Someone about to die from a medical episode will bear a surprising amount to not die.
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From there, insurance would likely break down into high cost / high coverage, mid cost / mid coverage, low cost / legally mandated minimum coverage.
The poor would end up with the low cost / minimum coverage plans as cost would likely end up being the main motivating factor. Given that 6-in-10 Americans can not afford an unexpected $500 bill (https://www.cbs19news.com/story/34248451/6-in-10-americans-d...), this would likely be the coverage level chosen by about half of Americans. These policies would be affordable, but I expect the deductibles and co-pays would be high enough to make it prohibitively expensive for policy holders to actually get much utility from them.
The other half would end up with the better plans, unless they were more comfortable with risk and elected for the cheaper plans. Their lot is probably pretty similar to today.
Apparently all the staff that actually knew how to layout the magazine, run the online content, and print the publications were important. A sales staff with no ad-space to sell can't do much.
I myself am further to the left than the dems, so I vote with them. I find their messaging so spectacularly weak. They are always trying to guilt people into supporting through this narrative of "we are weak and about to get crushed, save us." I find it so off putting, I wish we had other viable parties and could get rid of FPTP so we don't have to constantly select between these two.
Here's a TED Talk about it from 2009 https://www.ted.com/talks/shai_agassi_a_new_ecosystem_for_el...
They went bankrupt in 2013
Seems like they went bankrupt though in 2013
Products like this
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Ready-America-2-Person-3-Day-Eme...
They are good to have if you live in an area with natural disasters, 5-year shelf life and you just keep it somewhere that you can quickly grab if you ever need to evacuate.
Per wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake
The biggest proof-of-stake blockchains by market capitalization in 2021 were Cardano, Avalanche, Polkadot and Solana. Other prominent PoS platforms include Tron, EOS, Algorand, and Tezos.
There have been repeated proposals for Ethereum to switch from a PoW to PoS mechanism. In April 2021, the Ethereum Foundation announced that it planned to switch to a PoS system by the end of 2021. This has since been pushed back to the second quarter of 2022.
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So if most of crypto transactions are conducted on proof-of-work chains, which do require burning large amounts of electricity, why would this make you think someone doesn't know about the current state of crypto. What exactly about the current state of crypto is incompatible with this critique?
We don't they just count the vehicles, I would imagine even basic computer vision software could do that with reasonable accuracy.
If 100 vehicles are in a 10 mile long convoy and then they space out more and are now in a 20 mile long convoy, it's still 100 vehicles.
I do enjoy reading each day the different lengths and distances to Kyiv.
A reminder that at that time there were no vaccines available, and the US was seeing a fairly large increase in both cases and deaths.
So someone was tasked with adding COVID precautions to this document then, and they have not been removed.
The idea that disease is a non-issue during a disaster (nuclear or otherwise) seems rather myopic. After a disaster, resources will be scarce, people may have to fend for themselves for a while or travel because they've been displaced. Why you wouldn't take reasonable and simple precautions to not throw disease on top of that is beyond me.
It also mentions not using disinfectant wipes on your skin, which is likely because it can cause irritation. Skin irritation also seems like an "absolute non-issue" and yet you aren't taking umbrage with that.
Also considering that one of the parts that suggests hand sanitizer says the following
If you are able to, set aside items like soap, hand sanitizer that contains at least 60 percent alcohol, disinfecting wipes, and general household cleaning supplies that you can use to disinfect surfaces you touch regularly. *After a flood*, you may not have access to these supplies for days or even weeks. Keep in mind each person’s specific needs, including medication. Don’t forget the needs of pets. Obtain extra batteries and charging devices for phones and other critical equipment.
The "After a flood" part makes me think this is just general disaster preparedness and has nothing at all to do with COVID.
Edit: There was another part about hand sanitizer that was much more COVID-19 related that I missed the first time, my mistake. But the entire page looks like a copy-pasted frankenstein.
There are a handful of people that are capable of producing "Sustained A-level performance" and for them this workplace probably seems ideal.
Even for the engineers that could reach this bar, it's a very high standard to apply constantly. There's another slide that gives a slight allowance for temporary performance issues, but that lack of security is hard for most people.
Slide 34 to be exact says this about Loyalty. "People who have been stars for us, and hit a bad patch, get a near term pass because we think they are likely to become stars for us again."
"A bad patch" is pretty loosely defined, if you burn out achieving something, or are assigned a problem that is particularly difficult, how much leeway do you have?
I don't think it would be an environment I would particularly enjoy, but I think to the original post's point this is a pretty great set of values because it really clearly articulates the trade-offs. If you are a 10x engineer and hate working at $current_company because they care about hard work and that's frustrating because you work smart not hard and you are comfortable with your career being contingent on consistent high performance, then Netflix is the place for you. If you work hard but think this would burn you out, look somewhere else. And that's what values should do, declare the trade-offs and take a firm stance on which things you value.
The author of the packages wants to use the fact that there are so many downloads to justify their position that they should pay him. The only reason the downloads exist was because he gave it away free.
