This is a good idea that could easily go bad. But from what I've seen so far their gimmick - taking interesting photos, some "slice of life" some perhaps "political" and putting captions that *could* describe them but likely wouldn't be chosen by the participants - is a great recipe.
HEALTH CARE IMPROVEMENTS -- AHEAD OF SCHEDULE.... Marc Thiessen recently urged Republicans to fight as hard as they can to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The GOP need not fear political repercussions, the Bush speechwriter turned Washington Post columnist said, because Americans won't see the law's benefits kick in for several years. "The charge that Republicans are 'taking away your benefits' will hardly ring true for Americans who don't yet enjoy those benefits," he said.
It's worth appreciating, then, that new benefits are already kicking in, in some cases, well ahead of schedule.
In recent weeks, we've seen many major insurers begin implementing a provision of the law that allows young adults to stay on their family health care plan through their 26th birthday. What's more, the industry agreed to stop denying coverage to children with pre-existing conditions (after initially intending to exploit an alleged loophole in the law).
And this week, consumers and families received more good news -- the industry will scrap its "rescission" practices, four months before the new federal ban was scheduled to go into effect.
The health insurance industry has decided to end its practice of cancelling claims once a patient gets sick next month, well before the new health care law would have required it, the industry's chief spokesman said Wednesday.
"While many health plans already abide by the standards outlined in the new law, our community is committed to implementing the new standards in May 2010 to ensure that individuals and families will have greater peace of mind when purchasing coverage on their own," AHIP president and chief executive Karen Ignagni said in a letter to top House Democrats.
The decision to end rescission, as the practice is known, was made during a Tuesday afternoon conference call of chief executives organized by their trade group, America's Health Insurance Plans, and represents the industry's latest attempt to build political good will after the bruising health care fight.
The heartening announcement on rescissions came on the heels of a Reuters report on WellPoint routinely dropping coverage for women diagnosed with breast cancer. Yesterday, the company said it would end the practice by this weekend.
White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer described all of this as "a clear sign of momentum for changing the health care status quo."
Go ahead, Republicans. Promise to undo all of this progress, turn back the clock, and eliminate these needed, popular advances. I dare you.
—Steve Benen 8:30 AM Permalink | Trackbacks | Comments (16)
Its great to hear that now that they will be forced to do the right thing, some insurers are starting to do so ahead of their deadlines. I suppose it makes good business sense.
There's a political angle here too, but you can just click through to Washington Monthly if you want to get into all that. I'm simply happy that reform is taking hold.
Wal Mart will try to establish a beach head in Jamaica Bay, Brooklyn. Expect a big fight. Even poor New Yorkers know to avoid crummy Wal Mart jobs and our city government, even as poorly as it functions sometimes, usually looks out for the community and is not in the pocket of big business (except maybe wall street!).
If you are going to work or workout in the heat, you can increase your stamina greatly by eating a slushie before you start!
I am so happy I found this today. I think it could be the anti-facebook: Keep your privacy while being social!
You want to share your ideas, photos, media, etc. but sometimes email isn't the best way. You want to interact with people online, but some of that interaction needs to be public and some very private. You should be able to own and have a reasonable level of control over the content you produce, and that's why we're building 6d. No privacy concerns because you own it! 6d is an identity building application. Its purpose is to allow you to centralize your life, photos, thoughts, posts or anything else, but still share with friends, colleagues, or the world. 6d is in alpha testing right now. Send us your email address if you'd like to get updates on 6d.Centralizing You By Decentralizing Social Networking
Posted via web from Arelybook
6d is a lifestreaming application. You can socialize with it, or not.
Though we plan to monetize it, the important thing for us is to ensure freedom of use. We're building it so you can download and use it without ever seeing us again, if you should so choose.
Open Standards
We're utilizing open standards such as microformats and the HTTP protocol, the fabric of the web. We considered using the XMPP protocol, but our requirement to run on most shared hosting environments killed that idea.
Keep It Simple
Simplicity is key for us. Some web applications add more and more features, cluttering the User Interface (UI) with options you don't use making it harder for you to just write or post a photo. We're trying hard to stick to the basics with 6d. We want to build it so anyone would be able to set it up and immediately start streaming their life on the web, sharing with their friends, or not.
