> A for profit hospital...
The hospital[1] under scrutiny is in fact a 501(c)(3).
[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/610...
4,146 karma · joined September 7, 2015
The hospital[1] under scrutiny is in fact a 501(c)(3).
[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/610...
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1843714/000095017024...
Looking at BLS wage statistics for tradesmen really won't tell you anything about the financial well-being of private small business entrepreneurs; you need to be looking at their company's financial statements---which is quite privileged data---for a meaningful idea.
Still worse, a brazen attempt to service an older R-22 system with R-410A, which would have completely destroyed a heat pump that I ended up getting an additional 5 years of serviceable life out of (after dismissing that clown on the spot).
Other ridiculous mistakes I've had to deal with are incorrect wiring of air handler emergency heat source during initial installation that prevented system from cooling; and on that same heat pump system less than a year later, discovering an improperly secured lug within exterior disconnect box that eventually created enough heat to fry ~6 inches of insulation before failing open and killing power to compressor (in retrospect, city inspector not only should have caught this, but should have required the contractor to replace the disconnect box altogether to remain in compliance with prevailing residential building code).
The grift has gotten so bad over the years that a few friends---a professional ME and electrician---have gone out of their way to earn § 608 tech certs[1] to legally purchase refrigerant and have sufficiently tooled themselves up to handle common failure modes.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/section608/section-608-technician-certif...
Not in California---the subject of the article---it ain't.
For example, in the Mariana Islands, there are two independent othography committees that have been low-key duking it out over an indigenous language with less than 50k native speakers; see these brief highlights[1; p. 11 onward] from a recognized scholar of the language for a small sampling.
In the CNMI, the language is routinely spoken (i.e. English is a second language in most households) and the CNMI's othography committee has taken a conservative approach, focusing on simple written rules that capture sound as spoken, and biasing its orthography towards serving as an optimal language preservation mechanism...which makes objective sense given its target population is overwhelmingly fluent.
In Guam, however, the spoken language was nearing generational extinction largely driven by American colonial influence not dissimilar to the going concern of native Hawaiians. Ironically, Guam's better funded orthography committee has taken a much more liberal approach in establishing new written rules and spellings (e.g. CHamoru is the official spelling of the language/people written into law as of 2017; yes, the letter CH is now entirely capitalized in a proper noun; previously Chamoru, as opposed to the prevailing and historically consistent Chamorro in the CNMI).
There's also been a recent resurgence of language adoption by the native youth cohort on Guam largely motivated by grassroots sociopolitical identity movement. This hipster generation has taken it upon themselves to replace an ever growing number of established words adopted during colonial rule hundreds of years ago with all but forgotten words of the ancient tongue...which I suppose is fair game as language evolution goes, but it's gotten to a point of irony where these changes are throwing off the elder native-speaking generation responsible for passing on the language to their progeny, e.g. family (English) --> familia (Spanish adopted) --> manggåfa (antiquated is the new hip). In contrast, no such shift in zeitgeist is happening in the CNMI.
[1] https://people.ucsc.edu/~schung/orthog_differences.pdf#page=...
Your cited article makes it abundantly clear that the provenance of said $17 million claim was a default clause entitling Miami-Dade County to three years worth of naming-rights fees.
They sold that speculative claim for $5 million cash---effectively recovering that year's otherwise uncollectible receivables---then immediately turned around and locked in a 17-year, $117.4 million agreement with Kaseya[1]; back-of-the-envelope says that's an implied ~$5.4 million (2023 dollars) per year with 3% annual inflation adjustment baked in.
Call me naive, but I imagine that if you're in the business of running a multi-purpose arena with real opex, you've gotta be the dumbest risk manager in South Florida to allocate expensive legal resources in chase of speculative claims when a mutual opportunity to repair a gapping hole in your balance sheet presents itself and you have a willing long-term replacement suitor lined up.
[1] https://www.miamidade.gov/global/news-item.page?Mduid_news=n...
Wow, now I can't unsee it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Sexually_Identify_as_an_Atta...
[2] https://archive.ph/20200101232918/http://clarkesworldmagazin...
Geopolitical threats aside, I imagine floating a farm would be the least of challenges[1].
[1] https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/80/1/1520-04...