If the author had started by charging a license fee, they would have close to 0 downloads. Someone else would have made a library to wrap strings in ansi-escape characters and pull random values out of data packages assembled by the Perl community.
The author does seem to be having some sort of mental health crisis at the moment. I hope they get the help they need.
Twilio outbounds the SMS message over the carrier network. Part of that relationship is that Twilio has to prevent spam from entering the carrier network, or the carriers will ban the interconnect.
Here's the full workflow of this situation.
The inbound leg looks like this.
[Spammer] -SMS-> [Carrier] -SMS-> [Twilio] -HTTP-> [Customer]
The outbound leg looks like this (the customer initiates this in response to the HTTP request)
[Customer] -HTTP/TWIML-> [Twilio] -SMS (SPAM DETECTION HERE)-> [Carrier] -SMS-> [Employee]
All of these parties are separate entities, each enforcing spam blocking. Twilio is incentivized to not transit spam over the Carrier because the Carrier will get upset at Twilio. Twilio has no way to tell the Carrier "Oh, hey, this is spam, but the customer owns the number and they said they were cool with getting spam, please don't get angry"
"Long lasting effects Bactose™ will continue to thrive digesting lactose for the whole month, individual results may vary."
I was trying to say that the Bactose product's "long-lasting" claim falls a bit flat when you realize it only lasts a month. If I could take some pills for a week and then be set for 6-months or a year, yea, I might drop $40 on it.
One day after I had started drinking coffee a friend wanted to go to Starbucks. They were excited that I finally started drinking coffee and we could go for a walk and grab a cup. I had heard Starbucks was pretty awful coffee but the coffee was a side point, so I went and got a cup of coffee.
I was wildly caffeinated the rest of the day. My brain had made an incorrect association that "awful coffee" == "weak coffee" so I got the largest one because I was a bit tired. That was WAY TOO MUCH caffeine, a Venti coffee at Starbucks has 225mg of caffeine and the standard cup I was brewing at home / in the office was closer to 90mg.
That was a difficult afternoon at work, unable to sit still, agitated, but I learned a good lesson. Starbucks didn't get rich from flavor, they did it the old fashioned way, massive quantities of addictive substances, caffeine and sugar.
Have I heard about diabetics refusing to change their diets and dying, yes.
Does that mean we should outlaw sugar? Probably not, plenty of people struggle with obesity and sugar is a major contributing factor, but there's plenty of responsible adults that can consume sugar in moderation.
I also imagine there are a non-zero number of people that begin using more pure forms of caffeine in ways that are damaging to their relationships, health, and careers.
For a year this is $40 * 12 = $480.
Or I could get 180 pills from CostCo (and you could probably source these cheaper) for $18, even if I ate dairy at every meal 365 * 3 = 1095, I would only need 1095 / 180 = 6.08 (round up to 7) boxes of Fast-Acting Lactase which is only 7 * $18 = $126.
This is 4 times the price and for 1 week each month I need to remember to take 3 pills a day. The value prop just doesn't add up, it's not hard to source or have lactase pills on hand.
https://www.costco.com/kirkland-signature-fast-acting-lactas...
> If the systems are so vital surely there is a detailed specification
This is hilarious, and wrong. There probably is a specification somewhere, but there is drift between the implementation and the specification. When that 4am bug pops up and stops processing a billion dollars worth of transactions because of a weird corner case, someone fixed that to get the system running again, did they update the master specification, maybe. Half of the job is figuring out how the system really works, all the bugs, all the quirks, all the things that other systems have come to expect.
Sunsetting is often a bug-for-bug type of conversion, because the output of COBOL programs are similar to database tables. Other programs are built on top of this data and that consumer code introduces a bunch of expectations on how the output of your replacement must behave to keep everything working. The number of consumer programs that have some expectation on the data can range from dozens to thousands.
So you can either read and understand and fix all the consumers as you make your replacement behave to spec instead of behaving identically, or you do what most sunset teams do and you make it produce identical output.
This now means that you are reading the target code base and understanding hundreds of thousands of lines of COBOL, you are unearthing decades of extensions, bug fixes, hacks, and mistakes.
Your job then is to make sure the replacement behaves exactly the same way over decades of input. This is the best test of course, learn JCL and beg the mainframe operators to let you run a massive job that will process historical records with the target and replacement programs and compare the results.
Your days begin to look like the following. Get in, get the report from last nights run which tells you all the discrepencies. For each one you can run your code and the cobol locally with some work. Formulate a theory for why some figure is wrong, fix it, move onto the next. Do that for 8 hours. At the end of the day kick off your massive JCL and do it all again tomorrow.
Just do that everyday for a few weeks or months or however long it takes until your replacement program behaves the same as the COBOL program and then you can swap them without breaking 1000 other applications.
Then you get the long tail of bug reports. The zipjack flim-florp report isn’t working. So now you dig into that, the flim-florps are processed by the COBOL you replaced, so maybe the zipjack system had a requirement you didn’t realize. Dig dig dig, days go by, your will to live eroding, but finally you find it, deep in the CVS history bug-1376892 looks like the target program accidentally added an extra hour to the business day in Seoul on leap years because the time zone data is wonky and they have special code expecting this wonkiness and correcting on their side because the mainframe programmers in 1994 decided it was too much work to fix on the mainframe side.
