Which is why I said "mostly". Anyway, remove that sentence and the rest of my comment stands.
1,517 karma · joined April 7, 2011
The health care system was structured poorly before any of this got started. Basically, how health insurance worked in the US is that about 90% of people get health insurance through their employer. This happened for two reasons: during the wage freezes around World War II, companies started offering fringe benefits to get around it, and there is a standard tax deduction for companies to offer health insurance. Individuals cannot claim this deduction.
For the remaining 10%, about half of them buy insurance on the open market, which is really cheap and easy for people that are young and healthy, expensive for older people, and pretty much impossible if you have an existing condition.
The remaining 5% go uninsured either by choice or because they can't afford insurance at all. That doesn't mean they can't get health care, that just means they use free clinics and pay cash at places like urgent care centers.
The ACA made changes to the insurance market. Among the changes were new minimum requirements for what companies could sell as "health insurance". For example, even if you are a single 25-year-old male, you now have to pay for maternity coverage, mental health coverage, childhood mental health care, and other things that you're very unlikely to need. Further, health insurance is no longer allowed to have a cap on coverage, and companies are not allowed to charge old, sick people more than a small multiple of what they charge young and healthy people.
Mind you, a key campaign promise while passing the bill was that "if you like your health insurance you can keep it".
After the bill was passed in rules were promulgated, it turns out that if health insurance companies make any change at all in a plan (even changing the deductible by five dollars), then they are no longer able to offer the old plan and have to switch to a plan that qualifies.
This rule is resulting in millions of people having their health insurance canceled, and they are being forced to go on to the (nonworking) exchanges to buy health insurance that in most cases is much more expensive (if you're relatively healthy and young). New insurance results in you having to pick all new doctors, most likely, also.
So the main opposition comes from conservatives who oppose it on the grounds that government is interfering in the healthcare market, healthy people who are now being forced to pay sometimes more than twice as much, and young people who now get to subsidize the insurance of old people.
An additional philosophical objection comes from the individual mandate, which technically was upheld by the Supreme Court but many conservatives think that the Chief Justice had to contort himself into a pretzel to do it. Essentially, the ruling said that the government doesn't have the power to force you to buy something but they do have the ability, under the taxing power to tax you for not buying something. This was not written into the law, and the Supreme Court had to, in effect, change a clause in the law to make this work.
There is a populist opposition to the law because there are many large companies and labor unions (and Congress itself, including the president) that have been exempted from the law... And there are rumors that the president is going to further exempt certain well-connected labor unions from the tax on high-cost health plans.
There are legal objections to the law because the president decided to postpone a tax on employers that was written into the law. Many legal conservatives don't believe that the president has the power to rewrite portions of a law after it's been passed by Congress.
There are religious objections the law because it requires private companies run by very religious people to offer abortion and contraception coverage in the health insurance they offer their employees.
And finally, because the Democrats and the President decided to pass this law without any Republican votes (And using a questionable tactic called reconciliation that enabled them to pass it with 50 votes instead of 60 in the Senate), there is no political downside to opposing the law on the Republican side. Mostly, Republicans dislike the law and therefore their representatives in Congress get more kudos as their objections to the law get louder and louder.
And there is no end in sight.
Then you poke fun at "American idiots", and then admit in your last sentence that you don't really even know how the law works yourself.
Bonus points for picking the two conditions, heart disease and diabetes, that mostly result from poor choices instead of random innocent victims.
Your whole post is like a parody of pseudo-intellectual liberalism.
That's .03%. Assuming you start from some whole number of percentage ownership, it's almost impossible to get diluted that low. You would need something like 10 rounds of 50% dilution.
The only thing the video does is spend three minutes saying "if you have a problem, solve it among yourselves rather than going to the boss".
* If there are instructions, that's usually a red flag to me that I've done something poorly in the UI design. I agree with one of the previous commenters that you should do a make/model search instead.
* I'm not quite sure what to do with the filter field on the results page. It's just a blank text field. Does it filter by keyword?
I wish these guys the best of luck. We often get asked if we are worried about this company or that company that seems to be positioning as a direct competitor, and the answer is no. In fact, the best advice we ever got was from a competitor.
The market is so big that there's room for a lot of players to make a lot of money. Though, ultimately, we think that the market will be led by one major player (In the same way that eBay is where you go to buy used things and Amazon is where you go to buy new things), which is the reason we have consistently chosen not to narrow our scope either geographically or by vertical.
It's also interesting that they chose to seed the database from contractor records. We thought about doing this, but wanted to be able to say that every service provider on our site was real. Not sure what we would've done if we had to do it over again, but it appears they've had some success (25,000).
The hardest part is yet to come, though. We've been at this for five years, and the biggest take away is that it's not really about getting service providers or getting consumers - the important part is what happens in the middle. That's what we've spent the most time working on.
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/171732/help-us-make-...
I can understand why it appears this way from outside, but we've never been moving faster than we are now.
I have been on board for about six months, and in that time we have rolled out lots of usability and layout improvements: streamlined sign-up process, a new anonymous homepage, a consolidated and curated help center, completely rewritten search, new badges page, upcoming new privileges page...
In the next couple of months, we will be finishing sitewide SSL, redesigns of our more high-traffic pages, and a complete re-factor around closing to make that process more clear.
Stay tuned, because I'm excited about where we're headed.
