2,503 karma · joined February 1, 2016
A meditation, perhaps - shared because you will likely encounter this situation often over the coming years and maybe it will help you as it helped me.
You waltzed into a thread about the CIA suddenly changing their tune about where COVID came from; and started making assertions that it wasn’t that bad.
I shared a deeply personal story about exactly how bad it was, from my vantage point. I expressed outrage at your dismissal of the suffering and many deaths that occurred. “How dare you” isn’t the same as “shut up.” But it is a strong suggestion that you’re being uncharitable.
> Check yourself before engaging in conversations about FACTS.
I scrolled through your comment history and based on some recent arguments with the mods, it sounds like you’ve have a bone to pick with people on this site.
Log off and touch grass, man.
I hope that people do not treat you with the callousness with which you treat others.
> Because I understand statistics and am making sweeping statements I can and will make them from an objective viewpoint. Please do NOT sensor proven facts. I don't care for bible thumping tora humping nonsense that does not match reality. I'll take 2k years of religion and raise you 50 years of tech, oled TVs and microprocessors.
My friend, you are speaking gibberish. I literally have no idea what you are trying to say. Maybe check your house for a gas leak, or something. I don’t mean it in a dismissive way - I quite literally cannot make heads or tails of what you’re saying here.
> Again the statement of millions dead _DOES NOT_ match the real world
The dead are dead whether you like it or not. Sounds like the pandemic didn’t affect you personally. Be grateful for that, and be kinder to others.
> 0. COVID-19 was mostly harmless. Even more so than Douglas Adam's books.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I found out that my father and his partner had COVID. He lived, at the time, about 12 hours drive from me. Where he lived, his support network was thin (to say the least) - the little family he had nearby needed to keep away because they were responsible for caring for my cousin with a severely weakened immune system. His friends, sadly, also contracted COVID around the same time.
I called him twice a day, and each call he was worse than the last. I decided to rent an AirBnB nearby. My partner and I packed up the dog and everything we needed and drove overnight to get there.
We masked up, and got supplies at Walmart. We brought them to my Dad’s house and left them on the patio - retreated a safe distance - and my Dad came to retrieve them. He was in an awful condition, and his partner was worse.
For the next week I came to their porch every few hours, and called my dad, and we spoke with what little breath he had. He dictated his last will and testament to me. I delivered pedialyte, meal replacement shakes, pulse oximeters, anything to help them make it through. I forced them to get up and move around a little from time to time, and took notes on their condition. They wouldn’t let me in the house.
One day, before I arrived with supplies, my Dad told me they had called an ambulance for his partner. They took his partner to the local hospital… and the hospital turned him away because they had no beds. They essentially sent my Dad’s partner home to die.
By some miraculous turn of events, they survived. They have issues walking and breathing to this day, but they survived.
It’s one of the more agonizing, awful things I’ve ever had to watch. COVID-19 wasn’t harmless; it killed millions. I saw it up close. Especially early on, it was virulent and deadly, and very nearly took my parents from me. It did end up taking a lot of people in my extended social network. They died agonizing deaths.
How dare you paint it as “mostly harmless.”
Sure, it’s not a gotcha if we divorce such a statement from all of its surrounding context.
But context in communication is incredibly important, and it’s unwise to analyze these kinds of statements in a context-free manner. I find it occurs on this site fairly often; it seems endemic to engineers. I try hard to avoid it myself, but frequently fail.
The relevant context here, of course, is the rabid anti-China sentiment expressed by folks like Sen. Cotton for years, dating back to well before the COVID pandemic. I take no position on whether or not his views are accurate or fair - but a context-informed analysis of the situation suggests that Sen. Cotton (and others) are not simply seeking truth and accountability: rather, they seek pretext to justify their views.
I do believe that's all one really needs to know about this shift in their thinking. In other words: it's really far from certain.
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One thing that is, however, quite certain: there are very real political reasons to favor one theory or another. For example, Sen. Tom Cotton is quoted as saying:
> “Now the most important thing is to make China pay for unleashing a plague on the world,” Mr. Cotton said.
So... I'm not certain this is a development worth trusting. Maybe it really did originate from a lab! But the real goal of the constant back-and-forth over where it came from is not about finding the truth; that much seems quite obvious to me.
That said - the Additional Use Grant for Restate is fairly ambiguous:
> Additional Use Grant: You may make use of the Licensed Work, provided that you may not use the Licensed Work for an Application Platform Service.
> An “Application Platform Service” is a commercial offering that allows third parties (other than your employees and contractors) to access the functionality of the Licensed Work by registering new services (directly or indirectly) with the Licensed Work for the purpose of invoking such services through the Licensed Work.
What does it mean to "access the functionality"? What does it mean to "register [a] new service" ? How do you determine the "purpose" of invoking such services?
I understand that the intent is to prevent someone from launching a competing "Restate-as-a-Service" business; but broadly written clauses like this scare me off. If I want to build a totally different kind of business that heavily _relies_ on Restate, I would worry that these ambiguous, broad definitions could easily be used against me.
I really wish that companies adopting the BSL would put much more clarity into the license text. I know there's likely very good business reasons not to - you may constrain yourself in the future by doing so - but in my mind it would be the "right" thing to do. You'd get people actually using and contributing back to your software, much like they would under a more permissive license.
