I caught a diagnosis of cancer last year. Fortunately, I'm in the US and have a good PPO. I only wiped out half of my emergency savings in the last 12 months. I had the foresight to keep 12 months of expenses on hand, 6 months like they advise is the bare minimum.
Less than three months passed between the diagnosis and when I first got sent to collections.
You wouldn't believe the deluge of bills that come in from doctors, imaging centers, and various labs. If you need to get in an ambulance, you may get bills from both the ambulance company AND the fire fighers who show up and check out the action while the paramedics work. That audience alone set me back $225. I think the ambulance wanted another $200 on top of that. They dinged my insurance $2800. I was driven 700 feet to the emergency room. I don't recall a whole lot, but I asked for and received 7 heated blankets in the ER. $50 each.
The bill that got me sent to collections was for less than $60 for a lab in Texas. They sent two bills that got buried in the pile next to the door. At the time I got the collections call, I found it challenging to walk from my bed to the mailbox. My surgeon wanted me to walk one mile per day. My credit is about 80 points lower now.
I had hoped that the ACA would be a stepping stone to a better health system in this country. It could still happen, but not while we allow corporations to seek rents as we all inevitably fall ill. Until then, OP is right, don't get sick in America.
Yeah, this is what I think of whenever someone tells me that AI is going to unlock the power of human judgement in an engineering organization. The first thing they did was enable managers exercising bad judgement to fire the people who would allegedly use this tool to exercise their own good judgement.
Some leftist groups view the police as class traitors who suppress the freedom of speech of the working class. I'm not sure that people who would align themselves with a group like Palestine Action would agree that they are free to protest about Palestine "all [they] want," or would find fracturing a policewoman's spine to be disqualifying. In fact, some may find that kind of action to be preferable to the reflexive deference to the police that really became visible after 9/11.
They put all the good jobs in a city surrounded on three sides by a mile or more of water, IDK how this doesn't get mentioned every time a "San Francisco has gotten too expensive to live in" article gets posted since the late 90s.
There are lots of incentives for politicians and executives (and anyone else holding the levers of power) to ignore information, intelligence, and advice. I think you're right to be skeptical that "free" intelligence is going to improve anything without first addressing the incentives of the people holding power.
> Even if you do not want to accept climate change is a thing, you can accept the current state of the world is affecting people
Or you could choose option three: do neither and go on Twitter to do some political point scoring: "The Democrat Party is going to use this three day Indian heatwave (they have one every summer) and their climate hoax to open our borders back up to illegal immigration! We must stop them! Vote against the Demonrats this November! MAGA!"
I hope that most people would try to get their news from sources who endeavor to report with as much of an objective perspective as possible, but I expect that most are comfortable with getting an editorial or interpretation of the facts from a biased perspective. I can read Jacobin with the same interest as I read the National Review, but I would never trust either to give me an unobjective statement of facts.
I don't understand how this is a counterargument to the article's claim that capitalism is to blame for the declining birthrate around the world. Could you connect the fraud to the birthrate for me?
I'm thinking about the future of programming as a skill like math or writing. I could never cut it as a professional mathematician nor writer, but both skills have improved my ability to write code. Similarly, I think that having a year's worth of CS instruction could help me if I'd majored and found a career in a different field than CS.
There are other areas that a STEM minded student could be interested in. Biology for example could benefit from a programming background. Knowing how to collect and groom data, analyze it, then export it as JSON or CSV is something you could pick up in a couple of classes and be useful to you for an entire career.
Yes, CS is a great program if you have a passion for computers, tech, and programming. If you truly have that passion, I suspect that you'd be targeting CS programs without concern for whether or not there are jobs for grads and would be willing to figure it out when you get a degree. If you don't have that passion for CS above all else, however, you might want to consider another degree with a CS minor.
If you're not headed directly into a 4 year bachelor's degree program after high school, I see that the local community colleges around me have maker programs where you learn a little programming, a little electronics, and a little 3D printing. That might be enough of a skillset to augment a degree in another field and let you differentiate yourself. You might check to see if you can get a certificate or AA in that if the market still looks uncertain after you graduate. Taking entry level courses in calculus, physics, and chem alongside a maker program for a couple of years might allow you to see the future of programming more clearly.
> Personally, I do not yet have a definitive answer
I don't think any of us do. Much of what I'm reading on this subject seems to be shifting so fast. Three months ago taste was going to be the big differentiator. Six months ago, OpenClaw was going to be the future. I'm afraid to say that my best advice is to wait and see like the rest of us.
Don't stop taking CS classes in high school, but be ready to pivot into a CS minor and a science or engineering major if you encounter headwinds either with the CS curriculum or you see that two or three successive graduating classes of CS majors are finding employment to be difficult or impossible.
Less than three months passed between the diagnosis and when I first got sent to collections.
You wouldn't believe the deluge of bills that come in from doctors, imaging centers, and various labs. If you need to get in an ambulance, you may get bills from both the ambulance company AND the fire fighers who show up and check out the action while the paramedics work. That audience alone set me back $225. I think the ambulance wanted another $200 on top of that. They dinged my insurance $2800. I was driven 700 feet to the emergency room. I don't recall a whole lot, but I asked for and received 7 heated blankets in the ER. $50 each.
The bill that got me sent to collections was for less than $60 for a lab in Texas. They sent two bills that got buried in the pile next to the door. At the time I got the collections call, I found it challenging to walk from my bed to the mailbox. My surgeon wanted me to walk one mile per day. My credit is about 80 points lower now.
I had hoped that the ACA would be a stepping stone to a better health system in this country. It could still happen, but not while we allow corporations to seek rents as we all inevitably fall ill. Until then, OP is right, don't get sick in America.