> but the last 6 months and this moment in particular is a level of shame, embarrassment, and disgust that I have never felt in my 45 years as an American citizen.
I personally felt more disgust when we bombed a Doctors Without Borders hospital. But I guess Trump's kind of outlandish too.
"They can use the system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you've ever made, every friend you've ever discussed something with, and attack you on that basis to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer." -Edward Snowden
Sorry, but I don't buy that they aren't in the business of data collection. I'll buy that they don't have the time to analyze everything if there's not a compelling need, but the data does exist and is readily available to be abused at any time.
I put some of this blame on the hospitals themselves as well. The fact is that I have no idea what I'm going to pay when I get to a hospital or doctor's office. They won't tell you anything up front. By the time you know what they cost, you're on the hook for some ridiculous amount. They won't give estimates, you can't shop around.
And medical coding to figure out what you're paying for and what a normal price should be is ridiculously hard to understand. Some of this is going to be their response to a litigious society, but you can't use that excuse for all of it.
Also, if someone doesn't have insurance, the fact that the hospital puts you on the hook for the full bill is ridiculous. Insurance isn't paying 100%, they are discounted crazy amounts, even only paying 20% in some cases. But you don't get this discount from the hospital. If you show up without insurance, you will be charged the full amount, less what you can negotiate on the spot. And most people don't know they can even try to negotiate it.
I agree that the insurance companies are a huge problem, but I don't think the hospitals and doctors' offices themselves should be absolved from their share of the blame.
Microsoft published a research paper on "Why Nigerian scammers say they're from Nigeria". Was that research paper a stereotype that painted Nigeria in a false and negative manner?
The thesis, for those less interested in buying the book, is that when we embraced blogs like Gawker and Buzzfeed as a source of news content, the quality of our news decreased drastically.
You went from sort of the New York Times subscription-based model, where people are subscribed already and your journalists can focus on the quality of your content, back to the days of "EXTRA! Read all about it," where everyone is just trying to be heard over the thousands of other available blogs.
So our headlines became clickbait, content became lies, and because it's so pervasive, there is little to no accountability.
The hogan case is important because it adds accountability.
>The potential solutions that come to mind range from, on the pessimistic end, apocalyptic, to technological if we are to be optimistic. We'll either think our way out of the crisis with cleaner sources of energy, or nature will have it's way and our population will dwindle.
That was the original statement. To me, the fact that 'range' is included, means there's more than just two choices implied. I do believe it misrepresents the argument to suggest that there's only two 'extremes' of "taxes and regulation" or else "we go extinct."
You don't need to be a heroic icon to be more valuable than a 100x developer.
The 100x teacher who molds the mind of the kid/teenager/adult who eventually cures cancer is worth more than just about any single 100x developer out there right now, and you'll never know that person's name.
(Yeah, I'm aware there will be multiple different cures for different cancers, the point remains)
The link I posted above is a common SQL land usage. Dimensional modeling in a star schema is very widely used in BI projects.
There's actually two competing philosophies on data warehousing (Inmon and Kimball), but I've only ever used Kimball's method, which favors denormalization.
This is really to a point where it can only hurt Google. Just look at the word choice in the article:
>The crashes are calling the safety of such automatic driving features into question, just as they're being incorporated into more and more cars on the road.
Tesla's failure in this court harms the entire concept, not just their own brand. The average person isn't going to distinguish between Tesla's inappropriately named 'autopilot', which is not 100% automatic, and Google's, which is.
Are you suggesting they're not? Where did he plagiarize them from if so? He can't exactly prove they're original, but you could prove they have at least been said before, if not plagiarized.
Except that I didn't say anything at all about the Government's right to seize the money.
I commented on the stupidity of transporting the money in such a fashion, and the skepticism of what the article was telling me about how he got the money. And, no, even though you would like to misrepresent that statement, it does not imply he did something nefarious to get it.
So if I understand what you're saying here: "You don't believe that the Government had a right to seize this guy's money, but since you question the story you're given in any way, your attitude leads to dictatorship and oppression."
First off, upon googling this case beyond the two paragraphs, the money didn't just come from waiting tables and working retail. I've done both, and saving that much would have been nearly impossible for me. So while you question that assumption, it turns out I was right. At no point did I suggest the source of the money was nefarious.
Second, I'm much more concerned with the foolishness of putting one's life savings ($11,000) in a bag, and handing that bag off to someone, who will hand it off to someone else, who will hopefully put it in the right plane, and then someone else will hopefully pick it up, and that person will put it on the right conveyor belt, and nobody else will just take the bag anyway off the conveyor belt and walk off with it.
I had to look it up because it's so bizarre. The explanation is even more bizarre.
>Charles was carrying his cash because his bank has few physical branches and he and his mother were in the process of moving and he didn’t want to lose his life savings in the move while he was in Cincinnati.
So open up a Chase, or Bank of America, or <insert bank here> account instead of risking someone just stealing your cash in a checked bag that you won't be watching for a few hours, much less airport security?. I've lost bags at the airlines before and had them sent to the wrong cities and such.
Who died? I'm curious because if that happened, I figure we would have heard about it. Do you have a link to a story I can read?