lostcolony

-Some- realtors will. The best ones won't; they know they're offering you more than Zillow. When I bought, our realtor was constantly hounding the seller's realtor and our own financing company to move the process forward, as well as proactively reaching out to answer our questions and in general help us feel good about the process. She also returned texts and calls promptly, and she had an arrangement with an extremely good independent home inspector, plus pretty much every kind of contractor we could need for improvements; everyone she put us in touch with was amazing. She didn't ask for exclusivity, and she absolutely didn't need it.

Meanwhile in the past when we were looking, a mediocre one tried to get us to sign an exclusivity deal that we'd agree to use him until we chose to cancel (no stipulations there at least, though legally I don't know if he could have, but still, into perpetuity unless we canceled) for -any house in the entire state-.

One of many explanations for their brain damage I suppose.

Even outside of VC companies. I worked briefly for a large, old tech giant you've heard of, and was told to hire two teams of contractors. I didn't have -work- for two teams of contractors; it was all green field development and I already had a team of devs champing at the bit for any requirement product (which was -extremely- slow) actually defined, and they were sitting idle half the time as it was, and I was basically told "the roadmap says we need these two extra teams starting in a month, so hire them". So I did, reiterating my caveats. Cue two months later when leadership was asking me why the contractors weren't doing anything; isn't there -something- they could be doing?

Fine, for the terminally pedantic - I refer to the fact that the prospective buyer can not easily say "nah" and walk away; healthcare for a loved one can't be viewed as a purely economic transaction. It's easy to say "I don't need that expensive a car", even possible to say "I can make it work without a car", it's incredibly hard to not get Spot his life saving surgery because of money.

It ceases to be a purely economic function because people can't just walk away, and that has market effects that mean the typical pressures of a free market (such as 'supply and demand') become muddied. Sufficient supply is irrelevant if Spot is suffering -right now-, all the providers form a monopoly, and their prices are massively inflated.

Citation needed.

Uh...it still has the "you need this or you see a loved one suffer" thing going for it which leads to an ability to seek maximum profit. Large multinationals are monopolizing by buying out small vet practices, also allowing them to set prices. And those monopolies not only offer their own insurance, but there are also numerous others offering pet insurance.

So it might be the "closest thing to a fully free market in healthcare there is (in the US)", in that it's slightly better than the human healthcare market...but that's it. It's still nowhere close.

And there are plenty of other markets, all of them cheaper, and many with better outcomes...though I guess few countries with "freer" markets (since pretty much every other western country either has a single payer system, or has mandatory private insurance or similar, such as Switzerland), so I guess if your point is that having a "free market" approach to healthcare leads to worse outcomes in every instance?

Same reason they're used in grading. How else do you ensure that "partially correct" is consistently weighted?

Certainly, in college, I recall one calculus problem, we had to find the local maxima or minima of a function, something along those lines. Long and short, I differentiated, plugged in for zero, and made an algebra mistake, got one right, one wrong. Something like that. 5/10. Someone else...differentiated, and ended with the differentiated function set equal to zero, but didn't solve for it. 8/10.

No idea if that was a lack of rubric, or a badly worded rubric ("got one of the maxima/minima wrong = -5 points", "Well, he didn't get either one wrong, so..."), but yeah, a good rubric would have prevented that inconsistency in grading that I still carry with me to this day because it was so unfair.

You can also access the website from your phone (though it might require 'desktop mode' at this point). That's what I did when I used Duolingo if I wanted it on the go, and the experience was a lot better (as well as allowing me to type answers as you mention).

Yeah; that won't work for replacing lenses in existing frames, but for a new pair it's what I do. $50-60 and I've got my prescription in a frame I like with all the coatings.

Nah. Outside of the vision cartel you can get replacement lenses for any pair of frames < $100, with all the various coatings and special shit for low hundreds. Likewise, using insurance to just replace the lenses, if a plan includes that, is often $50 or less. It's just shopping at the vision cartel without insurance = huge sticker price.

