davideous

In my example in the grandparent post to yours, it was actually the empathy of the medical provider toward my paying the bill that prevented the unnecessary test.

Setting prices by supply-and-demand and having insurance "pay for whatever is needed regardless of the cost" are incompatible. Insurance blocks the pricing cost signal back to the patient. Insurance also prevents better doctors that provide better service from charging more because the patients will pay for it.

An example: about 20 years ago I had just a major medical plan and I was at urgent care for a problem. After diagnosing the likely problem and prescribing the solution, they were about to run some tests "just in case." When I told them I would be paying for the tests due to the major medical plan, they explained that the tests didn't have any benefit, so we didn't run them.

I don't know of a real solution to these problems.

A partial solution is exposing some of the cost to the insured to create an incentive to save (like what I had when I was paying for the tests). At my company, we fully pay for a high-deductible plan AND a give company-funded contribution to a Health Savings Account that mostly covers the per-person out-of-pocket max. If the employee does not spend the HSA money (which is their money in their account), it can be used for retirement savings... so they have an incentive to save. But once someone hits the out-of-pocket max, there is no more incentive to save.

Agreed that sometimes it is appropriate for insurance to say no.

After one round of physical therapy for tennis elbow, which made some progress but didn't completely clear up the issue, I got denied my insurer (not UHC) for the additional physical therapy that the PT recommended. The problem resolved itself on its own in a month without additional therapy. Seems like they may have been right that it wasn't medically necessary.

HN and Desiring God are my two favorite websites.

Here are a few key paragraphs from a sermon that has the most compelling explanation of that sentence that I've heard:

When Paul said in 1 Timothy 6:10, “The love of money is the root of all evils,” what did he mean? He didn’t mean that there’s a connection between every sinful attitude and money — that money is always in your mind when you sin. I think he meant that all the evils in the world come from a certain kind of heart, namely, the kind of heart that loves money.

Now what does it mean to love money? It doesn’t mean to admire the green paper or the brown coins. To know what it means to love money, you have to ask: What is money? I would answer that question like this: Money is simply a symbol that stands for human resources. Money stands for what you can get from man, not from God! (“Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters. He who has no money come buy and eat!” Isaiah 55:1.) Money is the currency of human resources.

So the heart that loves money is a heart that pins its hopes, and pursues its pleasures, and puts its trust in what human resources can offer. So the love of money is virtually the same as faith in money — belief (trust, confidence, assurance) that money will meet your needs and make you happy.

Therefore the love of money, or belief in money, is the flip side of unbelief in the promises of God. Just like Jesus said in Matthew 6:24 — you cannot serve God and money. You can’t trust or believe in God and money. Belief in one is unbelief in the other. A heart that loves money — banks on money for happiness, believes in money — is at the same time not banking on the promises of God for happiness.

So when Paul says that the love of money is the root of all evils, he implies that unbelief in the promises of God is the taproot of every sinful attitude in our heart.

From: https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/battling-unbelief-at-be...

The Bible speaks about this:

“But godliness with contentment is great gain, for we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world. But if we have food and clothing, with these we will be content. But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs.” — 1 Timothy 6:6-10 ESV

https://archive.ph/Fay8D

The book "Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail" by Ray Dalio compares the rise (and decline) of the American "world empire" to prior world empires. The two most recent are the U.K. and the Netherlands.

The same things that are happening now have happened before -- just not in our lifetimes. The history and his analysis is quite instructive.

The book was refreshing in its objectivity, lack of political bias, and clarity of writing. I've given copies to several friends.

It's pretty clear from his analysis and the data that the U.S. is in a decline of global influence.

https://www.amazon.com/Changing-World-Order-Nations-Succeed/...

The heat flux through the walls depends on the temperature of your apartment and your neighbor's apartments -- not on if your thermostat is on or off. So even if you leave your thermostat on at 19° you still benefit. And you have no obligation to turn your thermostat up.

Fair enough.

