The U.S. is not one of those countries. For better or worse. The idea of having 15 PDO vs 10 vacation + 5 sick days is at least a step in the right direction. Although really it should probably be 20 PDO. :)

Right, but most relevant examples were literally one year to the next. $700/month for insurance for 3 with decent coverage, low deductibles, included doctor visits, etc. The next year (first year of ACA taking effect), $900/month for high deductible / catastrophic insurance, AFTER a small $150ish/month subsidy. This was for a single income household making well under six figures at the time.

I've been a contract worker on and off for many years. As such as I've had to shop for health insurance for myself and family. ACA has been a mixed bag, even with subsidies. Pre ACA, I was able to get pretty darned good insurance for myself, my wife, and our only child (at the time) for about $700/month. This was a low deductible pan with a $20 copay. I don't recall the exact deductible but I think it was between $1k-$2k. My wife had a pre-existing condition at the time; there was a waiting period for benefits to kick in that would apply to her condition which ended up not being a big deal; I forget the duration of the wait period.

Post ACA, I initially received a very small subsidy but all of the plan prices jumped tremendously. All of the plans shot to ~$1k a month for what we considered to be worse coverage. Higher deductibles, no included doctor visits other than a yearly wellness checkup. Basically close to catastrophic insurance. For quite a bit more. Oh we had given birth to our second child at this time so there was an additional family member, but children are cheap to insure, relatively speaking. Any plans that were close to the coverage that we had before were out of reach. The subsidy was something like $100-$150 for us. Our family income was under $100k/year.

Eventually the subsidies changed.. along with the plan prices, which continued to go up. That said, there was a time when my out of pocket (again for not so great insurance) was about $600/month after the subsidies. I've since had a career change and am again working under contract. This time around, perhaps because of increased income, I'm getting no subsidy although my state (Oregon) covers my children's healthcare. My wife and I pay. $950ish a month for a silver plan which is still pretty crappy insurance.

I'm sure there are a lot of nuances to the system and the subsidies that I'm unaware of, but starting as a young family in the system, ACA has hardly felt like a win to us. But my perspective is that we have fewer options available to us and it's all generally more expensive than pre ACA.

In sports, in less-competitive settings, it's common go match up with players quite a bit above or below your skill level or athletic ability. There are things to learn in both scenarios: When playing against less competitive opponents, you can work on aspects of your game that may be less developed, which is much more challenging to do when you have to play at full speed/intensity. On the other hand, playing against better players gives you a chance to see what they do differently than you, so you can learn to match or counter it. In other words, there are things to be learned from being the best player on the court as well as being the worst player on the court.

Emotionally, it can also be beneficial to see where you've come from, so that you can clearly look back on where you were at this time last year, etc. and see "wow, I used to struggle with x, y, and z." If the bracket constantly changes as you improve, it's difficult to see that and can be frustrating. And that's where I think the matchmaking systems can be frustrating: if they're active all of the time. Sometimes you want to just have a more relaxing experience playing a game. But sometimes you want to be very competitive. If there's no easy way to switch things up to meet your mood, then a game becomes a bit more one dimensional. It is a game after all. It's supposed to be fun. If you always have to play a game at maximum effort, then that game can lose its fun aspect.

I don't think it's all about wanting to pwn n00bs. (Although it's not... not that.)

Full disclosure: I no longer play video games.

No such thing with high performance summer tires. Even if it says it's a 20k mile tire, you may only get 10k. The mileage you get on a tire really depends on how you're driving. Besides, this idea is needlessly complex. Just trust the people at registration, as others have said. The trouble is, living in Oregon, I can tell you they don't like to trust their citizens and rarely treat them with respect. Oregon has an incompetent government.

Dang, really wish I had mod points.

Hard to move away from family. Yeah you're right, commute is expensive. So I didn't really mean to communicate that companies should pay remote workers more. The ergonomic concerns are what's most important to me. Financially, it's not so cut and dry. But clearly there are cost savings for companies if they no longer have to rent or own and maintain large office spaces. But again, whether or not there's a financial benefit to either party, it's a real pain in the ass (sometimes literally) to work remote. And not every job even has the option of working from the office. I would prefer an office environment.

So this is a very short article with very little information, but the point of this is that people don't have space or equipment to adequately work from home--NOT that people work from their bed. I've worked remote for the last 9 years and I completely agree with the assertion that a small stipend isn't enough. I rent an office space because I have no space at home. And housing prices in my area have become too expensive to afford a home office. The ergonomic issues that you will develop if you regularly work from a couch are pretty horrible. Don't do it.

... not once you start adding on a reasonable amount of memory and storage and consider legitimate sales from competitors. Apple's upgrade fees are insane. I just bought a 16" MBP for $3300. I had priced out a comparable Thinkpad (whose hardware I prefer) at $2400. Unfortunately because I do iOS development I really had to go Mac. The kicker is that it's just not that fast of a system. The UI slows down regularly and the system gets hot very easily.

Yeah that's literally me as well. I used to pay out of pocket for insurance. We had a $20 or $25 copay. Now all we can afford is high deductible stuff. I think it's $12k for us as well.

There have been stories posted here on Slashdot (mostly from several years ago) of individuals being held in contempt of court for not revealing such things. It *shouldn't* be possible, but it's all a matter of interpretation and law is interpreted differently by different people, some of whom really just want to get what they want.

I live in a relatively small town as well, and this lines up with what I expect would happen. Who's going to go digging to check the victim domain transfers? Maybe they'd check bank account history, but that wouldn't show up there.

That's definitely an issue, but the point is that the system should not make it so easy for an app to compromise the system like that. Allowing an app to install a root certificate is like giving the app the keys to the kingdom, but in a very subvert sort of way. It shouldn't happen. That is the real problem.

If you're comparing female to male couch potatoes, sure that may well be. And of course someone who's been doing a physical activity regular for some time will have an advantage over someone who does not, regardless of gender. But if both male and females spend the same amount of time working at a given activity, *in general*, the differences are absolutely staggering. This can easily be seen in sports, both professional and amateur. I'm about 5'5", 135 lbs and play basketball... not really the greatest sport for my stature, but hey I love the game. Anyways, my point is I'm more like the size of female players than male. But the difference in athleticism is readily apparent. Small sample size and anecdotal, I know, but it's also backed up conclusively by professional sports.

(Of course, there are the exceptional female athletes who are more athletic than most male athletes. But even they are unable, at the top levels of competition, to compete with the exceptional male athletes, at least in terms of pure athleticism.)

They'll fire you for being dishonest. Unless it's a contract gig, you're almost certainly being paid for your time in a given job description. A CONTRACT pays you $X amount of money to receive Y in return. Employment literally assumes a certain amount of time worked per week; by not working even a small fraction of that time, a person is clearly violating good faith. Rather than trying to do nothing and get paid for it, why not inform your employer, receive praise, ask for a raise and move on to automating more tasks?