<p>It would be cool if Intel could aim their research teams at the other parts of small computers but I don’t think that there’s enough profit in those other pieces to make it worthwhile. Intel makes an incredible amount of money on CPUs for larger systems and it could pour a bit of that money into further R&D on processors for all sorts of things. But those other pieces are typically inexpensive parts on phones so it might be hard to get a return on doing the kind of nanoscale research that they’ve done and apply it to cheaper components.</p>
<p>There are a lot of other companies working on the other pieces though I don’t think that they are as driven as Intel is to improve performance while decreasing power requirements.</p>
<p>“In 2011, New York charged a per-diem rate of $5,118 for residents of the institutions, a network of 11 centers that now house about 1,300 people with severe developmental disabilities. Over the course of a year, Medicaid spends $1.9 million for every resident, or $2.5 billion in total—with half coming from the federal government. But the cost of running the institutions is only a quarter of that amount.”</p>
<p>“Between 1990 and 2011, the daily reimbursement rate grew to $5,118 from $348. Ms. Thompson said it wasn’t clear if CMS “completely understood” the cost projections when it approved the rates. CMS officials acknowledge they first became aware of the problem in 2007 but waited three years before launching a probe.”</p>
<p>I think that NY negotiated a deal with the Feds - but the Feds didn’t realize the amounts that they would be billed.</p>
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<p>The solution is to cut payments to 20 to 25 percent of that amount which is still a lot of money. I understand that there are private schools in MA that charge around $160K to teach an Autistic child and the public school district may have to pay those amounts for some students - so this sort of care isn’t inexpensive. $1.9 million seems wildly excessive though.</p>
<p>Give us $1.9 million a year for a developmentally-disabled person and I think that we could take care of them quite well in our home. We could probably do that easily for one-tenth that amount.</p>
<p>States have been trying to overstate their Medicaid costs for decades. Because the feds reimburse half of the the state’s costs, the higher their fake costs are the more of their real costs are paid by the feds. In the 90s states created bed taxes so that the state charged a tax on every medicaid nursing home bed. For example, if a bed has a ten dollar a day tax on it, the nursing home would pay the state the ten dollars but the nursing home was using state medicaid payments to pay for the ten dollar tax. The feds would have to pay for half of that tax when they reimbursed the state for half the cost of medicaid. The effect of the bed tax was that the state would recycle $5 of state money with the feds contributing $5 to the state’s revenue. Ultimately the feds told states to stop the bed taxes. Apparently not all the feds are idiots.</p>
<p>I am still doing my 2011 tax return. It is way too complicated. I don’t understand a few items. I don’t understand where the tax preparer got some of his numbers. My state taxes are off by so much money. There is a tax credit missing. My CPA doesn’t call me back. It is so frustrating. </p>
<p>I looked at my parents’ return done by a tax firm like H&R Block and it was incorrectly done. Theirs was relatively simple.</p>
<p>We do need tax simplification. I realize that the business world is complicated and that makes the tax world complicated, but I am sick of spending so much time on tax returns.</p>
<p>I need to stop investing in companies that use K1s. The companies don’t usually make money anyway.</p>
<p>People complain about the AMT. I think we should just move to the AMT and get rid of the other stuff. Everyone gets a big standard deduction. Maybe the first $50,000 of income is tax free for everybody. Then there are a couple of tax rates and that is it.</p>
<p>I hate K1s - but they can save you a lot in taxes. Unless they screw you by reporting your non-taxable income too (this happened to me a few times with foreign MLPs).</p>
<p>Tax simplification? Get rid of all credits, deductions and exemptions.</p>
<p>My short FB puts are going to expire worthless today. The stock has rallied quite a bit so I haven’t rolled. I am not going to have much in FB after today.</p>
<p>I had 300 shares in the 600s and just 100 shares in the 700s. I have four-figures in AAPL. Sometimes I think that I should have split them evenly between the two companies.</p>