A friend of mine died and I didn't know because of algorithms
twitter.com
twitter.com
This is the oddest thing to me. I would imagine that people who post rarely should be given preferential treatment and have their post included more often than if the feed was just a chronological timeline.
Most were:
Britt added a new photo.
You have a new friend suggestion: Gloria.
Tiffany updated her status.
Jeff updated his status.
June updated his status.
Lily updated her status.
These are people that I assume the algorithm thought would "suck me back in". It was really fascinating to see how the algo was stuffing my notifications to fuel that dopamine release.
Maybe my Facebook posts drive people to close their Facebook window or otherwise engage with ads less, so Facebook is encouraging me to stay away.
Maybe it's feedback loops: people that post infrequently tend to have learned to do so because they made genuinely less interesting posts and got fewer engagements and ipso facto less psychological reward from posting to Facebook. So, they post less frequently. The algorithm notices that posting infrequently is a sign that your posts are less interesting ends up amplifying the effect, driving even fewer engagements to these people, and so on. It doesn't self-correct because the posts are genuinely less interesting, but the would-be posters are penalized disproportionately more than how relatively less interesting their posts are.
Probably, but with primary goals of ad clicks, prolonged FB time on site, etc.
Worth noting that the old, unoptimized system would have worked fine for this case.
Facebook's goals just don't align with visitor goals.
> Facebook's goals just don't align with visitor goals.
Well, obviously
Or rather, Facebook's goals are (or should be) to balance optimally between visitors' goals, and advertisers' goals such that profit is sustainable. They need people to stay on and return to the site in order to bring in advertisers. They also need advertisers' ads to get clicked to remain attractive and profitable.
Might change as their current demographic ages and dies off. Teens and college kids don't seem to care much about FB.
Facebook is trying to get people to be miserable because then they are using facebook more, and its engineered in such a way that it makes us addicted to facebook and want to use it more anyway.
Is this enough reason for our society to revolt against facebook? How do we actually make it go away when everyone is addicted to it. Does anyone have any practical tactical strategies to get rid of it?
And yes, there was no facebook 15 years ago. That is great, 15 years ago everyone new to SMS or email you. Now, everyone expects you to be on facebook. See the difference?
I'm lucky in the sense that I made a FB account, tried it out for two weeks, realized it wasn't for me and then cancelled so I never got hooked. But I can see that once you are in it takes a bit more effort to get out. But being 'on Facebook' should not be a prerequisite for normal social interaction.
Why not? Collectively it's proven to be the easiest way for groups of loosely and moderately connected people to communicate and coordinate socially, so it's what virtually everyone I know uses. We all use Facebook for events and for Facebook Messenger. The set of friends who live within train/car distance who I communicate with via something other than Facebook Messenger numbers around...four? Out of dozens? And it's not because We Don't Use Facebook, it's because we share a Slack and had an IRC channel before that.
By not using it, somebody my age and in my neck of the woods relies on making people who they ostensibly call friends treat them as a special case just to organize beers on a Friday. And it does make that person a special case: why would people use group-SMS anymore when Facebook chats are right there and you don't need to track down phone numbers to include everyone (and deal with sharded SMS threads if people are added, etc.)? The expectation that people special-case your edge-case life decisions has to be balanced against not being a pain in the ass for people you claim are your friends.
So, yes, in many quarters Facebook is a prerequisite for normal social interaction (unless you're That Guy, and it's good life advice to never be That Guy). And, TBH? It works fine. It's nothing special. It works fine. I very rarely see a news feed (I use Social Fixer) so I have no real opinion on the way it does likes/shares/etc.; I did tag some people as "close friends" so when they post it does reliably surface, but I don't remember the last time I even scrolled down the news feed and its existence has no impact on the other features of the platform.
It is just not that big a deal. It's certainly not worth the airs put on--not from you, but the I-don't-even-own-a-TV levels of smarm from people who don't use Facebook makes my eyes roll out of my head and bounce down the stairs--by people who don't use it.
It is really, really good at that stuff, and you can--you really can!--pick and choose what you want to use and what you care about.
>Why not? Collectively it's proven to be the easiest way for groups of loosely and moderately connected people to communicate and coordinate socially
I'd be happy to have a source for this outlandish claim.
As to answer your question, there are many many reason not to let a private transnational company take control of your social interactions. Easy one: what happens to your social interactions when facebook disappears as every other so called social network before it did (remember friendsted, myspace, etc.) Another easy one: what happens when your account gets locked and you get banned from facebook ?
Harder ones are not so obvious for people who do not stay informed such as the deep impact on shaping people opinions and thoughts, the disappearance of empathy, intelligence dropping, destruction of internet, support of foreign dictatorship, massive tax fraud and tax evasion, emotional manipulation, organized abuse, sextorsion, and a lot more.
My entire friend group and extended friend group in the Boston area. Somewhere between ten and twenty thousand people within two hops of me and in the local area, geometric expansion's weird like that. If I want to talk to any of them, we will end up using Facebook. If a friend intros two people face-to-face and they want to talk later, we use Facebook. If I meet a girl at a bar, or if I meet somebody who might be cool to work with on a project, and we want to hang out later, we use Facebook. Suggesting SMS is usually tolerated but makes you a little weird and makes you harder to get ahold of and you're likely to be ignored and left out later; suggesting email (outside of an explicitly business context) makes you a dinosaur and makes it very likely that you are ignored.
I cannot remember one time in the last five years that somebody suggested SMS as a contact method to me. I have phone numbers for folks I knew before Facebook was a thing, sure. And phone numbers are a good-enough "front door" for stuff like online dates. But actual interaction? Overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly via Facebook Messenger.
Nobody's saying you have to use it. But, in my experience, making it harder for people to contact you means people don't. The fumfuh about "well my real friends" ignores that there are both social and transactional benefits to not being sand in the gears, not being a pain in the ass, for people who are not your real friends. Being sorta friends is still both fun and useful.
> As to answer your question, there are many many reason not to let a private transnational company take control of your social interactions.
The assertion I am making alongside that rhetorical statement--which, TBH, I'm not quite sure why you thought was not rhetorical enough to need a soapbox stand--which is missed in the less friended corners of HN, is that all of this matters a lot less than keeping in touch with people.
Datamining--whatever. Oh, no, Facebook knows I go out for a drink on Fridays. Oh, no, the like button on pages (which don't actually phone home, because I have a hosts-based ad-blocker on my phone and my browser) shows that I read the Times. The tradeoff of that whatevermining versus not having a functioning social life in the year 2017 is immense and the types who don't-own-a-TV about Facebook display a distinct lack of understanding that maybe that trade-off is okay for some people and that it does not necessarily come from ignorance but is weighed and calculated--because having a social life is really nice and not having a social life really sucks.
Facebook is often annoying and is kind of shitty, sure. It is also the only game in town. In plenty of social circles, you play or you don't participate. The lack of understanding and empathy out of the "oh, just don't use it" camp is not shocking--tech people choosing not to understand things they might not agree with and choosing not to employ human empathy is not and never will be shocking--but it remains profoundly annoying.
It's akin to "I've used this email address for years and decided to stop checking it and use another one but did not tell anyone about it. Now I'm missing messages people send me to my old address I do not check anymore".
It's like time spent watching TV. I enjoy it; sometimes it provides value; it's tendency is to take over and create an unhealthy life for me.
