pandemicsoul

Yeah, but if his tool showed – hypothetically – that in 75% of cases the generic (or just the cheaper medication) was just as good or better, that seems like it would have been a slam dunk?

"Thing is if people start hoarding medicine then new companies can pop up and fill in the gap"

That's not how the market works. That's not how patents work. That's not how medicine works. That's not how any of this works.

That's great. I don't know if they hid the comments I was referring to or what, but all the top comments at first were these really disgusting academic takes on torture and debating its value. Even for HN – which I often find to be pretty skewed toward the libertarian like others mentioned – it was appalling.

Bonkers reading through this thread and seeing people discuss torture as casually and unemotionally as if it were just a regular ol' anyday thing. Like wow folks, this is not academic!

You're right that public transit is inefficient for people living in rural areas, but 83% of the U.S. population lives in urban areas so to simply discount public transit as an "urbanist hobby horse" seems pretty hand-wavey.

You only have to look to other developed countries to see how fast, cheap, and efficient public transit is not only a major and driving force in the economy, but also a critical part of the social safety net. Just because America's public transit systems have been hobbled by the oil-industry doesn't mean we shouldn't be improving it for everyone's benefit.

Doesn't Apple REQUIRE a subscription on most apps? Like haven't there been multiple devs talking about how Apple rejects "free" apps if they "don't seem to have a unique purpose" or whatever, and you need to have either an up-front cost or a subscription model for Apple to accept it?

why make a promise you intend to break?

Spamhaus, which (as far as I can tell) is seen as the "most legitimate" blacklist is just as bad, if not worse. UCEPROTECT might be extorting you, but at least you know the name of the game. With Spamhaus, any email sender can get blacklisted for whatever nonsense rules Spamhaus comes up with – many times a set of entrapments they themselves have devised – and they have zero urgency or clarity around resolving it. "Fix the problem" they say. Okay, what's the problem? "Be a better sender." Okay, how? It's like a conversation with Yoda.

To be clear: I DON'T think blacklists are the problem. I think the problem is that a half-dozen major blacklists are controlled by unaccountable organizations who make up rules willy nilly, and privilege major email senders while punishing smaller senders / home hobbyists.

Spam blocklists are run by an unaccountable cowboy cult that somehow has managed to consolidate a ton of power simply for the fact that most people who run email inbox services didn't want to deal with the problem of spam, so they were more than willing to just hand over anti-spam "enforcement" to anyone who was allegedly doing "what was best for the internet." There's no check on these people who run these blacklists, and the system they've built is entirely a black box, antithetical to the principles of the open internet. And if you're not a huge corporation that can afford professional management of your email deliverability, good luck – the individuals and small organizations are just out of luck. It's a miserable racket and for what?

If you want to know why there's a new thread each week on HN about why it's impossible to host your own email service, this is why.

"PrEP reduces the risk of getting HIV from sex by about 99% when taken as prescribed," according to the CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/basics/prep/prep-effectiveness.html

It's not that mysterious, lots of other countries manage to do it fairly well: You create a minimum standard of living and help anyone that falls below that. A social safety net. If you have no place to live, the government provides you with a relatively good alternative (not homeless shelters – those places are awful). If you don't have enough to eat, the government gives you food or money to buy it. You make sure newborn babies have food and care. You set up a system of laws that make sure companies provide time for parents to take care of their newborns. You make it easy and relatively cheap for parents to find early education options and child care. You give people healthcare so they're healthier as adults. You provide options for mental healthcare to help people avoid violence. All of this stuff raises the quality of life for everyone.

It always amazes me, in situations like this, that people just end up suffering even though the machine is "working on their behalf." Like, I used to have this idea – I have no idea where it came from – that if a crime happened to you, the government would step in and help you. Like, if your family member is murdered in your home, they'd come in and clean it up and help you fix the door since you'll be inconsolable. Or, if you get fired for something like this that the government would help you get back on your feet and make sure you have a place to stay and pay your bills. How utterly childish and naive that was.

This country has no safety net and that's terrifying.

The article also says you shouldn't use boiling water and recommends just using hot tap water.

