jcrben

Credit card companies make money off the fees, so why would they want to lower them? The pressure for low fees must come from retailers.

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22277404 on the rise of surcharging

Surcharging is becoming more common with a couple companies like CardX focusing on it: https://thepaypers.com/expert-opinion/credit-card-surchargin...

Particularly driven by https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressions_Hair_Design_v._S...

We as in people who want to live in a reasonable climate in 50 years, when I will likely still be alive.

No. In theory we could have just two active (non-index) managers, and their average returns certainly would not replicate the market.

If you have back pain in the morning, make sure you try a new mattress. Research suggests adjustable (e.g Sleep Number) can help you find the best. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23527...

If you have back pain in the morning, try changing your mattress. Adjustable firmness (e.g. Sleep Number) are particularly helpful as they allow you to test various options.

Just do what Plaid does and scrape it. Your bot could also download a csv file.

If only they had built-in keyboard shortcut customization.

If you edit using Visual Editor and compare that to the old wiki markup, you will understand. Visual Editor much faster esp. with automatic citation templates. My time is valuable (more than when I started as a poor college student) and my tolerance for bad UX has declined as technology in general has improved. And that's just one tool which has improved. There's an annual community wishlist survey: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_20...

And yes, it's reasonable. I work in tech as a software engineer and it's not as cheap as people think.

If editors don't get better tools, they'll stop editing. Then the content for basic users will not be worth reading.

Source: continuously edited since 2007, and continue in large part due to improved tools.

It has been raising an endowment for several years: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment

You can donate at https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Landi...

Over half of the board is elected by the community of editors, so it doesn't seem very likely https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/board/.

I vote in these elections and count Dr. James Heilman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Heilman) as a friend.

As someone who has edited since 2007 (pseudoanonymously, about 13k edits), I appreciate the continued investments that Wikipedia has made into various initiatives, most importantly technology. It's not cheap or easy to stay on top of technical trends (e.g., upgrading to PHP 7) while shipping feature improvements. For example, I use Visual Editor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor) all the time.

Except that highly-paid people have a right to resources, which they often invoke by buying lots of stuff.

California has time of use rates (relatively new and uncommon). And we're beginning to see deep discounts in the middle of the day consistent with the solar. So people may strategically charge during the day. If it's a commuter car on a reasonable commute and you've got 300 miles of range, it's feasible to wait till midday.

You can see the power supply / consumption at http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.aspx

That seems like the type of thing your state medical association should lobby against.

Btw, in California the state medical and hospital associations are definitely more influential than insurers. And I bet that's true in MA too.

What do you mean about lobbying? There's always lobbying by both sides.

Narrow networks are usually a symptom of few and picky doctors imo. But I don't really know. Economics suggests that more insurers in a market should benefit providers.

No, their net income margin is capped at 20% (well, technically their total administrative expenses are capped at 20%). Their total valuation is mostly a multiple of total net income, which is driven by higher revenue. New upstarts are probably looking to operate at a lower margin anyhow (similar to other growth-oriented companies e.g. Amazon) to achieve higher valuation from revenue growth.

It's quite clear that the insurers are aggressively trying to control costs when you consider that networks on exchanges are extremely narrow and denial rates are actually pretty high - IIRC nearly 1/3 of claims are initially denied for ACA plans.

These companies are also bringing the narrow network model to the small and large group markets too, where utilization review is also quite aggressive and has been for a long time.

It basically works out like textbook oligopolistic competition models where the Nash equilibrium resembles a prisoner's dilemma. For companies to increase "total market size" by allowing costs to balloon would require unusual collusion and there's no evidence of it.

No, this is a terrible (but surprisingly common) argument. Most insurers operate in competitive markets - even if they let costs balloon, their competitor probably doesn't and can undercut them. There are a few that operate in non-competitive markets but the larger and startup insurers (e.g. Oscar Health) are aggressively entering new regions these days.

Most insurers are pretty aggressive at managing costs thru managed care techniques (described at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managed_care#Techniques).

Everyone who knows anything about healthcare policy has been on board with decoupling for decades, but the big corporate self-insured plans lobby plus the union lobby plus the loosely-informed general public is too strong.

ACA exchanges set up the infrastructure to decouple in a market-oriented way.

But single-payer would also fix it.

FAIR Health is a claims db. It doesn't have a single price. You think every doctor should be paid at what percentile - 90th? Doesn't make that much sense to me. I know that's typical UCR.

Also, you don't have to do everything, but you could start by doing something other than complaining about doctors who have ruined many people's lives getting paid less.

I'm working on setting up a Bay Area chapter of https://rightcarealliance.org/ (which is national) for grassroots healthcare organizing - feel free to hit me up if you'd like to participate.

Yes, self-insured employer plans are exempt from state law under ERISA. It sucks but the big multi-state corporate lobby doesn't want to have to deal with the patchwork of state laws.

I believe the DOL could fix this via regulation, but doubt they will.

S 1895 Lower Healthcare Costs Act would fix this nationally https://www.natlawreview.com/article/beyond-surprise-billing...

If physicians are not going to get on board with solving the problem, then I'm not too sympathetic when it doesn't work out well for them.

Physicians who see patients while out-of-network without asking permission are outrageously unethical.

And if someone is unconscious or dying, then you can't ask permission.

Real estate tends to be leveraged.

This order targets negotiated prices, not hospital chargemaster prices.

Many (most?) hospitals will give you semi-accurate estimates if you hassle them long enough these days; I recently spent a month and a half and a dozen phone calls getting an accurate estimate from UCSF on a predictable medical procedure (cost: $3,300 OOP on a $10,000 negotiated rate).

You're talking about the non-shoppable expenses. Those would be handled the same way that they are now.

But most expenses are pretty predictable, like the colonoscopies that I have to get periodically (and which I do shop around for, altho it's damn difficult). Yeah, if there's a bowel perforation all bets are off, but that happens 1/1000 times.

I think it's surprising that people are saying the code is too sensitive to view. We live in a world in which an increasingly large portion of code is open-source. Is it really that big of a deal if a prospective hire gets a glance at your CRUD web app code?

People don't have photographic memories. They aren't going to go home and write this stuff out.

Granted, there are areas where code is perhaps too sensitive for even a quick look. But I think those are the exception.

It's unrealistic that an organization can predict exactly what users want. If you try to do that, it's like central planning of the economy. It just doesn't maximize people's happiness.

However, if you give them lots of control and monitor choices, you can modify your defaults to improve that situation... but don't expect preferences to remain static.

Wikipedia notability is actually quite strict. Relatively few businesses have significant coverage by multiple independent reliable sources, for example.

I use Plaid, but I'm not paying them (and not planning to) so I don't have much trust that they won't pull the rug out from me.

Maybe it's niche, but the number of programmers in the world continues to grow and if there was one that would be a powerful differentiator among that audience.