throwway120385

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8 giorni fadiscuss

The major egg supplier for most of the grocery stores decided not to buy as many pullets to replace the ones they culled from Avian Flu, and then the second and third largest also followed suit. As a result there was a bug supply crunch that coincided with Avian Flu cullings. Unless Biden was there making command decisions about how many pullets to buy that year he had nothing to do with it.

10 giorni fadiscuss

In my experience, insurance issues are usually insurer and patient going back and forth and then patient getting 6 different answers from 6 different representatives, then reviewing the 3000 page plan document, finding the single line that properly describes what should have happened, calling the insurance company, explaining to the rep how your plan works, and demanding that it be reprocessed. Like my wife has to do this frequently and spends several hours per month dealing with this but she has saved us probably tens of thousands of dollars in mis-processed claims that the insurance companies can't even properly handle. I usually am the person carefully reading plan docs, finding the proper billing codes, and explaining things like that to the insurance company. Sometimes we have to get the doctor's billing people to code things, like once they coded something that was an outpatient appointment as a minor surgery which could have cost us a lot of money.

So in my book since we get to speculate about what the system should look like, it should absolutely result in people getting care without all of this run-around. It's about eliminating as much misery as possible from the system and letting people just get treated and providers just get paid. We can talk about efficiency once the misery is gone.

10 giorni fadiscuss

Even cash subsidies can be a kind of chain. Why wouldn't we just subsidize the whole thing for everyone then? And if the purpose of a health insurance plan is to collect groups of people into "risk pools," then why wouldn't we just put everyone in a global risk pool? And if the purpose of a health insurance plan is to negotiate rates on behalf of a bunch of people, why wouldn't we have someone like CMS determine those rates? And if the purpose of a health insurance plan is to make sure everyone has health care, why would we create a system where people are excluded by means-testing?

11 giorni fadiscuss

Why wouldn't a single-payer solution work? The margin that the insurance companies take for themselves seems like a good place to start. From there it would spiral out to the third to half of time that all of the clinical staff spend just dealing with insurance issues and insurance billing.

11 giorni fadiscuss

For example, if you're sitting in your living room with a bunch of other people, many of whom know each other, and two people start fighting, you are all witnessing a crime and you can also all identify the two people fighting. It would be ridiculous to require DNA evidence in that situation.

22 giorni fadiscuss

It never priced flexibly because the company that makes it kept a total stranglehold on the IP through patents and basically requires you to buy both the panel and the controller from them. I think it's actually quite a simple technology but I think it's tough for them to get the economies of scale they really need to be competitive as a display technology. I'm starting to see the older-style black and white eInk displays used as Electronic Shelf Labels more often now and I think it has to do with the patents finally expiring so you can buy the components from more than one supplier. The technology they're replacing, paper labels, costs thousands of dollars per week per store to update and more so when there are sale prices. The eInk displays cut most of those costs in favor of capital and then once in a blue moon battery replacements.

22 giorni fadiscuss

The value of employee equity is approximately zero, but sometimes people get lucky. Don't let these arguments fool you into thinking you're definitely in that 5%, because in the absence of information about the market, the product, and the other people you're working with you're probably in that 95% that makes nothing. By all means update your priors but arguments about expected value assume that all things are equal, and they are manifestly not equal.

22 giorni fadiscuss

> Even if they somehow imagine themselves as philanthropists or minimalists, they tend to put off giving away too much too soon under the rationale that they'll be able to eventually share more if they hold out and use it more practically.

What you're describing sounds exactly like Effective Altruism. The issue is that the expected value of an act that happens at an unspecified time in the future is zero.

23 giorni fadiscuss

Family apartments could be really desirable, but nobody builds them because of the building codes so people don't look for them. The point that a single-family home costs 1.5 million dollars is very applicable here, as the monthly payment on that loan is cripplingly expensive or totally out of reach. A 4-bedroom apartment for a family of 4 would be extremely desirable in that market.

23 giorni fadiscuss

Or that time that we parked an army on the Rio Grande because a bunch of people from the US decided to settle in the Mexican territory of Texas? That was a whole thing and the President of the US at the time, James K. Polk, ran on a platform of "Manifest Destiny" -- that the US should span "from sea to shining sea." There were a whole host of other countries with interest in that territory, not to mention the Indian tribes who would be displaced by that policy. The US has had a lot of dark periods in our history, and we shouldn't let those periods displace us from the moral certainty we derive from the Declaration of Independence and things like The Bill of Rights.

