drtillberg

For families with 3 children, the child car seat requirement generally pushes them into a minivan because you can't install car seats 3 to a row, so you need an extra row. And then you still max out at 1 friend instead of 3, because even a minivan won't seat more than 4 child car seats.

It's also not magic getting your children into a car seat. It takes time, the angles are awkward, and when parked on a busy road it often exposes parents to traffic. I've only heard of 1 fatal accident through where a parent was struck by a car (sideswiped) while fiddling with a car seat.

Sounds like a 'bug'.

My VOIP vendor provides a spam-scoring system for inbound calls from an outfit called TreCNAM. Needs more participation to be highly effective, but it's an idea!

The VOIP vendor also enables call treatments that can require a caller to press a specific number after the call is connected, before it actually rings, and to whitelist specific legitimate callers. Together, those phone screening tool reduced rings from robocallers on my VOIP phone to a very rare event.

>The possibility that a Libra node run by Mastercard or Andressen Horrowitz would suddenly start running malicious code is such a bizarre scenario to plan for and is better solved by simply enforcing protocol integrity and through non-technical (i.e. legal) means.

Refusing to rely on legal means of enforcement suggests the project views itself supreme over all national policies, laws and regulations. On the one hand, such a concept is usually the domain of autocrats, despots, and organized crime-- odd for a tech startup. On the other hand, it would suggest a system more secure from outside legal interference than, say, MasterCard. This detail tends to add a datapoint explaining the lack of support from global ministers of finance....

If you and 1 other person use the cloned Bitcoin, that's a network. How many other participants do you need before new Bitcoin is comparable in every tangible way to old Bitcoin?

Patent trolling, for example, is less profitable due to reforms around the edges. We've seen an almost shocking level of legal innovation in many backwaters, from pot to legal opiod to climate change. The ground is shifting and a company that controls 40% of the nationwide market for anything is (or ought to be) subject to a higher standard.

A business practice of refusing to make key cultural works available to the public-- this is on par with patent trolling. I don't debate their legal right to do it. It's still surprising and another reason to criticize both their business model and the current incarnation of copyright law, which this company had a significant role in creating.

But that salary is discounted based an offer of real ownership of a piece of the company. It's not clear to me why the last 20% of a salary, taken as equity, should have a lower preference in the capital structure than cash invested.

For the life of me I can't understand his prominence either. He seems profoundly lost and misguided, so much I take even his mea culpa with a grain of salt. I only can imagine that someone important considers him to be a useful idiot.

From a 40,000 foot view, it's odd that employees who are investing their professional effort are relegated to a lower equity tier. I think the person asking the question in the article makes a valid point: why is it fair for human capital to be devalued in this way?

The problem isn't the password or the camera that captured it.

The problem is that the phone required a password in that scenario-- same user, phone never left his vicinity, probably not a long interval between uses. Being more selective about when to require a master password is a better protection model IMHO.

Is anyone working on a meta-level a-la-carte subscription system? Pay 3d party, which grants per-article access to journalist websites at a lower price point than full subscription to any or all of them. Bonus if the system shields identity so as not to allow publisher to personalize ads, etc.

It's so interesting that people get hired on account of the organizations and jobs they've held in the past, instead of strictly based on current skill. It sounds like those things should roughly line up, but from my experience they often don't. Makes for a high-friction and vaguely irrational recruiting process.

People go where transportation takes them; we built highways and they went. It's not easy to untangle cause from effect.

TL;DR: Private startups built subways rapidly in the 1910s and 20s. Government took over in the 1930s as startups lost steam, declined to invest via bond issues, plowed money into autos, and the long gaps in capital projects meant private expertise was repurposed and no longer available when needed.

> ... if a UAV campaign is part of a war that has a justified cause, the use of force is necessary and proportionate to the threat posed by the enemy, the UAV pilot's actions can be seen as potentially justified.

Maybe part of the problem is that the drone killings are occurring in a nontraditional conflict with no formal declaration of war and remote or conjectural threats to the territory of the United States....

No, they're Quixotically trying to balance Amtrak's finances, which always has been bad. If Amtrak was an airline it would have declared bankruptcy over and over and over again through its history.

