I never understand what “fire all the people managers” _actually_ means. Presumably, someone is in charge of hiring and firing and all the hr stuff and people development, and presumably that’s the people they promoted into roles formally held by managers?
I think he kind of alluded to it, but I wish these oeiple he would explain it instead of the clickbait “we fired all the managers”. I assume he means, he changed the expectations such that managers are expected to be held accountable and heavily invested in work output (the implication made since he talked about promoting tech leads into those roles) and then managed out the people who didn’t fit that description.
I do agree with the headline, but inevitably he says “we fired all the managers” and I don’t think that’s strictly speaking true to his point. Promoting all your best if’s to manager’s can be the best way to lose some of your best IC’s (either because they hate managing people or they hate being managed by a terrible manager)
Because 92% of Americans have health insurance, and 22% have totally free everything covered health insurance. Of the uninsured, most either are eligible but don't apply, have insurance through work but forgo it, or are not US citizens.
All said and done, you end up with a very small sliver of people who are legitimately uninsured, which means the problem mostly exists as scary stories rather than people actually experiencing it.
Wildly false. This thread is full of people sharing stories of being supposedly "insured" and getting fucked anyway. The complete lack of transparency around what your insurance covers, something you can't be expected to verify while in the middle of a dire medical crisis, can lead to a life destroying bill.
Nobody should have to be wondering what company an ambulance works for. It's crazy. The whole world thinks it's crazy.
I don't know what I said that is wildly false. Or even false for that matter.
People getting surprise bills that their insurance will not cover is rare, because being in a situation where it's a possibly is rare. Insurance pre-approves or denies care before it is done, so you really need to be in the ER and getting odd-ball care that falls outside standard procedure.
I'm also not defending them system, it is a mess (even I posted a story in this thread), but the fact of the matter is that the system largely works for most people, so things like inflation, wages, housing which have daily reminders of shittyness for huge swaths of people gets political priority.
A better way to think of this is like bad car accidents. They are horrific and most people know someone who knows someone with a story, but we don't put a lot of political capital into improving vehicle safety. Most people go their whole lives with no accident.
I know you were just explaining why America puts up with this, but it's not my opinion that everyone does prioritize inflation over healthcare. It's a core issue for a lot of people.
> People getting surprise bills that their insurance will not cover is rare
Define rare. Because millions of people per year are forced into uninsured ER visits.
> A better way to think of this is like bad car accidents
A hard disagree.
Most people avoid the hospital until they need to go to the ER, because taking time off work to find out if you're even allowed to be treated is prohibitive. I can't talk to any medical professional anymore without going in. And with the doctor shortage, if I go to a hospital, I will be dismissed unless I'm experiencing severe sickness or pain because I'm wasting their time.
People are driving all the time. People avoid the hospital as much as possible, because they are understaffed and predatory, and there are many pitfalls where you can be ripped off. This is all assuming you even know how this stuff works. Not everyone realizes an uninsured visit could cost as much as a house. You don't get the bill until it's done. That's the fucked up part.
I don't know a single person making under 100k who is comfortable with their healthcare situation. They are terrified to be unconscious or misinformed, making a mistake that could financially cripple them for life. There are no guardrails for this. Yet there is more vitriol for AWS bills then there are for the healthcare system.
Absolutely. General advice is to never ever get in an ambulance since they charge $$ and may not be covered by insurance. Drive yourself if able or get a taxi.
As a non-American, I think the thing I'm hung up on in what you said is that I don't understand why a developed country should allow anyone to be "uninsured".
Sure 92% of Americans have insurance, but they pay 5-10x the monthly premium compared to most Europeans and then on top of that the co-pay is thousands of dollars more than the small (or zero) amounts Europeans have. And insurance is not guaranteed, it's all linked to your employer. It's bad for nearly everyone, but enough people accept it so it doesn't change.
Americans still have higher take home pay and lower cost of living than Europeans. You also need to understand that the 22% who have full free coverage pay nothing, and because of their income also don't pay taxes.
There are also subsidies for middle-low earners, and most full time jobs offer insurance (which people foolishly wave to save a few bucks, but end up being another horror story).
The situation is not nearly as dire as the young American crowd that dominates social media makes it out to be. It could be much better, but as I alluded to in my other comment, don't let stories of car crashes scare you from getting a license.
The American healthcare system creates an immense amount of waste and is a parasite on society.
You go to the doctor and then the provider comes up with some reason why the service isn't covered by insurance. Then your insurance comes up with some reason why they don't need to cover you. Sometimes you contest it and the bill is removed or lowered.
But regardless, at every step in American healthcare, people are being paid full time salaries to overbill or missbill you for services, to invent arbitrary reasons to deny coverage, and to do everything possible so that people who pay thousands a year for a healthcare plan get as little out of it as possible.
The only silver lining is that medical debt is legally hard to collect, so non-payment is a real option for those who don't mind trashing their credit.
It's awful and the only hope for change is either a left-wing populist who guts the whole system, collective action where people withhold paymet, or an increased rate of Luigi-esque incidents that motivate the industry to self-reform. But these all seem unrealistic and liable to worsen the situation.
What I wonder is people are ok paying hundreds of dollars and going bankrupt but they haven't heard of taking a flight to a location that doesn't bleed them dry? They haven't heard of medical tourism?