In your earlier comment you mentioned:

MBTI has the predictive value of horoscopes, more or less

My understanding of MBTI is that it's not supposed to be predictive, but it helps you understand a different person's preferences or view-point. Preferences don't necessarily predict behavior.

Understanding the J vs P preference difference was revolutionary early in my marriage. I'm P and my wife is J, and our different preferences on that dimension helped explain much of our conflict. And understanding her preference helped me be more considerate and loving to her. MBTI helped me understand her (not predict her).

When I read a description of an MBTI type for someone I know really well, about half of it rings true -- but then reading and talking through it together sparks a great conversation where we learn a lot about each other.

The book does recommend using a qualified MBTI coach/trainer, so that it's not mis-used.

Hope this $0.02 is helpful.

Five Dysfunctions of a Team completely was absolutely revolutionary for me and my team. It's not about MBTI at all, but MBTI is just a tool it mentions to help with dysfunction one.

Here are the five dysfunctions:

The foundational dysfunction is a lack of trust -- trust defined as belief that your skill weaknesses and deficiencies will not be used against you. So people conceal weaknesses and don't ask for help from each other, etc.

This leads to fear of (healthy, productive) conflict -- you don't hash things out, but rather any meaningful discussion gets suppressed. Creates an environment where back-channeling and politics thrive, etc.

This leads to lack of commitment -- the team has not really had heathy, productive conflict/discussion so they don't buy into decisions. There is ambiguity about direction and priorities.

This leads to avoidance of accountability.

This leads to inattention to results.

Here's a high-level overview: https://www.executiveagenda.com/application/files/3215/6401/...

Where are you selling it? I want to know where to buy a used 16” MBP.

I looked at a SBA loan several years ago and it required a personal guarantee. Almost all small business loans require this.

That stretch of road serves 40 houses. So paving every 20 years works out to $125/year/house. Median home value is $105,000 so that costs 0.12% of home value per year.

Not unreasonable if planned for and if other expenses are not chewing up all property tax revenue.

Population was 277 at the last census. Yes, we experience freezing temperatures.

This interested me enough to read some of that chapter. Here are a few quotes that give more context:

Traditional operations teams and their counterparts in product development thus often end up in conflict, most visibly over how quickly software can be released to production. At their core, the development teams want to launch new features and see them adopted by users. At their core, the ops teams want to make sure the service doesn’t break while they are holding the pager. Because most outages are caused by some kind of change—a new configuration, a new feature launch, or a new type of user traffic—the two teams’ goals are fundamentally in tension.

...

The use of an error budget resolves the structural conflict of incentives between development and SRE. SRE’s goal is no longer "zero outages"; rather, SREs and product developers aim to spend the error budget getting maximum feature velocity. This change makes all the difference.

...

...the decision to stop releases for the remainder of the quarter once an error budget is depleted might not be embraced by a product development team unless mandated by their management.

My small town resurfaced (grinding and re-paving) 5/12ths of a mile for about $100,000. That's about $240,000 per mile. Or actually $120,000 per "lane-mile".

However, we could only afford it because we got a grant from the state. Our annual town budget could not afford the road maintenance.

We also have a one-time purchase option. Although it starts at $6,000. We serve a lot of larger businesses with higher volumes, like Six Flags or Fry's Electronics, and email service providers.

My company sells a self-hosted email list management solution that meets the requirements you mentioned:

https://www.greenarrowemail.com/

You're right! Most of what I described is common to the Pomodoro technique. I was never able to stick to the Pomodoro technique. The accountability of the timer being a person is huge.

It's weird (but true) that disappointing a random person is more motivating to me than doing what I told myself I would do.

It's been a huge value for me, and I get a ton more done with it. No joke, I would pay $100/month. (See my other comment about this article for how its been so valuable to me.)

I've been using focusmate for four months. It's been absolutely revolutionary for me. (I work remote at home, so YMMV.)

