Impressive that he had the tools to flash the chip but it’s absolutely ridiculous that HP and all companies in general can get away with this sort of nonsense, voiding the warranty should be an easy small claims court appeal.
Article is paywalled but the healthcare system is death by a thousand cuts, there's no one boogeyman to blame, it's a very classic tragedy of the commons. Anyone claiming they've found the root cause of the broken healthcare system is selling you a bill of goods.
True but “there’s no one boogeyman to blame” should read as “there are many, many boogeymen, all of whom bear blame, and all of whom need to corrected/removed/circumvented/improved.”
If only we could take our money elsewhere, but we are mandated to pay with insurance, which makes them the defacto customer, to decide with the doctors, cutting us out of the process (which is handy under circumstances where the patient can't talk; There's a use case for everything, but coercion and blanket enforcement seems to ruin everything)
We can't even choose our insurance - it comes from your employer with no choice (or no real choice - I have two slightly different choices from United Health Care). All the negotiation on how it works is done by HR not me, and HR likes the current rules as it makes it hard for me to leave.
In theory I can bypass my employer insurance - but if I do I throw away thousands of dollars that my employer is paying directly and so anything I find elsewhere either cannot be as good, or is has to cost a lot more money.
Even then, good luck... I couldn't find a personal plan either the Health gov compliant plans or out of pocket that matched my employer insurance... I'm pretty sure if I try again, I'll wind up creating a company again, using one of the HR based collective payroll options just for better Insurance options.
The system sucks a lot, and for a lot of different reasons. Namely is that there's no room for individual negotiation, and there are dozens of pricing models for the same drugs, procedures, etc.
We don't do that in America. We pick whichever boogeymen are more scary to our given political team and make that the only cause while arguing back and forth and not actually doing anything while we all get robbed fucking blind and pay our politicians six figure salaries for doing fuck-all.
Not really. The current administration has been going after healthcare on several fronts: lots of FTC enforcement against PE in healthcare; increased number of funded medical residency slots; allowed Medicare to negotiate prices directly with drug companies; attempted to stop excessive consolidation in healthcare businesses.
All of these are reasonable attempts to solve big, important problems and I don't think it's helpful to throw your hands in the air and say no one is trying to do anything.
The Medicare negotiation allowed has still been VERY limited. It should be granted full out by congress, as well as combined for federal employee and VA coverage as well as congress itself... they should all have the same coverage, thus the same incentives. Open/public pricing models would be a good start. As would domestic production and multiple supplier requirements for medications and devices just from a security stand point.
In general the current FTC is better than most in my lifetime, that said, there are plenty of other areas of Govt that are really bad, and even the FTC and SEC could be doing much, much more. It's a mixed bag.
Contrary to a lot of replies, I don't think that another Trump presidency would be particularly worse in these areas as they are pretty populist in nature. Trump isn't a die hard conservative, he's really a populist first.
Agreed it all can and should be better. That doesn't mean "it doesn't matter which administration" etc. There are meaningful differences and the sane thing is to prefer the better option over the worse option, even if neither is particularly perfect or downright evil.
When it comes to improving systems like these, incompetence, hamfistedness, and inaction can be plenty damaging by themselves. "I will roll back ACA and replace it with [crickets for 4+ years]" is a worse alternative.
If course there are differences between different administrations. Unfortunately, the best I can hope for is one that I agree with even 60% of the time.
And even then, some issues are far more important and foundational than others.
I do. We have the Democrats who are mostly alright and well meaning, with exceptions but in practice are not capable of handling what the Republicans have become, which is theocratic-fascists. And the Republicans are filling the legislature with dipshits who scream about Jewish space-lasers and want to regress us socially to the 1920's.
I think the root cause is transparent for all to see. Humans need their bodies. And profit-maximizing entities of multiple kinds have figured this out, and bought politicians to prevent laws from reining them in.
A problem is that health insurance has no bare minimum to compete against. There is no saying "alright, fine, your rates are insane so I'm gonna just go with the state-operated option". That's more-or-less what happens in most Western countries; you can still get private insurance which gets you faster/better treatment, but if you're a fairly healthy person who just wants to cover their bases for a catastrophic occurrence, the state will do that for you. If the private guy wants any of your money, he has to justify it with more than "what happens if you get in a bad car accident or get a cancer diagnosis?".
In the US private insurance is the only way to go, and many of them are operated by people who have profit motives, even if they themselves work for an entity that is non-profit.