Your Home on the Internet
We want 6d to be your home online, literally. Think of your 6d web site as your "house" on the internet. A place where you live online, store photos, thoughts, videos, and invite friends and family to visit. The power of 6d is that you can be social with anyone on the web, but still extend your application to update other parts of your life like Twitter and Facebook.
Control Your Privacy
Sites like Facebook and MySpace provide a public meeting place on the web. They solve that problem really well. However, as their use increased and their privacy policies changed to accommodate their business plans, concern has grown about people giving their photos, thoughts and videos to these centralized sites, essentially giving up control and possibly ownership of them. 6d contains an address book where you can choose people or groups to share your posts. You can also just post it to your public facing site without broadcasting it to anyone.
Credibility
With social interactions based on your website it's much easier to find out if a person is real or not. Since the easiest thing you can do is click on someone's website, you'll immediately be able to tell if this is actually someone you want to connect with
The Evolution of the Web
We want 6d to be representative of the web's evolution, letting you stream your life online while allowing you to control your content. We want it to be able to grow and change with you.
From what I've heard so far this sounds EXACTLY like what is required for the future of the social web. Its the antithesis of Facebook. It starts at the level of the individual and lets them build out multiple tribes to the extent the person belongs to them. This is vastly superior than trying to plot every person in every tribe they have any allegiance to and selling this information for use in "targeted" advertising. I will be signing up for this as soon as it is up and running and I will blog about my experience with it.
Experts say you can sometimes obtain a better lease by breaking the deal into its components and negotiating each point.Start with the capitalized cost of the vehicle, which is simply the negotiated price of the car if you were to purchase it outright.
Edmunds.com, Kelley and TrueCar.com all are useful sites that can help you figure out the lowest price for the vehicle.
TrueCar.com just unveiled a tool that can help you get to the low price range quickly. Its website will generate a graph charting the price of closed sales transactions in your region for the model and trim level you want. A "lowest certified price" shows what several dealers have agreed to sell the vehicle for, plus taxes and registration fees. (This is operated by a company affiliated with TrueCar.com that manages sales referrals.)
A Southern California shopper looking at TrueCar.com would see an $18,552 offer for that Honda Accord, along with prices as much as $1,200 higher from other dealers. The car has a sticker price of $22,565.
Honda's lease offer assumes a sales price, or capitalized cost, of $20,961. So, use the $18,552 as the starting point for negotiating the capitalized cost portion of your lease. Other dealers might not move all the way down, but some are likely to drop their price by a significant amount.
The next piece of the puzzle is what's called the "money factor." Jesse Toprak, an analyst at TrueCar.com, says that this is just a different way of expressing an interest rate and is "designed to confuse consumers."
The money factor on this Honda deal is 0.00137. It seems pretty meaningless, but if you multiply it by 2,400 (this always works regardless of the number) you get 3.29%, or the true interest rate on the deal.
Now you know if that component of the transaction is competitive with what you might get from a bank or credit union and whether it is in line with your own credit rating. It never hurts to ask for a better rate. (In this instance, American Honda says lease customers must accept this money factor to take advantage of a popular option of having their first monthly payment waived.)
The next piece of the puzzle is listed in the lease as the residual value of the vehicle, an estimate of what the car will be worth at the end of the lease. New vehicles with high residual, or resale, values typically have lower lease payments than other autos in a similar price range.
Manufacturers will disclose the residual value in the lease offer, but it is usually stated as the dollar amount you can pay to purchase the car at the end of the contract. You have to convert it to a percentage of the sticker price to be able to compare to other offers. Honda says the Accord's purchase option is $13,539, which translates to a 60% residual. Residuals vary depending on the lender funding the transaction.
Remember, you want the residual to be as high as possible and the capitalized cost and interest rate to be as low as possible.
Other factors that affect the contract include how much cash, if any, the manufacturer puts into the deal as an incentive, the size of any down payment you might make, the length of the lease and the miles allowed.
Edmunds.com has a handy lease calculator that lets you alter variables to see how different residual, money factor and capitalized cost numbers change the contract.
