40 months inside, eh? Looks as though the law protected us from you for those months.....

You might not have read that bill, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, now codified at Pub.L. 111-148, 124 Stat. 119; and, that goes into effect in stages from July 1, 2010 through 2014.

A genetic predisposition is not a preexisting condition - it is a predisposition that may or may not result in the manifestation of the disease (you might get hit by a car, die in a war or avoid a BMI over 1.2 and prevent the predisposition to type II Diabetes from manifesting itself despite the genetic predisposition).

As a result I suggested that the insurance industry could (and, I'd bet money on this) determine that a pre-pre-existing condition - the genetic predisposition of a healthy individual - would be grounds to deny coverage.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is silent as to genetic predisposition - and as such, there is nothing precluding the industry from implementing this pattern of exclusion from coverage. RTFL

Vexatious refusal - a class of actions that annoy insurance companies and don't pay very much when you win the lawsuit.

Laws are things that are a nuisance where you have a stock insurance company - dedicated to making a profit for the shareholders by collecting as much in premiums as possible and paying claims only when trivial.

Mutual insurance companies are owned by their insureds and benefit by spreading the risk pool to the largest number of insureds - damn shame that they are an endangered species....

Contemplate the insurance industry that presently wants to cover the "worried well" and facing a bar against dropping coverage for pre-existing conditions empowered with DNA data that proves your genetic predisposition to disease and dropping coverage on a pre-pre-existing condition.

The silver in old film is too valuable - the film is sent to a recycler who recovers the Ag. Also, radiology records rooms with tons and tons of film have to be specially designed to hold that mass and are, obviously, limited in space.

Radiographs are not simple to read and many require the radiologist to highlight, magnify or compress (yep - dual convex lens) to get an accurate read - making scanning the film an inadequate solution.

My spouse has her own set of baseline films - because an odd structure showed up and was determined to be benign - and we still have those films 30 years out....

Private Legal Counsel.

More than 23 years ago I took a Toshiba T-1000 to law school. I'm a fairly good typist, but gave up trying to keep up contemporaneous note taking within the first two weeks. I found that the best thing to do was to condense and rewrite my hand-written notes on the laptop after class.

Yes, I was the first student to bring a laptop to any class in my law school.

Synthetic instruments are unregulated and exceed the value of the planet's GNP. Just because people are willing to posit a value in something doesn't mean that it actually has value. Take the Tulip mania of the 1800's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania for example.

The problem with the jerks marketing the derivatives again is that they were bailed out once and expect to be bailed out as many times as they can get away with it.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if today's little "accident" wasn't just a few program traders making a killing under the guise of a typo. I trust nobody in any of the Wall Street Arbitrage / Hedge Fund business. We would all be better off repealing the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and imprisoning the top 20% of every investment house.

Well, Italy didn't do much where a massive engineering firm created a dam that failed. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam

"Tort Reform" has capped the liability for physicians in many states - despite criminals like Michael Swango, M.D. poisoning patients and co-workers. http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=96548&page=1

The number of crooked lawyers (my own profession) is burgeoning and many are directly involved in the economic meltdown. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/04/21/92637/goldmans-connections-to-white.html

Time to take a had line approach to a class of criminal that would actually BE deterred if they knew that they would certainly be executed. Hell, make the next of kin push the button. Add a real fear of retaliation from a disgruntled spouse and those "masters of the universe" would dot every "i" and cross every "t."

Well, you have a point - but the risk associated with developing real property is substantial and not necessarily foreseeable or controllable by the developer (e.g. September 2008).

Moreover, the risk is spread - typically a bank makes a construction loan that is paid off very quickly after the completion of construction - and that, in turn, means that the developer has a major incentive to line up buyers for the condo units so that they pay the developer and the construction loan issuing bank at the closing. Once the construction loan has been retired, the rest is profit.

Of course, the potential for default - or a chain of defaults - is always present where a prime contractor or a sub creates the first default in the domino chain that takes the project south. Liens, breach and litigation are the stuff of a construction project gone bad.

Wanna bet? Trade has driven human intercourse for millennia. The "economy" is not going to disappear any time soon.

It may be seriously twisted by the unregulated banksters - but not killed.

Oh, we simply eliminate the world economy and devolve back to barter?

Quoting Glenn Beck for anything is entirely revelatory. Nixon took the US off of the Gold Standard and allowed uS Currency to "float" against other nation's currencies. The price of gold has *nothing* to do with the value of US Currency.

Gold is grossly overpriced today and the fools who buy at the top of the market will lose big.

So, we know the intellect of the target market for Glenn Beck's show.... you know, people who believe the things that a Vick's Vapo-rub crying lunatic whines as he plays with chalk. My God, what a fool he is. Even worse are the total tools who watch his BS.

Good luck with your

Well, perhaps we ought to consider lifetime revocations of trader certifications - or, where a fraud has been committed that costs more than $1meg - consider death penalties. These well educated investors/brokers/traders/managers would be deterred if a few were executed. Unlike the fools who rob and murder who can't conceive of the consequences of their acts.

Imagine the crowd outside the prison if the law mandated Bernie Madoff pay the ultimate price. Would we even have had a Madoff embezzlement if Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken had been subject to the death penalty twenty years earlier.

If we are ever going to hold these traders accountable - then I am for an effective death penalty for financial mis/mal/nonfeasance in excess of $1meg. Cull the herd.

Or, it was intentional. Who says that the initial drop wasn't strategy?

That nails it. The synthetic instruments in trade now exceed the GNP of the entire planet. Smoke and mirrors - vast investments in products that have no intrinsic value - we are playing dice with the planet's economy.