Anyways even if this friend posts about visiting on facebook, this is not guaranteed you will be shown this post, as demonstrated by the actual HN submission you're commenting about.
It's a bit like a parasite - it needs to control and extract usefulness from the host but not let the host die quickly because well it won't get the resources anymore and it would die with it.
> Does facebook have enough power that it can chose to kill off certain people? A
I never signed up for Facebook to start with, but I got a glimpse of this power with Netflix. The movie recommendations were so good that I end up liking them if took its advice. Where normally I wouldn't have watched them based on rating, synopsis, or title. I had realized some algorithm at Netflix seems to know me better than I knew myself. Then thought what if it suddenly decided to use that against me, because it somehow would be more profitable for it.
[0] A decent review with code, a Noble laureate, and a top notch Computational Economist: https://lectures.quantecon.org/jl/rational_expectations.html
It would make a good novel, but it would be too confusing and depressing, like the Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman, but more frustrating and confusing.
Nowadays, a professional engineer (a phrase with a precise legal meaning) can be held criminally and civilly liable for negligence even when they are "just following irders." Unfortunately, we're at the very early wild wild west stages of the industry, before some big exposé or calamity completely shakes up the industry (i.e. Sinclair's The Jungle did for food, Carson's Silent Spring for pesticide use, or the 1906 SF earthquake for building codes).
I think of these algorithms as being algorithms created and vetted out by algorithms, therefore, its negligent to not understand what they are doing. Since its difficult to know what they are doing, then the risk to use them in this way should be viewed as too great
The only way to ensure nobody is killed is to add "0 people killed" to the target function of the black box.
peopleKilled() < εI have no interest at all in a solution that can’t be explained. That’s not a solution, that’s a remedy.
I don’t have a lot of time for humans that know things but can’t articulate them. Why would I make time for a computer that does the same? It doesn’t even earn the courtesy of give a human.
I was drawn into this field by the idea of understanding things and solving problems with them. If AI can’t “show it’s work” homework style, then it might find me a shorter route to the mall but it hasn’t solved anything.
Not all things that humans learn are easily articulated or explained, not because those humans aren't articulate, but because they learned actions that are more easily intuited.
Also, on this topic, explainability of machine learning models is a hot field: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP7-JtFMLo4 https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.04938 https://github.com/marcotcr/lime
I agree, but far from being an unique or surprising property of Facebook and the way it (as a company) works, I'd say it's almost in the nature of any system built by a large enough group of people that "nobody there really understands how it works".
Sure, there are ways to ask some ML systems why they made a decision after the fact, and they can elaborate which variables had the most effect. But before the algorithm gets the training data, you don't know what it will decide - nobody does!
It picks actions that maximise a value it was told to maximise. It does this based on "well, when I encountered a situation like this other times, I did these 5 things, and this one thing maximised that value I'm told to maximise in most of those cases, so I'll do that.
At the beginning it will try random things. After several iterations, it will find things that "stick" i.e. maximise the value. There are sophisticated techniques to get unstuck from local maximums and minimums, too, in order to find even bigger maximums.
When you have enough data, enough users, enough actions in a system, you can very quickly try a lot of things and learn a lot of stuff. But what those stuff would be, no human can predict.
The main problem is that its unethical to train a machine learning system with a value function that doesn't take into account basic ethical behaviour. There are 3 challenges here
The first challenge is technical, and its the easiest one - how to come up with a value function that encodes additional measures of human ethics. Its easy as in, you take a bunch of ethicists, give them various situations and ask them to rate actions as ethical/unethical. Then once you have that, you try to put it into the value function, so that the system can learn some decency. All done. (If only it were that easy!)
The second challenge is a business one, which is, how far are you willing to reduce your value maximisation to be ethical, and what to do if your competitor doesn't do that. One way to solve that is to have regulations for ethical behaviour of machine learning systems. The system could be held responsible for unethical actions. If such actions are reported by people, investigated by experts and found true in court, the company is held liable. Public pressure and exposure seems to help too. Perhaps we could make machine learning systems that detect unethical behaviour and call it the ML police. Citizens could agree to install the ML police add-on to help monitor and aggregate behaviour of online ML systems. (If these suggestions look silly, its because they are)
The third challenge is philosophical. Until now, philosophers were content with "there is no right answer, but there have been many thoughts on what exactly is ethical". They better get their act together, because we'll need them to come up with a definite, quantifiable answer real soon. On the more optimistic side, lets hope that any generally agreed upon ethical system is better than no system at all.
i propose that all legal actions are ethical, and all illegal actions unethical. There shouldn't be actions that are considered unethical, but legal (and, for completeness's sake, no ethical action is illegal either).
Then, society will need to continue to codify their ethical framework as law.
Laws are based on ethics, but not everything that is unethical is also unlawful.
It's usually legal to lie, break promises, exaggerate, and other things that I would consider unethical. I also submit that the should remain legal and unethical. Lying to my parents about some detail of my personal life I don't wish to share is unethical, but shouldn't be illegal.
Physical products have reasonably comprehensible user experiences. That's even true for much software. Microsoft Word is a beast, but the user experience is tethered by the external reality of what people do with it. Memo writers and novel writers and PhD dissertation writers all have different needs, but it's reasonably clear what their goals are and what successful outcomes look like. There are approximately equivalent tools that can be swapped in.
Facebook, on the other hand, is creating an ongoing experience. My needs are jumbled together with that of my friends, their friends, strangers, news organizations, advertisers, companies, non-profits, celebrities, would-be celebrities, and Facebook itself. And each experience is deeply individualized, adding yet more complexity.
It still probably had some intellectual coherence at a much smaller size. But they have so many people working, and so many of them beavering away at optimizing semi-conflicting metrics based on so much data that I don't believe it makes sense to anybody there. Much less sense than Word makes to its creators, for sure.
https://www.reddit.com/r/facebook/comments/6u5twl/friend_pos...
I know that as a sporadic user myself, I get mobile notifications telling me things like it's been "6 weeks since you've last posted", or that it's about time I change my profile pic.
With that being said, the FB algorithm beast is far too complex to figure out by guessing, so experiences like the one being outlined in this twitter post are probably all too common.
Finally there's the bugs in facebook that randomly causes my feed to refresh. And on these refreshes, I'm shown an entirely new/different feed. Maybe Facebook thought they showed me a post, but the bug and auto page refreshes caused me to miss that certain post.
It was the straw that uninstalled the camel’s app for me too, the app would refresh itself whenever you switch to something else and come back
I’m almost positive Facebook thinks I’ve successfully seen the post because it completely vanishes from then on and I have to visit the person/page’s profile to see it again
That said I'd rather have a strictly chronological feed of everything/everyone.
The only reason I dealt with Facebooks nonsense is because it was a useful tool, but now it is no longer a useful tool.
Now that it is gone, the value of Facebook to me is near zero. Even if I saw MOST RECENT, posts are missing. When I come back it's switched back to TOP STORIES.
I have no idea why companies decide to make users work hard for what they want.
The best thing I did recently was turn on 2-factor auth for Facebook. Now, because it's mildly annoying to log in, I haven't logged in in weeks. I still can, but I don't.
Facebook changed from an extremely high engagement niche product to a nearly free-of-utility product with the goal of capturing the entire planet as users.
