2014 Employee Tax via Obamacare for Top 50 USA Employers

Total Tax		Top 50 Largest U.S. Employers
For				Cost Per Participant
Obamacare	1	Wal-Mart	2,100,000	$63.00	$132,300,000.00
	2	IBM	436,085	$63.00	$27,473,355.00
$725,451,237.00	3	McDonald’s	400,000	$63.00	$25,200,000.00
	4	United Parcel Service	400,600	$63.00	$25,237,800.00
	5	Target	355,000	$63.00	$22,365,000.00
	6	Kroger	338,000	$63.00	$21,294,000.00
	7	Sears Holdings	312,000	$63.00	$19,656,000.00
	8	General Electric	287,000	$63.00	$18,081,000.00
	9	Citigroup	267,000	$63.00	$16,821,000.00
	10	Albertson’s	240,000	$63.00	$15,120,000.00
	11	FedEx	222,300	$63.00	$14,004,900.00
	12	General Motors	210,000	$63.00	$13,230,000.00
	13	United Technologies	208,200	$63.00	$13,116,600.00
	14	CVS	201,000	$63.00	$12,663,000.00
	15	Altria Group	199,000	$63.00	$12,537,000.00
	16	Verizon Communications	195,400	$63.00	$12,310,200.00
	17	Aramark	195,000	$63.00	$12,285,000.00
	18	Berkshire Hathaway	192,012	$63.00	$12,096,756.00
	19	AT&T	189,950	$63.00	$11,966,850.00
	20	Home Depot	189,390	$63.00	$11,931,570.00
	21	Delphi	185,200	$63.00	$11,667,600.00
	22	Safeway	180,000	$63.00	$11,340,000.00
	23	Bank of America	176,638	$63.00	$11,128,194.00
	24	JP Morgan Chase	168,847	$63.00	$10,637,361.00
	25	Yum Brands	165,920	$63.00	$10,452,960.00
	26	HCA	165,450	$63.00	$10,423,350.00
	27	Lowe’s	164,794	$63.00	$10,382,022.00
	28	Ford Motor	164,000	$63.00	$10,332,000.00
	29	PepsiCo	157,000	$63.00	$9,891,000.00
	30	Walgreen	155,200	$63.00	$9,777,600.00
	31	Wells Fargo	153,500	$63.00	$9,670,500.00
	32	Boeing	153,000	$63.00	$9,639,000.00
	33	Darden Restaurants	150,100	$63.00	$9,456,300.00
	34	Hewlett-Packard	150,000	$63.00	$9,450,000.00
	35	Gap	150,000	$63.00	$9,450,000.00
	36	JC Penney	150,000	$63.00	$9,450,000.00
	37	Starbucks	149,000	$63.00	$9,387,000.00
	38	Starwood Hotels and Resorts	145,000	$63.00	$9,135,000.00
	39	Marriott International	143,000	$63.00	$9,009,000.00
	40	Sara Lee	137,000	$63.00	$8,631,000.00
	41	Lockheed Martin	135,000	$63.00	$8,505,000.00
	42	Walt Disney	133,000	$63.00	$8,379,000.00
	43	Alcoa	129,000	$63.00	$8,127,000.00
	44	Northrop Grumman	123,600	$63.00	$7,786,800.00
	45	Electronic Data Systems	117,000	$63.00	$7,371,000.00
	46	Honeywell	116,000	$63.00	$7,308,000.00
	47	Johnson & Johnson	115,600	$63.00	$7,282,800.00
	48	Lear	115,113	$63.00	$7,252,119.00
	49	Tyson Foods	115,000	$63.00	$7,245,000.00
	50	Emerson Electric	114,200	$63.00	$7,194,600.00

Chris Horner, 41 Wins La Vuelta "Tour de Spain"

via www.chron.com sciguy section  
                              American Wins La Vuelta Tour de Spain

Virtually no Americans watched the Tour of Spain, a three-week cycling race that ended Sunday in Madrid.             http://www.lavuelta.com/ official race site

It’s a shame, not only was the racing some of the most memorable in a grand tour that I can recall, but because of the race’s remarkable American winner, Chris Horner.   

 He turns 42 years old next month. After Armstrong was stripped of his Tour de France titles, Horner is the first American grand tour winner since Greg LeMond.

Prior to Horner’s stunning victory, the oldest grand tour winner was Belgian Firmin Lambot, who was 36 when he won the 1922 Tour de France.

Horner is nearly six years older, and won arguably the most demanding grand tour in recent memory. Moreover, average age of pro cyclists at the highest level of the sport is 28. Grand tour cyclists hit their peak, usually, between 27 and 33 years of age.

