescription drugs.... (Score 1) 392

A useless baseline. What's important is the negotiated (discounted) price. Then the insurance covers what they cover, and you pay the rest, whether that is a percentage, or a co-pay (and which of several possible co-pays)... example for BCBS:

To fill your prescription at one of the participating Network retail pharmacies, ... you pay only the appropriate coinsurance or copayment amount.

coinsurance = % appropriate = it varies based on the drug category

which really means the more expensive the drug, the higher percentage of the higher price you will need to pay

To file a claim for reimbursement from an out-of-network pharmacy: When your claim is processed, you will be reimbursed up to 55% of the drug's Average Wholesale Price (AWP) for covered medicines and supplies purchased at an out-of-network pharmacy.

Where AWP is code for, "determined however the insurance company feels like", much like Reasonable and Customary is.

Comment Re:Generally, when prescription drugs.... (Score 2) 392

It's more complex even than you have stated. The cost is going to depend upon which drugstore you go to, what your insurance company has negotiated with that drugstore (considered a trade secret BTW).

It's a nightmare.

And anyone who claims that Americans are not cost conscious when it comes to medical expenses is being willfully obtuse. They system is designed to make it impossible to comparison shop. You have a procedure done and you don't even know how many different entities are going to send you a bill.

Comment Re:250GB (Score 1) 284

No, Comcast provides 250G at my current cost.
I'm fairly close to cancel cable TV entirely (I've shifted to a less expensive package) because we do not watch it.

Comcast precipitated our whole migration by re-jiggering their offerings and they telling us we needed to spend $40 more a month on a package we don't want in order to keep the other packages we were already getting. Already unhappy with how little there was to watch when I could sit down and watch, I decided to drop a package instead and use my savings to pay for Netflix plus have money left over to buy DVDs or downloads at Amazon. Add in Amazon Prime to help with the Xmas shopping and we now have enough streaming content queued up to watch that no one ever complains that there is nothing on, at a lower monthly cost.

The cable box almost never gets turned on now. Comcast On-Demand is not available because it's not "included" in our package, so even if we wanted to PPV from Comcast we CANNOT. They deserve to have their business melt.

Comment Re:This is just misleading (Score 1) 292

Which is ackward, because you can't very well require the funds for cleanup up front because it would make buisnesses that use radiation in any significant way (radiopharmaceutical companies, as an example) impossibly expensive to start.

Well if you can't pay to clean it up when you start, what makes you think they'll be able to pay to clean it up later? This is why projects should require bonding up front.

It's especially painful in the nuclear energy sector, where licenses are issued for 20 years(?), and the corporations all assume that the plant will operate indefinitely. If you assume the plant will never be decommissioned then you don't have to budget for it. It's not part of your costs, it's not part of the plan. Someone is going to end up paying to decommission the plants, but they don't plan on it to be them.

Comment Re:No (Score 1) 287

You cannot demand from youtube or the RIAA to flag it all manually...

So Tech News should alert youtube to unblock their video and move on.

What? Manually? Why not make it automated? Tech News can't hire a bunch of people to do all this counter noticing.

Perhaps right next to "Submit" button, there could be a "Submit (and no this material is not violating any copyrights" button that Tech News could press to submit with automatic counter noticing.

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