How much of that goes to malpractice?

None of it? Wouldn't said doctor incorporate his practice so that he could deduct business expenses, such as insurance coverage, before paying his salary that will include tax obligations?

We need a single-payer system if we're ever gonna have any kind of sane pricing for healthcare, and having the consumer of healthcare pay for it is the most logical choice because that brings market forces into play. And free market is the most efficient distribution of goods and services known to man.

You seem to be confused by the terminology 'single-payer' and 'free market'. The only practical single payer is the federal government. Unless you're saying we set up a private company in a monopoly as the single payer. But that wouldn't be free market either and possibly the most idiotic solution.

And a free market isn't the most efficient method of distributing goods. It's efficiency is in profit margins. Example; suppose I open an ethanol processing plant and pay a premium to Nebraska corn farmers. The farmers choices are to sell at market prices to food manufacturers or at a premium to me, even if that means people starve. That is profit efficiency, not distribution efficiency.

The 850Mhz spectrum they are freeing up with the iDen shutdown will help a ton

The time to judge Sprint's coverage is next year, after they have had a chance to exploit the recent changes in their business. Shutting down iDEN frees up capital and spectrum. Being purchased by Softbank infuses a lot of new capital. And the purchase of Clearwire gives them a ton of new spectrum. With the Network Vision upgrades they have pluggable cards to support frequencies and protocols at the towers. So the 'upgrade' the upgraded towers to support 850 FDD-LTE and 2.5g TDD-LTE is a matter of plugging in two new cards. The 850 will enable them to get Verizon like coverage at a similar cost. And 2.5g in metro areas will provide access to massive data capacity in high density areas. Now their only problem will be backhaul. Sprint and T-Mobile are both at a disadvantage due to not having a Bell lineage.

They haven't done a good job of informing their customers of the upgrades.

Are you looking for something like this? http://network.sprint.com/

With these rideshares, the passenger is submitting a request over the internet to a public facing company. That company in turn sends out a pickup request to a specific driver, who accepts it and logs their intent to pick up the passenger.

And here is the problem with the whole situation. These companies aren't offering a 'rideshare' service, they are offering a 'shuttle' service. Rideshare, I'm going someplace and I'll offer to take someone along to share the expenses. These companies are hiring drivers and dispatching them to pick up people who signed up for their service on the Internet. This is Super Shuttle with an online interface. Except that the drivers likely don't have a commercial drivers license (and training) and there are no standards on vehicles and inspections. No verification of liability or medical insurance. No background checks and a tenuous relationship with a company that may only have an online presence.

It doesn't matter if code explicitly states that something is permissible--if they don't personally understand it, it doesn't meet code. If they don't like the practice, it doesn't meet code.

As someone who does have experience with codes enforcement, I can tell you for a fact that in the US, if the code explicitly states something is permissible, it will be accepted by the inspector. City/County governments don't like to get sued any more than the rest of us do. If my city codes inspector failed my inspection because he 'didn't like the practice', I'd make 3 calls and it would be resolved; the city administrator, my alderman, and my attorney. In that order.

As far as the GP's assertion that if an engineer designed it, then it's good. That's bullshit too. Many jurisdictions base their codes on national standards, and the engineer needs to be familiar with the codes for the property in question. For example, if code says a 2x10 floor joist can span x feet. The engineer can't make the span x+1 and say "a little deflection is acceptable". It will fail inspection, builder will have to remedy the problem, and the person paying the bills is going to sue the engineer for the additional costs.

I am led to believe many of these "prologue ads", like the overpriced refreshments, actually go a long way toward the theatres bottom line: unlike much of the ticket revenue.

I have a friend that works (IT management) for a smaller theater chain. They earn very little from ticket sales. Particularly when taking into account the requirements the studios put on them for new projection equipment every few years. (the result of the studios appeasing the George Lucases with fancy new tech rather than requiring better content) Without ad revenue and concessions you wouldn't have any theaters. Even large chains, like AMC, are struggling with higher overhead and lower revenue.

has their office and their servers in that same building can't afford a DR Plan.

Every business can afford an IT DR plan. If you can have a disaster, you need a recovery plan. That plan might be to take the off site tapes and run down to Best Buy and get a new computer. But it's still a DR plan. Every serious business should have contingency planning. What happens if you lose your phone service? A power outage? A tornado? Flooding? A disgruntled employee? A drunk driver through your front door. How does your business survive when your customers can't contact you or you can't provide whatever puts money in your accounts. The cost of the contingency plan will be directly related to how long you can afford to be without those resources.

As far as moving your business to the cloud, what happens when the 'cloud' eventually has a failure. And it will at some point. Some will be large, some will be small. Will your business be important enough to encourage a 3rd party to respond quickly to restore your service. Because now the response to any outage is directly related to how much income you provide for that 3rd party, not how serious that outage affects your business.

I have several relatives w/ type 2 that were able to reduce their medication dependence by losing weight (they were overweight to begin with), though of course it doesn't cure it.

Then there are those of us who managed a normal weight through diet and exercise until diagnosed Type-2 and put on medication.

And back in the reign of Pinball, you would find a machine in every convenience store, and every mall had an arcade. But today you can earn more money by standing up another rack of Twinkies.

Oddly enough, I have both a 1996 pinball machine and a 1970 muscle car. Not that I'm arguing the maintenance on either is easy, but they are not expensive -- probably under 50th percentile as far as hobbies for Americans go. Both have low or negative depreciation, and $100-$1000, plus 5-10 hours of my time, per year.

Hmm, I have a 1980 Williams pinball. I took care of some 'deferred maintenance' when I bought it 12 years ago, but since all I have needed to do was clean/wax the playfield and change an occasional bulb. Since it was designed for commercial use and now is strictly home use, once restored the ongoing cost is not much more than electricity. Due to appreciation I should be able to sell it for more than all the $$ I have spent on it.

My cars, OTOH, are much more expensive to keep around. Local ordinances require all vehicles to be licensed or stored in a garage. And licensing requires maintaining insurance. Because somehow an unlicensed vehicle lowers everyone's property value. I swear, one of these days I'm going to buy the ugliest car that I can find that will pass a state inspection, and park it on the street in front of my house. I'm thinking something along the lines of a Yugo with a rattle-can paint job.

Some organisms live at the edge of sustainability,

That would actually be a good design choice. Something that could limit it's growth so as not to introduce yet another invasive plant. Imagine glow in the dark kudzu.

Try that sort of thinking out with other infrastructure; why not invest in 4 lane roads to each house, and 500 amps of current to each house, and double-capacity storm drainage. I mean, the need isnt there NOW, but in the future, who knows, right?

So what you are saying is that you would be fine if they were dragging 10mbit coax to those rural houses? You do realize that the bulk of the cost is deploying the last mile, and there is little difference in cost whether they pull coax or fiber? Wouldn't want to use current technology to support the hicks out in the country. Just update the copper on the phone poles and give them DSL. (of course, you might end up needing to pull some fiber anyway for the DSLAMs they'll need to install to overcome circuit length limits) Question, if the cost was essentially the same to build your mythical 4 lane road to each house as the current 2 lane roads, would you still advocate building 2 lane roads simply based on cost?

One mistake and you cause a national communications blackout.

Or worse, you kill somebody. This was caused by a sub contractor for Time Warner installing fiber to a new office building.

They city pays for the entire infrastructure and then once the bond is paid off will have to pay Google for the pleasure of using the service they the tax payer paid for!

That is incorrect. Only about a third of the households were covered. Without this deal the city would have to pay for the expansion to the rest, or admit defeat. Google is committing to complete the network.