Balanceinfinity

The American healthcare industry is fascinating for a number of reasons. First, when insurance is involved you have the person seeking the service completely removed from the person paying for it - which almost always will result in overconsumption. Then, you have life or death issues, which people won't apply their usual cost/benefit analysis. Do you need a new car? Depends, is it worth the added expense. Do you need brain surgery even if the chance of success is 4%? Will it possibly extend my life? Yes, no matter how much it costs.

More systematically: offer a "good housekeeping" seal. Presumably those who have good implants will cooperate and open their books so you can look at who they install to and outcomes. Being a reliable 3rd party, cooperating and getting a gold medal seal will help with sales.

Makes one wonder - in the absence of thorough regulation, why a third-party evaluator hasn't arisen to provide real risk analysis for patients regarding each device (the good device seal) - and I'm surprised insurance companies aren't more aggressive in ensuring that they aren't making the patients worse 9which would increase their insurance costs).

Sadly, horribly, that is now a risk with every major procedure - but at least it's a known risk that the patient can choose to accept when the underlying condition is not life threatening. Devices that don't work properly and haven't been properly reviewed by the FDA are risks the patient can't reasonably evaluate.

the best food in London is always in the restaurants from the places the British colonized: Indian, Middle eastern, American, etc. English food - traditionally English food - is better than it used to be, but still down the gastro list.

Cruising is kind of fun. I've traveled every way, from backpacks and youth hostels to four star hotels - they each have their merits. No, if you take a cruise and stop in Maine, it won't be the same as staying there for a week with friends (I've done both), but if you haven't done it don't mock it. If you just want a day to look a city over (or maybe take a hike in a national park) but don't want to shlep in and out, cruising is a fun way to go.

One great thing about cruising is this (same is true of resorts in general), if you have a large, diverse family, you can all get together for meals or activities on some days, but go off and get away from each other on different days - so you don't all drive each other crazy. Also, when you get older, it makes traveling a lot easier.

As you age, you just can't bring the same focus and stamina to bear on a project - which is ok, because experience, wisdom, and efficiency can actually make things easier.

There's not the 24H grind with programming to a deadline. There can be long days, especially when preparing for a court appearance or a trial, and law firms notoriously work their associates very long hours to cover their significant pay checks. Attorneys at firms bill by the hour, so there's an incentive to work lots and lots of hours to be at the top law firms - but there are lots of more human jobs at companies as in-house counsel, or with the government or with a non profit or NGO.

I'm a lawyer, but talented paralegals (typically just a college degree) can do very well. Especially ones who can master ediscovery - the production of documents stored electronically.

It's a fair question - when you're presenting an oral argument the goal is to teach/convince/explain. The ability to see your audience is huge: do they have a quizzical look, are they trying to jump in on your comment; do they look at you with incredulity? an experienced attorney (which all of the SCT bar are) will use these visual cues to focus their argument.

I realized that I was only a so-so programmer. the real ninjas were so passionate and knowledgeable; I was only successful because of brute force and overworking. I moved on to a career in the law - which is a much more natural fit for me.

This is totally addictive

Not surprised they are moving from in-person, but i am surprised they aren't moving to a video system; so much of communications are visual.

"In essence, cooking—including not only heat but also mechanical processes such as chopping and grinding—outsources some of the body’s work of digestion so that more energy is extracted from food and less expended in processing it. Cooking breaks down collagen, the connective tissue in meat, and softens the cell walls of plants to release their stores of starch and fat. The calories to fuel the bigger brains of successive species of hominids came at the expense of the energy-intensive tissue in the gut, which was shrinking at the same time—you can actually see how the barrel-shaped trunk of the apes morphed into the comparatively narrow-waisted Homo sapiens. Cooking freed up time, as well; the great apes spend four to seven hours a day just chewing, not an activity that prioritizes the intellect."

