The cost of shipping contributes to the cost of every product we export and import. Treating this as a purely zero-sum transfer between longshoreman and shippers is ignoring all the reasons this is interesting & important.
As a hypothetical example, if there was some new method of transport that bypassed ports entirely at 1/10th the cost, would you support an effort to scuttle it to support longshoreman?
This same issue played out with the introduction of the shipping container; if history had played out differently and we were still manually packing ships I don't think you'd choose that world over what we have today.
Great comment, and I'm glad you brought this point up so we can deep dive. If you read the book "The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson," (Chapter 6: Union Disunion) [1] it covers the historical negotiation and agreement between the longshoreman unions and shippers when the shipping container improved efficiencies; they split the gains from the efficiency improvements knowing it was going to reduce the need for labor into the future.
If that was on offer today, I would have a different opinion, for sure. I would strongly support Automating All The Things. I think the grand bargain that was previously made when the world standardized on shipping containers was reasonable and fair. But that is not what is on offer. What is on offer is the Robber Barron equivalent of folks attempting to automate as much as possible to the detriment of labor for shareholder and management returns, and because of that, I hold the opinion that I do. With the decline in labor unions and lack of labor regulation in the US for the last several decades (since the Ronald Reagan era, broadly speaking), Capital has ground down Labor, and Labor needs to grind back to make up for lost time and ground [2] [3].
Is modularity an unalloyed good? Modularity comes with tradeoffs that mean you end up with, well, a bunch of discrete modules rather than something that works cohesively. That's why systemd was adopted pretty much everywhere, ignoring the arbitrary modular boundaries results in a more useful tool.
Some analogs: modern filesystems like ZFS and BTRFS that combine volume management with the filesystem, every service that's consciously chosen to deploy a monolith instead of microservices, and so on, every deployment that chooses to statically link, etc.
That stat alone doesn't tell us if the disparity is due to different rates if criminal behavior, or different treatment by the system. A useful check is to look at murder victimization rates, since a) murder is almost always reported, and b) most murders are intra-racial.
The doc you linked says 39% of inmates are First Nations, and this[0] says they are 37% of Alberta murder victims.
Of course this isn't saying that there isn't inequality in the system, but just that happens before someone gets sentenced.
But that’s unrelated to the “racism” comment above. European Canadians came and destroyed the indigenous Canadian population, scattered their population and upended their societies. But Canadians today might treat indigenous people without any prejudice.
Generally speaking, crime isn’t a matter of economics. My dad’s village in Bangladesh in the 1950s—when 1/4 of kids died before the age of five—was safer then than Toronto is today.
Also culture, socialization, and community structure (which may also be the result of historical events).
“Socioeconomic factors” by themselves have limited explanatory potential. Even the poorest Canadian reservations are wealthier per capita than India is now or China was a few years ago. But the homicide rate among indigenous Canadians is about double what India’s was in 1990, and triple of what India’s is today. It’s almost 20 times higher than China’s homicide rate.
British Pakistanis and British Hindus look basically the same, especially to a naive native European, but the groups are internally different enough to be on the opposite ends of the British societal ladder in all sorts of attributes - education, wealth, crime rate etc.
Yes, a large fraction of ER visits aren't emergencies. Typically they triage new patients, take the actually critical ones immediately and everyone else waits.
I'm not sure wait time is an informative metric, vs something like survival rate for different kinds of conditions.
Seems to be a good metric for a dysfunctional triage system. How else does a type 1 diabetic with a known non-functioning insulin pump on the verge of going into coma get labelled as non critical.
I’m not defending the hospital in TFA, per se, but my wife recently had an ER visit on a miscarriage. She was immediately admitted and tended to be a doctor for the fact that she was hemorrhaging.
During the course of our 12 hours I came and went from her room through the waiting room and to my vehicle. Saw folks waiting hours and hours. For all I know they had a faulty pump.
When it came time for dismissal, we waited hours and hours. The attending staff were handing a GSW and a head trauma on a child. While I didn’t go full-Karen I had to drop the “my wife suffered a miscarriage and is having a mental breakdown, are we going to be banned from your hostile system if we just leave?” to receive final clearance to leave.
Triage is just… complicated. You can’t plan and staff accurately for random tragedy.
I'm sorry this happened to you. I don't know what happened, but good ER docs and nurses prioritize getting people out before they get people in. (No beds left = no new patients can be seen... not that hard of a concept!)
Sometimes things happen that we can't control, but I sure do get tired of ER docs/PAs/NPs overlooking common sense stuff like this. Especially since most good ER RNs would have bugged your provider multiple times to just get y'all the hell out of there!
I assume because DKA usually takes 24-72 hours to develop. So unless said diabetic waited the good majority of that time with their non-functioning pump before showing up at the ER, then that might be their assumption (though if a BGL wasn't done, that's a problem, but not of the triage system).
Also, ER isn't really the place to handle DKA, those patients will cycle quickly through the ER to endocrinology or the ICU. It won't be "give me some insulin manually so I can get on with my day".
There may be a bug or change since I left, but I built the app library and authorization logic, and it was explicitly designed to work offline. Of course, using it day-to-day and initial setup are different and I'd imagine if Apple is down it's hard to setup an AVP as well.
I'm not sure who this is directed at. A more interesting question is, does Substack expand the number of people who can support themselves by writing vs a world without it? I personally spend over $1k/yr on Substack; sometimes because I get great value out of the paid posts, and more often because I want to author to keep working in an area I care about.
I imagine your photo might be up on a "whales" board back at Substack HQ, and the growth team might refer to you by name in their weekly meetings when they hypothesise on how to attract more like you.
If there's one universal truth about whales, it's that there's always a bigger fish. Every time I've heard about a real-life whale, I've been out by multiple orders of magnitude from my wildest guess.
And yes I know whales are mammals but facts don't get in the way of puns.
I'm just not one. Or the addictive type, either. I had rotator cuff surgery last month, and a couple people joked, "Oh, you get these really good drugs for the pain!"
I had Percocet (oxycodone + ibuprofen). It did nothing for me; no high at all. I wonder if there's a connection.
These are really good. I had them after removing my wisdom teeth (less than easy operation as they came out horizontally) I stopped taking them as soon as the pain subsides because I understand why someone can be addicted to them. The pain just vanishes a few moment after ingestion.
