Is there anything they condo about that?

“There are two types of fool. One says, 'This is old, therefore it is good.' The other says, ‘This is new, therefore it is better.’" --Twain

I only buy from manufacturers that have easy and inexpensive (or free) advance replacement.

HDD manufacturers never realized that they had everyone over a barrel. When the Thailand flooding happened, they figured it was a nice opportunity to try some price collusion (triple prices after a 25% drop in production). They never thought it would go so well, and now they're scrambling to roll out similar changes everywhere else, such as dropping the warranty five-fold. Next they will discontinue all the low-end and low-capacity models to "be more consistent with the consumer electronics and technology industries". After that will be to demand a seat on the security council with veto power. Finally, the world. :D I, for one, welcome our hard drive manufacturing overlords. /tinfoil hat.

Two statistics majors went on a police ride-along to see how the new crime prediction model was working. They went to the first predicted location on 200th st., but there was no crime. Then they went to the second second predicted location on 100th st, but again no crime. Just when they were about to admit defeat, a call came in about a crime on 150th st and they both yelled "we did it!"

It doesn't matter whether the $450 for a 5-minute procedure goes to the doctor's salary or to clinic's investors. That's not the point.

Are you saying that $450 is justified because of that?

Thanks for that, friend, but I haven't gotten anything from her except liquid nitrogen and a variety of prescriptions written on paper. Do homeopaths have a special deal with pharmacies and billion-dollar pharmaceutical corporations where my prescriptions for Zyrtec, Nasonex, Proventil, etc. get secretly switched with water if they are written by a homeopath? Because they sure seemed identical to the drugs I got with the MD's prescription in the previous year.

Thanks. I wonder why the Empire Blue fraud department said those were the correct codes for a 5-minute wart spray visit with the PCP. But maybe they were just giving me the quick brush off because they didn't want to bother with the hassle over a measly $450.

I don't really know, but as I hinted in the original post, my guess is that it's due to our braindamaged tax laws:

* Employer plans are tax deductible, while individual plans are not. In my tax bracket, that means I can get a $1700/mo plan for the same effective cost as a $1100 plan if I were to buy it using increased income and an individual plan. If individual premiums were deductible above the line, I'd rather take the $1700/mo in salary and buy whatever plan I actually needed.
* Avoiding the painfully retarded double taxation (dividend tax) by compensating owners through insurance.
* IRS Employee "equality" rules forbidding owners from having nicer insurance than employees.
* Avoiding non-deductible health care costs. For example, paying an extra $500/mo in deductible premiums instead of $500/month in premiums, copays, co-insurance (which still wouldn't be enough to reach the 7.5% rule).

I wonder. What percent of the *actual* cost does $40/month cover? What pays for the rest of it? And what would a 5-minute wart spray cost in your country?

Huh? She used the exact same liquid nitrogen and technique as the medical doctor. The only difference is several orders of magnitude in the price. Oh, and also that I didn't have to call ahead and wait several weeks for an appointment, nor did I have to sit for an hour in the waiting room and another 20 minutes in the examination room.

By what mechanism, exactly? Is it due to competition? For example, if costs increase, the insurance company could retain the same profit margin by just increasing premiums. Subscribers will either pay the higher premium or drop down to a lower-benefit plan. But if a competing health insurance company achieves lower cost (by paying less than $5,400/hour, for example), then subscribers may switch to the competition (which can provide the same benefit at a lower premium). Is that the mechanism?

You may be right about the application of Hanlon's razor in this case.

You are mistaken. When they "spotted" the brown dwarf, it means they added decorative spots to it. So not only do they have the power to control its temperature as you correctly pointed out, but now they can even add polka dots. I'm looking forward to plaid stars.

No. It will be far more than 10 years before you buy 15 TB RAM and 2880 cores for $20, let alone fit it in your pocket.

Even 30 years is pushing it. Let's examine just the CPU. Watson has a total of 432 billion transistors in 2.2 square *feet* total die area (204120mm^2) using 45nm process. By contrast, the iPhone 4 has one core in 53mm^2 using 45nm process.

That's *four* orders of magnitude. When I do the math, I come up with 48 years for transistors to shrink that much (see below). That's assuming Moore's Law holds true indefinitely and $20 portables will have 50mm^2 processors.

The only way I can get 10 years is if I assume that $20 portable computers will have 35,000mm^2 die area for the CPU. That's a 7-inch-wide CPU die (!). By contrast, the Intel Core i5 die is only half an inch in diameter.

At best, we'll get enough software optimizations that we can run something "similar" to Watson on much less powerful hardware, such as $20 portables.

The math (works in octave but not bc):

# IBM power7 die area in square mm.
per_cpu_da = 567

# Number of power7 processors in Watson
watson_cpu_count = 360

# Watson die area in square mm.
watson_da = per_cpu_da * watson_cpu_count

# Cheap and portable die area in square mm.
cheap_da = 50

# Number of years for transistor count to double for a given area.
doubles_every = 2

doubling_factor = 1 / doubles_every
years = log(cheap_da / watson_da) / (doubling_factor * log(1 / sqrt(2)))

Do you have any references for that? Among my family and acquaintances there have been two house fires with the intervention of dozens of firefighters with millions of dollars of equipment, and neither one resulted in near or total destruction. Just a refinished garage and bathroom.