This was actually the solution in some cities to pandemics of the early 20th century: Overzealous heating and open windows, even in the winter. You can read more about this at the link below, but basically the old furnaces that many New Yorkers complain about have their source from a time when health officials were fighting the Spanish Flu and recommended people keep their windows open. These steam furnaces put out an obnoxious amount of heat to overcompensate for people leaving their windows open all the time. (Also look up "New York City steam system" for interesting stuff about the big steam delivery system in New York City. Moscow has one, too!)

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-05/the-curio...

True, but it's a compromise most of us are forced to make. The vast majority of people know that a custom domain name makes their email more professional, but wouldn't have the faintest idea of how to even begin to manage one if it weren't for services like this one. (Or, at the very least, wouldn't have known how to do it in 2007-2010 which this service was marketed as "free forever.") These cloud services are basically just "linux admin done for you" since most of us don’t have the expertise.

I'm in a different boat than OP so maybe I can also provide a different perspective. I have a half-dozen legacy free G Suite accounts that I set up way back in the day. One was sort of a "junk email" domain that I used for logins on sites I registered for to try out and whatnot. Another was for my main personal domain. Another was for a family domain. A couple others were projects that then got retired. Now I'm down to two personal Google Workspace accounts and I probably will pay for one of them, while closing the other.

But the biggest issue for me right now is the club I run, which has nearly 30 accounts on our Google Workspace domain. The only reason I did this, way back when, was because of the promise of "free forever."

While we have about 30 people on Google Workspace, we have another 70 or so "non-staff" members. Our entire group of about 100 fundraises for our website costs every year, which are considerable for an all-volunteer group ($2000-ish) because we have a pretty resource intensive MediaWiki installation, and other resources.

We've spent 10 years integrating with Google. All of our other resources use Google login. Our group has dozens of Google Groups used for sub-committees. We use Google Drive/Docs excessively. And so on.

But there's no way we can afford to DOUBLE our costs just for Google Workspace. And we can't get a non-profit discount because we're not a charitable organization – we're just a club of writers.

So for us, this is a huge nuisance because not only is Google breaking the agreement it made with us ("FREE FOREVER"), but I don't have the time or resources to manage this kind of transition to something else. And... what, even? If we had known from the beginning they'd break their promise of being free forever, I just wouldn't have built so much infrastructure on top of this system.

> My spouse worked for the state government as part of a benefits/disbursement program. She took phone calls from benefits recipients. Some who are disabled, on unemployment, or generally within the states bar to qualify for tax payer aid. > The pay was slightly above minimum wage. My spouse quit after about a year, during which my souse constantly suffered from verbal abuse and even callers who didn’t qualify threatening to murder my spouse unless they received cash from the state.

This feels like a particularly unfair anecdote in the context of what we're talking about. Imagine for a second that the tables were turned and your spouse was disabled and unable to work: Everything is harder – they can't leave the house without someone to give them a ride; maybe they have to use a wheelchair, which makes everything twice as difficult. They're in survival mode every day.

Not only do they rely on the state for money to eat, to pay rent, to keep the lights on, but doing anything enjoyable is challenging. They have to navigate a byzantine system that is DESIGNED to make qualifying for support extremely frustrating, and then have to stay on top of getting their benefits regularly. The system has literally trained them to react to any issue with anger because they know that whenever a problem occurs, it could be weeks or months until they get the money they need to survive.

I'm not saying that your spouse's experience was justified in any way – dealing with that requires a hell of a lot more than minimum wage! – but (theoretically) this particular problem would go away with something like basic income, where most of these people would have their basic costs covered. They might still have "disability" to help pay for all the other stuff disabled people have to deal with, but at least they aren't relying on a sclerotic bureaucracy to eat, yunno?

I was just using an example of bias to make my point clearer. It wasn't my intention to make any connection beyond that.

> Why isn't it valid to say you don't like unions and so don't want anything to do with them?

Because you can't possibly have personally experienced every union, and the media isn't good at covering unions generally, so whatever bias you're (or anyone else making this statement is) presenting here feels unearned.

