This phrase is used so often, but I don't know how meaningful it is supposed to be
A family might make $300,000 a year and be living "paycheck-to-paycheck" while also maxing out 401k contributions, paying a mortgage on a $2 million home, and paying $80,000 a year in private school tuition.
Are we supposed to think that such a family is in worse financial shape than a family making $40,000 a year but with minimal expenses and a few months of living costs in a savings account?
It's somewhat of a mindset question and somewhat of a wealth question.
Mr $300k may have zero months in an emergency account, but be stable in his job as a doctor and not worry about finding work - and may actually "feel poor" because he barely has any "fun money" to waste and feels he can't buy coffee in the morning.
Mr $40k a year may have 6 months of expenses in the bank, saving half his income to FIRE, and know that anytime he wants to he can buy that coffee - and sometimes he does.
Net worth likely says Mr $300k is worth more than Mr $40k - but that may not be true forever, and Mr $40k may be "retired" at 50 while Mr $300k is perpetually working until death.
Who is rich, who has wealth, and who is happy? There are no clear answers.
You're missing the third question which is of definitions. There's an other person Mr $65k who after all their necessary expenses has $1k left over each paycheck that they spend on dinners out, concert tickets, vacations, etc so that at the end of the month they are left with no additional savings. Are they living paycheck to paycheck?
I mean, should we live in a world where the only way to create savings is by denying yourself any fun? You've picked a number, $1k, because it sounds good to support your argument, but maybe after paying for the essentials, a family has $200 left per month. Should we expect that family to never go to the movie theater, never go out to a restaurant, never splurge on a nice piece of clothing or jewelry, never do anything fun at all? Do we think it's ok for people to have to live like that?
So sure, maybe if they spend that $200 on fun stuff, it's not "living paycheck to paycheck". But maybe that's just a bad metric, or just too poorly-defined to be a reasonable way to measure anything.
Happiness for him was somewhere between having zero dollars and being $33 million in debt. His influencer wife seems to have no humility, has moved to Miami where she can continue her partying lifestyle and going to yoga classes.
Its' both maddening and saddening. To what point does the ostentatious display of wealth serve if it leads to suicide? A few years of looking rich at the cost of the rest of life? We have no choice but to assume he was willing to make that trade-off. So it's angering to think a person would believe that.
On the other hand, suicide is the ultimatum when a man thinks his pleas are unanswered. Being surrounded by old-money socialites, I can imagine the feeling of having to leave the club being a fate worse than death. But how can an average guy have any sympathy for that, much less this guy's own feelings of himself.
I deploy prod by running a shell script I wrote that rsyncs the latest version of the codebase to my server, then sshs into the server and restarts the relevant services
You know your app better than me, but here are some practical reasons for the typical B2C app:
split deployments -- perhaps you want to see how an update impacts something: if error rates change, if conversion rates change, w/e. K8s makes this pretty easy to do via something like a canary or blue green deployment. Likewise, if you need to rollback, you can do this easily as well from a known good image.
Perhaps you need multiple servers -- not for scale -- but to be closer to your users geographically. 1 server in each of -5-10 AZs makes the updates a bit more complicated, especially if you need to do something like a db schema update.
Perhaps your traffic is lumpy and peaks during specific times of the year. Instead of provisioning a bigger VM during these times, your would prefer to scale horizontally automatically. Likewise, depending on the predictable-ness of the distribution of traffic, running a larger machine all the time might be very expensive for only the occasional burst of traffic.
To be very clear, you can do all of this without k8s. The question is, is it easier to do it with or without? IMO, it is a personal decision, and k8s makes a lot of sense to me. If it doesn't make a ton of sense for your app, don't use it.
What happens when your new version is broken? Kubernetes would rollback to old version. You have to rerun the deployment script and hope you have the old version available. Kubernetes will even deploy new version to some copies, test it, and then roll out the whole thing when it works.
Also, Kubernetes uses immutable images and containers so you don't have to worry about dependencies or partial deploys.
>Swap to diff and start reading through the changes
this forces the reviewer to view the entire diff at once, which can greatly increase the cognitive load vs. being able to view diffs of logical units of work
for tiny PRs it may not matter, but for substantial PRs it can matter a lot
Developing for Android is also a much worse developer experience than developing for iOS, because there are thousands of devices to support, and much greater stratification of operating system customizations and older versions.
Not really, because whereas before things were bad for people with pre-existing conditions, now they are really bad for everyone.
People are paying exorbitant prices either for insurance, for routine health care stuff, or for both.
There was no free lunch, so we traded some health care for the chronically ill, for slightly less healthcare for everyone else. The insurance companies make sure it's an extractive zero-sum game in terms of actual healthcare provided.
When I was looking for healthcare after my employer went tits up right before the ACA went into affect, I couldn’t buy insurance at any price because of a pre-existing condition. Mine you that I have had my ore-existing condition since birth in 1974, had one surgery my entire life - foot surgery in 1996 - and this was 2011 and now I’m 52 and still haven’t had any complications from it and don’t expect to.
I was also a part time fitness instructor, runner and could past any of the standardized fitness assessment standards for someone who was 5 years younger as far as push ups, sit ups, running etc.