To be clear, I'm referring to the outcomes of the DEI programs in and of themselves; not the outcomes that resulted from having those programs (and/or appearing to have them). And to be clear - some C-suites really might have cared about the programs because they believed in them.
> It's very cynical to think executives have no goals or ideologies beyond enriching themselves.
I disagree, wholeheartedly. The majority of executives have shown, time and again, that they primarily care about money. A close second is power. It's not to say that they don't have goals beyond enriching themselves, but rather that does appear to be the goal they overwhelmingly choose when said values are in conflict.
Put differently: the C-suite set up these programs (and hired very sincere people to work in them) but never really actually cared about the outcomes.
One man’s “bias” is another man’s “expertise”. Who, exactly, would you say is qualified to study this sort of thing?
> Overall, the commission tends to collect about two-thirds of its money judgments, officials said.
Puts the $10B number in perspective, I think.
This is true to some extent, but the share of medical providers that over-bill and over-treat really doesn't justify the way the insurance industry does business. It's a false equivalence.
...and how has it gone when you tried to use them? Just as a personal anecdote: I once tried to get UHC to partially reimburse me for an out-of-network mental health expense. My policy explicitly covered such reimbursement (at a lower rate, of course). I tried for months to get the claim reimbursed. My employer at the time retained the services of a "healthcare concierge", and one of the main things they did was fight insurance companies on your behalf. That concierge service tried for six months to get a single claim reimbursed.
We all gave up.
It was such a small dollar amount; UHC likely spent more time and effort denying the claim than it would have cost to reimburse. It boggles my mind, to this day.
Just because your health insurance "makes it very clear what the benefits I paid for are" has no relation to whether or not they will actually pay those benefits out to you. If you haven't really experience this yet in America, I can only conclude that you are either rather healthy (and haven't used the benefits much), very lucky, or possibly both.
- You keep stating that UHC "provides healthcare" (paraphrasing is mine). That is a ridiculous thing to interject into the debate: UHC can be described as paying the bills, but they are not actually providing healthcare in any real sense of that word.
- Because they do not actually _provide_ healthcare, it is very reasonable to ask why they need to spend billions on what essentially amounts to clerical work. We know they spend a lot of overhead on finding ways to _not_ pay for healthcare, which is one way that they could reduce this overhead if they were so inclined.
- It is obscene that in addition to massively overspending on providing this clerical function, they manage to still profit somewhere north of $14 billion dollars. That money, and the overspending on clerical functions, could have and should have been spent on paying for healthcare.
- No single individual should earn a compensation of $10 million dollars; but it is especially wicked to earn that amount of money, essentially, while there are unpaid claims. I won't start ranting about capitalism in general here - the CEO needs a paycheck too - but it's just absurd to think that they alone provide $10 million dollars worth of "value" and it's immoral to provide that compensation _in lieu of paying for healthcare_.
- You keep saying the CEO is "competent." From what I can see, his primary competency seems to have been increasing (or at least, holding steady) the amount of profit that UHC earns year over year. That is to say: he was competent at making sure UHC did not substantially pay for more healthcare. Another way of looking at that is that he was uniquely competent at increasing (or at least, holding steady) the amount of human suffering caused by UHC in exchange for those profits.
So - yes, I stand by my original statement that the population would have been far better off if he were not running the company, because he was carrying out a fundamentally immoral function in society. All of the insurers should be non-profits; in fact, every aspect of our healthcare system should be non-profit. Or at the very least, regulated to only earn a tiny amount of profits. Because there's no way around it - profit in the medical system is always directly tied to extracting more money from a population than it takes to provide that care, and I view that as utterly immoral.
Yes, if that means that $0.20 went towards patient care.
The money is better spent caring for patients than compensating one man.
But speaking more generally - I think a lot of people would, indeed, shrug. The US healthcare system is one of the most miserable parts of living in this country and virtually everyone has had to deal with it at some point. And whether or not they deserve the direct blame, insurance execs (and pharma execs, etc) directly profit from that misery.
I think a lot of people are not going to shed a single tear over events like this.
Some of the cruelest, most selfish, and least compassionate people I have known have also been deeply religious; and some of the kindest, most loving, and most caring people I have known have also been deeply religious.
I don’t think that the popularity of religion really has much to do with it either way.
The proper framing is “the owners stepped in to change the policy, to mirror the same policies they had before the 80s”.
Whether that’s right or wrong to do is a separate question. But framing this as though it has been editors going rogue or something is just not what’s happening at all.
But what really stands out to me is how misguided the attempt is here. Trump only rewards absolute fealty - not campaign cash. If they really want a “seat at the table,” they’re going to have to pony up a lot more than just their money.
But this ain’t it. In the opening paragraphs the author dismisses the hardest parts of the problem (presumably because they are human problems, which engineers tend to ignore), and betrays a complete lack of interest in understanding why things ended up this way. It also seems they’ve completely misunderstood the API/SDK split in its entirety - because they argue for having such a split. It’s there - that’s exactly what exists!
And it goes on and on. I think it’s fair to critique OpenTelemetry; it can be really confusing. The blog post is evidence of that, certainly. But really it just reads like someone who got frustrated that they didn’t understand how something worked - and so instead of figuring it out, they’ve decided that it’s just hot garbage. I wish I could say this was unusual amongst engineers, but it isn’t.
It is wise to be exceedingly cautious when deploying ends-justifies-the-means logic. Most of the time, history doesn’t remember those who employ it too fondly.