In any deal, make sure the contract includes gap insurance, which covers any difference in what an insurance company will pay out if a car is destroyed in an accident and the value the lease company has assigned to the vehicle. Many manufacturers automatically wrap that into the transaction, but you should never sign a contract without checking that it includes this coverage.
You also want to be sure you're getting a closed-end lease. (The Honda contract says so upfront.) That means that if you return the car with normal wear and tear you can walk away with no further expenses, even if the vehicle's resale value is below what was estimated at the time the contract was signed. Most dealers write closed-end leases, but still double-check.
Never lease a car for a period longer than its warranty. One of the advantages of leases is that you should never have to worry about having to pay for repairs beyond normal maintenance.
Finally, be sure to "keep verifying that everything is in fact as good as it seems to be," said Reed of Edmunds.com. "It is very easy to be bamboozled."
A useful guide to leasing cars.
The Bloomberg administration is moving ahead with what amounts to a radical, river-to-river reimagining of another major corridor: 34th Street, the Midtown thoroughfare that is home to Macy’s — and some of the city’s most congested traffic.
Automobiles would be banned on the block between Fifth Avenue and Avenue of the Americas, creating a pedestrian plaza bookended by Herald Square and the Empire State Building.
The result would be a street effectively split in two.
On the west side of the pedestrian plaza, all car traffic would flow west, toward the Hudson River. On the east side, all car traffic would move east, toward the East River. Buses would still operate in both directions, and through the pedestrian plaza as well, but in dedicated lanes separated from passenger cars by a concrete barrier.
A public hearing on the plan was held on Wednesday, and officials from the Transportation Department met with business leaders last week. The intent is to create more space for pedestrians and to speed up bus trips on the street’s crosstown routes, which are among the slowest in the city.
NYC is really trying to ease traffic congestion. This is right by my old graduate school and I can tell you that the area is choked by pedestrians and car traffic. I tried to use the crosstown bus (M34) on many occasions but it was ridiculously slow. I remember hearing that when timed it averaged near 3 miles per hour during business hours. That's slower than many people walk! This seems like an innovative way to alleviate the problem.
<div style="text-align:left;font-size:x-small;margin-top:0;width:480px;">Best Man Ruins Wedding - watch more funny videos</div>
Someone PLEASE tell me this was staged.
I think Andrew Sullivan is pretty much the saving grace of contemporary conservatism. Though I'm a liberal, I certainly think a political landscape with only one party is a very bad thing.« The Conservative Case For A VAT | Main
"History Happened"
23 Apr 2010 12:07 pm
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It couldn't happen to a nicer guy. I hope this guy becomes as big a legend in the NFL as he was at Clemson. It was such a pleasure to watch him kick ass for the tigers for 4 years.
Here's a list of some of my favorite quotes, which used to appear on my FB page. I'll update it periodically.
"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?" - John Maynard Keynes (attributed) "And there was a time when all I wanted was my ice cream colder and a little cream soda. oh well, oh well....And a wooden box, and an alley full of rocks was all I had to care about. Oh well, oh well." - Jack White In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination. - Mark Twain When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bustling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity. - Dale Carnegie “We're all busy little bees, full of stings, making honey day and night" - Bette Davis as 'Margo Channing' "Now it is a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best you very often get it" -Somerset Maugham "Revenge without respect to the example and profit to come is a triumph, or glorying in the hurt of another, tending to no end (for the end is always somewhat to come); and glorying to no end is vain-glory, ...and tendeth to the introduction of war" - Thomas Hobbes "If there is a complaint, fill out the proper form and mail it to the hospital in which you were born" - The Onion Kafka Airport story "If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich" - JFK
I really do not want any part in this. I already turned it off so I'm not "active" in it, but it looks like I'm still "passively" in it. That means I'll have to get off Facebook.
I got a chance to see the exhibit about a month ago, but chose not to try and get a seat. It really is something to behold, as are her works in the retrospective upstairs. Even if your not a fan of performance art, check it out if you get a chance.
Pretty damn good for a year and some change. Especially with the level of obstruction going on. I reiterate that once this become more clear to voters, the republican party is doomed. And I feel pretty sure this will start to happen well in advance of the fall elections.
Hat tip: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/04/obamas-big-bills...
