For the love of god, be sensible - sell half on Monday and put it back into a traditional retirement investment. You'll still do well if BTC goes up. There is no reason to put 100% of your retirement funds into any single asset.
A gap in coverage is not as much a problem any more, thanks to the ACA.
edit: Hey downvoter, let me educate you - the worst thing about a coverage gap used to be the potential to have an illness classified as a preexisting condition, and then to never be able to get private insurance coverage again. The ACA prohibits that practice by insurers as of next year. Here, I even dug up a pre-ACA article on the practice for you, served up on a silver platter: http://articles.latimes.com/2006/sep/17/business/fi-revoke17
edit 2: You know what, prospective downvoters can kiss my butt. Sorry that you don't like the health care reform law. It may be a total mess, but it's no worse that it was before. The only people that are pissed off are healthy, young people (hello, HN) that are paying next to nothing for individual coverage that is garbage. Get sick or old and then tell me how bad the ACA is.
I'm a safe driver. Why should I have to pay for auto insurance? It's a wealth transfer to bad drivers.
... And actually, I completely reject your characterization of it as a wealth transfer. It's insurance. You have no idea if you're going to need it. You may be in a car accident and badly break your legs, and require corrective surgery and rehab. You may get pneumonia or a bad MERSA infection. If you haven't saved up a few hundred thousand dollars and you show up at an ER, then the wealth transfer is to you when the hospital eats the cost and passes it along to properly insured people. That's not even going chemo/surgery should you develop cancer, god forbid.
This is a stale discussion, but, auto insurance is not designed to be a wealth transfer to bad drivers. That's why you, as a safe driver, can pay a very small premium. Meanwhile, Mr. RacerX (with his super-powered sports car, speeding tickets, and an actuarial risk profile which suggests he is more likely to require payouts) will pay more.
More importantly, Mr. RacerX cannot call the insurance company from the scene of an accident, say that he needs auto care, and expect to pay the same rate that you do. Yet this is the financial equivalent of knowing that you have cancer, and signing up for a new insurance policy.
Finally, there's catastrophic health care insurance (which the ACA has more or less outlawed) which is in fact similar to auto insurance... then there are fancier plans with more coverage, which are more like warranty / service plans for your car. If you have an old car with 300,000 miles on it, it is likely to need more service or develop a crazy expensive engine issue than a brand-new car. If a warranty service plan or similar contract is available to you, you would expect to pay more for it. Likewise a human being, but the ACA has both mandated these plans and limited the amount that older human beings may be charged.
Please note that the moral rectitude, overall desirability, or similar characteristics of the wealth transfers associated with the ACA, or of other hypothetical wealth transfers or health-care related scheme... are not addressed by this post, which examines only financial structures. (The grandparent post examined only incentive structures.)
> I'm a safe driver. Why should I have to pay for auto insurance?
AFAIK, at least in California and I think this is true more generally, you don't. In order to drive legally on public roads, you must demonstrate the ability to meet a certain minimum amount of financial liability in the event that you are responsible for a collision either by posting a bond or by demonstrating that you have adequate liability insurance.
Most people choose to meet that requirement through insurance, because it has a lower up-front cost (though likely higher lifetime cost), and because they also want other coverage besides the required liability coverage along with it.
> ... And actually, I completely reject your characterization of it as a wealth transfer. It's insurance.
It is insurance, but rules like the "no exclusions for pre-existing conditions" and controls on what factors can be used in rate setting also make it a wealth transfer. (At least part of the idea of making it a wealth transfer is to improve overall access to insurance and, through that, preventive care, to make the overall system more effective for everyone.)
The subsidies are to poor people. The poor people get medical care anyway, at ERs, where hospitals cannot refuse them. Or they forgo the care until mundane problems become chronic or acute problems (and they end up in the ER). ERs happen to be the most expensive means of providing heath care. So, to answer the first part of your question, the subsidies exist so that people who cannot afford heath insurance via the exchanges can still have health insurance. And the reasoning behind it is to reduce health care costs that emerge from lack of access to care.
I know less about the age rating bands. Off the top of my head, it's to smooth costs over a lifetime. So it's a wealth transfer from your young self to your old self, if you have typical health care costs over your lifetime: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1361028/
There are massive subsidies going to the 50-64 years of age crowd.
Now, yes, you can argue that it's good to smooth costs over a lifetime ... but that also hits the young very hard when they can least afford it. As does their FICA taxes for Social Security and Medicare.
As we've seen in pretty much every other developed country, this whole welfare state approach is a self-correcting dead end, as enough of the young decide not to play the rigged game and decline to have children.
Mandatory coverage was another wealth transfer; when 30% of patients are not paying for their medical treatments, and the other 70% are being forced to cover that cost, it is a wealth transfer.
