briffle

There SHOULD be the same incintive in private health care like the US to also lower costs. but when we voted in the ACA (Obamacare) there was a well meaning clause that said insurers had to spend 85% of their premiums on care. That should also re-inforce the cost savings part, but then the largest companies started buying Pharmacies, Pharmacy Benefit Managers, Doctors offices, and even whole Hospitals.

Now they can still spend 85% of the INSURANCE premiums on care, but then those costs are going to their other divisions which can raise prices at will, and make massive profits for the whole group.

Kind of curious how many of those 15,462 fires shut down a freeway for 10 hours because they can't put it out?

How do you have multiple Water companies compete?

That Gravel road is partially washed out in parts. and VERY rough. its completely unmaintained. Unless you get out and study the angles, and have a few friends guide you (and experience) your going to high-center most regular clearance vehicles, at least some parts of the year. The actual trail has spots where you have to use a rope some nice person tied to a tree to lower yourself down a cliff about 15-20 feet, etc. Especially when its wet, which is 10 months of the year.

Also no signs or parking lots.

> Lots of companies have a way to unsubscribe electronically, but it requires logging in to your account, going into settings, saying you want to unsub, and possibly declining various offers to stay.

My local paper on the west coast is owned now by USA Today. They often have specials (digital edition for $8 for only 6 months) sales. Takes a CC, and a few clicks. If you go past that time, you get switched to the $15/month subscription.

But to cancel the digital version of the local paper, I have to call customer service, that is based out of the east coast, that seems to be open from 9-4 east coast time. And then of course, they try to get me to change my mind, bargain with me, etc.

its bad enough, last time I used privacy.com, and set a max limit, and just ignored their emails about my card declining. and they are ALMOST as bad a cirrusXM was when our free trial with a new car was expiring.

My state charges a fee for every new bicycle that is purchased in the state to help cover costs.

Great to know that everyone's RAM, GPU, and SSD costs have skyrocketed over the last year, so that companies like Oracle can fill giant buildings full of RAM and SSD's (and GPU's) and then not even be able to turn them on..

They never did. they had the balls to resist against western governments, where it was politically adventagous to do so. They folded to China real quick, because they wanted to make sales. All "icloud storage" in china has been on another storage platform, that follows all the local laws.

I have not been attributing it so much to malice, just that all the major cloud vendors seem to be running at full capacity, and can't build new datacenters fast enough. I just kind of assumed that as they got busy training newer models, that they allocated less resources to handle the existing systems, because they aren't able to get more capacity right now.

I had a cousin that worked private security, and for a few years (I think it was early 2000's) his main gig was to work as a team of armed security, and follow trucks from the two Intel campuses in Oregon to the airport in unmarked vehicles, get on the cargo plane with the cargo, and fly to the location where they did the packaging of the wafers (I want to say it was the Philippine Islands) and then fly back. Lots of overtime.

i think this is actually good, because there are differences between the images they found, and security settings that the company claimed.

They had not admitted before to tracking people, but their software is clearly submitting them. They had not admitted before to looking at bumper stickers, but turns out they do.

I wonder if they could find all cars with Bernie Sanders bumper stickers within X blocks of a polling place.. I can imagine that (or similar queries) might be very useful in the wrong hands.

most large tankers are too large for both the Suez and Panama Canals.

Sat in CERT and emergency coordination meetings in the Pacific Northwest. If the > 9.0 earthquake happens that is predicted, it will take a week to get temporary shelters working. All supplies will get flown to the few large airports east of the cascades (Redmond OR, Tri-Cities WA, Yakima, WA, etc). Because all the small bridges on moutain passes will collapse (creeks, small rivers, etc) all supplies will be helicoptered over the mountains until they can get Army Corps of Engineers teams in to rebuild runways.

They suggested having at LEAST a weeks worth of supplies, and more if you don't want to be waiting in a very impatient line with a bunch of scared, hungry people that may be desperate.

The other data is harder to quantify, but kind of insane. Like how long DHS estimates it will take to rebuild I-5 (minus major bridges) as a passable road, along with some key railroads, and basic power.

I would have also immediately asked for their policy on how long children of different ages can be unsupervised.

> If it's so much cheaper to build multiple small reactors, just build one big plant with 24 small reactors.

That is literally the plan with several designs like NuScale (and I think TerraPower). The plan with NuScale is to ship the reactors on rail or barge, and then truck it in the last few miles. So they cost savings is in not having to custom desgin the actual components for each site, and build them on site. Standard reactor, standard monitoring systems, standard control room able to monitor multiple reactors, etc.

Plus, when you have 12 of them onsite in one large area, you can take one offline for refueling, and still produce power with the rest of them.