rootusrootus

Medicare. It's too bad we can't all get it.

About 20 years ago I had a phone number that was one digit off from a local attorney who took medical malpractice cases. And despite not using it myself, that phone line had built-in fax detection and so it would accept any incoming fax and then email the results to me. I lost count of the number of times I got sent a good chunk of someone's private medical records. In many cases repeatedly from the same source, despite me calling them and politely explaining that they had just sent someone's medical records to a random stranger.

So ... perhaps more secure than email, but not necessarily as much as you'd think. Though maybe it isn't as common now to have phone lines with fax receiving included. I worked for a CLEC at the time and got my phone & internet through them too, so maybe I was just getting the special deluxe plan. Had my very own public class C, too, but that's a different problem.

Totally agree. About half the time, or more, that I send an actual email I get no reply because it got lost in the deluge of crap and I end up calling or texting the recipient so they know to search their inbox for my message.

Was going to say, to the extent I rely on Claude, I'm closer to the old school than the new hotness. I don't run fleets of agents per se, I just use Claude Code with a good bit of back-and-forth and review. So not quite web browser level usage, but I don't have a big swarm of agents working full time. I guess CC can spin up multiple agents, but I don't know if that counts.

Fortunately I'm in a shop that isn't being judged by feature output quantity, but is absolutely judged on whether or not our internal or external customers go out of service. We don't have pressure to pump output.

The birth control one might be a stretch.

Not the guy you replied to, but I assume they are saying the examples are typical of the current right wing. Though antivaxxers are also represented a bit on the left. Just not as prominently today.

Are there plans to scrap it anytime soon? It's modern, built in the early 2000s, and seems in some ways more like a modern cruise ship than an ocean liner of the last century.

> There's a lesson about people there.

Could be. But it could also just be a Goomba fallacy.

> she was on the Committee for Intelligence

So is Wyden.

It's from Matrix Reloaded, when the architect explains past failures of the matrix and that they only succeeded when they figured out that they had to offer a choice, even if that choice was subconscious. That nearly everyone accepted the matrix, and the few that did not escaped to Zion. That's the whole point of Neo, to manage the outliers and keep the system going.

At least that's my recollection. I've watched the matrix a few times :)

People like to throw out that one line from the blog comment because it is a wonderful partisan critique of the modern Republican party. But I think it is more interesting with the first part of the comment [0]:

"There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc.

There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation.

There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely."

[0] https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progre...

Why do you think the UK is not doing exactly the same thing?

Claude is getting pretty good with this kind of stuff, I think I will update my vibe coded browser plugin to add a button to replace the post with Claude's explanation of what it means. I have to say, one of my favorite personal uses of Claude these days is whipping up browser plugins to make the web more usable.

In this case it leads off with "It’s sovereign-citizen pseudolaw" and then does a nice refutation. Apparently it's not really a novel argument.

> unable to read and write legalize

Did ya mean "legalese"?

> There is no obvious point where the microcomputer or the Internet made any major difference

I think it lags. There was a sag between the mid-70s and mid-90s, which is when computers and the Internet were being rapidly developed but weren't really hitting the business mainstream. But late 90s through today it clearly ramped up a lot -- my bet is this is because of IT. It just takes a long time, it's not a sharp jump because not every business gets on board immediately and productively.

My guess is AI ends up the same. But then again, I'm not an economist, only a developer, so I just think I can tell anything about that productivity graph.

Are we looking at the same graph? What I see is that there was a huge spike at the onset of COVID, and then it flatlined and even corrected a bit, and in the end seems to have resumed the same trajectory it had before COVID.

If I understand correctly, the spike in 2020 was not any kind of jump in real productivity, either, it is an artifact of how the calculation is made -- there was a sudden drop in hours from low paid workers who typically have a lower than average contribution to productivity (as measured), so laying a bunch of them off skews the per-hour calculation. Then as things settled down companies re-hired, and then over-hired.

That's fair, ring shanks are a thing, but I was thinking more along the lines of a wood screw with deep threads. That just sounds like looking for pain. I'd expect it to chew things up pretty badly, too, though I have so far lacked the commitment to try pounding a screw with a hammer ;).

> I've driven screws with a hammer

That takes a lot of commitment, you really have to want that screw in pretty badly! And when you're done it ends up just being a worse nail.

IIRC the take rate on the Samsung folds is about the same as the iPhone Mini take rate was. If that holds, Apple may ditch it as not being worthwhile, just like they did the Mini.

I just wish they could make a Mini once every three or four years. They'd sell a bunch each time.

I'd like to see them go the other way. Something like a Razr v3 that opens up to a normal iPhone size.

In Washington, it ranges from 383/week to 1208/week. For anybody making up to ~188K it amounts to 1/3 of what they were making, for up to six months.

TFA says the earlier offer was more generous, MSFT does not expect the take rate to be as high this time.

> healthy dose of antisemitism

Uh, what?

And then they need to staff that island with all the accoutrements they are accustomed to from modern society. And defend it with a navy. And presumably pay for all of this with their billions of ... what, exactly?

The market is unhinged. TSLA also continues to maintain an absurd valuation, and my bet is the same dynamic explains SPCX.

> The American ideology that public transit must directly support itself with revenue is what has resulted the miserable transit system that we see today.

Is that true? In Portland, to use an example familiar with me, the fares are nearly pointless. They probably exist primarily as a behavior enhancement than any fiscal reason. The transit system is paid for with taxes.

AFAIK the MTA (New York City) has the highest ratio, and it's still like 1/3 fares and 2/3 taxes. Second place is under 20% and it just goes down from there.

> "Suburban cities" is a very funny concept to me.

An example near and dear to me is Portland. Although there is an urban core, so some people would claim it is not in fact a suburban city, the footprint of the city is dominated by single family homes. And generally not the endless modern tract variety, either.

How well would you have fared if you had grown up at the edge of Manchester?

To my understanding regulation explains most of the difference. And it will vary a lot from place to place -- your experience will depend largely on local government policy and what your grid provider requires in order to establish the connection. E.g. locally I'm kinda forced to go with one of the power company's blessed installers. Cha-ching! If I understand Australian regulations, they tend to be more uniform nationally, there is less bureaucracy to drive up costs.

The risk to line workers is overstated, they ground the lines before working on them. The reason solar doesn't work without the grid is because most solar installs don't [0] have batteries. And you can't practically power your house directly off panels if you don't have a battery to act as a buffer.

[0] It is becoming way more common now, though.

> 25 years at a minimum

So long as the roof itself lasts that long. People who are mid-cycle on their existing roof should not install solar until they get to the next replacement. This is where I am, and why I do not have rooftop solar. I expect to get 15 additional years from my roof, and there's no guarantee I will have hit the break even point by then. Plus, solar installers will not warranty a mid-cycle roof against leaks, so if something goes wrong that quickly eats into your cost savings.