To be clear, I am not saying wealth transfers are bad, but we should be honest about what is happening.
I do see where you're coming from. Maybe if I said I don't believe it's a _new_ wealth transfer? 30% of the population is not going without care today - they are getting ER care for non-emergent reasons or they're covered by Medicaid or the VA. The Medicaid/VA is a direct cost and the ER visits are indirect via increased costs.
Unless we want to decide as a country to not subsidized healthcare for those that can't afford it and to allow hospitals to refuse treatment without upfront payment... then let's be honest about what's happening there, too. The money comes from somewhere, it's every bit as much of a wealth transfer.
What a pile of first world problems. I suspect a lot fewer guys will quit sugar and lose weight instead of quitting soy after reading this. And diabetes makes soy estrogen mimicking hormones look like kids' play when it comes to erectile dysfunction.
A guy in his 50s or 60s (well past when the boys are pumping out huge amounts of testosterone) drinking _3 quarts_ of soy milk per day is not exactly typical.
I had the awful experience of (at the age of 15) having my father decide to be a vegan (due to a mid-life crisis) and replace all protein sources in our house with tofu and tempeh. It was fucking awful, and on top of the constant gas I had (going to high school with bad gas is itself torture) I remember having soreness and tenderness in the breast region. My progress in the weight room (I played football and wrestled) crumbled. It was my coaches who suspected the vegan diet at home. They didn't necessarily pinpoint soy, but essentially came to their own conclusion that I wasn't able to digest the soy protein, explaining my sudden inability to put on muscle.
Eventually, after 2 months, I rebelled and began getting meat wherever and whenever I could. I'm still very resentful of my father's sudden switch to veganism at my expense. I am particularly hateful of the PETA fanatics (it was a pretty woman he dated) who converted him from a hunter and fisherman to a silly fuck who wears turquoise and preaches animal rights. Did I mention his vegan diet of over 18 years has resulted in him having bad heart disease?
"Vegan diets do not result in heart disease. Many studies have shown that vegetarians seem to have a lower risk of obesity, coronary heart disease (which causes heart attack), high blood pressure, diabetes mellitus and some forms of cancer." (http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/GettingHealthy/NutritionCenter...). There are plenty of other of legitimate articles if you look for them.
You may have some kind of soy allergy. Your gas and breast experience is neither universal nor typical.
I won't question your unusually strong feelings towards PETA, but please don't confuse what they do with animal welfare. Also, your bad feelings towards your father will do you no good in life, and you should try to get on decent terms with him before he dies (considering his advanced heart disease).
Anyone who carefully considers their diet likely has a lower incidence of heart disease than someone who doesn't because of noting food sources and caring about food. You could pick any arbitrary diet and draw similar large-scale conclusions.
The real data is when you consider two groups who consider their diet. The national average is absolutely not a control for meaningful diet analysis.
Yes, it is, because the person with $1 and no access to credit was just made up for the purpose of convoluting a point about wealth inequality in America.
Somehow this idea always comes from libertarian quarters, too(please, no 'no true scotsmen responses' replies about how nobody but a single mute hermit living on a mountaintop in South Dakota is a _real_ libertarian).
This seems like an incredibly market distorting policy. Social welfare programs provide hard floors on quality of life: you don't have food? food stamps. you don't have medical care? medicaid. Some people live longer than they financially planned? universal old-age poverty insurance (social security).
This has all the feel of letting the more financially/business-sophisticated citizens go hunting on one of those hunting ranches with borderline tame 'game'.
None of that matters. They can read what they're posting and filter out personal information. Who cares what the detractors think, it's the right thing to do.
"Two wrongs don't make a right"
EDIT: people understand that Stratfor is a small publishing company, right? They sell subscriptions to a security-focused newsletter of debatable influence. They have no operational capability.
Yes it does matter. The right thing to do is transparency and that's what's happening here. If Bad Person & Associates are doing evil, they're not going to get a break just because their messages also contain personal love letters.
See post by kid0m4n below. It's the worst kind of evil: warmongering.
I had a much better opinion of Stratfor until now. They were plotting how to best sell misinformation. Misinformation that could start a war in which millions could die. They thought they could get away with this shit.
That's not how I read that email. I read that as a joke, kinda like a bunch of doctors talking about a disease epidemic and joking that it'll help put their kids through college.
Good point. We don't know the context of these emails. Are they being serious? Are they joking? Are we to assume every email in the 500k is to be taken seriously?
I'm sure many HNers have sent joking emails concerning their work to fellow coworkers. It happens in almost every office. I'm not saying that's the case here, but you never know.
"War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone but affect the whole world.
"To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from the other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