In the US private insurance from your employer is the only way to go. My company puts in a lot of money towards my health insurance that I lose if try to find someone else. I can in theory find a different private insurance but there is no competition as no private can afford to compete with deal my company has - either they have to provide substantially worse service or they have to charge substantially more than my employer.
Since I don't have a real choice nobody tries to serve me. Complex billing and codes I don't understand - the people paying the bills like that.
Most Americans are only familiar with the US system and the completely socialized systems in Canada and Britain. Something like the French system isn't really politically on the table here.
I'm of a similar mindset... even though I'm very libertarian in mindset... I think that all the current spending between Medicare/aid, VA Medical, Federal Employees and other programs would be better served by a govt backed non-profit insurance corporation, maybe a little more self-goverened than say the USPS. If federal employees and politicians had to deal with the same "plan" as everyone else as a baseline option, that would provide for better competition. Full negotiating power would also be necessary.
This should be combined with a 50% domestic production and at least dual sourcing requirements for all FDA regulated medications and devices. Both for strategic security, as demonstrated during the pandemic and necessary given political shifts. It would also have the side effects of requiring licensure of medical patents as well as at least some more open knowledge.
Blocking pharma ads would help a lot as well. Unfortunately, pharma is the single biggest advertiser as well as one of the biggest political donation blocks by a wide margin.
I don't really see how blocking ads for things help, I also think they serve a really valuable purpose. IME Doctors are so stuck in their first decade of work (CE programs are mostly a joke) that there actually needs to be a forcing function to get them to learn about new drugs. If they start irresponsibly prescribing drugs then that's not the fault of a company advertising drugs that have gone through the most rigorous approval process that exists in the world.
There are pharma reps all over doctors offices. They're definitely aware.
People are generally over medicated and the drug pricing has nothing to do with actual costs for either research or production. Similarly for advertising highly processed "food".
Don't let any of them fool you, there are three heads on this monster and when they aren't busy blaming the other two heads they do a remarkably even job of splitting the loot.
This. They all benefit from the lack of price consistency/transparency. Nothing in our system has a single price - why charge what the market will bear, when you can charge the individual as much as they can personally bear, and make 3X as much?
Yup I have mild ADHD and as the day wears on I find it harder to do this subconsciously. I need to start making a conscious effort to focus only on the person I’m speaking with and not the cross conversation happening at the same table.
> I'm not sure if their diagnostics sucks, or I'm just a normal person and others pretend better that they hear everything well
This is one of those frustrating gaslighting things that is half true in that half the time I also pretend to hear what someone else is saying even though I couldn’t just because it’s not really important and making a big deal about it (ie asking them to repeat it at continuously louder decibels) can get awkward.
So I'm not alone. I'm in my mid-forties and have experienced a significant decline over the last few years. Now I can rarely distinguish one voice in moderate background noise (conversations, music) without leaning towards them, cupping my ears. Sometimes I just have to give up and try to nod or smile at the right time as the conversation goes on around me.
I recently had a test at an ENT doctor who told me my hearing is fine and insinuated I was wasting his time. The test was listening to high-pitched beeps over white noise, which isn't representative of the problem. Distinguishing one particular tone over several similar ones would be more like it.
I did exactly the type of diagnosis you're talking about. It was quite good at how it simulated a noisy environment with a bunch of background chatter and then a single voice you were meant to listen to that would repeat various patterns of words with various combinations of lower speaking volume and/or higher background noise.
One thing I wish I'd made a point of at the time was the fact that, despite being an apparently soundproof booth with headphones on, I could definitely hear people talking in the waiting room and another audiologist in an adjacent room. Though I'm not sure it would have materially changed their lack of diagnosis (they'd already detected I could hear into negative decibels).
I still don't have a diagnosis, but I'm increasingly coming around to the idea that maybe it's not that my hearing is bad but that I actually hear too much. What I'd previously thought was my unability to hear people speaking on the radio in the car when everyone else clearly could wasn't because I couldn't hear the radio, it's that I can't hear it over the top of all the tyre and wind noise I'm also hearing and trying to process out. I don't think the other passengers in the car hear the rest of the noise, they only hear the radio.
I bought various types of Loop earplugs and have found them fantastic for live music events. I can now hear my friends when they're talking to me! Unfortunately they greatly amplify my perception of the volume of my own voice when I talk which has the undesirable side-effect of making me talk even quieter so I feel like I'm having to yell when I want to talk to people. I've also not found them as useful as I'd hoped in restaurant-type settings.
