Absolutely, but just as it's not ok to enter someone's home just because they forgot to lock the door, it's not ok to exploit access at your old employer because their offboarding process missed something.
I do the same as GP does; I don't want there to be any chance that my former employer has forgotten to revoke access to something, so I make sure to clear out anything that might remain on any device that I don't return to them.
Who knows, maybe another former employee will decide to steal from them around the same time I leave, and me having access credentials on a personal device, even if I haven't used it, might arouse suspicion.
This is a fine example of coming up with some "plausible" numbers to support a conclusion, but all of the "plausible" numbers are actually wildly incorrect.
A new ambulance will probably run 2-4x what you quoted. Gas/maintenance will not be comparable to a regular automobile; it will be significantly higher. Paramedic wage (though there will probably be more "cheaper" EMTs out there than paramedics) seems right, maybe a little high for some markets. $12k for liability seems shockingly low; I wouldn't be surprised if you're off by an order of magnitude.
Regarding salaries, you're not just paying for the people in the ambulance. You're paying for dispatch, operators, support staff, administration, etc. You're also paying them 24/7, not just for the times that the ambulances are actually making trips.
You also left out the cost of medical supplies and equipment, both of which need to be maintained and replaced.
As far as I can tell, your article is talking about total salary cost, divided by number of rides, not just the amount that the ambulance crew is being paid during an actual trip.
For that, $1500 seems pretty reasonable. In a place like the US, labor costs often dominate the total cost of many goods and services.
And remember, you have to pay the staff while they are sitting there waiting for a call that may never come. According to the OP's article, the ideal utilization is 30-50%, because you don't want a situation where there's a surge in requests and you don't have an available ambulance. So you're paying people to sit around and wait for a call, and, under normal conditions, you'll have 50-70% of that pool of people not ending up needing to take calls at all.
Also your article includes under salaries:
> Regular, overtime, vacation, and holiday pay for all EMS staff, including EMTs, paramedics, chiefs, 911 call technicians, dispatchers, and support staff
That's not just the 2-3 people on the ambulance during trips. That's a lot more people required to make the entire system work.
Perhaps, but, for better or worse, it's about optics. It looks better to say a soldier died bravely in war than it does to say they died because of a friendly-fire incident with a drone with shoddy control software.
Maybe $100B is too much for that particular infraction, but the idea of punitive damages has nothing to do with "fairness" or charging the real cost of the bad thing they did.
It's a deterrent. It says: "you did a really bad thing and I'm going to slap a huge fine on you so you think twice about doing it again". And "huge" has to scale with the entity paying the fine. It has to be an actual wound, not a papercut.
The net profit figure isn't all that relevant. But I would be completely unsurprised if they made significantly more than $1M via their anti-right-to-repair practices.
Sure, but behaviors that never have a bug or regression don't get a test. Software of this kind of complexity has all kinds of behavior that has never been broken, and doesn't have a specific test written for it.
Getting an extensive test suite passing is certainly orders of magnitude better than having no test suite at all, but it still doesn't tell you as much as you need to know. I would absolutely never trust an LLM Postgres rewrite (in any language) in production based on "only" Postgres's test suite passing.
It depends on what you're comparing it to. It is indeed very slow when compared to a C compiler, or a zig compiler, or even a Java compiler. C++ can be comparable, or slower, or faster, depending on the C++ features used.
Sure, maybe rustc's performance compares favorably to how tsc used to be, but that's not the benchmark most Rust developers (such as myself, for more than 10 years now) care about.
> a “crate” are just a directory at the root of your repo, the ergonomic impact is literally zero.
Nonsense. That's another Cargo.toml to maintain, and another place you might need to add/remove dependencies, and you have to manage the dependency tree among your sub-crates. The ergonomic impact is absolutely not literally zero, and I'd even say it's enough to be annoying.
I think I have two opinions on this, from different angles.
I think the phenylephrine stuff is absolutely messed up. I personally had no idea it was ineffective, and I've bought medicine with that included, believing it would do what it says it does in the active ingredients list. To me, this is criminal, and these companies should be taken to court for outright lying about their products. (And the FDA should be slapped, hard, for not having done something about this by now.)
But when it comes to the CVS brand of acetaminophen costing $5 and the NyQuil brand costing $10, that's just... the result of normal market forces. I'm not a big "free markets" guy (because we don't, and can't, have truly free markets, and if we could and did, it would be a disaster), but it's pretty normal and common for people to pay more for something just because some company did a better job advertising it than their competitor did. That's just life.
It's funny, because when I go to a pharmacy, the store brand is usually shelved right next to the big-name brand, and there's even often a little card next to the store brand (or even printing directly on its packaging) that says "Compare ingredients to $BIG_NAME_BRAND!" And yet, people still buy the big name brand. ::shrug::, that's life.
Same situation in the US. I can buy NyQuil/DayQuil, or I can buy the pharmacy-branded version for a lower price. Here it's usually not such a dramatic difference; probably the pharmacy brand is a a 30-40% discount off the big-name brand.
> How is THAT legal
Why shouldn't it be? Companies are free to set prices to whatever the market will bear. In this case it's based on customer ignorance, which makes it feel icky, but I don't think that's a reason to legislate this sort of thing.
> and how are people so unaware as to actually buy it?
Yeah, I don't know. I do remember that, many many years ago, I didn't know about this, and would always go for the big-name-brand version. At some point I learned to look at the active ingredients and just buy the cheapest one that had the same ingredients in the same dose, but I don't recall when or why I learned that, or why I didn't know that before.
I think there's also an implicit quality judgement sometimes, even if it's unfair. When it comes to groceries, say, canned tomatoes, and I see some fancy-looking Italian brand that I've heard of, my brain will automatically rate it much higher than the grocery store's own branded version of it. Maybe that's an effect of marketing/advertising, maybe it's something else, I don't know. And sometimes it's actually true: tomatoes are not all created equal. I think something similar happens with drugs, even if it's an entirely different kind of product.
People also often assume that something that costs more is automatically higher quality. For some types of things, that can be true (because yes, there is such a thing as a better tomato, and sometimes it costs more to cultivate said better tomato), but for drugs in a regulated environment, that doesn't really make sense. But people pattern match on what they know and what they feel.
In California, at least, if you are a resident of the state, you are legally required to register cars garaged in California with the California DMV. (It's actually a little ambiguous in an annoying way; even if you have a car that's garaged out of state, simply bringing it to CA for a weekend and driving it around can potentially trigger the CA registration requirement, again, assuming you are a CA resident.)
I'd be surprised if most other states don't have similar vehicle laws.
Not sure I agree. The only difference I see is the idea that there's no expectation of privacy while driving on public roads. That's potentially a huge difference, certainly, but I don't think it makes the negative outcome here quite as likely as you think.
Otherwise, it's the same: Google's database is a third-party-owned record of people's movements in public, and Flock's database is a third-party-owned record of people's movement in public.
The ruling in Chatrie had nothing to do with an expectation of privacy, or lack thereof. It was about the dragnet nature of the surveillance. And in that respect, I don't see any meaningful difference between Flock's and Google's systems.
I was at Twilio for 10 years (left in 2022), and worked at several other companies before that.
[0] https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/xfdesktop
[1] https://gitlab.xfce.org/apps/xfce4-notifyd
[2] https://gitlab.xfce.org/kelnos/xfwl4