The indigenous people of the Mariana Islands built somewhat similar dwellings atop a foundation of large stone structures called latte[1]. The latte today is a distinct symbol of Chamorro[2] identity (e.g. prominently represented in the flag of the CNMI[3] and surrounded by a mwarmwar, a symbol of Refaluwasch[4] identity).
P.S. Not Belauan, but sis-in-law is. Almost certainly just dox'd myself as well. I suspect the aggregate of us are truly ultra minorities in these tech backwaters.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latte_stone
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamorro_people
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_Northern_Mariana_I...
> This course kept the Birkenhead within approximately three miles of the coast, maintaining a speed of approximately 8 knots.
> One young officer did manage the three mile swim to the shore where he emerged to find his own horse standing waiting for him.
> Command by negation first came into being on individual ships, where it made sense - a captain who delegated authority and exercised command by negation could easily monitor his staff and communicate with them because it was a small environment.
...which is more or less asymptotic to the pragmatism behind Agile methods advocating for smaller teams of competent individual contributors.
Followed by:
> Within wider naval engagements, however, the Officer in Tactical Command (OTC) still maintained a rigid control structure, because communications systems simply couldn't work efficiently enough to make loose and autonomous doctrines viable.
> The introduction of AEW&C systems, SOSUS and satellite-fed data risked overwhelming the OTC, and so forces were forced to shift towards granting individual commanders more autonomy - something that improved communications made possible.
I interpreted this as an intercommunication scalability problem exacerbated by adoption of new tech. Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man-Month expressed this hazard as the n(n-1)/2 notional communication channels within a given team, to which effective segmentation (i.e. where command by negation comes into play) helps mitigate.
At face value, entitlement was never burdened by the concept of shame.
In any case, sure does look like a nasty Nunn-McCurdy breach that NASA has on their hands.
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/nasa-replans-clps-delivery...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Lunar_Payload_Servi...
[1] https://www.collinsaerospace.com/what-we-do/industries/milit...
In the US, those laws have been under persistent attack by Republicans since enactment, and there hasn't been a major election cycle where its repeal wasn't a campaign dog whistle[1].
And since when has for-profit industry required unequivocal evidence to strengthen their balance sheets and fatten their bottom lines?? These gamified business decisions are always beyond opaque and the burden of proof is always unfavorably shifted onto consumers in harm's way.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
Moreover, you voluntarily paid for and committed to earning a holistic degree---full stop. How you appraise its normative pieceparts is wholesale irrelevant, and the matter of extracting value from the vested experience is entirely on adult you. Something about leading a horse to water comes vaguely to mind.
A relevant counterfactual is that you could have bypassed lower division altogether and just audited upper division courses which you independently deemed to contain intrinsic market value as a non-degree-seeking student, dramatically reducing financial liabilities and time commitments to academic lethargy. Hell, you could have skipped university altogether and developed the necessary technical skills that you think the market values online for free! And yet you didn't...almost as if you desire the fringe benefits that society extends to formal degree holders without actually putting forth the honest effort expected of your accredited peer equivalents across the nation. Have your cake and eat it too much?
Example of real world consequences? Every year, my employer swallows an absurd indirect expense explicitly reminding its workforce of statutory regulation, internal policy, and professional obligation towards ethical practice to cover its ass because so many of my so called "learned" peers conveniently dismiss the softer elements of their formal education---major election years being particularly egregious---and then these former employees cry when an industry conditioned to anticipate such halfbaked behavior catches them in the act, chews them up, and spits them out like expendable cud without regret.
You reap what you sow.
[1] https://a.ualr.edu/classes/index.php?term=202460&campus=M&se...
[2] https://catalog.ualr.edu/preview_program.php?catoid=20&poid=...
> The only reason they pull stunts like this is because it actually doesn't have as much of an impact.
> And not what they're told is important by educators who have an obvious bias, but what they can see in the reality of the job market.
Oh, how you've missed the forest for the trees.
These students paid real money to voluntarily attend an undergraduate ethics and technology course, and like the complacent naivete of lemmings, immediately walked right into a philosophy professor's well-laid trap in a way that directly supports her research agenda[1]:
>> Her current projects focus on ways in which emerging technologies threaten to undermine essential conditions for human flourishing.
