reallydude

> hobble the USPS in 2006 by requiring them to suddenly pre-fund their pension obligations

Maybe it's a flawed methodology (arguable), but being fiscally responsible about pensions is something that should be encouraged. In California pension liabilities are out of control and at impractical levels, causing all sorts of havoc and manipulation (corruption). https://www.vcstar.com/story/news/2018/12/07/governor-jerry-...

As someone who avoids pain medication for medical diagnostic reasons, I have had FAR too many prescriptions for opiates in my 20s and 30s. They were unnecessary 75% of the time that had automatic refills! There was no oversight or followup beyond what you get asked for a medical marijuana prescription (which is a joke). Oh, you have had some pain anywhere for anything? Here's your refill.

What did I do with the ones I didn't need, which I was originally sent home with? Sold them or gave them away for recreational use after my recovery was over.

Opiates, in general, were poorly managed for decades. Vicodin just happened to be the most popular product and the producer never bothered to be responsible about the use of it's own medicinal product, despite being in the business of medicine. I'm sure J&J aren't special, as a company that would end up being willfully negligent in the face of a successful pain medication empire, but they were.

> that's a bit less than healthcare as a fraction of the nation's GDP

Let's assume you're talking about just the USA> What do you mean by "a bit"? How did you just calculate healthcare, given the massive social programs in play? $1000 is not ANYTHING near health care costs (not to mention the post-life care). The ambulance ride alone, when someone is in distress (or deceased) is $1000 today.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1361028/

UBI is idiotic, but healthcare costs are horrific.

That is demonstrably incorrect. My first post advocates for benefits that might be found in a discussion without using specific verbiage.

I saw a pile of leather pieces outside a home, on the street, near Seattle with a sign that said "free leather". I'm not sure why anyone would want it, but it looked sad...like someone had died and they were clearing the home.

> that you should strive

I think that terms like "should" or "ought" are toxic. I can try to express ideas in an objective way with limited assumption, starting with how I present the ideas. Typically, I have found the substitution of "I think" puts my thoughts in perspective. This has led to a few times where arguments felt genuinely fruitful.

Perception, Comprehension, Analysis, Publication repeat.

Somewhere in there, it's doesn't matter if it's "advice" or whatever you want to call it, as long as it's shareable elucidation you can apply your own reasoning...but if you don't bother to follow the pattern, it doesn't matter what you think. Asking someone else to have done these steps for you, is a proxy for a lack of interest, imo. Everyone wants to be lazily told things they either already know or can agree with easily, but being critical in a constructive way is work.

> It's a shame that so much activism is spent on nonsense and even outright destructive nonsense. All that energy could be going toward improving things that matter.

I did not vote on it, but this is obvious pablem. An analysis of "why" is an interesting question, but aiming for platitudes repeated throughout every age in every society, is the epitome of discussion "noise".

> "attracting" homeless to the city, despite the fact that the data show this trope to be a fiction.

This is incorrect and I think it's constructive to address it. People talk about numbers, but it's mostly just whatever justifies their bias. Where you draw a line AND when matters when talking about this, so I believe somewhere just under 40% are from outside Seattle. I measure that if you're not from King County (for at least 1 year) before you lost your home, you've moved to it (re: http://allhomekc.org/king-county-point-in-time-pit-count/). Either way, homeless people do not move away to cheaper locales, but are drawn toward the city center. This is primarily due to existing support networks, convenient mobility, drug availability, tolerance, and available disposable wealth. Seattle is not special in this regard, as this behavior is see in many metropolitan centers around the world. Does it matter? No. Where people come from isn't the issue as you can't really control for the conditions...what is WA gonna do, prevent global warming from sending climate refugees up the coast? Good luck Inslee.

I have observed how various cities have approached handling the homeless. I spent 5 years in Santa Cruz, CA and a decade in Santa Ana, CA where these same "issues" had been handled differently from Seattle. I'm not an expert, but I have an opinion, and I recognize that's all it is.