> “We’re always listening to our community and working to make Facebook a personally relevant and real-time experience,” the spokesperson said in an email. “We’ve heard from people that News Feed is the best place to stay up to date with the people and Pages they follow, so we are removing Ticker.”
Reports of the ticker disappearing can be found over the past years. Presumably they've been doing A/B testing to figure out how many people actually use it, compared to the potential of using that space for something else.
For those (like me) who forgot what the ticker looked like on the web: https://techcrunch.com/2011/09/20/facebook-news-feed-gets-sm...
*obviously FB would never allow that, but you can stop (or severely slow down) the firehose of information you are sending them by doing this.
How is it good for advertising that I dont use their product much anymore?
This is the one thing that made me so angry, especially during the election. I thought they were posting things onto their feed that was overly political, but then I realized all they were doing was liking things. It's not their fault.
Facebook needs to get rid of the Likes from my friends from my stream. It's the worst part of the feed and the least useful.
I have had a lot of online friends, though not through Facebook, which I mostly don't use. But I can agree with this logic. I would also be horrified to learn that an internet friend had died or had been hospitalized without me getting the memo, even though they posted about it.
I think this is a reasonable assertion, regardless of what people here think about whether or not this was a "real" friendship.
A friend recently took his life, and his FB account was deleted so I can't verify anything, but I can't help but wonder. Was there anything he had posted that I didn't see, that could have told someone (me) how he felt? It was loneliness apparently, and took all by surprise - how much did Facebook play a role in that? I'd do anything to have been there for him - I'd be devastated if an algorithm had prioritized my alt-right classmate's latest infowars share over a quiet plea for help because it generated more engagement.
I am sometimes suicidal. I have extremely good support. My adult sons don't leave me alone when I am suicidal, because most suicides occur while alone, so simply having company is a deterrent.
But they also don't bother to try to reason with me because I am not rational at such times. There is no convincing me that my warped perception of my life is completely unrealistic. Rebutting my crazy statements with facts to the contrary makes zero difference.
I'm sorry for your loss. And I agree that this is something social media has an obligation to do better on.
The Facebook feed has become an awful way for communicating with friends.
Organically, it reached 149 people (smaller posts reach 3-5x as much on average). It reached 1,471 by a paid promotion. Number of people who liked, commented, or even clicked to see all four paragraphs is 45.
My point is: you're a minority. And people who post like that get punished greatly by their algorithm. My ad was even postponed for like 30 minutes because images contained "too much text for an ad" until I clicked on "manual review" because I saw in their help pages that they let book covers slide.
I have no issue with preview images and preview text even for ads. Although I wish Facebook accurately labeled them as ads
The reality is that Facebook doesn't assume your Friends are your friends. It assumes you want to keep interacting with the same people you most recently interacted with. It also assumes you want to see things you're likely to Like or comment on. On the whole, this probably leads to them more reliably providing that dopamine hit when users check in, at the cost of being useful for actually staying in touch.
“Great hotel rates near the hospital! Act now!”
I know a lot of people that work at Facebook and they're all highly intelligent. It's a great place to work at but incidents like this makes me question if their talent is all being put to good use.
The algorithm has definitely a lot more "machine" learning to do to prevent these incidents from happening again. Close friend, related to death and health, gofundme campaign all scream that the statuses should've been shown. (if FB can be so good at showing relevant ads, why can it show relevant feed)
That said, I have experienced FB hiding something bad in someone's life for an extended period -- a relative I'm not directly linked to passing, cancer diagnosis, someone's dog getting very sick and having to be euthanized, etc. Again, I found out, but not fast enough, even with friends that were in the second ring out from my very closest friends.
Why are the ads so terribly targeted? They are an ad company with immense data collection and at the end of the day the ads are equivalent to a niche cable network
That's my guess anyway. And I work in (and/or closely with) marketing.
.edit:
Come to think of it, I want to elaborate on that.
Think about search engine optimisation. It's in a similar vein. "A guy walks into a bar, bars, pub, tavern, pulic house, irish pub, drinks, beer, acolhol, bar stool" etc.
My point is; people that are trying to sell 1 thing, might focus on reaching AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE, over focussing on getting the right (but smaller) audience.
Don't blame the tool. Blame the person wielding it.
Let me be a bit more specific. You remember the weirdness of seeing ads for mesothelioma lawsuits on network TV? It seems way too specific to be worthwhile to advertise to general audiences. But that's missing how profitable each lead is - if a lead is worth a hundred times as much for mesothelioma as buying a Star Wars toy, you only need a hundredth of the audience interest in order for the ad slot to be price competitive.
Essentially, you're seeing the most valuable advertisement in the eyes of the advertiser, given the tracking and metrics that Facebook exposes to advertisers. It gets some weird effects, like getting tracked visiting the website of the coding bootcamp you graduated from, putting you in an "interested in coding bootcamps" category that Facebook sells to advertisers, getting you the least relevant ads possible.
And all that real world demographic data that gets bought and sold and tied to these online identities, it's not very accurate.
Facebook often has local events, and small businesses advertising to me. That is more like the advertising that I want and I have actually clicked through and purchased from them.
https://twitter.com/Hellchick/status/942864030649036800
> Now, I'm a meticulous FB feed peruser. I always set it to Most Recent and browse until I see the stuff I saw last time. I keep up.
Despite her claim here, it's possible that she missed her friend's post because her surveillance of her own feed is likely to be imperfect, especially if she has a non-trivial number of friends.
edit: I bring this up because, ostensibly, the whole point of FB's (or any social network's) "most important" algorithm is to mitigate the problem of how "most recent" can be too overwhelming to consume if you have a non-trivial number of friends. If OP has a lot of friends, such that there are a few dozen new items per day on her newsfeed, even if she were meticulously reading her feed, daily, there's no guarantee that she didn't miss the post because of imperfectly skimming them. That no one else in her social circle noticed isn't much proof since, as a mutual friend admits, they don't know how many of them are active on FB: https://twitter.com/FRENDEN/status/942918637576441857
That said, I swear I've seen FB's algorithm point out users who have posted for the first time in a long while. This kind of notification/signal presumably would not be part of a "Most Recent" timeline:
https://www.quora.com/Why-am-I-getting-notifications-on-Face...
https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=1015223...
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-networks/how-permane...
> In the desktop view of Facebook, there's an option to change from "Top Stories" to "Most Recent", but Facebook only maintains that setting for about 24 hours and then it automatically reverts back to Top Stories.
You: personalization is not accurate enough. Go back to most recent.
Computer: got it. Changing algorithm. Trying again.
How does that make sense?
At the bottom, it says "there are no more posts to show right now." If I change the sorting order back to "Top Stories", it shows far more posts and the first four are in the same order as the ones shown in the other sorting order.
Given that, I don't have much incentive to use the "Most Recent" sorting order it seems.
But it doesn't provide that value any more. It shows me ads and posts from a handle of the hundreds of people I'm friends with.
So you're right that caring is a proactive act, but that doesn't invalidate that initial value proposition at all.
>A friend I've known mostly online for 15+ years died this weekend. Our friendship started on an old gaming forum, but continued on Facebook.
yes. curated is the keyword.
fb used to be a legitimate communication system - you could write on walls, you could poke, you could do a lot of stuff with fb apps that solicits an immediate response.
fb today is not the fb of 2007. I know a lot of users grew up with fb but fb did not grow up with us.
