I am mostly ok with these copyright crackdowns in AI in the spirit of - if a human were to do it commercially, it would be illegal.
We can argue if that should be the case or not, which is a different issue.
However, it should not be legal to automate something at scale that is illegal when done by an individual human. Allowing it just tips the scale against labor even more.
Indeed, healthy or not, once you hit 40s .. the number of friends/family/self dealing with accidents/injuries/serious illness/death grows exponentially.
Right I think a lot of upper income Americans don't understand how it compares globally.
Seeing what my UK colleagues deal with, a $200K income would land you solidly in the 40% marginal tax bracket over there, vs (if married) .. 22% here. US federal effective tax rate (before getting into deductions) would be like 17% on that 200k, for a $166k take home.. versus equivalent UK take-home would be as low as $123k (again not getting into deductions).
So UK similar income has $43k more in taxes.. to get you NHS? Doesn't seem like a great trade if in the US you have options starting from $14k?
They spend less because their nurses make poverty wages compared to the U.S. My sister in law is studying to be a nurse. Starting pay is around $70,000 here. In the UK it’s like $42,000. She could make that much being a nanny around here.
> OECD Health Statistics data show U.S. registered nurses (RNs) earn 1.5 times the OECD12 average salary. These data are adjusted for purchasing power parity. Using numbers of RNs in the U.S. from the Bureau of Labor Statistics,22 we computed total RN earnings using average U.S. pay and OECD12 average pay. The difference was $79 billion, or about 2 percent of 2021 NHE, representing approximately 5 percent of excess U.S. spending when rounded to the nearest multiple of five.
It's not nothing, but it's hardly the only reason, or even a particularly big one.
How are you getting $166k take home for a $200 salary? If I use one of those online tax calculator things for New York, I get a take home of $135,000 from $200k. Ok, so let’s try a lower tax state that still has a lot of economic opportunity. For Texas I get $150,000 take home. Once you start adding on the costs associated in the US with having a serious medical condition, it’s far from clear that you’re going to be saving a lot of money from lower taxes. You’ll save a bit if you stay healthy and pay a lot more if you don’t.
In fact, the portion of a US health insurance premiums IS a tax, based on your age! Not to mention the myriad ways tax policy (including the age rating factors that cause young people to pay a tax via their health insurance premium) vary among not only the 50 states, but the smaller jurisdictions within the states.
Sure. But if you make the calculation that granular, you also need to include employer-paid health insurance on the compensation side of the ledger. More than half of Americans have employer-paid health insurance, and employers contribute on average $17,000 per employee: https://www.business.com/articles/health-insurance-costs-thi...
Of course, that is why US employees should be able to have access to benefit costs in terms of dollars to be able to compare total compensation. Currently, that is usually only available after the end of a calendar year on form W-2 (box 12 code DD for health insurance premiums).
Technically, you have to get even more granular. If your employer subsidizes health insurance premiums, then you pay for health insurance with pre tax income. If your employer does not, then you have to buy with post tax income. The difference is thousands of dollars per year.
You even avoid FICA if you can max out your HSA via payroll withholdings, a decision solely made by your employer.
It’s actually amazing how many ways the US governments has come up with to screw young people and small businesses.
I mean generally speaking derivatives can be used as insurance or for speculation, and a wide gradient of gray in between.
By contrast, sports gambling is well, gambling. And importantly as we've seen in a lot of reports - the big online sports books essentially freeze out anyone who is good so that they are collecting revenue primarily from the.. innumerate.
Of course you also have some markets like India without legal gambling and oversized derivatives markets that are unfortunately serving as a replacement.
I'd also point out that you don't see the sort of degenerate nonstop advertising for options punting that you see for sports gambling. "Thanks for tuning into the ESPN FanDuel pregame show at the Caesars Superdome / and don't forget to stop by the DraftKings Sportsbook lounge." Followed by a barrage of other gambling ads in between plays.
My 30 year old central air which covers 1 floor of my home went out recently so I got a bunch of replacement quotes, most vendors I asked for both a traditional central air & a heat pump central air quote.
The quotes were generally 50% more expensive for the heat pump option.
Vendor A: $12.5k AC, $17.7K Heat Pump + extra electrical work for the heat strips.
Vendor B: $8K AC, $11K Heat Pump + they don't think the existing ductwork is sufficient for comfortable heating and would recommend redoing some of it.
And I wouldn't qualify for any tax credits because it doesn't cover full home (there are upper floors without ducts that already are on mini splits & baseboard heat).
