DrewEckhardt

There's no law which says poor people need to buy or rent their own private living space, drive newer cars everywhere, have cable or satellite TV, etc. Money goes much farther when you spend $300 to rent a room instead of $600 for a one-bedroom apartment, take a bicycle to work instead of using $4 a gallon gasoline, don't have a $60/month TV bill, etc.

No, and I found it a bit disturbing that a 1/2" thick foot long chunk of metal in my leg did not bother airport security the same way my car keys or pocket change would. OTOH, that was before the naked making machines that'll spot a plastic comb. I had the hole in my tibia closed with a bone graft and the rod removed so I don't know how that would show up with the current airport setup.

Computer vision wasn't up for the task, processing power was insufficient, and if that wasn't the case capital costs of sophisticated robots would have precluded human replacement in that situation. Cars also weren't yet designed for easy robotic service although that's changing too - the Tesla Model S is built for robotic battery changes and in the future we could do the same thing with other field replaceable units.

Sure and it won't work because not everyone will have the aptitudes needed to share the remaining jobs. Ultimately we're going to get to the point that most of our population can't work for private industry except as human conspicuous consumption (uniformed human maids, gardeners, cooks, and butlers) for the very well off and there won't be enough of them to employ the rest of us. Once past that point those people will be receiving government stipends and voting for politicians who ensure the payments are not stingy. It'd be prudent to plan ahead for that and avoid a crash landing.

Cannon fodder, sedan chair bearer, Soylent Green main ingredient.

I belong to TechShop http://www.techshop.ws/ where I get access to stationary tools that don't fit my shed or budget 9am-12 midnight 7 days a week without disturbing my neighbors. My home is about 15 minutes from each of two locations and I have a parking pass for the San Jose facility. CNC mills (with 4th axis option), wood routers, lasers, water jets, plasma cutters, embroidery machines, and 3D printers. I keep meaning to take the waterjet class so I can use it to cut a marble platform for my garden monk. Manual vertical mills, metal lathes, hot saw, cold saw, horizontal and vertical metal bandsaws, mig, tig, big sheet metal brake, English wheel, tube bender, oven for curing powder-coat, grinders, sand-blaster, wood lathes, 12" jointer/planer with a helical head, cabinet saw, wood bandsaw which will re-saw to 1' wide.

Outdoor furniture, bicycle wheels, empty beer bottles, meals involving meat or fish. My wife would say I'm good at making messes too. Some time soon I mean to get some proficiency with metal and wood lathes to compliment my milling (manual and CNC) and wood routing skills.

Computer software, stereo speakers and subwoofers,electronic circuits with tubes or solid state, ar15s, ammunition.

Buy a $1750 rig and throw it in the dumpster after 131 jumps and you'll be $1984 ahead of the new setup you get half your money back on. His encouragement to be less conservative than is accepted doesn't matter when he won't be covering your medical expenses and lost wages if you break yourself. Buy used gear, don't load it over 1.0 + 0.1 pounds per square foot per 100 jumps or down-size without the skills enumerated by Bill von Novak and Brian Germain, and you'll spend $1-$2/jump in depreciation regardless of how many rigs and canopies you go through getting to a size you want to jump for the foreseeable future. Being patient and negotiating aggressively can even turn a profit.

Your equipment very likely weighs more than you're estimating. It won't make a huge difference, but you might as well get it right. 20 pounds was always the rough estimate I was told to use for the equipment. I should weigh myself one day with all my stuff on just to be exactly sure. My 105 main / 143 reserve rig weighs 19 pounds. My 245/253 setup is 29 pounds. I'd bet that most rigs weigh more than 20 pounds.

If your legstraps are tight it's not a problem. Skydiving naked (been there, done that both horizontal and vertical) it's still not a problem although the sight of one's junk head-down might offend puritanical observers. Just don't botch the landing and get roadrash someplace exceptionally uncomfortable.

Just think of Silicon Valley as another country where the US dollar doesn't go as far and the local working class mines code instead of coal. $300K mobile homes are middle class where the big local employers pay new graduates over $100,000 a year (this article http://www.netpaths.net/blog/starting-salaries-of-top-technology-companies-apple-google-microsoft-facebook/ is illustrative but out of date) and good mid-career professionals (not executives who may do better) can break $200K cash at venture funded startups (disregarding equity with a median value of zero) and $300K total compensation at big companies. That's also the sort of population which supports $4400 tax and jumbo mortgage payments (what you get when you borrow $720K on a $900K property at 4.5%) that make a $3400 difference in take-home pay (or $53K and $41K annually gross and net).