You know who doesn't have a homeless problem? Irvine, CA. If you have a car with a bunch of caked mud on it and some dents or a blown out window, you get status-profiled (they don't admit to it, and it's not racial, but it's demonstrable) and pulled over. The Irvine Company (a family who owns most of Irvine) leverages or ships undesirables from the city and it stays that way (mostly in Costa Mesa, Laguna, etc) same as Santa Cruz did in the 90s where they would drop repeat offenders on a train to Santa Clara. Luckily(?) when a few people ended up freezing to death in their cars and the streets (over a few winters) in Santa Cruz, it came out as an official public safety policy. Draconian measures work to a degree, it seems, but mostly moving people CONSISTENTLY works.

Mixing unrestricted support systems into metropolitan areas has been applied for over half a century. It sifts those who can be helped, out until you have those who cannot or will not be helped. As unpopular as it seems, I think that a city/county being allowed to export people to unincorporated areas if they break a city/county law and have no residence and aren't able to complete a work program, would solve homelessness in a more humane manner. If you don't want to participate in society, homestead the land or run your way back and start over. Either way, it doesn't fill more jail cells. Yes people may die, just as people die now, but without putting residents at risk.

> So, you are giving about $2,000 a month of value to students?

I would think access to the internet is worth more than that. There's some implicit assumptions making with the conversion to dollars that make me think it isn't that simple.

eg > 49 students are now equipped with laptops, Internet access and online courses. Our partner Georgian Airlink, a local Wifi operator, covered the end-user device installation costs while our online donors sponsor the monthly Internet fees.

To have access, you need a stable living location, with say...wiring or a working wifi access point. You know, a place with a mailbox for a bill or equivalent. Schools are a decent proxy, where there are schools. You need to have a device to access it and of course, a nontrivial amount of knowledge to safekeep/operate these fundamental requirements within poverty conditions.

Ever seen someone brick an ethernet card trying to jam in a phone line? It happens, even with a 20-something that has had a smartphone almost their entire life. So maybe some stewardship is needed.

It's important to notice that online dating is how most couples meet, but what constitutes a "couple" here? I don't believe it means a long term relationship that lasts more than months.

For my fiancee and I, we know lots of couples through our friends and including through each other's work. The number that have met online is miniscule. "meeting people" is easy online, but relationships are hardfought when that's the start.

I did online dating in my 20s, matchmaking in my 30s and finally met my fiancee in my neighborhood bar (we don't drink, it just happened we were both there not drinking).

I wasn't trying to be obtuse. I'm not sure what's confusing.

Is it in the best interests of all the people to have proportionate power? I believe so.

I don't believe they (rural vs metropolitan citizens) should have some sort of relative power difference, despite their relative wealth and land-ownership differences. That's not important to me, philosophically.

Best I can do to clarify.

"doesn't mean that we should give the rest of the state disproportionate power."

Is it in the best interests of all the people to have proportionate power? I believe so.

The EC is an abstraction, which philosophically and practically takes choice away from individuals. Population centers having more power than rural areas (even when they are the geographical majority, otherwise) is a proxy for land-owners having more power. While, ironically, land-owners (like farmers) often tend to be poorer than city-dwellers in absolute terms, I don't believe they should have some sort of relative power difference.

After the computer revolution of the 80s and 90s, timesharing was reserved for only the largest mainframes (you might see a bunch of people huddled around a large cage in an Exodus colocation). I stand by the fact that it was exceedingly rare.

> He doesn't get to keep the boat,

He doesn't keep the title, but otherwise he keeps the boat. It's in his slip, it's maintained by his crew (well a company he pays to crew it). That's how it is, today. You can see this in harbors around the US.

The public is in the EXACT same denial about the politicians reading the laws they pass. It's fantasy to think that the corruption isn't blatant.

Binary data is lossy over json without more encoding/decoding, for example. HTTP is slooow, which is fine for stepping. But step debugging is not a problem that needs solving...unless....