Also worth noting the range of HVAC quotes for the same spec cooling in the same home are insane. Every quote I got seemed to widen the range.
Can you do the installation yourself? In my country i have to make a HVAC technician come to check the installation and sign a paper before i can start mine (200€ for a 15 minutes job, but it's less than the 2-4k it would cost to not do it myself)
[edit] i say that because my hardware is 2.5k euros, so ~3k¯dollars, so we probably have the same high end stuff, and i guarantee you it's not hard to install, and it can be quite fast if you have help from your SO.
Depends on where you live. Someone that has the tools can do it themselves and then shut the fuck up, which is how I suspect most of them in America get installed. Code/planning enforcement commonly surveils residences via satellite or air images but they're not noticing a mini split installed.
Newer units (not all) in the US come pre-charged up to a certain size of lineset. Manufacturers can sell you a whole unit with a charge. The rest is easy to source locally though I haven't tried to get nitrogen myself.
Of course you have exactly one chance with your install this way until you have to call someone.
Central air system with indoor blower & outdoor condenser generally don't come with pre-charged lines so self-install without certification isn't really an option in US.
I got my EPA 608 universal for free after 2 night of cramming and an online proctored test. Skillcat, I think they charge like $50 if you want a printed card, worth it to me because I wanted to be able to walk into supply houses and buy refrigerant.
I almost did this after I helped a friend install a mini-split.
Having just installed a mini-split in my office shed with a pre/charged unit. I told him it was easy and helped him. We ended up needing to buy an extra long line set to make the distance work, which needed more refrigerant.
I called 15 different places and finally found one that could come out and charge the line for under $350. Which was hard to stomach with the whole unit costing only $750 from Amazon.
Getting the 608 is mostly rote memorization and the only thing required at the federal level. On the state level if you want a trade license that generally takes 4 years, but where I live residential owner-builder doesn't need it.
Me too, except I got it in the SkillCat free trial. Did it while rocking my then baby over a few weeks. Super easy for anyone that is a “good” test taker and has high school level reading
It's not just certification/permitting. The manufacturers often state that the unit must be verified to be installed by a qualified technian or the warranty is void.
Around here anyway, I was getting quotes of 20k for the install & equipment of a central air handler and the outdoor unit.
I'd be dead before the thing paid for itself in electricity cost savings. $20,000 ÷ (~90yrslife - 40yrsold) = $400 / year of neccesary savings to break-even as my casket is lowered into the ground.
Most don't have a payback if the cost of electricity is too high. Let's make them lower cost up front and lower running costs so it's a no brainer when replacement is due.
This is similar to just about everything mechanical (e.g. auto maintenance). The labor is always the biggest fraction of the cost, not the parts. You always have the option to DIY.
The Virus TI series are truly impressive even.. or especially, by modern standards. 16 multitimbral parts, up to 90 voices... 20 years ago!
These days you can spend $1000 and get 8-16 voices without multitimbral feature. Hydrasynth Deluxe or Novation Summit in the $2k-3k range for 2 parts and total of 16 voices is considered good now.
Everything has moved to DAW centric workflows tethered to your computer and the hardware has really stopped innovating.
Sure, the DAW is king in the 21st century .. but hardware synths have their time and place. Access was one of the first to get hardware/software integration working with the TI - but as we can see, its a difficult thing to support, going into the future .. the TI plugin is no longer a viable feature unless you dedicate archaic hardware/OS to its functionality - however the synth hardware itself is still as operational and useful as it ever was. This is as true of the synth world as ever.
Its wonderful to have the Virus TI hardware working in a DSP emulator - one can only hope that eventually the reverse-engineering eyeballs will also tackle the TI plugin feature, some day ...
Agreed, every time the impacted services list internally gets shorter, the next update it starts growing again.
A lot of these are second order dependencies like Astronomer, Atlassian, Confluent, Snowflake, Datadog, etc... the joys of using hosted solutions to everything.
Before my old company spun off, we didn’t know the old ops team had put on-prem production and our Atlassian instances in the same NAS.
When the NAS shit the bed, we lost half of production and all our run books. And we didn’t have autoscaling yet. Wouldn’t for another 2 years.
Our group is a bunch of people that has no problem getting angry and raising voices. The whole team was so volcanically angry that it got real quiet for several days. Like everyone knew if anyone unclenched that there would be assault charges.
After circular equity investments and then debt in off balance sheet entities, we are speed running to the government handout phase.
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