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You substitute one belief system for another. No evidence needed. It's not hard to find people who have done just that.

Society is made of achievements we did not perform. This sort of hyper-individualist rejection of our sense of community is incredibly bleak and depressing to me.

What is the logical conclusion? How far do you take it? Should I, say, not be proud of my children's accomplishments? After all, I didn't do them, they did. I'm a musician and play in bands. Should I not be proud of things my band has accomplished? What my band does is stuff that I can't do alone, and they can't do without me.

Obsessively focusing on the individual and rejecting one's role in society is nihilistic and alienating. If you gotta do it, I suppose you do you, but please don't drag me into your sad, lonely world. I'm going to enjoy my place in my family, my town, my country, etc.

It's a civic pride thing. Even though I don't follow any sportsballs, I do take some pride in the fact that my city has professional football, baseball, basketball, and hockey teams. It's a "we matter" thing. I may not love those sports, but many of my neighbors do.

Likewise, I take great pride in the fact that we have two world-class museums, one focused entirely on modern art, and I hope the sports fans see the value in that, too.

In Minneapolis, there's a great bbq place that is right across the street from Vikings Stadium. I'm sure it's great game days, but it's a pain to reach any other time. They're abandoning that location and moving into my residential neighborhood. I'm sure that being in walking distance will change it from a 2-3x/year treat for me to a 2-3x/month treat - and their business will be far more stable.

Since when are political decisions evidence-based? Serious question. Tax incentives aren't there because they work, but rather because lots of people believe they work. Politics works on beliefs, not facts.

To be fair, I took that particular medication for over ten years before the crisis. So it's unlikely that the medication itself was the sole cause.

And when the symptoms started, I wasn't going to go to the chemist to start concocting home remedies for what I feared could be a mild heart attack. I went to the ER. Again, I don't know how old you are, but I'm old enough to have had friends my own age start dropping dead of heart attacks and strokes. Hence I decided to take the safest route.

We have conservation now, now that they're on the verge of extinction. For the cute species, anyway.

Read the Lewis and Clark diaries sometime, see how many grizzly bears they encountered, and how much they feared grizzlys. Now look and see how many are left. That's what happens to species we consider a threat.

Measure not by how we treat other humans. Measure by how we treat animals who interfere with us or are perceived as a threat.

Most of them are extinct.

It's just how Chinese fiction is. My spouse has a master's degree in Chinese pedagogy, so I've had more exposure than most to Chinese ideas and fiction.

I didn't read it as competition for scarce resources. I read it as preemptive war against an existential threat. The Dark Forest suggests that any alien species presents a potential existential threat, and the safest thing to do is to (if possible) exterminate them before they even know you're there. It's kind of related to the Prisoner's Dilemma.

And you don't need every species to play Dark Forest, either. As long as one species is playing Dark Forest, all the others learn to hide, or play themselves, or get exterminated. That's the fate of those who want to be nice.

I just got Ball Lightning for Christmas, so it's on my near-future reading list.

The sequels are where it really takes off. The Dark Forest is far more terrifying - one of the darkest SF books I've read.

I think cultural differences play into the read a lot, too. It's an intensely Chinese novel, and I'm pretty sure a lot of Americans find his perspectives on history jarring, and want something more "entertaining" and personal.

A lot of discussion of best language, etc, is just bikeshedding. (See Parkinson's Law of Triviality) We talk about technologies we use because it's easier and safer than talking about the actual product.

Yes, already read it! I like Three Body Problem better, but Blindsight is excellent.

To put it in software terms, it's not a bug, it's an architecture flaw. The "poor regulations" aren't individual issues, but rather part of the fabric of a framework that causes perverse incentives. Therefore, the simpleminded conservative/rightwing solution to "reduce regulation" doesn't eliminate the perverse incentives - it just changes the flow, the way tossing a rock in a river does.

If I were the one making the decision, I'd change American healthcare with one big thing, modeled on the Japanese system... price controls. Japan's system is more or less like ours, but with one key difference - a government panel sets the prices for all medical goods and services. Providers and insurers have to make their profits within that price structure. This incentivizes both to reduce costs, for the sake of their own profits.

Of course, this would be called radical socialism or some such stupid in America, and Democrats aren't even talking about it (Republicans have no ideas at all on health care). But it's politically a much lower threshold than single-payer (throwing out the whole framework and starting over, basically). And it demonstrably works - Japan's system costs less than half what ours does per capita, with better outcomes.

There's much to be said for sticking with things we know work, rather than experimenting with new things that might work better. If a doctor has an effective treatment for a common condition among their patients, what is the cost of trying something new? Do you try it with all patients, or just one?