Same. Though Lastpass' ability to request a trusted user's passwords (with a configurable amount of time to deny the request) obviates a lot for my wife if I were to pass.

Even if we had a competent, non-bitterly partisan Congress, no.

Because then you're left with who is better convincing uninformed people; the experts, or paid lobbyists.

More than that, it assumes the 19 headcount decision was a good management decision. It obviously wasn't; regardless of how brilliant the OP is (I have my reservations, just from the fact that the company opted to -rewrite- it rather than extend/build around it), you don't hire 19 people in one year to replace a piece of software written by one person. That reeks of "we need this replaced ASAP; get two teams of contractors working on it", without realizing that past a certain point adding people creates negative value.

So as someone trying to get better at drawing, I will say that the -ease of use- matters tremendously.

I'm doing gesture drawings daily now on a Supernote. The ability to use the entire 'page', then hit next page and start a new one, lets me crank them out in a way pen and paper doesn't.

Pen and paper -absolutely- is better for trying to capture a likeness, and the actual "quality" of the job at the end is about the same (if it isn't it's probably better), but the sheer ease of use means I do the thing more, which means I'm practicing more, which means I am, indeed, becoming a better artist.

The tools have to be suitable to the task (and I don't think anyone is saying the various frontend frameworks are -unsuitable-), but after that ease of use still matters.

>> Puranjay's claim here is almost literally "change will happen, and it will bring grief."

The only place he mentions grief (rather than "demographic change requires economic change") is at the very end, with "And any large scale shift in economic models comes with some grief, at the very least." Nowhere else.

Some grief. As a footnote. That's hardly quantified, and itself could be covered simply by the fact change is hard. Japan was forced into changing, and...it went fine. The US hasn't yet. It'll require adjustment, which will probably bring some unpleasantness as we all adapt. That isn't alarmist, which was my point.

"People" might, but the post you're replying to didn't. All they said was "Declining populations simply cannot maintain the “grow at all costs” current economic order" which implies a change is necessary, not whether that change is good/bad/whatever.

Yeah; the ones who treat conservatively are gold. I'm still looking for one in my current location over ones who are aggressive in pushing additional treatments and things.

>> Not everything is designed, or planned. Sometimes the result is just the sum of a bunch of not necessarily coordinated decisions.

I'll go one further. Almost always. Organizations are basically distributed systems; you theoretically could have fully coordinated decisions with an elegant and efficient network topology (i.e., the decisions involve only those people with relevant information, and don't pass through umpteen unrelated routing layers), but I've yet to see that. Invariably those orgs favoring coordination (CP from a CAP perspective) are slow and inefficient, with too many meetings seeking signoff from stakeholders who have no relevant knowledge or responsibility. The more 'agile' orgs (including suborgs routing around that kind of inefficiency) end up with eventually consistent systems, more AP, and, well, yeah, they're necessarily not coordinated. Hopefully they still have clearly defined areas of responsibility, interfaces, and useful sets of abstraction, but those abstractions are leaky, and the interfaces themselves developed as needs arise.

"If working with dangerous machinery without union representation for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, for company scrip was good enough for my great-grandfather when he was 8 years old, it's good enough for me!"

>> I wouldn't be surprised if half of Kickstarter's engineers pumped out fewer than 3 PRs a week.

Ah yes. That always super meaningful metric of high performance - number of PRs. Doesn't matter what it is, if you can't solve it and push some code in less than two days, it's a clear indicator you're a terrible engineer.

Their current minimum is 0%. I suspect "you get a 3% raise this year" will be treated the same way "you get a 0% raise this year" is.

What...sort of environment do you think caused them to unionize?

Oh, I know the incentives. I strongly suspect there's even an additional one you don't list - tax writeoffs.

