I don't think corporations had a smaller scope back then. Look up the Grange movement, trust busting and the progressive party. They were all responses to corporations having too much power, in fact control over many aspects of life and complete economic power over certain industries and groups of people. Government intervened, something which might not be possible right now.
You can have your old HN comments deleted by emailing the mods. There's limits to how much they'll delete, but they definitely don't want you to get into trouble over something you posted on HN.
Yes it's a huge problem. Many of us (or maybe just me?) would not have been so candid on HN had we known our comments would be indelibly preserved forever with no option for deletion.
The stated reasons for this policy I've seen from 'dang amount to "we don't like the look of a bunch of comment chains with [deleted] everywhere" which I find insulting.
I have a suspicion that the real reason is that the site software conveniently doesn't have a mass-deletion function.
They are perfectly able to add features to the site, and would absolutely add a feature if they thought it was as important as you think this one is.
I get the feeling you've never actually attempted to engage with them in good faith, because they're willing to put in quite a lot of work to dissociate you from your comments while leaving the comment intact. In case you missed it, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23623799 is linked from the FAQ.
> They are perfectly able to add features to the site, and would absolutely add a feature if they thought it was as important as you think this one is.
I mean we're talking about the forum software that can't handle more than a few hundred comments without resorting to pagination, so I feel justified in my thesis that engineering hours going into HN are pretty limited.
Again, you're not doing much to convince me you've actually gone out of your way to have a conversation with them.
They have other fish to fry, because maintaining a community doesn't just mean maintaining a codebase. They have a bunch of existing code that is architected in a way that makes some changes (like removing the comment render limit) not so easy. Though some of the consequences are annoying, they've never stopped anyone from using HN.
My personal experience is that they are implementing features and doing experiments, and it seems to me you've just never bothered to reach out and check with them because you think you know better.
Enjoy your thesis, or whatever. They're nice people and I recommend emailing them.
Have you thought about allowing different, unrelated employers to combine to insure one person? A lot of people find that a part time job does not give them enough hours to be insured, so they get a second job, but don't get enough hours there either, and end up working 40 hours with no insurance.
What about allowing different employers to pay parts of insurance, and another employer pays another part, to allow the employee to get insured?
A person just needs to come up with any amount of employers willing to pay the amount that adds up to 100% of the cost.
Chris (CEO) here. I’m not aware of anyone that has created a model to fractionally insure a single person as you have described.
There are models and mechanisms for multiple smaller employer groups to band together. For example, association health plans are common with professional trade groups.
While an interesting thought experiment, no, we have never thought about multiple employers combining and contributing to insure a single individual.
Would it be difficult? If you market to consumers, you could give businesses a cost over the phone just like any other business, just on a per person level.
A pooling mechanism is needed. Additionally, the pooling entity would want to meet (or make sure the various fractional employers trying to insure "Hank" meet) federal ERISA requirements for the favorable tax treatment of paying a fractional employee's fractional health insurance premiums.
The next challenge is non-payment of premium. Lets assume Companies A, B, and C each respectively insure "Hank" respectively for 50%, 25%, 25%. They respectively pay $50, $25 and $25 per month in premiums to PoolingEntity. What happens when any of A/B/C fail to pay a premium? The insurance contract would eventually be terminated for non-payment (after a statutory notice period), and poor Hank would be back to being uninsured.
Technologically, I think it could be done. But the legal, regulatory, and administrative complexity would need to be addressed.
Separately, a great resource for reading up on where/how Americans get their healthcare coverage is the Kaufman Family Foundation. Many Americans have more than one source for their coverage. https://bit.ly/3KazKNN
I'm finding there are a certain group of people who are really struggling socially, and to them this is a good thing, even with the risks. Some people lost their whole social network when the office went home, and they long for it to come back.
As a person who can only handle so much social interaction, it is baffling, but to others, it is baffling to stay home all the time.
A lot of those people are only struggling in the first place because the broken office-first model required them to relocate to a metro where they have no family or social network. This is particularly bad in the tech industry, because the major tech metros are notoriously unsocial. People on the West Coast tend to have fewer friends and be less outgoing[1], so it's particularly hard to meet people when you relocate there from somewhere friendly like the Southeast.
In a remote-first model people could stay located in the areas that suit them best socially. They could live in the hometowns they grew up in, or by their families, or in their college towns. Concentrated industries like tech are particularly bad, because there are so few metro options, compared to the geographic flexibility of doctors or accountants. Office-first in tech is a siren song of loneliness. First it draws us far away from our loved ones, which leaves us with no other option for meaningful human connection outside the workplace.
I won't argue with this being a difficult issue, but I also want to push back a little bit on this notion that forcing people into a situation is a totally net bad thing.
As an adult, you have precious few opportunities to make lasting, deep friendships. I consider myself an outgoing person with lots of shallow friendships, but my best, deepest friends are still the ones from High School, College, and the surrounding activities -- places I was, more or less, forced to be.
Being forced to be somewhere, be it the office, your college dorm, or the US West coast, gives you a sense of shared experience. Is it ideal? Maybe not, but a lot of people are, for better or worse, forced into experiences that (can) lead to deep and lasting friendships.
Candidly, I actually miss the office, even with all its warts. It builds a shared experience that is difficult to replicate digitally. I can see it in the faces of new hires since WFH started - despite best attempts at inclusion, they're still a little bit on the outside looking in.
To be frank, my life energy is not yours to consume. Your "shared experience" requires interaction from others, many of whom do not want to be giving it. Your perspective of "being forced to be somewhere" as a positive thing is selfish and unempathetic.
People that have been struggling socially are not the sort of people I would want to be stuck in an office with, if for no other reason that they are going to be wasting my time at work.
Maybe it's a bit rude of me but I'm fine letting the socialites struggle in isolation for a bit.
Pay close attention to how you feel during all of this, extroverts, and remember it. You probably make introverts feel like that every day with your pushy social behaviour.
1) We did have some intros thanks to being a YC company. That definitely helped.
2) For some funds for which we really wanted intros, we asked our investors.
3) We timed these 2 weeks of fundraising to happen 2 weeks after some important product release for us (0.2.0). And we did get some inbound from investors (them reaching out to us).
Also being at the crossroads of data infrastructure and open-source helped a lot, as both are important topics for investors right now.
We tried to keep the meetings with the funds that we liked most at the end. For instance, Accel was the 42nd investor we met with.
It helps people start a business by helping them find the right software and acts as a starting point for research. It's half-baked because writing content is very difficult and energy consuming. But hiring writers just gets you crap. Its difficulty to make money if words don't flow.
I created my own subreddit and if you look at the sidebar, it is clearly promotional content. I post my own stuff and have links to my website in my sidebar. It works pretty well and I don't get complaints. Its a fashion sub so I cross-post pictures, but otherwise just post my own stuff and answer people's questions. It helps that I promote other businesses as well, not just my own links.
Overall, I found it a good marketing tool for my side project and a way to not get into trouble with other mods. You can see it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Watchbands/
