Same, I want to believe that this is all a ruse and that the are smart and just really good at playing dumb, but there are just too MANY of them.
It's sycophancy plain and simple. Surround yourself with only yes-men, it ends up becoming less and less competent as the ones who stand up and say no are replaced.
Even if they know better, they can't do better because they know there is no loyalty to nay-sayers.
The main thing is that if you're a big enough entity, in favorable enough conditions, it's possible to make stupid decisions continuously and survive them for a very long time.
It's the "market can remain irrational..." problem.
And as a consequence, never recognize them as being stupid---in fact the reverse, because your bad ideas are met with macro success even while individually they may struggle.
> However, it only works if your product is good and you have decent margins.
Not sure if the product has to be good. Look at the lineage of my wife's car The 2019 Chevy Trax, based on the Buick Encore, based on the Opel/Vauxhall Mokka. It isn't a good car under any of the badges, but it does run, and is small, but the crazy thing is my Ford Ranger gets roughly the same milage as it. Note: the gas milage is probably an American issue, because it runs a naturally aspirated i4 gas engine instead of a more efficient turbo diesel.
Because adding a caddy/nginx/apache + letsencrypt is a couple of bash commands between install and setup, and those http servers + TLS termination is going to be 100x better than what LMS adds themselves, as it isn't their core competency.
Or better than that, loans backed by assets above some "jumbo" threshold ($10M?) triggers a capital gain on those assets in the collateral.
So if you get a $150M loan off of your amazon shares that on paper are worth $150M, but you paid $100M, you have a cap-gain of $40M, and at 20% tax, $8M fills the IRS's coffers.
This is something I've been in favor of for some time.
Obviously the tax basis in the assets would also be stepped up by this action.
The US should also get rid of the step up in basis at death. The recipient of an illiquid asset such as a family business should have a period of time (perhaps five or ten years from the triggering death depending on the type of asset) to "pay up" the tax basis "to market" at the time of death. Gains in liquid assets (such as publicly traded stock) should be taxed at the market value at the time of death by the estate or trust and passed on to beneficiaries with that adjusted tax basis.
> The US should also get rid of the step up in basis at death.
This would actually fix the issue without my suggestion, but it is a harder pill to swallow for the "soon to be rich" Americans that tend to vote against their current economic interests.
It is a real problem but its presented in a misleading way.
If you inherit a farm worth 1m and you have to pay estate taxes on that of 100k. You do not have to sell the farm, you can instead take out a mortgage to cover that 100k.
When we frame it that we its still very fair to the person inheriting the farm because who wouldnt want a $1m farm for 100k.
In American maybe thats the case. Im talking about situations where we are trying to implement an estate tax and the discussion is framed as basically forcing the receiver to sell the estate to pay the tax instead of presenting it accurately as taking a small loan to pay the tax.
You fix it by sidestepping it. Don't do it, even though it is the simplest/easiest to implement, and instead create 5 other laws that surround it and accomplish the same goal. Loop the hole back a them.
I can't tell if it was franchise specific, but we have a Burger King near us in Clear Lake/Houston that is absolutely amazing. Fries are always crispy and well seasoned, the patties actually have grill marks and taste like they've been charred. The location hasn't been updated since before I moved away in 2015, and has been consistently good since 2010 or so when I first moved near it.
That said, every other Burger King around me, and near my house in Louisiana, and near all of the places I lived including NJ, NY, CT, VT have been awful. I never ate there BEFORE this 2013 change though, so I cannot comment on the quality in the before times. But my local, is amazing. Tastes like I remember it from the 90s.
The burgers are fine at the one accross the road from my job but the Burger King here has to most bland frys I dont think they salt them at all they are crispy but lack taste.
I didn't downvote, but I'm thinking that you need endpoint discovery, bucket types, etc. Sure you could write a 1 page document describing the buckets at the root level, the relationships of the objects, etc., but why not let swagger do that for you at compile time?
I'm talking about actual REST here though, not RPC. Endpoint discover and typed schemas are core pieces of REST, we don't need Swagger or similar to fill in those gaps.
As a person who has been told I'm "morbidly obese" for decades now, I will say that doctors at almost every level look at your chart not you. I've been told time and time again that until I get my weight under control, my health will suffer.
I'm 5'8" and weigh on average 210lbs. My BMI isn't even morbidly obese, it is 31, which is just "regular" obese, but on top of that, a DEXA scan shows that I am actually only 25% body fat, with only 1lb of visceral fat.
Doctor's don't care about that, they see on the Epic chart that my BMI is > 30 and have to tell me some spiel about a healthier lifestyle so they check check off a checkbox and continue to the next screen.
> I'd consider 5'8 and 210lbs morbidly obese. An average male at 5'8 should generally weigh about 150lbs and no more than 164lbs
You would consider incorrectly then.