23 giorni fadiscuss

Yeah here's an example of an autonomous tractor: https://www.agxeed.com/. You buy this and program it with what you're going to do. Right now you still have to keep it fed with seed, and I think you have to run spray and some of the other equipment manually. But the more sophisticated this stuff gets the more we're going to see "robofarms." If you can have a tractor, sprayer, and combine that can be assigned self-contained tasks within a field, then you can have an LLM manage those systems by feeding them self-contained tasks. You could intermediate by having the LLM provide you with a "task list" in whatever control environment that equipment uses and then validate that the task list is correct with correct settings and boundaries. But I think technologically we're within striking distance of this today.

24 giorni fadiscuss

I believe that's covered under MIL-SPEC-M00-BAAA

24 giorni fadiscuss

That can be true in some cases, for sure. For example we probably don't want government-run fast food or government-run rental cars because of that "race to the bottom" you're citing. But there are also things where that 20% margin actually makes it more expensive. Managing utility poles and electrical infrastructure is a pretty good example. There's a strong public interest in having poles and electrical wiring in every house, and so a government monopoly is probably good. You're not going to have more than one electrical system in an area, and if you did it would substantially increase cost of delivery. Roads are another good example -- you're not going to find yourself in possession of more than one driveway to your house and pay differing prices for different driveways. You could also argue that things like healthcare, education, and maintenance of shared public spaces is also something we should probably do through government because consolidated physical infrastructure allows us to substantially reduce the cost to the taxpayer versus what they will pay out of pocket when these things are privatized, and you can experience those costs when you use for-profit public spaces like indoor play parks and such. And then the elimination of that profit motive absolutely does reduce costs even further. There are examples of this you can look at where IE emergency services are privatized and they immediately get more expensive for everyone and with less actual service provided.

I think it will greatly benefit politics in the US to stop looking at this tension between government services and private services as all or nothing and start thinking about what is most beneficial to the public economically.

25 giorni fadiscuss

I always thought raw, unchecked Capitalism sucked. I've thought that my whole life. "Welcome to the asylum" and all that.

25 giorni fadiscuss

Next you'll tell me that doing something at cost as a public service is somehow better than getting the same thing but with a 20% margin tacked on for the shareholders.

25 giorni fadiscuss

Assuming a good enough LLM, you can say something like "Please find me a site with optimum growing conditions for beetroot in the next year and arrange to have the field planted and maintained until the harvest season for beetroot is over" and then just let 'er rip.

What's crazy about that is it's essentially post-scarcity if we want it to be. Or what's most likely to happen is that in the US we'll all be sucking down water laced with contraceptives in terrafoam while our corporate masters wait for us to die off so they can inherit all of the land.

28 giorni fadiscuss

If you've ever walked up to your neighbor and politely asked them to do or not do something then by that logic you're putting yourself at immense physical risk. I think the vast majority of people, even gun owners, are generally civil and don't wish other people harm.

28 giorni fadiscuss

> I think a large amount of the danger American police face is due to how easily a single arrest can ruin your productive life. One facing the loss of their home, pets, job, important documents, sentimental items might not see the difference between losing everything, and losing everything and taking the guy who's taking it from you, with you.

I don't think it's that complicated. Rather, I think that a lot of cops think they're in more danger than they really are. The vast, vast majority of people aren't going to gun them down for a traffic stop or for providing a warning about something. The situations where they're likely to get shot are exceedingly rare. By treating policing as some tremendously dangerous job we're completely ignoring the actual statistics, which show that firefighters and construction workers are far more routinely in physical danger.

The police then get carte blanche to walk around treating everyone like some dangerous creature ready to explode at the slightest provocation when most of us are just trying to get by and are pretty accepting of the benign law enforcement interactions we get.

29 giorni fadiscuss

It depends -- if you need something from someone else, setting a meeting and sitting with them until they give it to you can be really powerful.

29 giorni fadiscuss

Especially because if they had read about or studied this problem they would find tons of prior art where CRC32 was considered not secure for solving the problem. CRC32 solves a different problem -- how do you verify that the data that was received is identical to the data that was sent. It makes no guarantees about who is sending the data, which is the real problem signatures solve.