Historically, progress has resulted in more environmental damage and CO2 emissions. Relying on progress to fix these things is counting on a fundamental shift to happen. By comparison, progress historically has always increased GDP, so counting on progress to grow away our debt is just expecting the historical trend to continue.
Exercising backups isn’t always a good idea. Testing your UPS? Yes. Testing your emergency parachute? No. I don’t see a pressing need to test my no-phone backups, and a lot of downside.
Wasting time and money getting lost, getting separated from companions with no way to find them again, significantly reduced transportation options, having some sort of emergency and having a much tougher time dealing with it.
I have a decent amount of experience traveling internationally before the smartphone era. It was mostly fine, but with the smartphone is way better. And I had a couple of difficult unforeseen circumstances that would have been made far easier with one.
Manufacturing employment has been on a long, steady decline. Manufacturing output is experiencing steady growth and has never been higher.
The US is the second largest manufacturer in the world and will stay that way for the foreseeable future. Giving up on it would be a huge mistake. What we can’t do is count on it to employ the masses.
Isn’t that just cooking the books though? I mean if the rump of manufacturing gets done in a low cost economy, and mere assembly is performed onshore, what kind of manufacturing is that really
No, the US builds lots of real stuff. It’s not just assembly. Not by a long shot.
The reason the trends are in opposite directions is because of increasing productivity. The number of worker-hours needed to build a car is much lower than in the past because of improved efficiency.
There’s lots of discussion here about UI design and intuitive interfaces in here, but not much about training.
Computers are, by far, the most complicated machines that people are expected to be able to operate without any training whatsoever. Is that actually reasonable?
It really sticks out for me in the workplace. So many jobs require computer use. So many of the people in those jobs have no idea how to use them. They muddle through on a combination of habit and tribal knowledge, and call for help the moment anything different happens.
Consider jobs that require operating a car. It’s expected that someone hired for this job already knows how to drive. If they dont, they either won’t be hired or they’ll be required to complete training to learn how to operate this equipment.
Yet if you replace “drive a car” with “operate a computer,” usually they don’t care. Just try your best, and call IT for help.
Making intuitive interfaces that anyone can pick up and use is great, don’t get me wrong. But I feel like we try to take it to impossible places.
I can totally see being upset with the people in administration and billing. But how can you be that upset with the doctors and nurses, when your whole complaint is that you wanted more of their attention?
The physicians and nurses are the public face of the healthcare mess. It's only natural that they would attract ire. You go to the physician and you know they'll overbill you. It's sickening. You get angry the moment you walk through the door.
The dude hates doctors and nurses so much that he thinks they deserve to be physically attacked. And yet he is desperate for their services. This is a contradiction. I’m attempting to point this out.
You can look at it the other way: you need physicians and nurses, and because you have no alternative they fleece you by any means possible, and the rule of law doesn't apply to them.
A couple of years ago I fell for the high-complexity drug testing scam at the intake visit. It goes like this: you pee in a jar, and they send it to an out-of-network lab. A few weeks later the 4.5 kUSD bill arrives, which isn't covered by insurance. Everyone denies responsibility: the physician says you gave us the sample, the insurance says out-of-network, and the lab says services rendered. The charges eventually went away, after several afternoons on the phone.
Civil society offers no solution. It's no surprise that people give way to their anger. There isn't even a contradiction.
Ridiculous. The best part about paying for a drug test is that it literally offers no benefit to the patient. He or she knows firsthand whether they took any drugs. (Excepting cases where something is slipped into a drink but that accounts for ~0% of tests performed.)
I can see that but suggesting a course of action that is absurd on its face doesn’t do anything to refute his stance. Medical treatment for a severe injury isn’t optional.
Ultimately, you're not going to completely keep out all the people banned all the time. Duty to treat exists for a reason: in an emergency, it's better for society if people get emergency treatment and sometimes the other bits (e.g. money) don't work out.
However, most people who consume emergency services, don't do so unconscious. Hospitals, EMS, etc. want to get paid, so you're going to be asked for an ID sooner than later.
Some people might not want to give ID, or just not have it on them. I don't know what hospitals do in this case currently, but it doesn't seem like a huge stretch to just make those people give fingerprints to continue treatment.
This[1] claims that 4 finger IDs from fingerprints are 99.9% accurate, which isn't perfect, but it's pretty good.
This was an actual reason for not having authentication devices, and why the Minuteman force had a password of 00000000 for a couple of decades. But it doesn’t apply to safety in a fire.
