conductr

7,440 karmajoined 18 anni fa

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9 ore fadiscuss

Thats fine, I'm a passerby making a comment on their work on a platform that they may not even be aware of. If you look closer I’ve done more than they have by simply raising the concern and I’m not authoring an article attempting to educate people on the industry. I think it’s perfectly fine to question someone’s assertion based on experience alone. Basically you’ll have to do more to convince me what you’re saying is true is what I’m saying. That’s the same feedback a teacher would give a student on their homework. It takes data that I don’t have to do the analysis which is probably also why they didn’t do it. But I don’t think it’s completely off the mark to mention that I’ve been an insider at multiple healthcare service companies that like to claim they lose money on Medicare yet they opt to accept Medicare patients. When we consider denying Medicare we realize they are such a large part of the mix that they allow us to be as profitable as we are. It’s almost always a misconception of what “losing money” means. Price gouging the few patients that can afford it, is only profitable if all your expenses are already covered and economies of scale are at play, which is what Medicare is good for.

20 ore fadiscuss

The implication was they were asking for a playmate and he’s shutting them down, he has a constant need for intellectual stimulation so has to read instead of engage. I’m all for alone time but if they need it you won’t have to say a word, they’ll just disappear off into their room.

Parenting is not a one dimensional role. A kid that doesn’t see their parent as a playmate is the saddest thing I’ve heard. I hope you’re saying that out of ignorance.

20 ore fadiscuss

No. But from a very early age they can tell when you’re truly preoccupied versus opting to ignore them. And it has an effect on your relationship and how they’ll remember your presence as a parent.

Framing it goes a long way, “I have to clean the garage, then we can go swimming or play a game”. You’re telling them about something you have to do that they won’t be interested in, then offering up something positive.

Much different than, “I’m here, staring at my phone, bother me if you must”.

Also, these things go away soon enough. They won’t want you as a playmate anymore. During these early childhood years, I do my reading and alone time activities after bedtime. Nothing wrong with having an early bedtime just to reserve it for this purpose.

I’m not a pro parent by any means but these thoughts are certainly based on my parenting philosophy. I actively try to engage as much as possible even to the detriment of my personal hobbies and interests because while they want to engage, I want to be present.

21 ore fadiscuss

I spent a lot of time in healthcare finance and across most medical service industries the Medicare rate is actually not a loss. It’s a common thing said as it’s not super profitable, but it’s usually not a huge loss. It’s pretty close to what the cost of care should be. It just doesn’t give the extra padding for extremely fancy clinics, hospitals, admin and executive compensation, and often PE investor margin expectations. It’s usually slightly positive on contribution margin and given the volume of Medicare in the mix there’s enough flow through to cover reasonable overhead and perhaps slim margins. But, whenever I see a claim that the true cost of service is 10x over the Medicare rate, it’s a huge red flag there’s some financial shenanigans at play. Saying that Medicare is a loss, leaves the impression that it leaves a huge hole to fill so other payers need to pick up the bag in a huge way. This kind of lazy analysis blindly perpetuates this misconception. If they wanted to add value here, they should have performed a “what should an ambulance ride cost?” type analysis. You have to really strip out costs that are unneeded, excessive, and account for profit margin similarly. There’s no way $13k makes any sense for the service described. We need sensible cost controls in this industry. The industry hands these people blank checks when they can hide behind out of network, etc. It’s still captive price gouging.

22 ore fadiscuss

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22 ore fadiscuss

“Relatively safe to” is a very official sounding rubric. I guess tell him that and see if you agree on the timing of when that safety threshold has been met.

Telling your kid to not drink beer is giving them the courage to say no to drinking beer. I personally don’t just bark out rules with no context. I also have discussions with my kid about why drinking beer can go awry. We all expect that they will, likely before we’d feel it’s relatively safe. So I want him to at least know what’s in store and how to not make compounding mistakes.

22 ore fadiscuss

As an American reading your comment, it’s because we drive everywhere and my initial thought is he’s asking for the car keys

That distance for a walk should be seen as fine by most Americans at that age. Although, I find it’s rare that we socialize much with people that close. Those would be neighbors and neighbors aren’t frequently socializing to this degree.