I assume that you met your wife in person before getting married - would you propose to her if the only way to contact and know her was through social media?
The facebook feed is one example.
Recent changes in google search, another.
I'm sorry for her loss.
Families would call all the close contacts and relatives to make sure that they knew.
For several years after my father died in 1985 people called our house to speak to him. Most were not close acquaintances but some were still pretty shocked to hear of his death.
I think people generally still do this? When my mother died a few years ago we took turns calling her relatives and close friends. We wanted them to hear the news verbally.
It was never received.
And therein lies the difference.
Still much better than the obituary world of yesteryear. You could then also say the info was transmitted but the rate of receival probably low.
Such a Hacker Newish assumption. In the so-called real world, most people travel for all sorts of other reasons than conferences.
I just did a sort of impromptu 2.5 month posting hiatus from FB (which also included no commenting or liking), and when I returned I got a ton of likes and comments on my fist couple posts.
I wonder how people can avoid noticing what Facebook has become after all this time and still use it.
Friends are not always those who you meet every day, but those that give you the feeling of happiness when you have them around, at least for me.
If you re-read the post, this is inaccurate. The friendship began elsewhere.
>Facebook isn't reality, and it's a company trying to make money
It is a company whose value proposition (to non advertisers) is its being reflective of or enhancing reality. This as opposed to, say, warcraft.
>it can't be accountable for the way we manage our friendships
Managing friendships is exactly facebook's purpose. If it claims to be the best way to manage a friendship, and bad things happen as a result of presumptions the company makes in the course of managing said friendship, it's sane to associate facebook's tooling around friendship management with the actual management of friendships.
If I sign up for facebook under the pretense of "see what happens to my friends", and then sort by recency, if recent things that happen to my friends do not appear, that is, IMO, a legitimate grievance.
Facebook might not owe this user anything, but that doesn't mean they can't wish for better service. A person missed the death of their friend because they were second guessed by an algorithm that has gradually torn control from the hands of users and downgraded reality and chronology to foster "engagement". That sucks.
Yes, but it didn't begin in the real world(irl) either. Quoting the tweet: "Our friendship started on an old gaming forum,". I used to play WoW: do I keep up with any of my online friends now ? No. Why ? Because I moved on and found friends irl.
> It is a company whose value proposition (to non advertisers) is its being reflective of or enhancing reality. This as opposed to, say, warcraft.
You pay NOTHING for Facebook. Any value they claim to bring you is subject to their discretion. If you expect anything else, go to a different network. Oh wait - you can't, since social networks are only valuable if everyone is on them. And please do not bring open source software as a counter example: open source software exists because it is more rational for companies to use it by cooperating to share the cost of projects that would otherwise be too big for each of them to handle (and also independent open source project are done by people out of curiosity, and to allow them to stand out when searching for a job). So the FREE in FREE SOFTWARE is not the same as the FREE in FACEBOOK. Also, as you correctly noted, the value proposition of Facebook is to advertisers (and also shareholoders), so to use the annoying cliche, you are the PRODUCT, does the product get to have a say on how it's handled?
> Managing friendships is exactly facebook's purpose. If it claims to be the best way to manage a friendship, and bad things happen as a result of presumptions the company makes in the course of managing said friendship, it's sane to associate facebook's tooling around friendship management with the actual management of friendships.
Does it? I didn't manage to find that product description on their website. Maybe I didn't look hard enough, so can you please share it? What I did find though was in the terms and conditions (https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms): point 15.3: >WE TRY TO KEEP FACEBOOK UP, BUG-FREE, AND SAFE, BUT YOU USE IT AT YOUR OWN RISK. WE ARE PROVIDING FACEBOOK AS IS WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS >OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, AND NON->INFRINGEMENT. WE DO NOT GUARANTEE THAT FACEBOOK WILL ALWAYS BE SAFE, SECURE OR ERROR-FREE OR THAT FACEBOOK WILL ALWAYS FUNCTION >WITHOUT DISRUPTIONS, DELAYS OR IMPERFECTIONS. FACEBOOK IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ACTIONS, CONTENT, INFORMATION, OR DATA OF THIRD >PARTIES, AND YOU RELEASE US, OUR DIRECTORS, OFFICERS, EMPLOYEES, AND AGENTS FROM ANY CLAIMS AND DAMAGES, KNOWN AND UNKNOWN, ARISING >OUT OF OR IN ANY WAY CONNECTED WITH ANY CLAIM YOU HAVE AGAINST ANY SUCH THIRD PARTIES.
Facebook's feed algorithms don't care about whether your friends die, they care about maximizing profits. If you care about your friends, you won't let that be managed by a stupid, free of charge piece of software, but you will call them regularly, or go meet them in person, so let's all be brutally honest not rationalise lack of empathy as failure due to external factors.
You might be able to give up control over something, but never the responsibility that comes with it. So in this particular case, we are free to let the algorithm decide for us, but we should all be aware who will suffer when the algorithm goes haywire. It's that simple.
She knows better than us whether they were friends or not.
This whole X is realer than computers is silly to me.
OP clearly states he met the person online and they communicate online and that might involve irregular but deep, friendly exchanges and meeting up once in a while. I.e. exactly a kind of communication Facebook is supposed to facilitate, yet it completely failed him here which is absolutely valid to criticize and call out.
Furthermore, Facebook is totally to blame here. For most users, the whole point of their service is to keep in touch with others. That Facebook failed to tell the user of something as important as the hospitalization and death of a dear friend is a clear red flag: Facebook's algorithms are failing. Sure, you can also blame the user for using the "wrong medium", leaving communication to a for-profit company. But then what's the lesson here ? That you should only talk to people in meatspace ? Well, I guess we're not living in the same reality here.
Sure, Whatsapp is owned by Facebook but you can send messages to each other and see their response pushed to your phone. It doesn't have an algorithm choosing not to show their messages sometimes.
https://righteousruminations.blogspot.jp/2015/06/hating-face...
I really dislike Facebook, but blaming it in this case doesn't even make sense.
They do appear when my friends switch to 'Most Recent'. But most recent is pretty much unbearable for friends with many friends because it shows every tiny thing like 'Mike is interested in an event' and stuff.
It's interesting from a social science perspective to have the expectation of the system / algorithms that it would have notified you of a friend's passing. This is an expectation that the model understands what is important to the user - something I doubt the model is optimized around completely.
Before Facebook, I think not knowing would be even more common than we realize - unless you had frequent contact with your friend. In a world disconnected, no email, no Internet, maybe only a telephone, or even further back, a telegram, or even less - it might be many, many times much less likely you would find such a thing out. Going back to the times of villages with no electronic technology at all, communication would have been only through immediate knowledge, written / recorded information or word of mouth.
I used to work for a website that tried to digitize obituaries, to serve as a replacement for the newspaper, way before that was really a "thing". It never really took off, because, the people who wanted to publish death notices in newspapers just kept doing that. Most people who wanted to read them preferred holding a newspaper than reading a website (although, it did help disseminate information quickly). Eventually, newspapers simply published the obituaries and death notices online themselves, and it all went to a big aggregator of obituary postings (or got indexed by Google), and then it was no longer much of a thing.
The most interesting thing, for me, having worked in this area, was seeing how users have taken to Facebook as a sort of memorial to those who have passed, help spread the news, etc. But with the conflux of marketing and so much personal news... I'm not surprised that this information slipped through the cracks.