I've been working in software for a couple decades with the last six years and two startups in Silicon Valley. While the tech industry is very competitive, once you get real world experience where you went to college and whether you graduated are completely irrelevant. It's all about what you've done in industry and are therefore likely to do again. You don't need to know people either; a linkedin account will get you plenty of contacts. Although most come from contingency recruiters just matching keywords a substantial minority are from executives and retained recruiters who know what they need for potentially interesting leadership positions.

Mine went down too although that was because I aged beyond prime baby making years not Obamacare. My adult son's catastrophic plan nearly doubled from $85 a month to $150.

Exactly. At that income level if you're neither self employed nor a family with both adults each working several low-wage jobs you probably have employer provided health care which is already expensive. After receiving their 2014 tax refund very few people will see a net decrease in income which is exactly the point - subsidies extend so far so that the few negatively affected Americans won't be a viable voting block. It's like the 25-59% capital gains tax increase with the low end kicking in at $200K a year for singles and $250K for couples (top 5%) and high end $400K/$450K (top 1%) - offensive, but applicable to so few people it won't cost congress critters their jobs.

You have drank the cool aid Nope. I'm just providing _facts_. People are free to keep their existing coverage under the circumstances I outlined. The observant reader would note that's like the states being free to have a drinking age of 18 which just doesn't happen due to the federal financial strings attached to the desired behavior. Hardly. While sold to the people by proponents and opponents as a socialist program, as passed ACA is a corporatist play intended to maximize profits for companies like those that belong to PhRMA (Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America) which had objectionable provisions like the reimport clause removed and then spent $150M passing the bill to send billions of tax dollars their way. If ACA survives the political onslaught which precedes peoples' tax refund from the subsidies it'll still be with us in ten years like Medicare Part D which is the other $100B/year tax funnel to corporatist interests in medical industries. The problem here is that most people won't have to pay for the cost increases. 15% of Americans are on Medicare because they're too old or disabled to be profitable. 23% of us receive Medicaid because we're too poor for profit. 45% of us get health insurance through our employers which is already expensive for the same reasons post-ACA insurance will start out being expensive (no pre-existing condition exclusions, limited premium spread due to age, captive market which can't leave without loosing subsidies). That leaves just 17% of the population getting private insurance who could be effected by increasing prices. When those people make less than 400% of the Federal poverty level ($94,200 for a family of 4) their contribution is capped between 2 and 9.5% of income. Given the tendency. With group coverage tending to accompany higher paying jobs we can expect more of those people to be at the high-subsidy end of the spectrum and not paying for those increases. Costs will go up more as health insurers spend more which is the only way to increase profits under ACA which allows them to collect 25% more than they spend on medical care as premiums although that'll have no negative effect on the 17% receiving subsidies. With a $10/month generic drug allowing just $2.50 of gross profit and $100/month patented medicine yielding $25 we can expect more spending on the brand-name drugs advertised on television so the perceived quality of care will go up and people will have even fewer reasons to oppose ACA.

What happened to being able to keep your current coverage? People are free to keep their current coverage as long as it conforms to the ACA requirements, they're willing to cover the entire tab themselves, and their insurer doesn't decide to discontinue it.

If their IQ exceeds room temperature they'll buy through their state exchange and collect their Federal subsidy. A family of four earning less than $94,200 a year (in the top 25%) that buys its insurance through a state exchange has its expenses capped at $745 a month. At the 2011 median household income for people holding at least a bachelor's degree of $73,466 it'd be $581 a month. At the 2011 median household income of $50,502 it'd be under $339 a month. With most "professional" jobs coming with health insurance they're probably on the low end of that scale and won't be paying for the increased costs themselves. If they're earning below the national median their share of insurance costs is going to drop.

No because much of the burden will be borne by "the wealthy". At the 2011 median household income of $50,502 a family of four's insurance expenditures are capped at $4065 a year or $339 a month provided that they buy through their state exchange which is in-line with what catastrophic plans cost before Obamacare.