And you're going onto a tangent that I am very much in agreement with (that the whole system is massively broken and suffers all sorts of perverse incentives), but -my- point, if you'll recall, is that not everything gets written off. People still get unexpected medical bills -all the time-, for things their insurance didn't fully cover; this despite their deductible and/or max out of pocket.

Or, as I commented before, and which you're...agreeing to, in a whole lot of words, it's a provider choice, and not guaranteed. I.e., every time you go to the doc you're rolling the die; doubly so for emergency stuff that you can't get pre-authorized. "It doesn't happen -that- often" seems to maybe be your argument, but it happens enough, and the consequences of it happening at all are devastating.

>> Any charges denied by the insurance were just dropped by the provider, not pushed to me.

That's a provider choice, and not guaranteed.

From both the context and the picture it's clear she's not actually, you know, retiring. The amount in someone's retirement account is meaningless unless you know their age and their income. Yeah, $10k isn't a lot if you're in your 60s and living a lifestyle that costs 6+ figures a year; it's a lot if you're making $30k a year and are in your 20s, and quite understandable if in your 30s at that income level. Three jobs are quoted because yeah, they probably are part time (and just saying "works 60 hours a week" or whatever doesn't carry the same punch), but -they may not be able to get a full time job-. Or else...you know, they might have healthcare.

The emergency room has ludicrously high costs, and none of his medical history. You're literally saying "don't expect to be able to see your primary care provider, go to the emergency room instead" -because of existing debt-.

You're making a lot of assumptions...all of which miss the point. Why is life shattering medical debt a common thing we tolerate in this country, given every other Western country has managed to make it a rarity? But, to your assumptions - maybe and she gave birth prematurely and ended up being seen by a hospital who were out of network and her insurance didn't cover it. Or even went to an in-network hospital, but was seen by doctors who were out of network, as frequently can happen, especially in emergencies when you can't personally vet the doctor is in network for you before you see them. Certainly, something unexpected happened (maybe even the pregnancy itself! Something to look forward to with the Supreme Court set to overturn Roe v Wade), and insurance wasn't there. Why is that acceptable in this country?

I've had mixed experiences with their recruiters, and their interviewers. Some recruiters were on the ball and pushed things forward; others just disappeared. Some interviewers were great, clearly wanted it to be a collaborative thing, so were responsive to the questions I asked and helpful in rubber ducking as I talked through it (I'm thinking here especially of an algorithm session)...others clearly didn't care, were cold and didn't seek to answer anything in a way I could move forward (here I'm thinking of a system design session; exactly where you -need- answers to scope anything out).

I happily never particularly cared one way or the other about working for Google (and only once or twice did their recruiters reach out/get back to me when I was actually looking; I am sufficiently ambivalent that most of the times their recruiters have reached out have been "I'm not currently looking"), but their cachet has only dropped since I started my career, and their remote-as-second-class-citizen approach currently makes it a non-starter for me. I'm not going back to the office.

It's not a binary spectrum between action game and walking simulator.

Tomb Raider had some sections that probably fit the walking simulator genre, but also areas of action and puzzle games.

Walking simulator is defined by moving and exploration. Interactions usually involve reading, or changing your environment (not in ways to unlock new areas, but perhaps to see new things). Playing one, you clearly note the vibe. There isn't much to do except move forward and see/experience new things, building out a plot and understanding of a narrative as you do so. You don't generally drive the plot through your actions, but instead learn about it.

Doesn't seem like it would be widespread usage given the checklist they provide. Title is a little misleading; it's not just "a doxy a day keeps the lyme disease away!" or similar.

Yeah. If only we'd had some other reason to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels by now!

I never really understood why people wanted to work for them in the first place. I knew they had large RSU packages (probably rather depressing now for the people tempted by it), but their culture always sounded horrible. Everything I saw screamed "you'll be expected to work > 40 hours every week", and even when they talked about culture it was hustle, make the company money. Which is probably more honest than most companies, but being so on the nose with the exploitation normalizes the expectation.