My 2c: actually it’s the problem of mixing security and identity mgmt with tracking and marketing
The main reason I don’t turn off cookies everywhere is so many sites put my login token in a cookie. Hopefully as a random nonce but even so, it’s using cookies for security.
We are all so used to it is a massive blind spot.
We should move to Fido/webauthn - everywhere. Most all the population has a really impressive Secure Enclave in their pockets
> The main reason I don’t turn off cookies everywhere is so many sites put my login token in a cookie. Hopefully as a random nonce but even so, it’s using cookies for security.
AFAIK there is no need for a cookie banner for a login token. It is necessary for the functioning of the website.
1. The identity token (tracking cookie) is a unique number the 400 websites that have 1x1 pixels on the site dump on my browser. They don’t need to know I might be bob smith, Ford car owner, likes dogs and so on. But they want to so they can know if it’s worth bidding on an ad
This is the egregious cookie. It’s mostly being replaced by the facebook cookie because hell there are only a couple of places running ad auctions but …
2. After I do actually verify I am Bob Smith, the session cookie arrives and is hilariously trusted for every request for the next 8 hours.
The thing is we don’t do this for stuff we care about - like bank accounts.
So presumably the total value of every site that uses session cookies is less than the amount in my checking account. Which says something …
Even more tangential - one of the “disaster” scenarios is a satellite collision - either East/West vs West/East or East/West vs North/South. The debris then would act as shrapnel taking out more and more satellites.
There is an assumption that such a loss would be a prelude to a major attack - but cock up is always more likely.
The most obvious response to this is “why give out money?”
Why not “universal basic services “?
Providing the basics of life via a modern welfare system (like most of the developed world), or provide regulations that reduce inequality and spread the wealth
Just giving out money does seem like it lacks imagination for people who think state services can only be provided by private sector (and co-incidentally the wealthy will own the private providers hence getting the money)
In the absence of private actors, the tendency of the state-run actor is to be inefficient. However, efficiency is not the only goal, and it should not be the state's main goal. Otherwise, you won't e.g. have emergency services capacity in reserve for rare but severe events. They get cut for "efficiency ".
In the absence of state actors, the tendency of private actors is to maximise profits and extract rents. But this is not the best thing for the larger society.
Therefor, the presence of each keeps the other honest. Specifically, we must distinguish the presence of state-run grocery stores from the straw man that you construct where there are only state-run grocery stores.
Food is probably the one where free market will do better. Or what should universal basic food look like? And how would it operate?
With education and healthcare. Well good enough systems already exist as examples. So nothing really to do there with UBI receivers spending payments.
Housing is more balanced question, but maybe involving money with public housing could allow better allocation. More popular locations being more expensive and less popular cheaper. Thus moving demand around.
>Just giving out money does seem like it lacks imagination for people who think state services can only be provided by private sector (and co-incidentally the wealthy will own the private providers hence getting the money)
I think UBI is a concession to this unfortunate political reality. In the US (and maybe the UK I don't know, they seem to love privatizing everything now) universal basic services are an absolute existential impossibility. Americans hear that and they imagine Stalinism and mass graves.
A better argument against UBI, to me, would be that it would only pass muster with voters under the Devil's deal of repealing all existing social services (and likely privatizing them) to cut government expenditures, and so it would never be enough to allow people to afford those services to begin with.
It would also cease to be universal. Voters would demand means testing and governments would attach strings and limitations in order to keep money out of the hands of immigrants and the indigent poor, as welfare policies often reflect systemically racist biases. And of course there would be corruption and grift at all levels.
And I'm saying this as someone who supports UBI as a concept. I think coupling people's access to the economy (and in the US, to healthcare and education) entirely to the value the market can extract from them is a moral evil. Food deserts are a moral evil. But I absolutely don't trust the US to implement UBI in any way that doesn't somehow benefit the rich and punish everyone else.
For me the lesson is not something that happened years ago, but that all to often a system that “ought” to work is handcapped by not accepting it cannot work as stated - there just was not enough computing power to send PINS to a central computer to verify and lookup, so you store the pin on the card. Then you don’t salt it with the account number, you just encrypt my pin with the same key as your pin. And both encrypted values are in the open. Swap my pin onto your stripe and I then can withdraw from your account.
The fix? Not sure. I think there is a lot more to the story than I know - but the problem is I’m not sure anyone knows
And using it “in the public interest”
Is just bollocks
I think this is why OSS matters - if this scheme was published no-one would have trusted it. And queues at banks would have got longer.
I think it’s possible to make a case both of you are right.
These are huge globe changing effects being batted around. Solar is going to have an enormous effect - it’s distributed at minimum. A lot of human domestic activity (billions of people) can go off grid. That’s going to chnage politics in ways that’s hard to understand
Elite production (a term I always have concerns about - I prefer to say that the average school leaving age has moved from 16 when I was young to 21.)
But elites, social media, balkanisation of social groupings (death of mass media) these also have huge effects.
But the good news is this page on HN probably lists all of the giant freaking tidal waves - it’s not an infinite challenge. But it is going to need radically different approaches to fix it.
Luckily we have Democracy and Science - tattoo them on your knuckles folks - we got a fight ahead of us :-)
HNUser - “OpenAI told you to go swivel until they made a billion and you accepted that. Samesies “