The lanes are quite narrow, and the outer curb is deceptive - there’s a 1” edge with a curved curb behind it making it look wider than it actually is. Scraping along that edge will push cars into the center of the road. There will be a lot of minor accidents here due to the road design.
One other second order effect - people are getting used to roundabouts here now, but nearby are ‘traffic circles’ that are roundabouts with stop signs on some entrances. People are now ignoring those stop signs (because it’s a roundabout!). I almost hit 3 cars in 2 intersections as people ignored their stop sign.
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
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
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)
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.
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.
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!
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
I think the plane was his, and was already there, so he probably picked up the tab for that one himself.
One thing to note is that there is a hospital at the location he was evacuated from, so if it was a true emergency, they could have operated right there.
They flew him from the harbor of the main town in the Galapagos, to the airport on the other side of the island to avoid a long drive or boat ride. It's not like he was out in the wilderness - of which there is a lot in that area.
Publish Date order was forced on me by circumstances - mainly that I started reading these books in 1986. This is a fine way of seeing the universe and Pratchett's writing craft evolve over time.
Off the original topic, but I read something in the last week for MS treatment that seems to cure it completely. This is done by taking the patient's own bone marrow, and transplanting it back after killing off the existing bone marrow.
Somehow, this has shown to be a cure, but the doctors that came up with it don't yet know why - the treatment is ahead of the knowledge in this case.