In winning the tour, Horner climbed better than Vincenzo Nibali, a 28-year-old climber who was probably the best overall rider in the race who earlier this year won the Tour of Italy. Here’s video of the winning move Horner made on the diabolical final climb of Stage 20.

So how did Chris Horner, who had never previously finished in the top five of a grand tour, do it?

Like every cyclist of this era, he has faced serious questions about doping, the using a performance enhancing drugs. This is only natural following the Lance Armstrong era, especially for a rider who rides on the team Armstrong formed during his comeback.

Full disclosure: I’d love for Horner to be clean. He seems like a genuinely good guy, and he’s had a lot of bad luck in his career before finally finding some success. The cynic in me is doubtful, however, especially as it remains possible to dope one’s blood in cycling despite it possessing the most sophisticated drug testing policy in any sport.

What I’m not sure of is how significant a decline there is physically, in an endurance athlete, between the age of 30 and 40.  So I rang up Dr. Theodore Shybut, a sports medicine expert at the Baylor College of Medicine.

Both an athlete’s endurance and power output fall off by the late 30s, Shybut said.

With regard to endurance, the fall-off generally begins in the mid-30s. At this time a person’s ability to sustain a high level of activity — say running fast, but not sprinting — without burning up all of one’s energy begins to diminish. This is known as the anaerobic threshold. By the mid-30s this threshold tends to lower a bit in a typical athlete, Shybut said. This means Horner, at the same energy expenditure has he used five to seven years ago, would be going slower to today.

“This is one reason why, in general, we don’t see a lot of Olympic athletes in strength and endurance events in their late 30s and 40s,” Shybut said.

Another critical factor is that athletes lose some of their ability to recover after hard efforts by their mid- to late-30s. A grand tour encompasses 21 stages of racing with just two rest days during the event. Day-to-day recovery is essential.

With power output the drop-off typically comes even earlier. For cyclists, a critical ability is their maximum capacity to transport and use oxygen, or their VO2 max.

“This does tend to decrease as well, in general for peak performance in power sports like sprinting, that peak comes in the late 20s,” Shybut said.

So for a cyclist like Horner, who puts out a maximum effort for 15 to 20 minutes on a very hard climb, his peak power would probably have come in his late 20s.

All of this looks pretty bad for Horner. However, Shybut noted, there are a handful of older athletes who have achieved peak status late in life. Notably U.S. swimmer Dara Torres, at the age of 41, won three silver medals at the 2008 Olympics and set an American record in the 50-meter freestyle.

It is theoretically possible that some athletes could maintain or even reach their physiological peak in their late 30s, Shybut said. The only way to definitively prove this would be to perform exercise and blood tests in ones 20s, 30s and 40s, and measure the changes. Unfortunately this information isn’t available for Horner as it could, in some way, exonerate him from doping allegations were he able to show improvement these physiological metrics.

Horner, in other words, might have great genes. But the genetics of endurance sports is not to the point yet where we know the genetic markers for 40-year-old super athletes. So a DNA test can’t validate Horner either, at least not yet.

Regardless, as someone who recently turned 40, I tip my cap at a fellow 40-something taking it to the kids, many of whom were also quite probably doping to some extent.

for complete article go here  http://blog.chron.com/sciguy/2013/09/how-did-a-41-year-old-american-win-the-worlds-toughest-bike-race/?cmpid=hpts

United States Grants Terrorism License to "Free Syrian Arm" FSA NATO Army

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Melissa Williams Ironman Inspiration

I had the pleasure of meeting Melissa Williams from Middleton, Wisconsin walking to my vehicle after the Memorial Herman Ironman Galveston Texas 70.3.

             Ironman Corporation re tweeted my photo

RT 2 help us congratulate Melissa on finishing #IM703TX despite a crash during the bike #IronmanSpirit #Determination twitter.com/IronmanTri/sta…
— IRONMAN Triathlon (@IronmanTri) April 9, 2013

"

She crashed on her bike during the race, with a possible broken hip, cuts on her leg, hip, elbow on the right side, and cutting hand and fingers on the left. She gutted out the heat and humidity of Galveston and finished the Run strong in 2 hr and 10 min for a finishing time of 5:59.    


I am attaching picture of her post race, swollen hip, bandaged bloody leg, bandaged hand and elbow, but offering a HUGE SMILE.

To me she epitomizes the spirit of Ironman, when the chips are down, your body hurts beyond belief, sure its easier to quit and say "i crashed and couldn't finish", but the spirit of IRONMAN shined through and she persevered to the finish.

I am certain she left Galveston with a GREAT Sense of PRIDE.