This sounds like cyclical political pressure brought about when anti-train politicians are elected. It's virtue signaling. As for the underlying problem: imagine if interstate highways and airports were subjected to local property taxes the way rail infrastructure is.... conversely, imagine if the government built out high-speed rail infrastructure as aggressively as it did high-speed auto and air infrastructure....

I didn't see any mention in the article of how the aerial saw can perform precision pruning that I've always thought was the difference between trimming and maiming the trees.[1]. It's just a messy wilderness technique, I guess.

[1] https://www.preservationtree.com/blog/top-five-tree-pruning-...

Does anyone else find this business arrangement between the DME provider and the hospital to be fishy?

> they dispense the product on Breg’s behalf and Breg follows up with its own bill.

My intuition tells me that this relationship may have generated a little side hustle for the hospital, which if it really occurred would be extremely illegal. That reporter should dig a little more.

We'll, I'd say v.1.99. There is ample law out there that could make gig workers full employees in certain circumstances. What the gig platforms did was not new, it was simply big enough, bold enough, and arguably legally reckless enough that law enforcement either lost the will or ability to enforce existing laws to force gig platforms to act like mature, adult, law-abiding enterprises. California isn't legislating in an absence of law, it's clarifying that no one really likes guttersnipe employment practices, never did, and the fact that they have become prevalent in large, well-funded enterprises is a public policy problem that needs to be solved.

The minority tyranny described in the article reminds me of the hidden power of the owner of any system. For example, a large technology company may own and operate a repository benevolently and graciously, but it always retains the power to make exceptions. So there may be an ecosystem of smaller businesses that grow up on that platform but if any of them interfere with the broader interests of the platform owner, the rules may change (subtly or not), in a unique action to save the owner's interest. This is an attribute of most platforms tools, currencies and systems, and I think is an important if unexamined feature of them.

"Unfair" has a funny way of becoming (or retroactively being) "illegal," especially when you are talking about a consumer-facing monopoly. Who knows, long-term, you might be doing your boss a favor.

Ok, ok, asset price inflation measured by the S&P 500 has been about 9% annually from $123 in 1982 to $2,920 in 2019. In addition, the availability of debt amplifies increases. For example, the Case-Shiller Home Price Index increased from 100 to 220 between 2000 and 2019 (about 4% annually), but owners often leverage 80% at the start, and they actually have a 13% annual return (less carrying costs)-- lets say double the nominal return.

If high finance generated a ROI of 9% x 2 on average since 1982, through asset price gains magnified by leverage ... that would be 64% every 3 years, on average for almost 40 years. That's a remarkable inflationary event, however you choose to define 'hyperinflation.'

The Class of 1982 was special in graduating at the very inception of what has become a nearly 40-year bull market in credit, which is mostly a story of monetary and regulatory policy.

When the books are written 100 years from now, they will explain this period as a hyperinflation that our HBS-trained leaders in government and finance managed to trap mostly in financial assets, all the while counter-intuitively justifying their money-creation activities based on a theoretical potential to leak gradually out to the broader economy. Hyperinflation here to maybe generate useful inflation there, but really useful primarily in creating robber-barrons and oligarchs, who perpetuate the system through 'soft bribery' and 'reputation laundering' described in the article.

This article and the speeches etc. discussed in it should be a clarion call for folks to accelerate imagining what will come next, which may well go beyond increasingly cosmopolitan admissions and instruction at HBS.

Ok, point taken on underwriting and excluded risks, both of which are closely regulated and create legal commitments which insurers scrupulously honor by paying claims.

I think in any organization when management constantly is trying to squeeze costs there will be instances of incompetent conduct (which folks on HN will quickly note is often indistinguishable from malice). That said, if an insurer denies claims where liability and damages are reasonably clear, or abuse legal processes-- both of those are torts, legal fees are often available for the successful party, and if you feel you've been wronged by an insurer in any of those ways by all means go speak with a bad faith insurance attorney and good luck.

The insurance business is about paying claims with minimal friction, expense, and dispute, and making sure premiums are set at an appropriate level . Triggering bad faith discovery and expensive extracontractual settlements is not the point, and it is exactly what the companies identified in the article have done. The ability of claimants to bring those claims more than levels the playing field.