I recall a book on this topic - "Bowling Alone"[1] published in 2001, before social networks. The excerpt from Amazon.com -
"Once we bowled in leagues, usually after work—but no longer. This seemingly small phenomenon symbolizes a significant social change that Robert Putnam has identified in this brilliant volume, which The Economist hailed as 'a prodigious achievement.'
Drawing on vast new data that reveal Americans’ changing behavior, Putnam shows how we have become increasingly disconnected from one another and how social structures—whether they be PTA, church, or political parties—have disintegrated. Until the publication of this groundbreaking work, no one had so deftly diagnosed the harm that these broken bonds have wreaked on our physical and civic health, nor had anyone exalted their fundamental power in creating a society that is happy, healthy, and safe.
Like defining works from the past, such as The Lonely Crowd and The Affluent Society, and like the works of C. Wright Mills and Betty Friedan, Putnam’s Bowling Alone has identified a central crisis at the heart of our society and suggests what we can do."
Even with Facebook/social media, I wonder if the same thing is still true, or if we have begun to heal the broken bonds of our disconnected nature the book identified.
[1] ISBN-10: 0743203046
Sometimes I miss some important emails just because the emails are classified as spam and moved into spam folder.
All because you've given Facebook responsibility for keeping in touch.
One suggestion for keeping in control and in touch: a less algorithmic address list in email.
"Oh, but I don't want to manage that."
Well, how good is what you're using now working? Is that chance of someone outside the list serendipitously stumbling across a post really that valuable?
And, sorry for her loss.
If you just want to send a message to a friend then there are a myriad of ways to do that which neither involve email nor Facebook.
If you boil it down to why people actually use Facebook, then Facebook is nothing but a fancier and comfortable version of "keeping a list of emails", just with very nasty side-effects.
But you're ignoring the fact that Facebook is effectively the first opportunity in history for a universal "push" mechanism for friendship.
If your best friend died, would you really know how to contact everyone he/she was friends with? You could dig through their Rolodex in the old days, which would cover some percentage but also pick up a lot of outdated contact information and business relationships with no friendship involved; you could send email to everyone you could find in their mailbox, but that surely wouldn't hit everyone; you could dial all phone numbers in their phone, but same problem.
And obituaries are pull-based, and tend to be localized.
FB, for better or worse, has the potential to be the most effective way in the history of mankind to tell everyone who knew someone that person has passed on.
Do you have an email list right now that someone could use to share that news and hit 100% of your friends?
The nature of "Facebook friendship" as it pertains to real friendship is orthogonal and irrelevant to this question: in a world where genuine friendship spans continents and social circles, how do you notify everyone who cares that someone has died?
Most of my friends aren't actually "friends" on Facebook.
Anyway, it's clear that people are thinking I'm an advocate for the Facebook definition of friendship, which is in no way what I wrote, but whatever.
Yes, and my next of kin has a clearly written set of instructions to follow in that event. Plus I don’t have hundreds of “friends” defined by algorithms, just friends who would rapidly miss me and inquire as to why I vanished. It’s the kind of thing you consider when dealing with actual people, and not just text you’ve read to yourself and attributed to a set of imaginings you call your “FB Friend” and which may or may not bear any particular relationship to the real person.
I'd see an announcement of my death on Facebook as an insult, as my death would essentially be creating engagement/ad impressions/clicks for Facebook.
I know a lot of people. Many of those people unfortunately use Facebook. There's a good chance that at least one of them will be posting something about it, regardless of my wishes.
That's an odd way of seeing it considering that paid obituaries, in Newspapers, have been a thing for quite a while. The family pays the newspaper for the obituary, the newspaper sells advertisement space and then even asks people to pay for that whole package.
Compared to that, the Facebook version at least feels only like half a rip-off because your family wouldn't have to pay for it being posted and others wouldn't have to pay to read it.
But, I suppose that if I die today, someone will post something on facebook (statistically, at least one of the person I know should use it for that; although I totally condemn FB (FB, not the social network thing))
In Germany, at least, they are still very popular. Working at an ambulant palliative service, one of my colleagues checks the local newspapers each morning, over the years it's happened quite a few times that we found out about one of our patients passing away from the obituary in the newspaper before we got a notice from the family or the acting physician.
> FB is based on advertisement and on social information commercial exploitation.
So are pretty much the majority of newspapers at this point, just because Facebook is better at the social information exploitation angle doesn't turn them into an entirely different beast, as I'm pretty sure newspapers are equally busy trying to categorize their customers for better ad impressions, their databases just ain't remotely as big and detailed as those of Facebook.
From a practical perspective, I'd still prefer a free obituary to a paid one anytime. Sure, it might not be completely free, as you are paying with personal information, it's at least more free than "Pay for the obituary, pay for the newspaper and then still look at advertisements".
The best solution would probably something like Facebook that doesn't finance itself through the commercialization of its user's data. I wonder how viable an approach like the original WhatsApp one (subscription services with very small fees) would work for a social media platform at the scale of Facebook?
Only because it has defined downwards the entire concept of friendship.
How would all of your genuine friends find out you've died, if they are widely dispersed and to various degrees ignorant of each other?
If my best friend died I would be notified immediately by at least three people. If I weren't (I would be) I would know something was wrong as soon as he stopped responding to my text messages/calls.
That's because we're actual friends and are actually involved in each other's lives. His wife knows me, his mother and father know me, his children know me. The people you're describing are not in any way best friends.
Where did I imply that? I literally responded to:
>If your best friend died, would you really know how to contact everyone he/she was friends with?
>Nor am I trying to redefine friendship as "Facebook friends." And I wish people would read what I wrote, not what they think about Facebook.
Yeah, didn't say that either. I wish people would read what I wrote too.
It's just absolutely 99% ridiculous to believe that _facebook_ would be the way you'd likely be notified that your "best friend" (your words) died. A true friend, let alone a _best_ friend, is someone whose life you're involved in at a deeper level than FB.
I left 1% for situations like elderly people who have been friends for decades and live half a world away from each other.
> If your best friend died, would you really know how to contact everyone he/she was friends with?
How did you make the leap to:
> It's just absolutely 99% ridiculous to believe that _facebook_ would be the way you'd likely be notified that your "best friend" (your words) died.
I didn't say: "I want to find out my best friend died via Facebook." My question was meant to imply: "I don't know how to find everyone my best friend considers his friends, but his Facebook friends list is an improper superset of that list"
You posit that FB could be the "most effective way in the history of mankind to tell everyone who knew someone that person has passed on". Sure, but why stop at death? FB could also be the most effective way to tell every mutual friend when your best friend:
- Has a child
- Gets married
- Gets a new job
- Has a death in the family
- Loses their job
- Gets divorced
- Seems to be depressed right now.
The fact that FB has been highly-effective push notification has been key to its success but also one of the things that sometimes bothers people when it comes to privacy and other issues. You might argue that death presents a special case -- and I would generally agree -- but I would most definitely argue that significant parts of FB's userbase (which consists of basically every country and subculture) would disagree. FB's tweaking of things so that death is pushed as a priority would not make everyone happy, and every tweak means that something else gets untweaked, of course.
