"The halcyon days of Google’s youth are a distant memory."
Cheers to the legal assistant who won't get nearly enough credit for this.
1,915 karma · joined April 30, 2010
I write here sometimes https://ajsharp.com.
Cheers to the legal assistant who won't get nearly enough credit for this.
It's incredibly disappointing how long these issues have been endemic of the US welfare system. I'm not sure if other countries handle phase-outs more efficiently, but these would be painfully easy "bugs" to fix. It is within the power of these governments to address these issues -- they just don't care.
> While the median low-income American family may have a marginal tax rate of about 45%, there’s a large dispersion of experiences, depending on age, family size, location and benefits. Some families face an exaggerated problem -- 70% tax rates or occasionally much more. Just $1,000 in higher pay for a single mother in Oregon, in one example cited in Altig’s research, would result in a devastating loss of $15,000 in housing subsidies.
For further reading, Google "the poverty trap"
https://opentextbc.ca/principlesofeconomics/chapter/14-2-the....
This is about as serious a breach as it gets. To have (or claim) zero knowledge of it is pretty bad.
If the details of the story are correct, it would imply the attackers had full database access. I would not be surprised to learn the attack vector was gaining a privileged user's credentials, similar to the Twitter hack.
This is great in theory but is entirely inapplicable and utter non-sense in practice in a health care context, and in this instance in particular. My original commend made mention of inelasticity of demand. When people's lives are at risk, there is no demand curve and equilibrium. The price is what the supplier says it is. It has nothing to do with what the market will bear, or whatever other macro 101 theoretical framework you're applying to this reality.
It's different in almost every possible way than say, going to the grocery store and deciding if a box of cookies is too expensive for the value you're deriving, and whether this alternative or that alternative is a better value.
Maybe you don't know much about how billing and payments in the health care system works, or the exorbitant costs for things that happen in a hospital setting that are completely untethered to what anyone would be willing to pay in a normal market.
> Obviously, Gilead wants to make money. So they will decrease the price to attract customers, ultimately finding a ideal price that maximizes the balance between profit margin and customer volume.
Again, this isn't a b-school case study. Your mental model doesn't apply here.
They know people and/or insurance companies will pay for it, so why not charge whatever they want while they can?
Of course, there is a very simple way to bring down the price and reduce the overall cost burden to the economy: a price ceiling. The government could just say, "sorry, you can't bring that drug to market unless it's below X dollars".
But the Federal government has been entirely unwilling to exercise its power to enact price controls on drug companies. At the same time, other countries do this all the time, driving up the prices we pay even more. It's insane.
Most company Slacks are a ticking timebomb of sensitive artifacts waiting to be discovered. Whether it's passwords or just general internal info you wouldn't want to be public, it's wild how much sensitive info is sitting in like 4 systems (Slack, Gmail, Notion, Dropbox).
Protect y'selves people.
I don't work in gaming, and I haven't been an avid gamer in nearly 15 years. From my cursory viewpoint, it feels like every 5-10 years a story-driven game comes along, but mostly it feels like the industry is focused on either massive open world games, or Fortnite-esque quick-hit experiences.
I'd love to hear from people in the industry on how games like Deux Ex that live and die on story are thought of in the industry.
> News is entertainment. Quick gratification that lasts a day, at max.
I would say an important qualifier here is that most news is entertainment, but the very long-tail of what we might call news -- actual high-quality journalism (investigative or not) -- is critically important.
I agree here that the majority of news media is infotainment. But there is an important place for high-quality long-form journalism, which effectively exists in society to do hard thinking and investigating that's basically impossible without the resources, infrastructure and support of a news organization.
Yes, "news" is trash, and some "journalism" is too, but the very long-tail, the 1% of the really high-quality stuff, is critically important, and a free and open society probably collapses without it.
We need way more things like this.
When we did it, we bought a drive, went to the colo, offloaded the files, and you have to do some stuff to kick off a job to let them know you're sending a drive and what kind and all that sort of thing. Then you mail it to them and they run an import into an bucket.
My guess with these drives is controlling the hardware makes the process significantly more efficient for them, and for the enterprise customers they're trying to move off colo and onto AWS.
Kind of the whole point of software is to take a bunch of complexity and make it simpler for the end user. The fact that the software visually looks like shit or is difficult to work with because it's difficult to reason about is a rather unfortunate side-effect, but usually has no bearing on actual business success.
There are lots of things we should try to do to reduce software complexity and make it easier and safer to work with and change. But trying to force simplicity by way of size usually has the opposite effect.
Microservices are a modern re-branding of service-oriented architecture, but 'microservices' sounds cuter and less like it belongs in Java-land, and there's some theoretical idea that splitting your app into even smaller pieces will somehow make the whole thing better.
SOA/microservices solves a few problems and introduces a great many. The original SOA proponents were pretty explicit about this. Beware! There be dragons here! But one of the main pieces of prescriptive advice from domain driven design is helpful for splitting into distributed services: split along domain lines with minimum inter-service dependencies. Payments is an obvious one. Microservices seems to buck much of this advice in favor for a blissfully ignorant principle of "small" or "isolated". Good luck isolating something that is not meant to be isolated.
Scaling software is hard. Scaling teams is harder. Trying to scale teams by scaling/distributing software is an understandable goal but extremely hard to pull off because of additional complexities and costs you incur in doing so. Dev gets harder, deployment/ops becomes harder, testing becomes harder. Cross-team communication, documentation, API publishing and adherence goes from being very low impact within an org to suddenly being critically important.
To do SOA/microservices effectively you need complete organizational buy-in, and you have to commit completely to developing tooling and solving all the associated problems in moving to a services approach. Often, it's easier to just put it all back together, organize the code in such a way to minimize merge conflicts and wait for the ungodly slow test suite to run in CI. There are good reasons you rarely hear SOA/microservices success stories outside of enormous companies (Netflix, Facebook, Google, Amazing, etc). Doing this stuff takes an enormous investment and commitment from the entire organization, and there are just lower friction ways to skin this cat if you don't operate at mega web scale.
Growing a monolith is hard. Growing a microservices/SOA architecture is also very hard. Growing is hard.
It seems consistent with what you're saying. There's some broad consortium of companies, but there are already designs approved by regulators and they're more or less providing manufacturing capacity to make more of them as fast as possible.
My point is that, actually, no, they don't really. The visa+MC per transaction fees are actually quite low, unless I'm reading that wrong.
Again, this is a complete sidebar to the actual point, which is that banks are just rent-seeking because they can on these loans.
This seems ludicrously high for what is effectively clerical work -- checking some boxes, ensuring a company meets various criteria -- and money distribution. I get that smaller orgs are likely harder to check out (less income history, poorer quality financial records), but is the $350,000th dollar really 200 basis points more effort for a bank than the $350,001st?
It's not as if they're being compensated for risk-taking. It's not on the bank balance sheet; this is government money. They're getting 5% just for doling it out. Unreal.
Good luck hiring from here on out.