> I just wish Microsoft could get their act together on their OS and release a Surface Phone
MS has given up on mobile as a OS or device category. In fact I’d argue MS has given up on the entire OS sector, as a revenue stream Windows is increasingly less relevant to their bottom line. They only see windows as a way to bring other applications (read: advertising) to their users but not as a means unto itself. Ask yourself, what new OS features has ms released since windows 10 that is more than UI changes, or applications that aren’t really a core part of the OS? Adding dark mode or tabs to notepad are not real features that anyone needs.
The truth is that the OS has gotten so complicated and it’s nearly impossible to find competent talent that is excited about OS design and development so it’s barely possible to just keep the OS up to date with the latest hardware, there’s simply no time or effort available for new development.
Same as always, apply. Specifically with OS stuff you’ll need to show an aptitude for it, easiest way is if you’re already a college grad and you took an OS design track. If you’re self taught, it’s much harder to prove you have the basics down, so as another person suggested, contribute to OSS projects, which also sounds daunting, but unlike web dev, OS dev is not somewhere where it’s ok to be mediocre.
This is a classic xyproblem [0], excel is almost never the answer when you’re dealing with “big” data, you’re almost always better off getting the data in a csv or db format and working on it from your favorite scripting language.
This article is interesting but when we’re talking about design elements I think it’s always a good idea to include some actual demos or examples showing the final result and not just the “code”. I might also not be the target audience but I still don’t understand what container queries are or what old paradigm they’re replacing. The author does a good job explaining the difference between border-radius and the old way of using photoshop, but fails to do that for the features that he’s trying to promote.
Old paradigm (media queries): You make layout changes based on the width / height of the viewport (browser).
New paradigm (container queries): You make layout changes based on the width / height of the containing element.
This lets you layout a component so that it looks good in any sized container. Picture a component that might be in the main section or in the sidebar - you can now just style directly based on width of the container instead of having to know the total width of sidebar + main section and do the calculation using viewport width.
media queries are still useful, and since a media query may hide/remove entire containers in the view then the remaining containers may have widths that are no longer a simple proportion of the viewport width (or other property being selected for).
So container queries can also enhance styles with media queries, not just replace them.
> In fact, recently they asked to renegotiate the contract due to some obsolescence and we ended up significantly dropping the bill as a result. Kind of backfired on them, I wonder if the account manager is kicking herself for this.
Only if the cost of supporting the depreciated feature was less than the delta.
The thing is, she said it was strictly some contractual thing, that all renewals need to be in some new format. The feature set remained the same.
The new contract did put limits on some things we didn't have formal limits on before (like number of DNS queries), but aligned with our current usage, so our bill didn't go up.
I've been meaning to probe renegotiating pricing because we've been on this billing tier for probably a decade, and in the end some things we were able to negotiate down, and some rearchitect on the tech side to drop the usage by a staggering amount. We're still working out exactly what that amount is, I have several more weeks before renewal.
She did say she was around for only 6 months and enterprise sales cycles can last 12+. Though I guess if you’re engaging in scammy behavior it can be much less… maybe she wasn’t willing to do that.
Sorry, but if you‘re onboarded in a Sales Team you‘re at first getting small fry customers to get used to your Job. Cloudflare is massive and a complete no-brainer for 95% of companies. Not only that, she couldn‘t even land a single enterprise upcharge. Cold calls are hard, but upsells are much easier because companies are pretty much vendor locked with CF.
If you can‘t land a single customer in 6 months under these circumstances, you‘re likely just not a good fit.
Source: I worked at a Fortune 500 company in b2b sales and solution/ integration engineering. I worked with anywhere between 10 mil up to a billion YoY customers.
You can even google my name to confirm this info. This is pretty much exactly like it went when I started.
What’s especially shocking is how closely coupled sales and engineering are. Like I get they talk, but for a sales call to end in engineering pulling the plug…
To me it's pretty clear: Trust & Safety (NOT engineering; they don't appear to be involved) likely raised an alarm saying "Customer X is breaking TOS - no immediate resolution available, but something might be possible given extensive legal & engineering review. Recommend switching to enterprise so we can study how to make it work."
In that light you can see why Sales would be sent as the messenger. But I agree they shouldn't have been involved. Sending a T&S representative would have been better. But then again it looks like from screenshot #2 that they kind of did that? They just didn't have a direct call with T&S.
