The Case for Sequestration, and Other Links
Tyler Cowen: the case for sequestration.
How dangerous is taking a daily shower?
Can Viagra be used as a diet pill?
Could every company have fewer than 51 employees?
Researchers have created a bionic eye. But it sees mainly in black-and-white.
NHS will snoop on everyone: drinking habits, smoking habits, waist size, cholesterol, BMI…
How dangerous is taking a daily shower? </b<
This article is an interesting reminder of how we can become desensitized to risk or ignore it all together. Of course not showering creates another set of risks as well. As always, we must weigh our options. Besides driving, what is the biggest risk you take everyday?
Quote from “Could Every Company Have Fewer than 51 Employees?”:
“In the context of ObamaCare, a small business could go protean by offering current employees contracts for doing their current work as a corporate entity instead of as an employee.”
So let me get this straight, we get angry that corporations are treated as people – but now we have an incentive to treat people as corporations?
That’s just not right.
@ The article: Could every company have fewer than 51 workers.
I think this should be fascinating to observe. I know that small to medium size businesses tend to employ more people than big corporation because of greater resources in IT. Plus SMEs also tend to be most responsible for majority of the job hiring. Given the changes of the ACA and the 51st worker threshold, would this policy give rise to more SME, thereby, further improving the employment picture.
“Researchers have created a bionic eye”
The article mentions some aspects of actually completing a bionic eye for use are still being researched, but this is so encouraging for people with several visual impairment.
“How dangerous is taking a daily shower?”
This article goes into the risk of trees falling on top of you. If you think about it, there are countless of risks we don’t even consider besides driving. Is it healthy to be more aware of these risks or does that automatically deem paranoia?
On the National Health Service snooping:
From an IT perspective, this is a nightmare. In the U.S., this action would violate no less than three separate clauses within HIPAA. There is a reason that hospitals who do share PHI over a network use pull systems (the individual “hosts” the patient record, and other doctors and hospitals with need-to-know can access the record from anywhere – similar to hosting a website) rather than push systems (force records out to each hospital in the network from a central stored location).
Most national health records initiatives have favoured the “push” style system, because they become the central data warehouse. However, most private healthcare IT firms support “pull” systems because the burden of management and maintenance falls to each hospital in the system separately. If one hospital network goes dark, it only affect a fraction of the patient population; whereas if a national medical records data bank goes dark, it can shut down the whole country.