The strange thing about this case is the letter doesn't mention a specific debt and he can't get any details of a debt he supposedly owes. To be on the safe side I write a letter stating that I do not believe I owe them any money and asking them to send verification of the debt. I'd also include a copy of the letter they sent me. Send the whole thing to them via certified mail. At that point I can prove that I contacted them if it comes up again and that I asked them provide me information on that debt. If you end up having to dispute something that the put on your credit report that is good stuff to have. Basically assume they are lying scum and that you need to treat everything like they are out to steal from you.

This is just standard federal contracting maneuvering. When you get into these major federal contracts the award is almost always contested internally through the procurement system and then in court. Its simply a case where the potential rewards mean it is always worth throwing some money at a suing if you think you have any chance at all. It would probably be easier to list the major federal procurement programs that didn't end up in court than the ones that did. This is literally just how the game is played. Everyone involved fully expected whichever major company lost to sue.

Not just around DC but the entire DC to Richmond corridor on I-95 is terrible. Especially around Fredericksburg. It is not at all uncommon for traffic to be bumper to bumper along that section even during non-peak hours. It is frequently much faster to get off the interstate and travel route 1 which runs parallel to it. You can at least do 45 mph on most of route 1.

I have no idea what the real law is but all of these games are almost exactly copying the concept from the movie Battle Royal. If anybody has a copyright claim seems like would be the people who made the movie .

Health insurance companies make their money that way on smaller clients. Most larger companies self-insure. In those cases the insurance company makes their money off of fees for managing the plan. The actual costs for care are directly paid by the company. That is why at many larger companies you can get stuff that is not technically in the plan covered anyway if you can convince HR. The insurance company has no skin in the game so if the employer says they'll pay for it they will cover it.

My problem with euthanasia is anybody you put in charge of it is incentivized to kill you when you get expensive. The various national health systems have proven to be at least as slimy as private insurers when it comes to saving money at the patients expense. I do not want my doctor incentivized to do me in when my care becomes expensive.

If he was really working for the Russians perhaps he is afraid his former employers are going to try and clean house to cover their tracks? Wouldn't be the first myserious death invovling them. That might be a powerful motivator for him to play ball with the US to try and get a deal and some protection.

It also varies upon where you are in the company. I am the sole IT person working at small, about 100 people, remote office of a much larger company, about 8,000 people. I am the only person in the building who has tools. I get pretty much anything that breaks even if it isn't technically IT related. A lot of the stuff will eventually get handled by the appropriate departments in the company but I am pretty much always the first responder. In addition to my regular IT work I've fixed doors, the refrigerator, the microwave, a garbage disposal, turned off more than one plumbing fixture that was spraying water, assembled furniture and probably more stuff I've forgotten. If I was working at one of our bigger offices I'd wouldn't do all of that. On the other hand, I'd have to commute to one of our bigger offices so it is a reasonable trade off in my view. Besides this other stuff gives me the occasional change of pace.

We are already well on our way to that. When I was a kid there was a guy in our neighborhood who was very proud of buying his new cars in cash. He'd save up walk into the dealership and just buy a car. Whether it was wise or not it was something you could do. Try doing that now and the dealer probably won't take the payment. Simply because they don't want to deal with the paperwork. The government won't ban cash they'll just encumber it with requirements until people stop accepting it.

If you are interested the paper work, at least that I am aware of, is IRS form 8300. You can find a publication talking about it below. That rule has pretty much-reduced cash to use in small transactions because most companies simply don't want to do deal with the paperwork. Those that do still allow large cash transactions are creating the same sort of paper trail using credit creates anyway. Either way they get to monitor all but minor transactions.

IRS Publication I544

This is pretty close to my thoughts on this as well. There have been a number of cases like that in the press here over the years. Enough that I'd argue that rather than carrying no cash you make sure you have at least a token amount on you. I'd rather lose a few bucks than get seriously injured or killed by some robber.

The "complex stuff" is a smoke screen. The real answer is they've bought enough politicians and regulators that they can get away with ripping their customers off with relative impunity. The only problem is the occasional state regulator who isn't with the program. So now they are trying to leverage the people they've already bought to make that go away.

I am not a lawyer but from what I am reading it sounds like that can't leave until 2020 clause is dead on arrival. Basically, one President can't make executive orders or agreements that bind the hands of the next President. So even if the Obama administration agreed to that treaty he lacked the authority to say the Trump administration would do anything at all. Trump can throw any of those agreements out at will no matter what the text says. If Obama didn't want that to be the case the answer is he had to submit it as a treaty to the Senate and get them to ratify it. Then those terms would be legally binding and would matter. Since he didn't do that the agreements effectively ended the day his administration did unless the next administration chose to continue them. There are a bunch of articles from the time of the signing talking about how it was largely symbolic because it wasn't legally binding in the next administration.

I've had friends in similar situations and one of the reasons they stayed to the end is they got paid a significant bonus to do so. During these mergers, the companies are always afraid that they'll lose the best and brightest needed to keep the lights on. The companies often go to those people and make them an offer of some level of compensation in order to get them to ride it out to the end.

One guy, I used to work with got six months pay over and above the standard severance package for staying until the company was liquidated. Between that bonus, his severance package, cashed out leave, and the salary he earned during that last year he made a sizable amount of money by being one of the last people out the door. He then conducted a leisurely six-month job search, mostly from a beach, while he collected unemployment.

I think the limiting factor here isn’t a lack of available open source materials. Too many schools have gotten bed with the publishers and are getting a nice cut of the way over priced books. The schools for example could have gone with cheaper publishers without much trouble. They could have told their publishers to not rearrange the same text every year to make it hard on people using used books. Yet, they don’t. Simple fact is that at the end of the day it isn’t in their interests to make it cheaper for you get your books.

Now the community college system is often a different beast. I did the first two years of my degree at the community college in my home state. They stuck with the same books until something significant changed. The campus books store always had a nice stack of used copies of every book you could need and they were the exact same book that was being sold new. When I transferred to a regular school it was entirely different. The books changed every year, sometimes every semester, and many of the professors had written their own supplemental books you had to buy. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if my old community college adopted open source books to save the students money. I suspect hell will freeze over before my university does it.

I hope AMD has figured this out. The last few years AMD chips just haven't been all that competitive. I've continued to build the occasional AMD based machine in the hope they wouldn't go under and would turn it around. We really need at least two chip makers making really viable CPUs. The consumer always wins when companies are forced to really compete with each other.

I was wondering about that. Why don't they buy some other brand? How proprietary is this stuff? Is it possible that people who were using John Deere before they started this are basically suffering from brand lock-in because they've got too much money sunk into a proprietary solution to change?