These students were played just as easily as the commercial tools they blindly leaned into, and if that doesn't sharpen their critical faculties while eliciting a meaningful opportunity to introspect on what the future has in store for them, I don't know what will.
> Once you can actually reproduce the issue, you've often done 80-99+% of the work already.
War story...
I spent over a year on-and-off between adjacent sprints circa peak COVID chasing an elusive intermittent bug that kept coming back after failing formal acceptance testing performed at a designated off-site location. Despite requesting that I be flown to this location to personally replicate the issue within days of the initial report (unable to replicate in local lab and familiar enough with the system's design to intuit the superficially unbounded depth of the rabbit hole) and every subsequent failed test report thereafter, PM persistently decided to allocate funds elsewhere and just kept kicking this product to the back of the pipeline.
Nearing project end as the last backlogged issue in queue, I managed to isolate the root cause to a race condition in a firmware ISR of an embedded microcontroller buried 3 levels deep in mixed-signal hardware. This subroutine's execution path interacted with an async signal from an instrument that was occasionally ~10 ms slower between bursts than any of the references we had in our lab...which really shouldn't have mattered because the entire flow control setup was designed to be timing insensitive and executed by non-realtime host...except this one buried onion subroutine that really wasn't.
Attaining local replication was an imperative, which required some creative speculation and a kludge hardware mock, but once I got to a state of repeatably mirroring the failure mode at will, the problem was effectively 95% solved; what followed was a quick subroutine rewrite, anti-pattern scrubdown review, host software update to account for new payload, and instructing off-site techs to field reprogram before the next scheduled test event. I'd never been happier to tag an issue resolved and finally merge an all but abandoned WIP branch.
To this day, I still don't know with certainty what caused that catalyst instrument to occasionally perform ~10 ms slower relative to our references. In the end, we indirectly absorbed at least 50x the notional cost of that site visit when the dust finally settled.
That's +1% share of a pie on the order of $TRILLIONS between 2006-2013 to which the top-1% directly benefited from by under-reporting and playing pass-through games...and this was retrospective analysis long before the TCJA corporate tailwind went into effect.
[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w28542
[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3089423
No...the proportional equivalent impact of ~150,300 $140k families.
Of the $32.653 billon in revenue Visa pulled in last year, 2.3% was network and processing opex, while 53% was pure bottom line profit[1].
Furthermore, squaring 17.9% tax provision line item: if your household had simple married-filing-jointly tax return with an AGI greater than ~$139.5k, you paid more in 2023 taxes than Visa...and that assumes you live in a state without income taxes.
Think about that for a hot minute while recalibrating expectations.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1403161/000140316123...
Priced individually:
| Fitting | Price (ea) | Qty | Total |
|---------|------------|-----|-------|
| T | 3.34 | 12 | 40.08 |
| 90 | 5.79 | 4 | 23.16 |
| 45 | 4.95 | 4 | 19.80 |
| 180 | 4.95 | 2 | 9.90 |
|=========|============|=====|=======|
| 22 | 92.94 |
If you've got the cash to burn on benchstock at this price point, more power to you, but the point is you're really paying a premium to throw away choice for the illusion of value with this bundle.
The disaggregation you couldn't readily find is on p. 25 of the 2023 PSF Annual Impact Report[1].
[1] https://s3.dualstack.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/pythondotorg-as...
No, it's stacked, and strictly applicable between 400-3000 ppm as characterized (despite 0-32000 ppm operating range by design).
At the lower 400 ppm end, accuracy is +/- 50 ppm +/- 20 ppm = +/- 70 ppm.
At the upper 3000 ppm end, accuracy is +/- 50 ppm +/- 150 ppm = +/- 170 ppm.
Also worth noting that the calibrated reference used to determine this published accuracy has an uncertainty of +/- 2%; ref datahseet[1] Table 7.
Caveat emptor: this published accuracy can't be trusted at face value when sampling more than 1 meas/min; ref ibid.[1] Table 4.
[1] https://www.infineon.com/dgdl/Infineon-PASCO2V15-DataSheet-v...
Cite? Wiki[1] appears to suggest otherwise.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_McNerney#Career_path