But "laziness" is something of a trigger word for me in health care discussions, just like "greed" is. It's so easy to attribute what we see as suboptimal outcomes to malice on the part of the person acting - even passive malice like laziness.

Having read The Three Body Problem, I am no longer nearly so excited for our first encounter with an alien civilization...

I don't know how old you are, but at a certain point, the input of a general practice doctor becomes very valuable. Remember, the doctor doesn't even do the little tests you mentioned, like taking measurements and blood tests - they just order them, and nurses or technicians do the work. The doctor's job is to make decisions and give advice.

About a dozen years ago, my doctor caught my blood pressure shooting up in my annual exam and started treating me for high blood pressure. High blood pressure is a "silent killer" that leads to premature deaths for millions. You don't feel sick, while your heart struggles and your brain risks explosions. And treating it, once diagnosed, isn't straightforward. It took six months of experimenting with various medications to find the combination that worked for me. That's a doctor's judgment and expertise, not something for some technician with a community college associate's degree. And this summer, when a critical potassium depletion drove me to a scary ER visit, she noted that one of my BP meds could affect potassium and adjusted my dosages.

And it's not just an expert-system thing that could be replaced by a robot, either. She's not just dealing with my measurements - she's dealing with my fears, and helping me decide on best approaches. That requires a human touch.

I'd like to imagine "laziness" isn't the reason doctors write the prescriptions they do.

Perverse incentive structures are the fundamental reason US healthcare is so expensive and stupid. It's not "greed" in a simple sense, and it's not "regulation" in a simple sense. It's a system of interacting problems that needs treated in a systemic way.

Blaming the insurance companies strikes me as the political equivalent of yelling at the cashier.

Why are you assuming that money is their only incentive?

It seems to me that if the promise of a golden parachute led to CEOs simply not caring if they do well or not, then there'd be no point in paying them well or trying to hire the best. Heck, there'd be no measure of "best", because all the candidates would just have a string of disasters behind them.

There's an S curve to the utility of money. Anyone who works at the kind of level that could become the CEO of a company like Boeing is already quite rich. So money alone isn't the incentive. But thinking of money as sole incentive is kind of characteristic for those of us who actually have to work for a living.

Language choice is an implementation detail. As long as the language isn't technically unable to do the job (ie you can't write a device driver in Python), it doesn't matter much. It may be intensely interesting to practitioners, but it's not a make or break decision. Use what makes the team comfortable.

Hasn't anyone ever watched the opening scene of Pulp Fiction? Tarantino got right to that... no one is going to stop if you if you decide to rob a diner.

It's not just California, either. I live in MN, had my car window smashed out for a couple of bucks in loose change. The neighbor's doorbell camera caught it on video, but the cops didn't even want to see it. Just file a report, my insurance replaced the window, and it was mostly just a pain.

And if we bombed Indiana to the brink of collapse and burned Indianapolis to the ground and nuked Terre Haute, maybe we'd do that.

I think it's rather an oversimplification to say that five years of reconstruction of a totally shattered Japan caused the Korean War. Or to take any lessons from the immediate postwar period and use them to explain the state of Japan 75 years later.

Working pickups in the wild are subject to lots of sharp impacts that regular cars do not normally get. Glass is a big problem.

Honestly? That's not how development works at all, in my experience. Best developers aren't isolated on "most interesting problems", but rather, are getting constantly sucked into war rooms and emergency calls. And when they are working on "interesting problems", they are constantly working, verbally and in writing, to convince reluctant management and other engineers to agree to their new, "interesting" approach to the problem in question. Those are massively social behaviors. "Being honest" is necessary but not sufficient. Understanding people's motivations, finding reasons for them to believe your idea is beneficial for them and their own interests, that's what gets you what you want.

Here's an example. I am trying to do important, interesting work, but I'm often interrupted, because I work in DevOps and wind up drawn into other people's problems. So on the whiteboard next to my desk, I wrote my two "Wildly Important Goals" (from the book Four Disciplines of Execution), and underneath that, the sentence "If something does not apply to these goals, why am I doing it?" This became quite the controversy, but it works! It has significantly reduced my interruptions. That's social skill in action.

Social skills are a huge part of my own IT work.

If you can use social skills effectively, you get to decide (to some degree) what you work on. If you don't, then someone else decides what you work on. As long as you're okay with that trade, there's nothing wrong with it.

But will it suffer from the problem of monetizing user data? That seems to be the big thing it's designed to avoid.