I had a contract so I could have easily paid more based on risk.
Before anyone mentions COBRA, that’s only an option if your former group plan still exists and it didn’t when the company went out of business.
Just looking, even now the ACA Silver for my wife and I would be around $800 a month in my state. Even ignoring medical costs have gone up more than inflation, that would have been $550 a month in 2011 if the ACA had been available.
Before ACA, insurance had a more traditional "insurancey" role by excluding pre-existing conditions (aka managing moral hazard) in order to make money via premiums. In the "guaranteed issue" world post-ACA, insurance companies have pivoted instead to extracting as much money as they can from an increasingly vertically integrated ecosystem (PBMs etc)
You have the two mixed up. Insurance companies - even for group insurance like through your company where they always had to accept everyone - required you to have “continuing coverage” and not have gaps or you had waiting periods.
The ACA also was written to enforce that through mandates and subsidies - a carrot and stick approach. The moral hazard was caused once there weren’t any mandates because of lawsuits by Republicans and the insurance companies still had to accept everyone.
We are talking past each other. When I said moral hazard I'm talking about adverse selection(1), my bad if that was unclear. And I was responding to some comments about denial for pre-existing conditions, which as you point out is irrelevant for continuous coverage group policies. Removing the mandate penalty without also adjusting the pre-existing condition protections did introduce adverse selection in the current regime. None of that disqualifies my argument about the current state of affairs though re the business model of modern insurance companies
If you were just looking to shout "dems good GOP bad" and find others who agree with you, that's cool too.
Before ACA, insurance had a more traditional "dump you when you were in need" role that leveraged pre-existing conditions rules by, if you fell ill in a way which was likely to be sufficiently expensive to make this profitable, looking for any minimally tenable evidence of an undisclosed pre-existing condition (just to have something to cite as a pretext, it didn't need to be convincing), using it to justify cancelling your insurance, and avoiding any legal remedy by refunding your entire lifetime of premium payments.
Of course, whether or not you actually had a pre-existing condition when you had signed up for the original insurance, you now have one that prevents you from getting new insurance,
The problem here is that pre-ACA you didn't have insurance, either.
Yes, they would (maybe--some plans saw huge sticker shock because the original didn't actually pay much of anything) sell you "insurance". They would offer a plan for a few years, then close it, offer something new. The old plan would see patients getting sick, costs would rise. Premiums were based on costs *for that plan*. Soon the healthy jump ship for something else, now the old plan is only the sick and the premiums go into a death spiral.
Thus the reality was that any ongoing problem soon you were uninsured.
> Why is that inherently bad? Should I be able to buy fire insurance on pre-existing embers?
What if someone gets Type 1 diabetes as a child so they can no longer get insurance because of that "pre-existing" condition: if they get cancer for unrelated reasons they should just be saddled with medical debt? Or because of your Type 1 you can't get coverage, and you get t-boned in your car by a drunk driver.
Certainly it sounds 'unfair' that someone who smokes (a personal choice) gets similar cancer coverage for someone who does not smoke. But it also means that if your ((great-)grand-)mother had cancer, and you get it through no fault/choice of your own (i.e. genetics), you can also get coverage. (This latter effects a cousin of mine: her aunt (mom's sister) died of cancer at 37, her mom at 63; so now she's wonder when here number will come up. We're in Canada, so have universal care, but it's still something in her DNA.)
There are many circumstances in which you suffer through no fault of your own, and universal health coverage is present in many societies because it was decided to protect those people—even if it allows some 'free-riding' by others making poor choices.
People make all sorts of crazy decisions to prevent the "wrong" people from getting what they "don't deserve":
Pre-existing conditions also continue to frame healthcare as 'insurance' against a bad thing happening to you, when it should just be a regular service like any other.
You don't need 'insurance' in order to get your vehicle serviced, but that is what the US does with healthcare.
The most it will ever cost me to go from “not having a working car” to “having a working car” is the cost of used car that will reliably get me from point A to point B.
When one of my kids was 4, they had an unexplained seizure. Hospital workup, whole nine yards, never recurred; it was probably a medication reaction. Years later we were denied coverage from all the private insurers over it (more accurately: we were denied any coverage for that child).
Similarly, insurers would as a matter of course exclude from coverage any woman with one of several extremely common conditions, including endometriosis, PCOS, fibroids, and adenomyosis.
Prior to Obamacare, insurers were free to deny coverage wholesale for these conditions. It would have been fucked up to extend coverage but exclude any neurological conditions from my kid, but the actual outcome was worse: they were under the law entitled to withhold any coverage.
If you live long enough, you will have a pre existing condition.
The way it was suppose to work with the original mandate is that everyone had to be insured either through their employee or the exchange. So you couldn’t just buy insurance when you were sick. The Supreme Court struck that down.
If you lost your job, before the ACA, you could not get health insurance outside of working for someone and having group insurance at any cost.
But you do realize that the entire idea of not being able to get insurance because of pre-existing conditions is completely unique to the US?
