aggieben

TL;DR - saved it in Readability.

ducks

As someone who has been onboarded with docker like in the example, I can testify that this article is absurd. Docker increases complexity, not decreases. So much so that I question its value in most circumstances, and I will never on-board someone by throwing a docker image at them.

I don't keep asking for advice from those kinds of doctors.

I really wish people would quit treating doctors as unquestionable authorities on health. Rather, they should be treated as consultants - expertise for hire - who should be able to give good answers to most questions, but should expect to have to defend their recommendations, and can sometimes be wrong.

>I’ve often wondered why the so-called Masters of the Universe, those C.E.O.s with multimillion-dollar monthly paychecks, keep working. Why, once they have earned enough money to live comfortably forever, do they still drag themselves to the office? The easy answer, the one I had always settled on, was greed.

>But as I watched the hours slowly drip by in my cubicle, an alternative reason came into view. Without a sense of purpose beyond the rent money, malaise sets in almost immediately. We all need a reason to get up in the morning

I enjoyed the article, but this is painful. Is it really that hard to imagine why someone with a lot of money would want to keep doing what they do, or that it might not be primarily about the money?

> The attorney patiently explained to me that returning to Santo Domingo was far too risky. Because I’d overstayed my tourist visa as a child, I’d be subject to a ban on reentry; it was also extremely likely that I’d be denied a student visa.

Well, why can't we just fix that, instead of completely ignoring the law for 20 million people (while in the meantime, millions more wait in line the legal way without the privileges that this guy's family took illegitimately)?

From my very surface-level experience with HIPAA, I'd say to just call the whole thing off. All it does is make me irritated that medical providers send me those stupid "secure email" messages - or worse, only accept fax.

Medical advertisements aren't the problem. The problem is that consumers aren't spending their own money and don't know how much things cost because medical providers can't/won't tell them.

Let's fix that problem.

So....what is that `choose` thing? Curious how that's implemented...

+1 for that. I didn't know railguns were limited thusly.

Giant railguns. That is all.

This is most definitely _not_ illegal if US citizenship is required to perform the job, which is the case in any job dealing with classified information.

REMOTE or ONSITE?

If the chief/captain/whatever didn't know about it, it wasn't reviewed. Simple as that.

As a programmer, this seems like this is almost entirely Clemans fault. Good grief: you can't just walk into a mission-critical, production environment and start deploying crap, even if the dispatchers like it.

Yelling at your boss who rightly pulled the plug on that stunt is hardly justified. Whether or not it's a firing offense depends on a lot of things the article doesn't tell us, but..

This is really not the "idealistic and pure-hearted lowly programmer" vs "corrupt and overly political, turf-controlling police culture" it makes it out to be.

Ah. In context, it sounds quite a lot less ominous than title of the OP. Of course they have to address it. How is the question.

Agreed. "Man on the street" works every bit as well in London or Paris or Munich as it does in LA.

Accurate.

Well, not Russians.

Texan here: this makes me kinda proud.

As a side note: I briefly lived in the UK. Once while on vacation on the continent a tour guide asked everyone in the group where we came from. The other Americans in the group all said "America" or "the States", but we said "Texas". The tour guide said that's always what Texans say.

:-)

I can't second this enough: if you haven't worked remotely before, you should definitely start out with a company that has a remote working culture.

Where in this document does that statement (or one like it) appear? I gave it a quick read but didn't spot it.

There's a category difference. I don't have a citation, but I would guess that credit card companies make a substantial proportion of their revenues from merchant fees. Also, they do turn down people. Not everyone can get a credit card.

> Payday lenders do not charge refinancing/rollover fees, as with mortgages, and the interest doesn’t compound (unless of course she takes out a new loan to pay interest on the first loan)

Yes, they absolutely do charge refinancing and rollover fees. They don't call them that, of course, so they can skirt state consumer protection regulations, but that's what they are. And oh yes, they get their users to take out new loans to pay off the interests on the first loans. That's actually their entire business model. You know what proportion of payday lender's business comes from this exact thing? 76%! (http://www.responsiblelending.org/payday-lending/research-an...)

Their business model is wholly and fundamentally based on the inability of non-creditworthy people to keep their obligations. If their customers paid back everything on time, they would go out of business instantly. That is what I call unethical. At best.

> I'm guessing you didn't have to spend a lot of time dealing with procurement of individual policies prior to the ACA. I did, and its a godsend.

A lot? I guess not, but I did shop for individual (+family) insurance plans before the ACA, and I much prefer the before to the after. I absolutely despise the stupid metal-color tiers, in which every single plan is a cookie cutter of another within the same tier. Nevermind that plans that before ACA could be obtained relatively cheaply are now quite a lot more expensive - in some cases, more than double. So there is far less consumer choice, and everything is more expensive. If that's not a trainwreck, I don't know what is.

P.S. - I 100% agree about price transparency. I'm ambivalent whether the way to accomplish it is through a regulatory rule.

Fair enough, but then you should explain that what you're against is mindless regurgitation, not good CS education (which again, has algorithms at its core, but goes far beyond that).

> a belief that memorizing a bunch of that stuff and being an automaton who spits back the correct algorithm name and a pseudocode implementation is all there is to programming. Because what companies really want is to hire a Fisher-Price See-‘n-Say toy, right?

I get the overall rant. I understand the frustrations - but this is wrong-headed. If you can't see the value of understanding algorithms - learning both how to write them and how to evaluate them (including proving their correctness), then you've misunderstood computer science education altogether. Nevermind all the rest of CS, which encompasses far more than just "names of algorithms".

> How long were you on hold while your kid was clutching his arm?

None at all. Possibly less time than I would have spent with a 911 operator asking me my address and whatnot.

> Many people are not good at judging what is an emergency

Perhaps, but I think in the main emergency care is an outlier in relative terms. I have no citation for you, but I just can't imagine that emergency care (i.e., you don't have time to make decisions about who to see, etc) is a very large proportion of healthcare dollars spent (and is also where insurance can actually make sense).

I think the goal should be to optimize the system for non-emergency care by making it a consumer-oriented market. As long as third parties are spending most of the money it can't be that, and until we have price transparency, the control of expenditures can never be with the patient.

Right, and we'd just be headed over a cliff like the rest of them. Nationalized healthcare is a disaster economically and in patient outcomes, not to mention patient and physician autonomy.

Yeah, this is close to my reaction as well. Higher deductible plans lead to less spending; confusion among the economically illiterate ensues.

Nothing to see here.

I agree 100% and would just add this as another way of saying what you just said: the healthcare industry _is_ a market, it's just that patients aren't the customers, we're a product that the insurance company sells to medical providers (much like google offers us "free" email and then sells us to advertisers).