That said, it's worth pointing out that FB has recognized its potential to be a new kind of obituary/memorial service, and all of the complications and downsides of that. Here's a pretty good whitepaper on the difficulties: https://research.fb.com/publications/legacy-contact-designin...
Inevitably, they know that because they are FB friends, but really met through me.
I wonder if we lose something because the connection between Person A-B-C is weakened. Person C is presented info by Facebook, instead of through the original connection. Denies neurons a chance to fire together and cross-associate.
Not really. Actual "social networks" have done that for millenia. They even include a much smarter filtering system than Facebook's: unimportant information dies out quickly, and people are told or not told about events based on human judgment. Ah, well... this is what we have now.
We can now build social "networks" which are much less locality based, and where your friends aren't necessarily friends with each other. And that's good.
It does mean that you've got less redundancy in the system though. Which is why it's not unreasonable to use new tools like facebook to keep up to date with people.
Because let's face it: In this day and age it's the most practical way to do so. It's the one place where you can aggregate all your personal relationships from different "communities" you interact with.
> One suggestion for keeping in control and in touch: a less algorithmic address list in email.
"I don't want to manage that" is a legitimate excuse in this case, just like it's a bit dishonest to compare "writing emails" with what social media does.
There's value to be had here, helping people connect with each other, in easy and obvious ways, is a noble goal. I don't want to explain to my grandparents how to manage mailing lists, but I'd still love for them to partake in the "digital happenings" of friends and family.
In that regard, social media also serves the function of a public diary for many people, giving opportunities to share and appreciate. That's a need that shouldn't be underestimated, but it most certainly could be facilitated in a better way than with this sole focus on commercialization through advertisement.
https://www.gofundme.com/StephenSykes
"Unfortunatey, the cost of the drug is above the NHS funding threshold. It is not therefore available on prescription and the Consultants have told us that we will need to raise the funds required to purchase the treatment that Stephen needs to give him the real prospect of becoming well again."
[0] See, e.g., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5210230/ from January 2017: "[M]ajor issues such as timing and sequencing, treatment duration and synergistic combinatory approaches remain to be resolved. Furthermore, long-term efficacy outcomes and potential development of late toxicities in lymphoma patients are still poorly defined."
Kind of different to needing insulin, isn't it
In bad cases, it _does_ get that bad. Dehydration on top of losing control of my medication and a not particularly serious gastric bug ended up being a very serious thing for me.
I don’t think most diabetics are that brittle that “without insulin quickly loses their higher brain functions”.
One of the above posters explains it better than I have.
In case of hypoglycemia, it is imperative to raise blood sugar as soon as possible. You do not need prescription for that. It is achieved with regular sugar, sweets, or orange juice that everybody has in their household.
In extreme cases a shot of glycogen may be required. Glycogen is not expensive and does not require prescription. Also, most people never use that shot. I have my one, and only, shot of glycogen in my fridge for many years now. Thankfully, I never used it.
Not having insulin results in hyperglycemia or high blood sugar which causes longer term complications and severe illness but won't put you in a coma.
Complications of high blood sugar level don't develop suddenly. It's a relatively slow process that takes weeks or months. There is a medical emergency, called diabetic ketoacidosis, that results from high blood sugar level. However, that takes months of untreated high sugar levels, combined with dehydration, to develop.
A diabetic without insulin will, with time, develop a ton of serious complications. However, none of them are sudden, and certainly don't lead to a "quick loss of higher brain functions".
Acute hypoglycemia, as you mentioned, we treat with sugars, either oral glucose, or IV dextrose. Complex sugars are of course better.
I will take issue with this, however:
> Complications of high blood sugar level don't develop suddenly. It's a relatively slow process that takes weeks or months. There is a medical emergency, called diabetic ketoacidosis, that results from high blood sugar level. However, that takes months of untreated high sugar levels, combined with dehydration, to develop.
You can begin to notice symptoms of DKA in as little as 24 hours, and high acuity incidents can happen with a matter of days to a week or so.
But yes, you're right that it will not be something that has such rapid onset as described by the parent.
Interesting. Can they really develop in a single day starting from a "normal" BG level, without a longer period of elevated BG beforehand?
I guess I should have also been more precise in my comment. I was mostly referring to the severe form where actual coma can occur. Still, I'm surprised it can develop in only a couple of days.
Thanks. I definitely appreciate the correction.
https://www.quora.com/What-do-doctors-do-when-a-patient-cant...
>When a patient comes into the hospital and there is a limb threatening emergency, there is no consideration to the patients financial status to provide emergency surgical management, PERIOD.
https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/who-bears-t...
>That means hospitals are effectively serving as “insurers of last resort” within the American healthcare sector by providing care to uninsured patients who cannot afford to pay their medical bills. “People are still going to the emergency room,” Garthwaite says, “and they are still receiving treatment—so the cost is still there. When governments do not provide health insurance, hospitals must effectively provide it instead.”
And before some brilliant downvoter comes along, I'd call attention to the fact I've provided sources for all of my claims. Doctors in the USA don't go through 8+ years of school and residence to simply let people die in front of them.
[edit] Per the child poster's date, I've got one more source:
>According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, 55% of U.S. emergency care now goes uncompensated.[13]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_an...
That reaffirms my point. And my God, 55% is a staggering amount and it highlights many sides of the issue. That many people know and use "free" emergency care when they have to, without paying insurance. And that hospitals are the ones stuck with the burden of our medical system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_an...
>It requires hospital Emergency Departments that accept payments from Medicare to provide an appropriate medical screening examination (MSE) to anyone seeking treatment for a medical condition, regardless of citizenship, legal status, or ability to pay.
Republicans profess to be against socialized medicine, yet very few of them propose repealing EMTALA. It’s suspicious.
Same end result, without the negative publicity.
Most Americans go to other countries as tourists and largely have no idea how hard everyday life there is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_tourism
Note that America is hardly unique in this respect and is both a destination and a source of such traffic.
By the way current day US citizens have may be a factor of thousands times more opportunity, freedom and economically supportive ecosystem in all of human history combined, including the current humans anywhere in the world.
I can say this as a Indian, who stayed for a few years in the US and came back to India.
Little do US citizens realize how easy they have it and how much privilege they have compared to the remainder for the world.
However, medical services in even poor European countries, so some wealthy Latin American countries like Uruguay, are far better than American alternatives.
Typically you'll be given the insulin and asked to pay later or it will be quietly written off as lost, expired, or just the cost of doing business. The pharmacists I knew we're more than willing to give a free vial if it was crucial and deal with payment later(or in many cases never). Repeat offenders are directed towards programs where they can get insulin at discount or for free. Despite the healthcare system being fucked, letting someone die without insulin is a bad PR move so the giant companies that make it will give it away if necessary (but you have to sign up and pass income checks).
Still, this is mostly just human compassion I've seen. Doctors and pharmacists I've known are generally very helpful and nurturing people. You make a lot of money but there's easier ways to make the same if human compassion isn't your thing. If this wasn't the case I assume many would die, because it doesn't seem that the government provides any protection against this.
The US medical system is corrupt and FUBAR but this is not a good example. I've worked low level jobs around retail pharmacy and emergency medicine and seen this happen firsthand many times. Healthcare providers in the US are of fairly high quality and generally will not let you die. Most of the insane costs and profiteering are focused around drug pricing, countless layers of nonsense surrounding insurance and pricing structures, and the need for hospitals to charge some people a lot to make up for the huge fraction that don't or can't pay.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15957446 and marked it off-topic.
