My Name is Roger Ebert and I am an alc…

Roger Ebert on AA

What email should be

What email needs to be: http://gigaom.com/2009/08/23/dunbars-number-and-the-future-of-communications/

Posted via email from tarunupa’s posterous

The 1 book you should read about money

GRS has a great post about the best financial matters books:

25 Essential Books About Money: Financial Wisdom from Your Public Library

If you can only read 1 book out of these 25, I will recommend one of the following based on your current situation

• To reduce your debt: The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey
• Building good money habits: The Millionaire Next Door by Stanley and Danko
• Investing: The Random Walk Guide to Investing by Burton Malkiel
• Kids learning to manage money: What Color is Your Piggy Bank? by Adelia Cellini Linecker

Full list of websites that you can take offline with google gears

1. Zoho Writer and Zoho Mail
   • Word Processor, Email
   • Not transparent.
   • You can access documents stored inside your Zoho account and edit them offline inside the web browser.
   • You can read and compose mail when offline
2. Gmail :
   • Transparent and automatically detects your are offline.
   • Even has a “flaky connection” mode.
   • Full read-write access to your mail.
   • Even allows access to most gadgets
3. Wordpress
   • Hosted Blogging Service
   • Transparent and full-access to your posts and pages.
4. Google Docs
   • Word Processor, Spreadsheets, PDF documents and Presentations
   • Transparent and automatic offline access
   • Read-write access to word processor (no new docs)  and read-only access to spreadsheets and presentations
5. Remember The Milk
   • Todo List Manager
   • Full read-write access to your tasks. Even allows local search engines to search offline tasks.
6. Some Things
   • Todo List Manager
   • Full read-write access to your tasks
7. Autodesk Labs Project Draw
   • create diagrams online
   • the application can run in the offline mode and synch files later when you reconnect
8. MindMeinster
   • Mind Mapping Tool
   • Need pro account for offline access.
   • Full read-write access
9. Passpack
   • Password Manager for your online stuff
   • Transparent and full-access to your passwords in offline mode
10. Paymo
    • time tracker
    • Google Gears added the “ability to work offline and sync the data with the Paymo server once an internet connection is available”
11. Google Reader
    • Feed Reader
    • Not transparent. You have to tell it in advance that you are going to be offline.
    • Can read and update feeds but not add new feeds
12. Google Calendar:
    • Transparent but read-only access to your events.

Creating a multi-layered backup strategy for mac

Apple Blog has a good article on how to create a multi-layered backup strategy:

http://theappleblog.com/2009/06/05/my-multi-layered-backup-strategy/

Some software worth considering are:

• Time Machine or Superduper! for daily painless backup. this is your first line of defense
• JungleDisk or Mozy for the off-site backup (just in case time machine is corrupted or your house is on fire. This is your reserve backup
• Dropbox or Syncplicity to sync files to other machines on your network (good to have a backup of “critical” files). This is for the worst case

There is also CrashPlan that is a little expensive but can take care of all these three facets.

S corp or C corp

RRW has a nice post on if you should register your company as S-corp or C-corp

Company Registration Choices

Building better health insurance plans

We are going thru our yearly open enrollment where we get a chance to change our health insurance plans (among other things). In that context, I am reading a little bit about health care sector.

While the sector has clear deficiencies and is probably ripe for a complete change – there has been some innovations worth mentioning. For example, consumer driven health plans offer a way for providing higher quality care at cheaper prices.

DefinityHealth (a startup that got acquired by UHC for $300M when it had 300K members) offered such products as early as 1998. Essentially, they offered cheaper plans with higher deducitibles.

A typical plan is funded as follows:

• Employers funded most of the cheaper plan (just like other plans) but their costs were less .
• Employees got an attached account (HSA) that they can fund with pre-tax dollars (upto $5950/year/family).
• Many employers choose to pass on some of their savings (say, $500/year/family) to employees to kickstart their HSA fund. This added as an extra incentive for employees to opt for this fund.
• Employees owned their HSA free and clear and are free to invest them as they wish or take it with them when they leave the job but can only use it for medical purposes.

A typical plan paid as follows:

• Preventive checkups were covered at 100%
• Any other expenses (upto about $5000/family) were covered by the HSA – funded by employer (first $500) and then by pre-tax money from employees
• Catastrophes (beyond $5000) were covered 80% by insurance and 20% by employees.
• Any unused HSA will rollover to next year.

The plan has following benefits:

• Extra incentives for preventive checkups (no copay).
• Since consumer pays from “her” money – she has more incentive to search for the right cost.
• Cheaper premiums for employers and employees.
• Incentives for staying healthy as consumer pays some portion of the cost.

The plans has following disadvantages:

• People with chronic diseases (diabetes etc) where annual expense is roughly between $600-$5000 will have to pay most of it from their pocket

One can argue that benefits outweight disadvantages by a huge degree for such plans and people with chronic diseases should carry higher costs than other people in a capitalist society.

Now, if we can combine such plans with pricing transparency (another article) – we will be half way to medical nirvana in USA.