Our program uses a different timezone database and it knows how to properly calculate this, so just add a data transform at the end to detect this scenario and fudge the numbers back to what the zipjack (and who knows how many other systems) expects.
The COBOL systems are rarely used directly, they are batch processors taking in data and pumping out data. Applications are then written on top of their output and bind the behavior of the COBOL system with all their expectations. And this is where the complexity lies, the specification for how the system works is possibly written down somewhere, but the actual specification is in the COBOL code and the hundreds or thousands of consumer programs and all their expectations. To do the job well you have to write something that replaces the actual real-world specification encoded in all that other software, not the one jotted down in wordstar a few decades ago.
And an excellent corollary to this is that when you have lucky 100% uptime there is no incentive to optimize mean time to recovery.
Sure the raspberry pi in your closet has been running fine for years, 100% uptime, but then a component fails. Do you have a replacement on hand? Are you continuously monitoring it to know it went down? The component failed at 3am, did it page you? Did you hop right out of bed to rush to fix it?
Single systems can have really nice uptime until they don’t. Then you are hoping that the people on hand can repair what’s going on after months or years of never having to do that. Mean time to recovery might be a week while you wait for new hardware or a few hours while you google some error message you’ve never encountered.
People can run their own systems if they want to, but they shouldn’t confuse good luck with rigorous engineering.
Seatbelt laws exist, in many places in the US if a cop sees you driving without your seatbelt on you are getting pulled over and getting a hefty fine.
It makes sense as when most lay people think of "warming" in connection with the "global climate" they likely think "weather" and the idea that it will be 2-3 degrees "warmer" out doesn't seem like a big deal. 68F feels pretty close to 71F, no biggie.
At a planet wide scale though, this is a huge amount of energy and causes a massive change in the climate.
There's a lot of "greenwashing" in the world, but the term is generally applied to corporations that use "a form of marketing spin in which green PR and green marketing are deceptively used to persuade the public that an organization's products, aims and policies are environmentally friendly." The term "Climate Change" is the preferred term from the scientific community and isn't promoted by corporations to make themselves seem more green.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/build-back-better/
> Ensures clean energy technology – from wind turbine blades to solar panels to electric cars – will be built in the United States with American made steel and other materials, creating hundreds of thousands of good jobs here at home.
> The Build Back Better legislation will target incentives to grow domestic supply chains in solar, wind, and other critical industries in communities on the frontlines of the energy transition. In addition, the framework will boost the competitiveness of existing industries, like steel, cement, and aluminum, through grants, loans, tax credits, and procurement to drive capital investment in the decarbonization and revitalization of American manufacturing.
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> The framework will also fund port electrification; facilitate the deployment of cleaner transit, buses, and trucks; and support critical community capacity building, including grants to environmental justice communities. In addition, the framework will create a new Civilian Climate Corps – with over 300,000 members that look like America. This diverse new workforce will conserve our public lands, bolster community resilience, and address the changing climate, all while putting good-paying union jobs within reach for more Americans.
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> The consumer rebates and credits included in the Build Back Better framework will save the average American family hundreds of dollars per year in energy costs. These measures include enhancement and expansion of existing home energy and efficiency tax credits, as well as the creation of a new, electrification-focused rebate program. The framework will cut the cost of installing rooftop solar for a home by around 30 percent, shortening the payback period by around 5 years; and the framework’s electric vehicle tax credit will lower the cost of an electric vehicle that is made in America with American materials and union labor by $12,500 for a middle-class family. In addition, the framework will help rural communities tap into the clean energy opportunity through targeted grants and loans through the Department of Agriculture.
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Clinton's campaign had similar promises around retraining coal miners to provide them good jobs in Wind and Solar.
The first experience you have is being dropped into your "home" and mine defaulted to a big mountain side house, warm wood, fireplace, massive window looking out into a beautiful valley.
It was virtual but convincing enough and I still sometimes enjoy just taking in the virtual view before or after playing a VR game.
I remember thinking it a bit odd, the actual world around me could be awful, but in here it was just good enough to trick my brain. Throw $10B at that experience and I'm curious to see what happens. Maybe a scarcity-free utopia where everyone can "live" in whatever beautiful environment they want to, maybe a dystopia where you get home and enter your unadorned concrete cube and plug in to your real home, needing just enough physical space to use the VR.
If they can ever get it fully jacked into your brain, I could see people just plugging in and never coming out.
I wonder if there are any studies about the deterrent effect for adopting smoking / drinking.
If someone is considering taking up smoking and cigarettes cost $1 / pack vs $10 / pack, I would imagine that there would be people that would see the $10 / pack and think, "too expensive a habit, better not start."
6 months worth of postholes is 200 * 30 * 6 = 36,000 postholes and a profit of $0.55 per posthole to pay down the capital investment.
In my original post I claim $5 per posthole profit can pay this off in 11 days.