It's a two-sided marketplace, which means we had the chicken and egg problem and the network problem. To add on to it, we had to figure out how to build trust using a medium (Internet) that has been traditionally untrusted.
We had to figure out how to scale customer service for a business where we quickly found out that people expect good customer service. The Google model for support wasn't working.
Further, the field is littered with the corpses of, sometimes well-funded, ventures that have failed in the same space.
And finally, our initial marketing plan involved boots on the ground, kind of like a political campaign (all the founders met in DC on a political campaign). That one failed quickly.
The latest, hardest part is scaling the matching engine without using humans. Not sure I'm at liberty to say exactly how we solved that.
Basically, it comes down to study + experience. But study is absolutely a necessary prerequisite; otherwise you have no criteria to decide what went wrong when something fails.
I did a post here about some books that I found useful
http://www.jeremytunnell.com/posts/books-on-user-experience-...
I basically spent a year working part-time and studying part-time. I read every UX book, article, and website that I could find, and then I got experience by offering to do a heuristic analysis for startups on the Washington DC hacker news list for $20 per hour.
This kind of thing:
http://www.jeremytunnell.com/posts/watchparty-tv-a-usability...
I used to be a developer who felt the same way. All of this stuff is just common sense. Then, I decided to do a career transition into full-time UX and spent a year studying intensely.
Now, I look back on my old self and laugh. Practically everything was wrong, and some things were horrifically wrong. There's just too much to think about and too many fundamental concepts that you must be aware of to do good UX (Gestalt principles, color theory, design patterns, etc.)
The way I feel about this post is about the same as developers out there feel when your uncle says "How hard can web development be? My nephew made me a website in Wordpress in a couple of weeks"
I get that it has nothing to do with armband itself, it just seems like a very poor choice. I cringed.
The IEEE is an association, and doesn't actually have any engineers working for it. Likely, their website is outsourced to one of the local web development firms in town.
In effect, you're saying "If we could get twice as many people, then we would have twice as many people".
In reality, there is some reason why women don't want to be programmers. Therefore, it follows that per capita, it's going to be harder to bring women into the fold.
To use your example, if you really wanted to increase your contributors to your open source project, you would be much better served to use your limited capital to attract men who are already predisposed to your project but unaware of it rather than women who are both unaware of it and predisposed against it.
I've been around the block a few times – enough to practically A/B test the various treatments out there.
I think this post covers things pretty well, although I have not had any luck with the psychosomatic approach, despite trying that too.
For the past 10 years, I've been retreating, so various things have worked at various times. I can't praise the kinesis keyboard enough, but unfortunately I'm too far gone for that. I currently use Dragon NaturallySpeaking for practically all of my typing, a bamboo tablet for mouse input, and a capacitive touch keyboard called a "cleankeys" for typing (it's made for dentist offices), although this is forcing me back to hunt and peck typing.
I've also had some limited success with some herbal and vitamin supplements at various times (and some definite failures).
However, my issues have not really improved a great deal until about nine months ago when I started a real strength training program (starting strength), although I have a few caveats for that program if anybody decides to pick it up.
I also believe that my upper extremity numbness is coming from some sort of thoracic outlet syndrome exacerbated by tight pectoralis minor muscles (I recently injured my pectoralis minor lifting weights and have noticed that my upper extremity numbness has gone away while I have been doing rehab stretching). I also had a nerve conduction test which came out perfect, so there's no impingement in the extremity itself.
Be careful with standing desks, because my shoulder tendinitis developed after switching to a standing desk and typing with my arm unsupported for a few months.
Not be self-promotional, but as a hobby I put together a website where I do reviews of RSI equipment for beer money: www.RSIinformation.com Most of what I would write in this comment is already elaborated quite a bit on the site.
The one thing that I would pass along is that tendon injuries do not heal correctly without stress. This means that tendinitis/tendinosis and a lot of other RSI issues will not heal simply from rest; you must "rehab" the tendon with exercise, but make sure it's the right kind.
I only wish that I knew 10 years ago when I know now, so if anybody is having issues, hit me up via email and I'm glad to help. I probably know more than your doctor does about RSI at this point.
However, I literally have never had a positive experience discussing religion or politics, except with people with whom I already agree.
I have a personal rule to never do so, and I've even attempted to apply that to the Internet and failed on several occasions. Yet, I regret having tried in each case.
I'm actually in the process of heading in the other direction. In fact, I think that I recently lost a budding friendship because of a heated political discussion.
However, I think there's one thing that needs to be reiterated, for everybody who's reading hacker news and thinking about starting a company:
The world probably does not need yet another incarnation of project management/collaboration software.
If I had a dollar for every first-time entrepreneur who told me they were starting a new project management tool for team collaboration app, I'm probably have enough to A-round my own company.
That's not to say it's not possible to succeed here – Trello is a case in point – but one has to realize that Joel has been in the project management space for probably close to a decade. It's even probable that he would've failed except for the fact he has such a large online following that just happens to be his target audience.
To use the example below, if 9/10 startups fail then probably 49/50 of project management/collaboration startups fail.
By all means, do a startup, but at least give yourself a fighting chance.
However, I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility that they will come to the taxpayer looking for a bailout soon.
The US should remove all the mandates from the Postal Service and all of the subsidies and open up mail delivery for competition from FedEx and UPS.
http://www.jeremytunnell.com/posts/books-on-user-experience-...
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/12/gold-an...