This is a move toward being able to debug programs on Azure with VSCode remotely.

Exactly. It fits for the world-wide inflation.

> In economics, hyperinflation is very high and typically accelerating inflation.

> It quickly erodes the real value of the local currency, as the prices of all goods increase.

This is in process. You seem to think there's a specific periodic minimum that is absolute. If the period is decades, it looks the same.

> This causes people to minimize their holdings in that currency as they usually switch to more stable foreign currencies, often the US Dollar.[1] Prices typically remain stable in terms of other relatively stable currencies.

Given this has affected every currency (not counting some closed off systems like NK) the flight currency is property/land/gold/etc

If I can pay for the sign on a boat instead of the moon, and it just says that politician's name, and the politician gets the boat, the difference is negligible.

The purpose of PHDs are to move human knowledge forward. You have to do an analysis of something that, in all likelihood, nobody has done before (or not enough to be considered settled).

> Think that’s producing the best scientific results?

That's a strawman. The answer you were looking for is, "I don't know". I don't know either.

> companies did IN FACT time share servers.

Ok. It was so uncommon that I didn't encounter it for the 15 years preceding AWS. It's like pointing to a car that runs on vegetable oil. Yes there are IN FACT cars that run on vegetable oil, but nobody does it statistically. This is much different than the chance that a business (with income) is renting commercial space. Yes your local mom and pop pool company doesn't rent an office (and that's a non-trivial amount of businesses, as I've worked for some), but they aren't going to rent space in WeWork anyway.

If I don't have to talk about servers, there's no difference in optics to saying serverless.

When I go to a Jimmy John's, I'm never served by Jimmy John. So what?

It's great marketing, albeit not what every person imagines, when encountering the term.

I wouldn't build anything beyond what the server logs, which I do by default in the server config.

Having an access log and error log is sufficient, until you know what you want to query. Writing a script to do some custom query is a few minutes of work and can run over all the files created...ever. Then the person who wanted the query will just as likely realize the question they had is impossible to answer right now or doesn't want to expose the answer, or any other of a myriad of results that aren't "this adds business value".

Stop building more than you need. Get back to the work.

That's a bastardization of the headline and inaccurate.

Do a little substitution over there... and here... and away you go!

No Evidence that you have been employed without killing my pet Liger

Proving a negative, is possible. It's relatively difficult and uncommonly done.

https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27130

You mean Cigna? Not sure why you think they would hunt you down for name dropping. These policies aren't affected by you mentioning them on HN.

> OP wasn't saying it's a moral failing

The morality and intent is irrelevant to my core assertion. A criticism of contravariance (if that makes it clearer) followed by a usage of it is unexpected hypocrisy, which is ironic.

That wasn't the implication. The issue is an hypocritical assertion. If treating a large group as a unified actor is improper, then giving another group another label and doing the same thing...because it's that group is in a different classification, is also improper. The fact these views live in the same comment, is ironic.

ie

> I would caution against trying to paint "developers at Google" using broad stroke

> a leapfrog for the masses

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20600789

Leveraging Amazon's disinterest in its own processes, to the MAXIMUM effect, surely is brilliant social engineering. It required knowing how return products are handled and treated, which is basically "they are weighed and forgotten in a lottery/auction". The exploitation of existing policies and practices was foiled by greed. Not enough to order products to keep, he had to try to make a business of it.

I don't see anything there about specific numbers of deletions, but I do see 2 things that worry me.

1. "I don’t think you could find a voting systems expert who would think the deletion of the server data was anything less than insidious and highly suspicious," is a clever piece of misdirection, wherein there is a hidden assumption about available information (in absence of context, of course deletion without record is suspicious, then again, according to privacy policy it may be warranted) and what a "voting systems expert" is, being left to the imagination.

2. The story tries to conflate a number of voting events as part of a larger conspiracy.

That article not only fails to address what concerned me about all the reports in Georgia, but it is not compelling that "covering their tracks" for the specific act(s) is accurate.