I'm just floored to see a post on HN criticizing someone else personally on HN and then calling insurance a "scam"? It's a regulated industry, it's definitely not a scam, and I'm really saddened at the level of misunderstanding brought about by a poorly written one-sided article that doubtless was inspired by some kind of sharp-elbowed personal injury litigation strategy by sources in the story.

I have seen and heard plenty of examples from the criminal justice system where fully impartial prosecutors, under no appearance of conflict, press forward on weak evidence and weaker investigation. So no, it's not mind-boggling. The source of the officer's salary raises an eyebrow for sure. Not going to defend that, but I'm also not going to rely on a breathless and fundamentally one-sided article to explain it.

For those interested in how a serious and meritorious bad-faith claim still generates exposure for the reporting party, despite all the immunities and whatnot, see Maxwell v. AIG.[1]. The sources in the article I'm sure are aware of the potential for huge extracontractual awards, and I'm just not impressed that angle also is not discussed in the article.

[1] https://law.justia.com/cases/massachusetts/supreme-court/201...

In this case the accused person sued the insurer who reported them to police and apparently won a settlement (that curiously did not forbid him from disparaging the insurer post-litigation).

The hypothetical you gave would be more on point if instead of deliberately withholding key information, the 911-caller made a truthful allegation for an ulterior motive. So more like, 'there are suspicious cars idling outside the firing range and people walking around with guns. Someone swung the muzzle in my direction for a moment and made me feel unsafe.'

As for the insurer paying the salary of the officer who investigates-- yeah, poor optics there but the extension of the hypothetical scenario would be that the police deprioritized gun crimes without funding and won't show up and investigate otherwise.

So the real newsworthy issue here, which the article missed, is why police departments in Pennsylvania don't investigate insurance fraud felonies unless someone in the private sector is willing to cover their expenses.

The insurers paid their own investigators to investigate the insurance claims. When those investigations generated evidence that in retrospect was defective or weak, the companies handed the file to the police. I don't know who pays whose salary in Pennsylvania, but the article goes after all kinds of public/private coordination in the SIU space, from NICB on down for alleged collusion, and from that perspective simply has it wrong.

The author gets this topic utterly backward. Large insurance companies each have essentially no business incentive to do anything except pay claims. Maybe they try to get insureds back to baseline on the cheap, but deny an insured loss entirely? No. Not even investigate them.

And so fraudulent claims and the shadow industry that surrounds them grow in size until something bad happens, like a grandma dies in a commercially-staged motor vehicle accident.[1] And then everyone gets all introspective and tries to figure out how we got to that regrettable point and what we can do to walk things back to a sane place where fraudulent activity is not acceptable.

Unfortunately, the basic incentives in the insurance industry still are, and always will remain, for companies to do as little as possible about fraudulent claims. What I see in the facts reported by the article are companies that have used fraud investigators who are poorly trained or under-resourced and are generating erroneous or weakly-supported evidence of fraud, which the companies then hand off to public authorities who apparently have no better resources. That leads to two observations:

1. If the problem is irrational, counterproductive prosecutions due to poor training and resources, writing a hit-piece about supposed conflicts of interests over supplemental funding being used to patch the resource problems isn't really part of the solution.

2. The insurance companies are paying for the consequences of poor-quality investigations communicated to authorities by their investigators. The article talks about some of the claimants suing the insurers for bad faith practices (and defamation?), which I'd call a "cottage" industry in the U.S., except that the industry is quite large and active. The insurers named in the article most definitely have been incentivized to learn the lesson not to refer marginal fraud prosecutions-- maybe not to refer prosecutions at all-- and so we'll repeat the cycle mentioned above until at a future time a grandmother, aunt or child is killed again in a staged fraudulent insurance claim, and then everyone will get introspective again and muse that at one point we had laws that incentivized insurers to identify and prosecute scam artists but bad press like this article led to changes that made them stop.

[1] https://www.ifb.org/(X(1)S(dzqyttjltzr0pry1l1wmvlxj))/Conten...