Here are some of the ways:

(1) I’ve been getting a ton more done and feeling better about it.

(2) It really does help me focus. I hardly ever get distracted from the task at hand. I used to get distracted a lot.

The focus does not come from being watched, but because I’m "working together" with someone else, and I don’t want to let them or myself down. And because of the built-in break/recovery schedule. It's like a hack for my brain.

(3) I schedule back-to-back sessions, so I have 50 minutes of 100% focus and then 10 minutes between. In the 10 minutes I use the bathroom, get coffee, clear my head, walk around, or stretch. These things I’m sure help enable the 100% focus for the 50 minutes. I don’t feel as worn out at the end of the day (and I get more done).

(3) Declaring my goal for the session at the beginning and then reporting on it at the end has caused me to become much more realistic about how long things take.

(4) Being more realistic about how long things take has made it possible to plan out my week. I’m now planning my day and week in "focusmate session sized blocks" of work. I do have to adjust the plan, but making the plan has been a huge help.

(5) Setting a focusmate appointment in the morning causes me me to get started at a constant time — for the first time in my life. Knowing that someone else is relying on me to be at the session makes me show up.

(6) The little bit of social connection helps working at home to not feel lonley.

This is genius.

If you don't enforce a trademark you can loose it. So this is probably helping protect their trademark.

And this also draws attention -- in a potentially viral way -- to their brand and the fact that velcro is distinct from and perhaps better than "hook and loop".

If she inherited it evenly with two other siblings and did not put any additional money down, then she has a loan-to-value of 66% (meaning 33% equity). That greatly reduces risk for the lender.

Yes, that's the effect. But I'd only have to carry the generator portion when needed for a road trip. You could perhaps even rent it only when you need.

Even if the generator was in a small trailer, that would provide the range freedom without loosing the storage space (and help with venting/cooling/noise).

Does any electric car have an option where you can place a portable gasoline generator in the frunk and then trickle charge the battery while you drive on a road trip (with appropriate venting of exhaust).

If not, why not?

I've seen very small, quiet gasoline generators. I would think this could solve this problem easily at the expense of a small amount of storage space.

I wear Etymotic Noise-Isolating Earphones in my ears (they are real earplugs with a small hole in the middle through which sound is piped), then I put Bose noise cancelling headphones over my ears, and then I play a rainfall noise through the Nose-Isolating Earphones. This multi-layer approach this works very well for me. The rainfall noise is not distracting to me the way music can be.

I have excellent hearing, and it's impossible for me to solve this problem with a completely passive or noise cancelling approach. Ears will increase their sensitivity until they are able to hear something.

Etymotic Noise-Isolating Earphones: https://www.amazon.com/Etymotic-Research-Noise-Isolating-Ear...

The noise app that I use: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mynoise/id813099896?mt=8

If anyone from Slack is reading, I'm respectfully asking that they change the sunset date or invest the engineering effort to fix the performance regression before the sunset date.

Perhaps management didn't know how much of a downgrade this was.

Stand-alone ScreenHero sharing is smooth as butter -- truly amazing. Controlling a remote computer feels local.

Right now I'm using the slack-integrated "ScreenHero", and it's really laggy. This is super disappointing, and painful to use. It's actually making the mouse pointer of the person sharing lag for them.

Slack: please keep the stand-alone ScreenHero until you make the integrated one have the same performance.

In my company's contract, we limit our liability to the amount paid by the client. Without a liability limitation clause in the contract, you're taking on a potentially unlimited amount of liability in each project. It's not worth the risk. A few good paragraphs in the contract make all of the difference in the world. If you don’t have a liability limiting clause, you should.

Also, this client engagement started going wrong from the very beginning, when the team allowed so many changes for free, and even launched the website without final payment.

I'm all in favor of over-delivering -- and I probably also would have fixed the problematic PSDs for free -- but 294 hours of work on a 116 hour project, launching the website without the required final payment, and then continuing to do work is way too much.