If you were building Rails apps in 2005/6, more than likely you were reading Ezra's blog post on how deploy to your VPS. It was tricky to get right, but Ezra made it so that it was no longer impossible. He was always there to help people with their own tricky configurations too.
If it does work this way, this is a breach of the Facebook developer terms of service. Data may be cached for specific amounts of time, but long term storage is not allowed. When this app gets big enough to notice, Facebook will shut it down
> You may cache data you receive through use of the Facebook API in order to improve your application’s user experience, but you should try to keep the data up to date. This permission does not give you any rights to such data.
Yes, I'm aware of this. But the applications they went after adjusted Facebook (injected into the DOM), instead of leveraged their API to provide functionality through a Facebook canvas app, or externally.
The $12000 out of pocket is only if you use it because you need medical help. You don't actually spend the whole $22K unless you have a lot of medical issues, and then you'll be happy that you only pay $22K per year!
When I left my last employer, I had the same company plan under COBRA. It started at ~$1000, and then went to ~$1300 at the next new year. It had lower out of pocket expenses, but those came at the cost of more monthly payment.
My current Gold medical plan (2 years later) is $820, plus dental at $120 or so. ~$950 for Gold plan, vs $1300 for my COBRA plan (in between, I had a really crappy personal plan that covered almost nothing for ~$600)
People who have employer payed medical have no idea how expensive their plans actually are
People who have employer payed medical have no idea how expensive their plans actually are
People in general have no idea how much their employers pay for any of the mandates - this is by design. If people were forced to pay all (the exact same) expenses from their own paychecks then the idea that they were getting a good deal would fade away.
In addition to what others have mentioned, your old plan had a lifetime maximum payout - maybe $1M, maybe $2M. That is removed by the ACA, and that costs extra too.
Also, there is extra cost because insurers now need to cover existing conditions - allowing you to change providers if you are already sick.
All of these extra things make it more expensive for some, but a better overall coverage - if you have catastrophic illness, you may have not been covered at the top end for all of these costs on your old plan.
Younger people tend not to think about catastrophic issues like 3+ years of cancer treatment, because new treatments are a) expensive and b) may extend your life significantly, so you may actually hit your $2M lifetime maximum, and then you are on your own, until you're bankrupt, and then the state (i.e. taxpayers) would help you out.
So, taken over 50+ years (not just this year's numbers) these new plans actually provide much better coverage, and may even take pressure off the Taxpayers for those that are under covered for their medical issues.
On a positive note on how to move forward on this idea, there's an example in the Seattle startup scene that is tackling a similar government regulation issue by focusing on exactly one set of regulations at a time.
Remitly https://www.remitly.com/ provides a service to send cash overseas to the families of immigrants who now work in the US
Sending cash has a lot of regulatory hurdles, so they picked 1 US state (WA) and one overseas country (the Philippines) to start their business, and then expanding their reach, first to other US states, and eventually to other countries. Focusing on exactly one set of regulations at each end vastly simplifies the legal issues (and costs)
Any time you cross a border with goods, there's a question that is asked about if this is for personal use or not. Sometimes this is on a form, sometimes in person, but the answer to this question changes what is allowed and what fees need to be paid.
Since you are operating a business service, you need to ensure that a) it is legal to take that item across that border, and b) The relevant fees are paid for an import business (not for personal use)
It doesn't take a lawyer to see that you'd be in trouble for not following the laws of the land your couriers are traveling to. But you do need to run this past a lawyer (and probably a set of lawyers, one for each jurisdiction) before you get one of your couriers thrown in jail.
It is possible to run this legally, but then the process won't be as cheap as I think you're expecting it to be.
I am intrigued by this part: "It is possible to run this legally, but then the process won't be as cheap as I think you're expecting it to be." Can you please expand?
Do you mean that one can 'enforce' duty payment, and then it can work?
Each country has it's import fees for commercial use. These are often quite large, and, as an import company, you will have to pay them to operate legally.
The reason some of these fees is large is due to governments trying to control the import process, not due to any inherent costs associated with the items, so where these fees apply can not be guessed without having knowledge of the specific laws and treaties involved. As an individual, you've never needed to know these laws and fees
Also, your legal costs to import random things over random borders is going to be quite large. Most importer companies start with one set of items into a single country to defray the legal costs for that one set of items over many items sold. i.e. It's as much legal effort to commerically import 10 cases of wine into the US from France as it is to import 10,000 cases. But importing Cheese from France to the US is a completely different set of laws, and could cost the same as the legal costs for the wine.
Duty Free shops, I believe, are for personal use only. Gifts to family and friends are overlooked, but the limits are small enough anyway that you can't possibly give too much away - i.e. 1L of booze, a few bottles of wine.
It's probably better to call this a 'Beta IPO' filing. This is a fairly new system that allows companies to work out bugs in their filings before they open it to public viewing.
Clearly anything on Hacker News and other news outlets isn't an actual secret!
Boeing a sponsor of the Seahawks, and the aircraft is a freighter owned by Boeing and used for testing (equipment? possibly used to haul parts?). The livery doesn't appear to be just for the Superbowl, so it's probably a permanent marketing/PR piece for their local city.
I wonder how much that really costs, though. The plane has to be painted one way or another, so you're paying for the design (which doesn't seem too involved here, since it's borrowing elements from elsewhere) and whatever extra work is involved with painting a more elaborate pattern.
Still, not entirely zero, you're right. I imagine the extra cost for the paint job came out of the marketing budget. Probably well worth it.
While bare aluminum saves weight, the TCO is higher:
"While the lighter weight of a polished airplane saves fuel costs [...] this savings is more than offset by the higher cost of washing, polishing, and painting a polished fuselage throughout its service life. The net operating cost of polished airplanes, calculated as a percentage of the total operating cost, is between 0.06 percent and 0.30 percent more than the total operating cost of fully painted airplanes."
This chart is part of the reason that Amazon's recent quarterly report of earnings is a little off, despite record revenue. These guys are growing their businesses at an enormous rate!
I have a lot of friends working at Amazon now, and my projection is that everyone I know will work there by 2016
