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pbz

1,115 karma · joined March 19, 2009

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pbz··on JPMorgan Chase Bank Assumes All the Deposits of First Republic Bank
Your original argument was the government caps the number of doctors (not taxi drivers). I am not finding anything that would show this. There is a cap on the total amount the gov is subsidizing (should be increased, but that's a different topic).

If an individual is willing/able to pay for the cost of residency that the gov covers there's nothing to prevent one to do so. Of course, this is not a practical solution for most, but that's another story.

> nb my issue isn't whether the healthcare system is "socialist" or not, it's that it's bad.

Agree, no argument there

> I don't think "just make the government pay for everything" is a solution to things costing too much though

Of course not, but if the capitalistic / private market has failed, I'd rather try a more gov-focused approach (or something else) than let it fester and cause more and more pain.

> if an ambulance ride costs $9000 the solution is to make it not cost that, not to share paying for it.

Agree, but how do you do that when the "ambulance lobby" owns the politicians and media who then try to convince the population that this is "the best system in the world"? You can't find a better system when you already think you have the best one (not saying you do) or that the "other" system is worse because it starts with an "s".

pbz··on JPMorgan Chase Bank Assumes All the Deposits of First Republic Bank
The US government caps the number of residencies it is paying/subsidizing. Yes, you have to go through residency, but there's nothing stopping the private sector from taking on this cost (well, other than greed)

It is a subsidy program:

https://hospitalmedicaldirector.com/how-residents-are-paid/

> We have tons of these laws.

Point me to one law that says you are not allowed to have more than X doctors.

pbz··on JPMorgan Chase Bank Assumes All the Deposits of First Republic Bank
The government does not cap the number of doctors. There's no law that you can only have X doctors. What it caps is the amount of social help it's willing to subsidize. This is like complaining that the government is not "socialist" enough and therefore socialism is bad.
pbz··on JPMorgan Chase Bank Assumes All the Deposits of First Republic Bank
> I'd rather pay a little more to a corporation

It's hardly "a little more" though. We're spending almost twice as much and get almost half as little back. Objectively speaking the capitalist market has failed in this area. We have to first accept this fact before we can find any solutions. If we keep thinking "government is bad" and "private industry is good" we're only allowing further exploitation and pain; and for what? We need to be data/solution driven.

pbz··on Microsoft plugging more ads into Windows 11 Start Menu
These kinds of changes just make the OS look cheap (like a bazaar of sorts). They're visually ugly, but easily ignored (I rarely open the start menu).

What I'm more concerned / annoyed by is the trend of Windows fighting with you. For example, try to disable the real-time antivirus protection. The UI makes it look like it's off, but then it turns back on by itself. Then you go to group policy to make it explicit that you don't want it. It's off for a bit and then it freaking changes the group policy (resets it back).

First time I noticed it do this I though I got hacked because I couldn't imagine the OS doing something so malware-ish, but it does. What's the point of having a setting at all?

pbz··on Lowest “Who is hiring?” Post Count in 30 Months
That depends on how authoritarian the regime is... However, I was talking about putting a price control over the level/amount of profit. If you look at the financial reports of late you'd see record profits during record inflation.
pbz··on Lowest “Who is hiring?” Post Count in 30 Months
There's historic precedence that increasing rates controls inflation. Yes, it's a very blunt and crude instrument. However, when you know this tool works, trying another tool is too risky to experiment with (in case it fails).

Inflation does have the risk of getting out of hand and being even harder to control. The risk analysis is that whatever pain increasing the rates would cause it pales in comparison to having hyperinflation.

As far as the lack of a pushback: My guess is a combination of apathy and the fact that it doesn't affect the average person quite as much as inflation.

