Recent content by dylar

I grew up in and still live in SF. I would classify myself as significantly to the left of most people even in San Francisco. I constantly find myself wanting to write to the Chronicle to ask them to nudge the Mark Morford record because it's skipping and playing the same thing over and over and...

UC Irvine has a free online course that I thought was pretty good. Here

It's the UC Irvine one. Fundamentals of Personal Financial Planning

If by new broom they mean, the same plan as before, I guess so. From the article: "A similar scheme, which was introduced in 2005 and 2006, was taken up by around 3,000 families." See also "Why Sarkozy will dissapoint the White House" by Bernard Chazelle. Sarkozy in the US would be to the left...

I've seen MIT's OpenCourseware mentioned before here. Basically OpenCourseware is the entire course, less access to the professor. Apparently other universities are getting into the act as well. See here. UC Irvine has a 20-30 hr basic financial planning course developed with the CFP board that...

On San Francisco GRM nuttiness... My parents moved into the flat where they still live, the the place I grew up, the year before I was born (1975). Rent control has limited the increases to some fraction of CPI for 30 years. They currently pay ~$600 for a 1bd 1ba flat with garage in Russian...

Around these parts $1MM is considered the (no pension) amount necessary to FIRE. According to the Wall Street Journal, that puts you in the top 8% of wealth in the country. So automatically at least 80% of people are just not going to relate to your situation. I would bet that most people who...

They can, of course, spend life in prison, and be continually tortured, without ever even being charged with a crime, on the wholly unsubstantiated claim of the executive that they are an enemy combatant. The news recently is that the government claims that they've lost the videos of Jose...

I think most people who are actually concerned about health care are worried about things like the graph below. Source.

Once again conjecture triumphs over data. Upthread is a link to the OMB that you might want to look at. Medicare and Social Security have a mandatory dedicated revenue stream and payouts, and do account for the majority of government spending. Of the money that Congress gets to spend (the...

Like Martha says, I think it's more accurate to say that there's access to emergency care. Which everyone agrees is the most expensive, and worst way to deal with health problems. MasterBlaster, that certainly wouldn't be worse than what we have now.

44 million more people having access to health care (at half the cost) vs. you and me waiting a little bit is a tradeoff I'm willing to make. I would love to see the evidence that the supposed waiting causes poor health outcomes. We could double the health spending of every other developed...

Based on the experience of every other developed country, it is possible to have a health care system which insures everyone at roughly half the cost of our system. This can be seen from the graph you linked to. I agree that getting the government involved will introduce inefficiencies. I tend...

Again, I fail to see how an argument that Americans are sicker (obese, stressed, smokers) than people in other countries is an argument that supports the health care system in this country. I don't think it's controversial to say that insurance and pharmaceutical companies oppose universal...

I don't think that there is a correlation between spending less and better health outcomes. I think it shows that it is possible to have a universal care system and still spend less on health care than we do now. Are overweight, stress and cigarette smoking not subjects dealt with by health...