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-fire-makes...

best/easiest writing tip 1: You place a square around the subject of the sentence and a circle around the verb. This ensures you have one (or more) of each, as opposed to having an implied subject or verb. Then look at how close they are - the fewer words in between the subject and verb, the clearer the sentence is. Thus: Joe quickly and unerringly picked the wrong word becomes: Joe always picked the wrong word

Best easiest writing tip 2: The most important word in the sentence is the verb - it should always do the heavy lifting. This means that - when possible - you should avoid the passive voice, but it means much more. When writing, select verbs that pop. From: Joe walked down the street without direction To: Joe meandered west.

fire made eating animal protein much more efficient. imagine the patience of eating raw deer off the bone - hours of chewing. With fire, it converted a monotonous task to something efficient

Shocked the story didn't mention the Fogerty suit - the strangest copyright -music case of all

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/27501/time-john-fogerty-...

Obama said he was shocked by how many people he met as president, and all they wanted to do was take a picture - even though there's a professional White House photographer recording everything and the pictures are made available. Heck - you're with the president: be in the moment.

https://www.today.com/news/barack-obama-explains-why-he-ll-n...

I agree - family trips (even long car rides) can be quality time if everyone is listening to the same songs and singing along together, or listening to a book together and discussing what's going to happen (ok, we're strange) or wasted time as everyone escapes into their own devices.

We go to a lot of sporting events and our rule is that when a ball or puck is in play, no devices - these have been the best way to share quality time with our teens.

I became familiar with the term "quality time" as a contrast to "quantity time," regarding child rearing. As both parents began working outside of the home, and less time was spent with the kids, parents tried to ease their guilt by ramping up the quality time. This really doesn't work, and I agree with Al Franken: "“Parenting is the hardest job you’ll ever love. First and foremost, being a good parent means spending lots of time with your children. I personally hate the phrase ‘quality time.’ Kids don’t want quality time. They want quantity time, big, stinking, lazy, nonproductive quantity time.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/04/upshot/upshot-letter-our-...

Warby really does have a good deal compared to other glasses options (IMO this wasn't true until they developed bricks and mortar stores to fit the glasses properly). If the only thing a new company is selling is that it's not your parents' brand, then failure seems like a matter of if, not when. Generational advertising can't beat a better, more efficient, or lower cost product.

Favorite role: Hannah and her sisters. he had a great role - some humor, some sadness (when his heart is broken). This guy could totally act.

He writes "There seems to be something in getting good at a skill tree that helps in latter life. I’d like to think it is a function of exposure: once you see the competitive meta at the top of one skill tree, you begin looking for it everywhere else."

Two things explain this phenom: 1) you learn how to learn - and if you pay attention you become better at learning, more efficient; 2) you develop the confidence that your time invested will pay off with expertise, so you don't begrudge the investment

Interesting - One of the things we teach is that we don't want our people competing with the slides, so if you want to put up a quote to expand upon it, first you have to read the quote - otherwise, you're talking and people are reading

need to lojack the hives

The number 600 would be the number of expected blind schizophrenics in the US right now. But as people have been looking for them over time, the actual number should be higher.

The origin of the mixed use movement (and the rebirth of cities) is The Death and Life of Great American Cities (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_Am...). The upshot is that mixed use is the holy grail. Here, I can't tell is residential mixed in with commercial - that's how you get people out of cars.

It says mixed use - does that means there's commercial and residential in the same space? In my mind that's what makes for a city.

citation for "half your human brain is devoted to visual processing"?

He was an engineer - he probably wanted to try and "solve" the problem (isolate the car's behavior and see what inputs are causing the incorrect reaction) and engineer a solution. As an engineer, I can understand this drive. He probably felt he was on top of it because he knew of the bug.

Realistically, the way we do it is we have a team of supervisors who have been around long enough and have seen everything that - as a group - we are the institutional knowledge. We are pretty effective at communicating with each other to bring the institutional knowledge to bear on a problem - we could be better at training our subordinates so that they have access to this institutional knowledge, but the truth is that the training is expensive and not usually well received.

Generally, I don't think efforts to accumulate institutional knowledge on a website work bear fruit - no one really wants to update the website, both because it's thankless, but also because of access time. It is much faster to tap the institutional knowledge in management by sending an email than by paging through the results of a search. For written institutional knowledge to have real value, the access time has to be small, which means someone has taken real care in curating the knowledge so it's easily accessed. Finally, we have the Brian problem. Brian was the person most likely to update our internal websites - unfortunately Brian wasn't very good and had some poor ideas regarding lessons learned - by adding them to the websites, his bad ideas were passed on to younger team members who didn't know better.