> Pretty sure this is what killed my friend @shanecomix by proxy. I and numerous other friends of his never saw his GoFundMe campaign for insulin. He died $50 shy of his goal. I'm very sorry for your loss, especially complicated by such esoterica.
Why exactly does somebody need to start a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for life-critical medicine?
That being said, the effects are often the same. And self-interest is an acceptable excuse for people that want to ignore their impact on those around them.
In the US however that seems to be a different matter for a lot of people. This - to me - goes beyond mere self-interest... It's essentially stating that one is fine with other people suffering and dying just because they are too poor to pay the ridiculous health care premiums in the US or find an employer who does that for them.
The only people that are going without proper healthcare are those that make too much money to qualify for Medicaid. But that live beyond their means and can't afford other insurance.
The very poor have it just fine when it comes to healthcare in the us. It's those that make too much for Medicaid but not enough for private insurance that have a problem.
As for little warning, there have been laws requiring ample notice and grace period for a long time now in the US.
Most [0] employers who "offer health care" don't actually pay the premiums for you; they'll usually negotiate a group rate that's better than individual (ACA/ObamaCare) insurance, and perhaps chip in some, but you're still paying the premium yourself. Half of ridiculous still rounds up to ridiculous...
[0] http://fortune.com/2016/03/30/employer-paid-health-insurance...
Having experienced such programs through others' experiences, I can say that they are very often staffed by underpaid, incompetent employees whom are trying to execute complex programs with perverse incentives designed by compromising committees. The people that need these programs the most are the least capable of dealing with these problems, but almost nobody knows or cares what their troubles are.
If you make sure that your government employees are educated, provided with good benefits, feel like they have an impact, etc., the outcomes will invariably be for the better.
A very good example of this is teachers. The OECD tells us:
"[...]in nearly all countries, when teachers perceive that appraisal and feedback lead to changes in their teaching practice, they also report greater job satisfaction. When teachers believe that appraisal and feedback is performed only for administrative purposes they report less job satisfaction. In addition, teachers who report that they participate in decision making at school also report greater job satisfaction. Indeed, although fewer than a third of teachers believe that teaching is a valued profession in their country, those teachers who report that they can contribute to school decisions are more likely to report that teaching is valued in their society."
http://www.oecd.org/edu/school/TALIS-2013-Executive-Summary....
And other sources tell us that satisfied teachers tend to lead to better outcomes.
"TN teachers’ job satisfaction linked to performance scores"
https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2017/02/01/tn-teachers-job-satis...
In other words, much like regular companies, governments with happier employees tend to have better outcomes. This should be hardly surprising to most HN readers.
The American voting public has not the interest or attention span in tackling small complicated problems. The politicians they elect therefore has little interest or motivation to fix these small complicated problems because doing so usually involves spending political capital on compromises. Sometimes a few of them get big ideas about civic duty, but not very many people vote for that. They just vote for whomever yells the loudest about their set of pet issues which are usually red herrings erected to distract the population from actual issues. (abortion, gun control, immigration, etc. not that this issues are _unimportant_ but politicians use them to secure power on both sides and keep up the yelling because if they actually solved them, they would have to tackle the sorts of issues that threaten the powerful)
In 10 years of various levels of being a model citizen (or not), all of my dealings with the local and national government have been satisfactory, even when they were in a position where they could make me have a very, very bad day if they felt like it.
My one negative interaction with the police (coerced into accepting a search of my bag) was because I was doing something else illegal, listening to music while riding my bicycle, and I am smart enough to know the difference between beating the rap and beating the ride.
Same in India. Pay is very good(you also get to make a fortune through bribes), working hours are non-existent and you get other benefits like a lot of holidays, health care and fat pensions after retirement.
Share stories of what being in a program is like.
Focus on the cost of administering complex vs. simple programs.
However liberal your locality, it's still hamstrung by a variety of state and federal laws that make building effective government systems much more challenging than in other developed nations.
Negative incentives work far better for organizations than they do for individuals.
I spent some time homeless and on food stamps. When the lack of resources and lack of compassion for your plight can cause you to literally go hungry -- well, it felt to me like a "beating." It felt actively hostile. That is what I was trying to capture and convey.
The basic problem comes from making things too complicated.
For example, there are a million programs that provide subsidies to the poor. The poor can't afford housing, so we have housing vouchers. The poor can't afford food, so we have food stamps. Heat, school, medicine, the list goes on.
The problem with all of these programs is that they're bureaucratic nightmares to navigate and cause all kinds of perverse incentives, e.g. inflating the price of school/medicine/housing, forcing people to buy a specific amount of the subsidized thing instead of spending some of the money on something they might need even more.
And the programs are all trying to do the exact same thing, which is to give money to the poor. Which we could instead do directly with a universal basic income and erase all of that unnecessary complexity from existence.
A UBI is pure redistribution. There is no money that doesn't go to the poor, because where else would it go? Taking money from the rich and then giving them some of it back is just the same thing as only taking the difference to begin with, and the entire difference goes to the poor.
It's equivalent to a government benefit with a phase out rate equal to the tax rate.
The reason why UBI works well is because it's a cash handout (like the other person said, you're not specifying the needs of the individual), it's a universal and not means tested program (you don't have to go through a bureaucratic maze every time you become eligible), and it's instantaneous for people who have sudden changes in fortune (IE, the income stream is already set up).
Some of this is purposefully done for a reason. You want people to be buying more eggs, milk and bread. Not Candy and Jelly.
In some case this seems to be exactly what has happened.
Only it doesn't actually do that.
If someone has $5 from their job and $5 from the government and wants to buy $6 worth of bread and $4 worth of candy when you want them buying $10 worth of bread, saying they can only spend the government money on the bread changes nothing.
And is almost universally wrongheaded to begin with, because individuals know better than the government what they actually need. It's too easy to find the government telling a diabetic they can't buy a candy bar when they need it to avoid hypoglycemic shock.
Responsible individuals do. Not every one.
People make their own bed. If someone eats too much candy and dies of a heart attack, it was their choice. The government is not your mother.
It makes no sense to punish all the responsible people with crushing bureaucracy just to save a few fools from themselves.
Drugs and medical treatments in the US are already very expensive compared to the same in other countries. If everyone suddenly has an extra $1k/mo, why wouldn’t the drug companies increase their prices even more?
To me (as a European) it seems like a better option is universal healthcare, to at least make life critical medicine and treatments available to everyone, no matter their financial status.
That's only how prices work for uncompetitive markets. In a competitive market anyone who raised prices would lose business to competitors.
Moreover, monopolies can raise prices in response to anything that causes the poor (or anyone else) to have more money. The problem isn't a UBI, it's the existence of uncompetitive markets.
> To me (as a European) it seems like a better option is universal healthcare, to at least make life critical medicine and treatments available to everyone, no matter their financial status.
Price controls are independent of single payer. If you had single payer and monopoly/patented suppliers without price controls then prices would be... high. So nobody does that. But you can also have price controls without having single payer.
The problem with price controls is econ 101 -- you get underproduction. And when the thing being produced is medicine and medical research, that isn't good.
The counties with single payer do it anyway, and thereby don't pay their share of the research cost and cause there to be less research than there would be. We could do the same thing, single payer or not, and pay less for medicine. But then there would be even less research.
