Category: Entertainment

If torture produced national security, the regimes in the Middle East would be the safest places in the world.

That would be the provision of the law, called the medical loss ratio, that requires health insurance companies to spend 80% of the consumers’ premium dollars they collect—85% for large group insurers—on actual medical care rather than overhead, marketing expenses and profit. Failure on the part of insurers to meet this requirement will result in the insurers having to send their customers a rebate check representing the amount in which they underspend on actual medical care.

Impressive

The problem is it creates the wrong incentives. Data is not like water or gas where you can save it by not using it. The fixed costs are the same no matter how much bandwith we use, and any bandwidth we don’t use is lost forever. This means we should encourage people to use more bandwidth, and if we don’t have enough, we should build more infrastructure. Usage based billing encourages us to waste network capacity, and discourages ISPs from building out infrastructure. Why spend money to upgrade the network when you can make money by charging the heavy users instead?

Hatta – http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2555322&cid=38236644

Private sector pensions are one of the great scandals of our age. Only 40 per cent of private sector workers are now in an employer-sponsored pension scheme. It’s even worse with low-paid workers: only 20 per cent of those earning between £100 and £200 a week are in an employer-backed scheme.

But the argument should not be to drag down the pensions of public sector workers: it should be to drag up the pensions of private sector workers. Why punish public sector workers for the bad practices of private sector employers? If we do, we end up in a race to the bottom.

http://www.leftfootforward.org/2011/11/four-myths-about-todays-strike-busted/