This person has ~155 pounds of lean body mass. 164 would put him at roughly a body builder level of fat, which basically requires a part time job in cooking and nutrition to maintain.
For reference, I’m in a similar situation to this person. I’m 5’11” (180cm) and about 200 lbs (91kg) with about 170 lbs of lean body mass. My dexa scan says that I’m 15% body fat, but I get the same lectures from doctors about being obese and needing a lifestyle change, all based on BMI and (I assume) my size (I’m barrel chested). It’s completely absurd.
Dexas are notoriously inaccurate. Your dexa scan is probably wrong, and you are fatter than you think. I've been lifting over a decade, so I have far more muscle mass than the average person, and I am 6'1", yet am still easily over 20% BF if I'm 200 lbs or more. Don't believe me? Try to get truly shredded. You'll see for yourself that you will have to lose far more weight than you think. Everyone is fatter and less muscular than they think they are, even if they're active. Unless of course you are a heavy steroid user, in which case you may actually be muscular enough for that to be valid. But for the average natural trainee? Nobody who's truly lean is getting an obese or morbidly obese BMI. Overweight at worst, maybe.
BMI is definitely inaccurate for those with greater amounts of muscle mass, but not as inaccurate as many would like to believe.
I didn’t want to belabor the point in my original post, but since you went there…
The next steps at the doctor is that I show them my MyFitnessPal nutrition tracking, my dexascan, and (at some point) take off my shirt. I ask them what exactly it is I should change. 100% of the time the answer has been something like “Oh, sorry. Please continue as you are doing.”
They just aren’t used to seeing muscular 200 pound dudes at my height in my area at my age (btw, I’m in my 50s).
Also, someone can workout in the gym all they want, but I think most people will struggle with lowering their body fat percentage if they don’t focus on their nutrition.
I realize that my lean body mass (both bones and muscle) are decreasing, and that rate of decrease be higher each year. That said, I’m doing what I can to maintain whatever muscle and bone mass I have.
Or that guy could be a burly bricklacker / concerete worker who can casually carry hundreds of pounds of weight all day every day in brutal conditions.
burly - maybe, but I haven't done any hard labor most of my life. I ran track as a kid, and kept my high metabolism - (RMR: 2460kcal, TDEE: 3380kcal); well lost it when my thyroid failed, but medicated myself back to it. I eat what I want, but its a very high lean-meat diet (lots of chicken breast and turkey because my wife likes them), but I don't limit my carb intake either, as I mostly burn sugar for energy (according to my Respiratory Exchange Ratio).
Somehow my body is just amazing at working without any help from me. I don't even exercise much. Maybe a few pushups a day, up and down my stairs at my house a couple dozen times a day, and probably 5-10k steps a day max.
Huh. The standard in your case is to measure waist circumference if BMI is high. Did no doctor do that? As long as you are below 40” or 37” if Asian you are considered good to go.
On top of that, I'm not sure if that is a real indication of anything, either.
The reason to do that is to get an idea of your abdominal fat (which is the more dangerous place for fat to store), but there are two types of abdominal fat, one is dangerous (visceral fat) and one is completely benign (subcutaneous fat). And a measurement around your waist won't tell you which you have.
I personally have almost all of my fat subcutaneous, with only 1lb of visceral fat (which is right in the perfect range).
Yes, humans have found that you don't need officially stamped statistics (and in many cases they're unreliable or "doctored" anyway), and that they can make general observations on their own, through something they call experience.
And a near universal experience with doctors for anybody paying attention is that.
One can reject it or accept it and improve upon it after checking its predictive power, or they can pause their thinking and wait for some authority to give them the official numbers on that.
I can't say literally all, but in my experience with having to get a new GP almost every year because of health insurance changes, location changes, hospital consolidation buying my GPs practice, and multiple doctors retiring or just quitting medicine (my last GP was tired of medicine after practicing for only 3 years). Over the last 20 years, I've had almost 15 GPs across 5 states (NY, NJ, CT, TX, LA). I also have multiple auto immune diseases, so I have had a handful of specialists of various flavors (endocrine, oncology - not for cancer, cardiology, and urology), but only need them occasionally.
Almost every single start of every single appointment (including a follow up from just a couple days prior), they comment about my BMI. It is the rare time they don't that I remember. My last urology appointment the doctor was very congenial, didn't even go over the lab work, just said, everything is looking good, asked how I was feeling, everything good, alright, refilled my prescriptions and left.
The volatility of bitcoin is why there is capital gains on every trade, it has nothing to do with the IRS's new crypto policy.
If a bitcoin rises or falls by a calculable amount between when you received it vs when you spent a portion of it, you have gains/losses. That has always been required by the IRS to be reported, whether that is a BTC or chicken feathers.
It's sycophancy plain and simple. Surround yourself with only yes-men, it ends up becoming less and less competent as the ones who stand up and say no are replaced.
Even if they know better, they can't do better because they know there is no loyalty to nay-sayers.
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