22 ore fadiscuss

Won’t dispute the utility, but curious if they would have become standard without regulations. At least in the US, I associate them with ADA requirements

I’ve set my work calendar to auto rejects invitations without an agenda. If you can randomly steal 30 minutes of my time, you will be required to at least give me some minimal context as to why. The rejection note simply says, “please include an agenda”

3 giorni fadiscuss

You should base64 it and sell tshirts

3 giorni fadiscuss

Feels like my experienced reality of task automation in corporate environments. We routinely have engineers spend 40+ hours automating tasks that an entry level person can do manually in 10 minutes and only need to be done weekly. Automation at all costs seems to be the future

3 giorni fadiscuss

Probably net positive. But just like spreadsheets, it’s likely that having tools created by a layperson that does not properly secure or test the system is probably going to occur, cause some unfortunate issues, and steal the headlines. Similar to when an excel formula error results in a flash crash of financial markets and such. It’s huge and sucks but there’s also countless value being added daily all around the world with little fan fare.

3 giorni fadiscuss

Fiberglass rebar is comparable in cost, stronger, and not subject to water/salt damage. Rusting steel expands and cracks concrete from the inside, id want to avoid that. I’m actually building a pool right now using it instead of steel.

4 giorni fadiscuss

I’m seeing this too. I compare it to spreadsheets in terms of getting broad application building tools to the layperson

8 giorni fadiscuss

I'm not sure I'm understanding your opaque comment correctly. But I'm assuming you saying the goal is to crush the already lowest levels of labor wages around the world? Because nobody's building this with the express intention of putting pressure on already low wages. They're building it because if they can make that labor productive and in demand, put it to work, they can monetize it. Labor rates may actually increase. Operating these things may be a specialty of its own with levels of skill. Then it's an economy of it's own and some of the demand may move to where the now-lower labor is in the future.

8 giorni fadiscuss

Interesting. I'm curious if you've seen this in operation and can vouch that it actually performs exceptionally better than residential products? I ask because the marketing claims all sound very similar; vision based object avoidance, mapping, and so on. So, I am skeptical this actual does anything much better besides the mow quality itself. It looks like this is good for large mostly open spaces and it basically knocks that out while the minimal lawn crew focuses on the trimming, edges, and cleanup. All to say, it looks bigger not better from a tech perspective. I still see the value for a commercial crew.

8 giorni fadiscuss

I’ve paid over $3000 for a lawnmower and over $1000 for a vacuum before. So I’m already halfway there and with a fraction of the benefits as a general device.

I’d need more diligence but would certainly pay $8k on a mower that did a great job consistently. A service cost me $5000 per year so it has a reasonable break even if it’s built well. Robot mowers are pretty hands on, I’d almost rather just diy it.

I feel like this is blowing smoke a bit. If this better tech was possible it would be available, there’s always a market even if it’s at the high end. Do you have anything specific to point to? Any builders/makers that have done this? I feel like this stuff gets touted as “oh if they just had affordable lidar” or whatever then it would solve it, but IRL the variety of homes and yards is so large that it still doesnt generally perform well.

9 giorni fadiscuss

How is it any more dystopian than any other offshoring that exist primarily as labor arbitrage?

My in-laws have a full time live in housekeeper that costs $500 per month. And where she’s from, this is a huge opportunity that she went to “maid school” for and many consider excellent compensation. She’s able to send this money home and provides for many family members and has amassed a bit of a real estate empire back home. But, she is absentee. She lives away and rarely gets to visit only about 2-3 weeks a year. So I feel that’s quite sad. They obviously don’t live in the US, because this employment would cost many times more here and probably impossible to even get the proper visas.

Now if this maid was able to live in her village, with her family, and make the same income but perform her tasks through a robot then I think she’d see immediate value in that. So would consumers in America who would love to have housekeepers but can’t afford the local labor rates. Even if you can afford some here, you could get much more for the same budget. A lot of Americans pay this rate for 1-2 cleanings per month, that’s dumb money if you could spend it on something that would sweep up every crumb the day it hit the ground.

9 giorni fadiscuss

I’m not sure remote operations needs to be like a VR sim or joystick control of every movement. It might be something more similar to prompts. “Go to front door” “bring in packages” “open packages” “sort trash into pile” <click for item select>”is not trash” “take trash to bin”. Once the house is mapped and a good deal of these routines are learned they can be executed with some fuzzy input to the automation. In my mind this is still full teleoperation

It would be great if the operator could say things like, in above example, “you forgot to close the door, make sure you never leave this door open, even if you have to open it for a task and it’s not explicitly said you should always imply the door needs to be closed after the task. As a general rule, the door should never be open longer than 1 minute longer than it needs to be for task performance” or something similar and this trains the model over time.

9 giorni fadiscuss

I could sweep, mop, vacuum, etc with just my thumb and index finger if needed. But I agree, it’s a limiting design. Probably something they will want to grow beyond eventually. They’ve intentionally handicapped this version, but if they went with a human operated system then maybe they would have seen more potential and given it extra attention. Also, would be interesting if this thing could swap out its “hands” as different jobs may do better with different designs.