A possible workaround is to subsidize medical research directly, but then you're not saving the money, you're just spending it on the same thing with different routing. Which method of funding research is more effective is open for debate, but you can't avoid paying for the research unless you don't want to have it.
Except if you had a job, you had to give half of your income back to the program until your income was above 2x the grant's value per month. (something like $800/mo, not in the bay area)
When you started a job you had to get your management to fill out a form and submit it to the local government.
When you stopped a job you had to get your management to fill out a form and submit it to the local government.
You had to fill out and get your management to sign time sheets showing how much you worked.
You had to save half of your income (and because homeless youth, that usually meant half of a likely barely above minimum wage job) to pay back to the program.
If any paperwork was submitted late you got threatened with getting kicked out of the program.
If you earned too much money you got kicked out of the program.
If your management failed to send in paperwork you got threatened with getting kicked out of the program.
If your case worker who was responsible for submitting your paperwork didn't submit it on time, you got threatened with getting kicked out of the program (this was often the case)
So literally every single month there was a new crisis and the threat of being homeless again. Not an idle threat but an actual "you're going to get kicked out unless..." ... in a program designed to help youth homeless as a result of abuse.
So on top of dealing with whatever severe personal problems, you have to keep down a job that already has a reason to stigmatize you under a program that put you in an apartment which at minimum wage would cost well over 50% of a full time income, but you also have to manage the constant crises of misplaced paperwork and new requirements and poorly understood and explained rules.
It's just a recipe for failure for the most vulnerable people who are the least capable of dealing with uncertainty and stress ... and the very real and constant threat of returning to living on the street, or in a shelter (they're horrible places), going back to the abusive situation you came from, or very likely getting taken advantage of by someone new.
... because a set of well intentioned people with no idea what it is like to be in anything like that situation couldn't come to terms which were simple and straightforward for giving aid to those in need.
Having lived in several US states the ones that "do the most" for their population tend to be the worst to work with.
You might not have many options for state healthcare assistance in some flyover state but if you qualify it won't be maze of bureaucracy. This trickles down to everything from the town hall to the DMV.
Getting benefits isn't as easy or as fast as setting up a gofundme. Have you ever tried either?
He got a date at a sort of administrative court. The people from the local Medicaid program tried to trick him into dropping the complaint by promising that they would provide care - but only if he dropped his complaint before the court date. They said it looked bad for them if anyone filed a complaint. But nobody in the system could fit him in for an appointment until after the court date, he was told.
A game of chicken ensued. When my friend told the administrators he would only drop his complaint after receiving care, an appointment before the court date mysteriously appeared.
I felt like I had to use all of the skills I developed from debugging systems and negotiating exploding offers just to get my friend what he was legally supposed to get automatically. It was quite clear to me that the Medicaid program was using this formal complaint system as a form of triage, to reduce costs by weeding out the people who can't work the system well enough to hold the program to its obligations.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-drug-companies-keep-insulin...
I for one, am tempted to just ignore the legal aspects and start a market on tor or something like that. sigh..
I'm sure overly complex government assistance programs aren't the exclusive domain of the USA, but it does seem to typify the scenario.
Australian government assistant programs are paradisiacal by comparison.
If you don't have any money, Medicaid will pay for your insulin. If you do make money but are living above your means so you can't afford health insurance or the medicine itself, then you are doing it wrong.
People of privilege truly believe that it’s simple but it isn’t.
If you're talking about making it taxpayer funded instead, you should remember that all taxes are collected under threat of violence and imprisonment.
That's not true; I'm American but I have personally been to more countries where the poor are (much) better off, in terms of health care or just generally. For instance, Canada, Japan, Spain, France, Germany, Netherlands, UK, Portugal, Belgium... well shit, let's just call it "everywhere I've been but China and Mexico". And even those last two could go either way.
Now I've run out of fingers on one hand
Germany, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Finland...
https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/ezwwze/the-high-price-o...
https://www.snopes.com/shane-patrick-boyle-died-after-starti...
What algorithm is being blamed? Twitter's or Facebook's? If the former, @shanecomix had 232 total tweets since 2012. The GoFundMe tweet could have been easily missed in a chronological newsfeed.
Because healthcare in the United States is a sad, cruel joke.
Facebook enables this sort of behavior in that you can outsource many of your social interactions, but at the end of the day, you as an individual have chosen to outsource those interactions.
I quit Facebook nearly 3 years ago, and it certainly 'cost' me some superficial relationships. At the same time, the relatively few relationships I've worked to maintain outside of Facebook feel more fulfilling and way less anxiety inducing than when I outsourced everything to FB.
You quit Facebook so you know what people say "I can't quit because my family is on there" or "I use it to keep in touch", I can relate to this because I quit it much longer ago.
People THINK Facebook is keeping them in touch with people. People THINK Facebook is a more efficient way of knowing what other people are doing. People THINK Facebook ensures they will occasionally reach out to people they thought they cared about.
This is a mistaken belief, and this person's PSA is making that more clear for people that need to know it.
Offer solutions to people instead of badgering them.
Which has to be the textbook definition of “not friendship.”
Why do you feel like you get to decide how others experience friendship?
The text makes it quite clear she did her best to keep up: "Now, I'm a meticulous FB feed peruser. I always set it to Most Recent and browse until I see the stuff I saw last time. I keep up."
Facebook's whole value proposition is to make it easy to keep in touch with people. Here they clearly failed to live up to their promises. I'm glad you're happy with your choice not to use it, but that doesn't mean those who chose differently are assholes.
GP did not say that, even indirectly.
A more charitable interpretation of GP's post could be, "Facebook gives you the illusion you're keeping in touch with friends, but it's just that—an illusion. You still need to manually keep in touch."
There's never going to be an algorithm that will be able to substitute for "traditional" relationships.
And I might add, Facebook’s value proposition is about getting personal details about individuals and compiling that into billions of dossiers valued by advertisers. If you’re not the customer, you’re the product.
A simple "I haven't heard from you for awhile, what's up?" text or call or even message on FB messenger would be far more effective.
It's not an asshole move to choose to use facebook to keep in touch with "friends", but it's pretty naive to make it the only way to keep in touch with someone you truly, actually care about (that's another issue...).
Hopefully the author learns something from this unfortunate event.
When it becomes normal then everyone will trust the news feed, which I'm sure is what the dying man must have done. Had facebook not been there creating a false sense of connectedness, people would have known to reach out.
> couldn't be bothered
Please don't post cruel things to HN. This violates the site guideline which says: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." It's clearly in the spirit of this site to extend that not just to what people say, but to how they behave. The fact that the person you're being cruel about probably isn't within earshot makes no difference, because the issue is what kind of community we are.
If the FB feed is the only way you "stay in touch" with someone, you're not friends. At best you're acquaintances. This person makes no attempt to speak to her "friend" for who knows how long and is now outraged that she didn't see one of his posts.
Yeesh, get over yourself. If she actually cared she would have been in touch in other, more personal ways.
Please don't post uncivil comments here. Instead, read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site to heart so we can all have at least one semi-decent place on the internet.
Edit: it looks like we've had to ask you this multiple times before. We eventually ban accounts that ignore these requests, so would you please fix this?
It's uncivil because (a) it's uncharitable about a painful situation and (b) "Yeesh, get over yourself" is a swipe.