No. They only placed a limit on _gross_ margins or markup depending on how you look at it. The health insurers can markup any goods and services delivered to their members by 25% (an 80% medical loss ratio for individual and small group plans means a 20% gross margin which is the same as a 25% markup) regardless of how much that is. For example, before ACA insurance companies maximized profits by approving Prilosec which is available as a generic and less expensive in branded form due to the competition but not Nexium which is patented and more expensive although otherwise the same thing without the D-enantiomer which is not bioactive. After they can "improve" care and maximize profits by allowing Nexium which performed better in clinical trials comparing 20mg of the S-enantiomer form to just 10mg of it in Prilosec and profit from the 25% markup on 8X the sales. This has nothing to do with the upper limits on how much more they charge people with risk factors; although most of us don't suffer from those so a better way of looking at it is that the law mandates charging young people at least 1/3 of what they charge old people and non-smokers at least 2/3 what they charge smokers. My son's insurance almost ($85 to $150 a month) doubled with the normalization for Obamacare.

Except 1. There is _NO_ limit on the amount of money they can charge. As group plan purveyors have demonstrated high rates (My employer and I pay about $1000 a month to cover my wife and I) allow insurers to profitably cover people with pre-existing conditions as long as it's hard to opt out. 2. Americans earning up to $94,200 a year for a family of 4 (which is at the 75th percentile for household income) are eligible for government subsidies which cap their share of those charges and make them less likely to opt out. 3. The fine for not buying health insurance is about as big as their capped premium contribution for many Americans. For instance, as of 2016 the fine will be the greater of $2085 and 2.6% of income for a family of 4. The median household income in the US is $45K which is less than 200% of the federal poverty level for a family of 4 dictating a 6.3% spending cap on health insurance which is $2835. That makes the delta between paying the fine and getting insurance $750 and 1.6% of income. There's no reason the fine can't increase as needed so it's never preferable to prefer paying it over buying insurance. While $100B/year tax funnels into for-profit industries are wrong, things like Medicare Part D show no sign of going away. Universal insurance by private companies also isn't without precedent in the US - Massachusetts has had its ironically named "Romneycare" program since 2006.

Agreed. My step-daughter just finished her fellowship in hand surgery and is now practicing in Mountain View CA. She has been in school for 14 years. Little does she realize Obamacare will be taking her down a couple of notches soon. But she worked really hard. I don't know if I would have been able to do it. She deserves to make some bank now. Why would Obamacare take her down a notch? Medical spending is going to increase. PhRMA (Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America) liked the millions of new customers coming their way from Obamacare so much that they spun up a pair of 501(c)(4) organizations which spent $150M to get the bill passed. It's true that insurers must spend at least 80% of what they take in on actual health care (my insurer was off by 0.3% and had to issue refunds) although the law places no limits on how much they spend and spending more is the only way they can make more money from insurance. Along those lines I expect negotiated rates for procedures to increase.

MX5s through 2005 can be raced door-to-door affordably against other MX5s in the Spec Miata class with some probability of winning dependent on your skill. TR6s cannot.

And it's only going to get worse the better robots become. Up higher in this thread was a quip about "food service robots." Trust me, that's not a joke. Yup. High-priced noodle cooks in China making $6400 a year are finding themselves replaced by robots which cost just $1600. http://singularityhub.com/2013/04/19/chinese-restaurant-owner-says-robot-noodle-maker-doing-a-good-job/ At $22K Baxter would pay for himself inside 18 months when used to replace a minimum wage biological robot. If the programming was commoditized for an application a cash-flow positive business that could get loans against revenues would come out ahead in the first month today. http://www.rethinkrobotics.com/products/baxter/ Having humans prepare restaurant food for you is going to go the way of having them take care of your grocery needs which is to say up market with fewer jobs. When I buy a $25 steak from Whole Foods one of several butchers wraps it, a checker scans it, and a bagger packages it for convenient transport. When I buy a $7 steak from Fresh and Easy it was wrapped in a central facility, I scan it myself, and I bag it myself. I don't interact with the one human on duty supervising 8 checkout stations unless I'm buying beer and they need to check my ID. Not quite. The top decile will still get human service which contributes to the value of the experience. At the bottom there will still be a few hole-in-the wall single proprietor and family operations which continue doing everything themselves.

I live to drive shareholder value and exponential growth excites me more than anything else not likely to kill me.