pbz··on Lowest “Who is hiring?” Post Count in 30 Months
I'd put taxation in the same bucket as price control because for this to be effective the taxes would need to be on the rich (in effect to drain liquidity) and that's as likely as price control.
pbz··on Lowest “Who is hiring?” Post Count in 30 Months
It's the only way we know of to stop greed/fomo running rampant. Folks need to be put in a time-out to cool off and force them to reprioritize. We like to think of the market as this calculated and rational entity. It's far from that, in fact it's closer to the opposite of that. The other option is to do price control, but that won't fly in capitalism.
pbz··on We Are Changing the License for Akka
My understanding is that the .NET version is a port and only related in the style/approach. However, if I was them I'd consider renaming the lib. Looks like the name "Akka" is tainted at this point.
pbz··on Apple is building an ad empire as its iPhone privacy crackdown weakens rivals
If they serve them locally (same domain as / part of the main site) they could still track you on the backend and you wouldn't even know it.
pbz··on Postgres 15 improves UNIQUE and NULL
Depends on how the PG team decides to implement this feature. If they're OK with a virtual order (for "UI" purposes) while keeping the true order hidden then this would not require table locking (or it would be a very quick lock). If the order reflects the real / physical positioning then yes, it would probably require locking for a full table rebuild.
pbz··on Postgres 15 improves UNIQUE and NULL
Views are not a good solution for this. The point is to be able see a specific order in 3rd party apps and when writing quick add-hoc queries (select *). Writing views for every table would just pollute the db.
pbz··on Postgres 15 improves UNIQUE and NULL
The problem is that we hear a lot of different features touted as "the crucial missing one" -- I would definitely put this into the polish category, but items in that category are also important; especially for those with a MySQL background.

which recently has been picked up again -- that's awesome to hear

pbz··on Postgres 15 improves UNIQUE and NULL
I've worked with DBs for 20+ years as well. This is a quality of life type of improvement. If you've worked mainly with DBs that don't make this easy it's hard to know what you're missing. Do a search for column reordering for PG and you'll get a ton of hits.
pbz··on Postgres 15 improves UNIQUE and NULL
I'm not sure how I could show if something is easier/harder to work with. Speed in this context refers to human processing speed, not database speed.
pbz··on Postgres 15 improves UNIQUE and NULL
Yeah with maybe an option to manually optimize (that would rebuild the table if needed).
pbz··on Postgres 15 improves UNIQUE and NULL
The trouble is when you need to add a new column you can only add it at the end, so you'd lose the alphabetical ordering.
pbz··on Postgres 15 improves UNIQUE and NULL
With SQL Server the management tool does give you a way to do this. Yes, it does a table rebuild behind the scenes. The point is that it's easy. Don't have experience with the other two, but MySQL is the most popular so it kinda sets the tone whether we like it or not.
pbz··on Postgres 15 improves UNIQUE and NULL
Exactly... You gain so much speed by having everything in the right order.
pbz··on Postgres 15 improves UNIQUE and NULL
Oh, absolutely; I'm just trying to raise the awareness/importance of this missing feature. Most devs that I know IRL that looked at PG had a very similar reaction to mine.
pbz··on Postgres 15 improves UNIQUE and NULL
I'm not talking about the physical layout of the data, just a thin UI layer that the DB tool could use. Maybe we could have two modes: physical vs UI ordering?
pbz··on Postgres 15 improves UNIQUE and NULL
Soothing my OCD is important, but it also helps when working in a team and having a shared ordering style. For example, we have certain types of columns that are always at the bottom. One would look there first. With PG you're forced to scan all the columns every time.
pbz··on Postgres 15 improves UNIQUE and NULL
Since we have some PG devs here: Can we please have a way to reorder columns?

Coming from MySQL, this is one of the first missing features one hits. It's like moving to a new house where you're told you can never clean or move the furniture without moving to a new house.

It leaves the unfair impression that this is a "toy" db. "What other basic features is it missing if it doesn't have this?" Please don't think of it as trivial; first impression are very important.

pbz··on Estonia clocks fastest inflation in the Eurozone at 20.1 percent
There's this constant tug of war between supply/demand (also applies to powerful/regular folks, those with money/without, etc). Inflation is the delta by which one side is winning against the other.
pbz··on Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it
I'm not upset nor do I have a solution; I'm just pointing out the model/problem.
pbz··on Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it
It doesn't matter what new model you come up with. As long as capitalism is around and pushing for ever increasing profits this kind of behavior will always be on the menu.
pbz··on Crazy fast build times, or when 10 seconds starts to make you nervous (2012)
And I was complaining about a 4s rebuild time for a similar (number of lines) .NET 5 solution
pbz··on A curated list of .NET performance resources
It's been rock solid for us. We're not using PS on Linux, just running/building binaries.
pbz··on AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
"Amazon can easily fund developers, they just didn't because they didn't have to"

That may be true for a few OSS projects, but if they were forced to do that for ALL the projects they're profiting from the math would probably not look as simple.

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