Costa Rica for instance (where I am right now for a month and half) allows anyone to become a resident as long as you have guaranteed income of around $2000 a month or you deposit $60K into a local bank account and they arrange monthly disbursements and you pay 15% of your stated income to CAJA. Healthcare is both better and more affordable here.
The same is true for Panama. Why can’t the US figure this out?
And if you had an expensive dependent better work for a big company. Saw it happen--wife lost her coverage through work because they had an employee with an expensive kid. Next year insurance wasn't offered.
It interacts badly with insurance being offered as workplace benefit. If you quit or lose your job, you'd lose your health insurance. And any plan you signed up for after that would then treat you as "pre-existing embers" and expect you to pay accordingly. The bundling of health insurance with workplace seems like the healthcare original sin to me.
Obama couldn't change that, so the ACA redesigned the system to work with it. Despite being called insurance, health insurance is no longer really viewed or designed to be any kind of insurance. Instead, it's supposed to be Netflix for healthcare. You pay a flat rate, and then get unlimited healthcare. Obviously, the issue with this is that if you don't need healthcare you can just not sign up for the subscription. So the ACA tried to solve this by requiring everyone to sign up. Once everyone is required to sign up, it's not right to discriminate against preexisting conditions. It may not be an especially good system, but it is coherent.
The US is allergic to taxes. Maybe it's a marketing thing. Benefits paid for by society.
Maybe a department of Return on Investment. See what those taxes pay for. Contrast to buying private versions of the services at the same SLA or better.
It’s more that the US is more like a collection of 50 little countries, and it’s supposed to be hard to accomplish much at a federal level. That separation has eroded a bit in the last 50 years but it’s still very much a part of our political ideology.
it's bad for the person, obviously. The point of society-wide policies is not to maximize economic efficiency; they're supposed to making society a good place to live. Of course if you only look at them under an economic lens they're going to seem bad. Economically the best policy would be to kill all the sick people.
We as a society accept the insurance system as an implementation of "funding healthcare" because market capitalism is supposed to lead to lower prices, fair allocation of scarce resources, and innovation, among other things. That is, the insurance industry is a market solution to a moral problem.
If insurance companies then can wiggle out of covering pre-existing conditions, they're no longer solving the moral problem they were brought into the world to solve, and now we need some other solution to solve the rest of it. Then, whatever that other solution is, it's solving the hard part, so why not extend it to solve the whole thing and cut the insurance middlemen out of the economy entirely? What are they even doing at that point besides extracting a rent?
(This is one answer among many good ones to what is really a bad-faith question—health-insurance is not a lot like fire-insurance at all)
> Instead use an inside source, an employee you know at the company you are interested in
I have been reading this advice for a decade, and I have been working as a software engineer as a decade, and I don't know anyone who got a job this way.
I'm not doubting it happens. It's just interesting that this obviously seems very common in some software engineering circles, but is virtually unheard of in others.
A Human Interviewer can be held responsible for their actions, a machine, so far, cannot. Outside of the potential for cutting costs, abdication of responsibility is the number one reason we're looking to adopt these systems.
Humans have a much greater diversity in bias because we have all lived our own unique lives. LLMs are incredibly limited, by contrast. Even if you were somehow to simulate bias by exposing subsets of LLMs to subsets of human knowledge corpuses, you would need billions of subsets to simulate the diversity of human bias.
Wisdom of the crowd also implies that diversity of human bias is a good thing, in aggregate.
To more closely address your point: if all companies use the same LLM they’ll all have the same hiring bias. But if Company Foo has Hiring Manager Bob that’s biased against me, I can shoot my shot with Company Bar with Hiring Manager Alice who might not be.
LLMs have no awareness of their own bias, and no incentive or ability to mitigate it. A human can, in theory, realize "hey, I tend to be a little harsh on <demographic>, is this negative judgement just that?" while an LLM could never.
In practice I doubt many people are aware of their biases either, or think "it's not bias if it's true" or something. But at least on the less "internally" biased end of humans there will be less external manifestation of it.
They don't have any concept of their "personal" bias, so they'd imitate whatever training data they received that was tagged as not being biased, if there even was any.
So you might think, but no. The LLM contains a large number of biases, coming from different training texts. Depending on how you structure the question, you can get biased statements.
For instance, if I discuss audio electronics with Google Gemini, depending on what kinds of questions I ask, I can get audiophile crackpot quackery out of it, or I can get solid electronic engineering statements.
The training data contains a vast number of narratives that are filled with different points of view. Generally speaking, you get the ones that resonate with your own narrative threaded through your prompts.
One way is if you ask loaded questions: questions which assume that some statements hold true, and are seeking clarification within that context. If the AI hasn't been system-prompted or fine tuned to push back on that topic, it may just take those assumptions at face value, and then produce token predictions out of narratives which express similar assumptions.
This phrase is used so often, but I don't know how meaningful it is supposed to be
A family might make $300,000 a year and be living "paycheck-to-paycheck" while also maxing out 401k contributions, paying a mortgage on a $2 million home, and paying $80,000 a year in private school tuition.
Are we supposed to think that such a family is in worse financial shape than a family making $40,000 a year but with minimal expenses and a few months of living costs in a savings account?
reply