Your plan sounds excellent - where do you live, who's your provider? Oh, and what % does your employer kick in?

These are real questions, since I employ people in NYC, and have just been going over health plans to figure out how to reduce the cost.

So are you saying that the Republicans are all behind the solution that Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (a Republican, somehow from the 'loony liberal' state of Massachusetts) has adopted ?

The system appears to be working well in Massachusetts, so how come the Republican party wasn't agitating for that kind of solution against the Obama plan? The Republican solution appeared to be 'don't change anything, or well call you a socialist'.

Perhaps you're being sarcastic - but since that conflicts with the first half of the paragraph, I'm guessing no.

Advertising against smoking, drinking and fattening is probably more money efficient than having doctors telling patients the same thing when they come in with complications. It's exactly the right call for a system focussing on long-term healthy outcomes.

As someone who is just inside the top end of the 'right' BMI range, I can assure you that it doesn't imply magazine-cover looks.

OTOH, I know that most of Americans in my office (I'm a Brit in NYC) agree that the BMI measure to be horribly wrong when applied to Americans - specifically the 90% of them that are on the other side of the normal weight cutoff. The 10% of them who actually care about their diet and exercise stay quiet. Moderation must be un-American.

> "In England" : swimmed, runned, stinged, waked, sinked, etc.

Not the England where I'm from...

Did you see that the lower rod is also driven by the main engine? It's like one engine driving both parts of the Prius mechanism. Small additional torque on the control rod causes it to speed up/slow down, and it's the speed difference that shows up at the output. The vast bulk of the torques are provided by the main engine through BOTH RODS.

There are two differentials coupled back-to-back. The both top and bottom shafts are being powered by the main drive. So the control shaft is transmitting torque to the main drive too. But the control motor needs only add an extra 'delta'.

Control shaft is also powered by the engine at the other end. It's experiencing a lot of torque which 'cancel out'. The control motor just adds a 'delta'.

But the control gear is connected to a shaft that has a 'counter torque' applied by the main drive. So the main drive is powering both shafts, but the gear systems leave the bottom gear with a net zero torque. The control gear only has to add extra 'delta' of torque, not combat the whole output.

Agreed - this is the 'secret sauce' in the design. Even though the output stage appears to put equal torques on the 'power' outer ring and inner 'control cog', the control rod is connected back through to the 'power input', so that the overall torque on it is neutralized. The control system just needs to add a 'delta' amount of force.

He's using google so that people's browsers have a chance of retrieving their cached version, loaded from another site. This is the Right Thing to do.

hospital bed?

I know this is untrue, having worked in Wall Street firms.

The bulge bracket firms normally pay a bonus in Feb, based on last year's "production" (but with fiddle-factors based on ill-defined factors such as 'contribution'). It leads to a lot of in-fighting towards the end of the year, and lots of job changes 'once the check has cleared'.

The last couple of years, a large percentage of the bonuses have been paid in (restricted) stock, to keep people where they are. That stock might respond to short-term figures, but that's a feature of the stock market, not the people holding the stock (who would normally prefer to have received cash they can spend).

I now work in a commission-only environment (despite not being a salesperson) since I prefer the clarity of being paid using a plain numerical formula related to the prior month's profits. Some months I might earn exactly zero, but I have to say that I'm a little proud of that, since it keeps the politics to a minimum.

Of course, in that case, it's not so much terraforming as 'somewhereelse-forming'.

And they'll be along soon to clear off the rodents from the planet they prepared earlier...