This is similar to the bias of racism or homophobia, right? Like, "I saw a Black person steal something, so now I think that all Black people are untrustworthy." Or, "I saw a gay man hit on a straight guy and now I think all gay men are sex pests." These are declarative statements about all people in those groups based on a small amount of information and on societal bias.

And these biases rarely go the other way – do you also end up saying, "I don't like corporations and don't want anything to do with them?" Corporations are, by far, have a vastly worse record on theft, corruption, anti-environmental practices, etc.

I love how all the objections to this are freaking out because people won't be able to get job offers above the salary range (which isn't even true anyway), as if the biggest problem facing workers in this country is being offered too much money and this law would stop that.

It really just depends on what the final law is. Probably will just be something pretty simple that requires them to publish the salary and then everything else will be worked out in court. In lots of cases like this, there's just no incentive for people to go through a lengthy legal battle to try and sort it out unless it seems like blatant and provable discrimination was at work.

But, in my experience in the nonprofit industry in the U.S. where there's been a concerted effort over the last few years to force employers to publish salaries up front (many places where jobs are shared, like email lists, job sites, etc. now require it), there's nothing stopping the employer from offering HIGHER than the range, and why would a job candidate balk at that? Nice surprise!

The intention here is to stop employers from forcing people to go through a long hiring process only to end up offering them an absurdly low amount. In a market where employers hold the power and there's always another candidate waiting in line to take a job, this kind of behavior harms job seekers by wasting their time and demoralizing them, which hurts everyone.

It's not doing a great job against transmission of Omicron, but the vaccine doing a fantastic job of protecting people against hospitalization and death. Non-vaccinated people are 15x more likely to be hospitalized than vaccinated people. If the bottom line is that most people are going to get Omicron one way or the other, because it's so infectious that we can't reasonably avoid that outcome, then it seems like ensuring the vast majority of people experience something akin to the mild flu is much better than a huge wave of hospitalizations and deaths.

I think ProtonMail (https://protonmail.com/) is the only one that comes close to being "privacy conscious," mainly because it's their entire focus. Any other non-major, non-free provider might be an alternative but they're probably not as focused on being proactive about the privacy element?

Probably besides the point, but you have an extremely skewed idea of what prompts a visit from Child Protective Services in the United States.

I mean, they've been doing this for decades. Don't you think their dataset is probably more informed than your speculation?

Yes, but you've got the framing wrong: The issue is that employees who don't join the union are essentially "benefit freeloaders." The union employs people to negotiates wages and benefits and manage the union itself on behalf of all the employees, even those who aren't paying union dues. If everyone can opt out of paying for the union, then the union can't sustain itself.

Having a unionized workplace is a bit like having a democratic government – in the U.S., we're born and become citizens of the U.S. government and all that comes with that. We can't "opt out" unless we move out of the country and renounce our citizenship. We still have to pay taxes and we get all the benefits of our government (safety, education, roads, etc.) even if we don't want to – you can't just not pay taxes, right?

If you don't want to join a union workplace, just find a non-union workplace. If you don't want to join a new union, vote against it and find another job if they accept the union? That's more choice than you get with being a citizen of a country where you pay taxes! (And usually, union dues are less than the negotiated benefit/wage increases anyway.)

"Gay males who do not identify or express as such" are not actually gay – they're considered "men who sleep with men" or homosexuals. Gay is a chosen identity that piggybacks on msm behaviors, so the idea that the study didn't control for the fact that they're just looking at men who are out seems completely beside the point as it's literally about gay men. (You can be gay and in the closet but not all men who sleep with men identify as gay.)

It's sorta like a study saying "married women get pregnant more often" and then balking that the study didn't control for the fact that women who get married have a second caregiver for a child. Like, yeah, that's the whole point.

I agree. Even if I don't receive a notification, if I happen to open the Slack app and see pending messages – particularly if they're from a manager or someone higher in the hierarchy – then I feel obligated to respond to them.

I'd argue that if ProtonMail's spam filter is too aggressive then basically you're in the same place you were with Gmail, aren't you? (Except now you're paying?)