dpatriarche

Thanks for an amazing game! It provided one of our all-time top TTRPG experiences, and years later we're still laughing about what went down.

For the large majority of Canadian residents there is nothing technically stopping them from traveling to the US for healthcare, paid out of pocket. Some people do that, in some situations, particularly for those who live just north of the border, but it's uncommon. Some reasons:

- From the experience of people I know who have needed urgent care (heart attack, cancer, anorexia, broken bones, etc), my Ontario provincial health system works pretty well, and was often excellent. The people I know received timely, high quality treatment (despite all the bad press in the news these days), at zero out of pocket cost.

- The areas that Canadian healthcare is most falling behind on are (a) access to primary care, and (b) treatment of serious things that probably won't kill you (e.g. joint replacements, cataract surgery). For (a) few people are going to travel to the US to see a family doctor. For (b) this is mostly seniors, who usually decide to grind through another 6 months on the hip replacement wait list rather than pay US$50k today.

- US healthcare is very expensive if you're paying list price. Waiting longer and getting free care in Canada often looks pretty good by comparison. Any reimbursement from your provincial health insurance will be a small fraction of the total US bill. Maybe you could save a month on getting treatment for your cancer or whatever, but is that month worth US$100k or whatever out of your family's life savings? Most people decide "no".

- Where will you live in the US while receiving treatment (e.g. for cancer)? Will your job allow you to be away? The cost of travel and lodgings adds to the cost of the already expensive healthcare. And if you feel crummy (e.g. because you have cancer and you're on chemo) you don't want to have to go through airports and live in hotel rooms, you want to be in your home.

- If despite all the above you decide to be a medical tourist, why would you choose the US? Once you're hopping on a plane and paying cash, there are often better countries in the world. I have heard of people going to Mexico, Lebanon, and India for treatment, and much lower cost than the US, while still getting high levels of care.

The notarization process is super painful, no doubt. I had originally written shell scripts to automate the process for my company, but recently switched to the excellent command line tool 'xcnotary' (https://github.com/akeru-inc/xcnotary). it's available through Homebrew.

Java is not commonly used for consumer desktop applications, where it often is necessary/desirable to invest in fully native apps for Windows and MacOS. But desktop Java is quite common in business desktop applications, for example, medical devices (like radiology image viewers).

I’d like to recommend checking out Numenera, from Monte Cook Games. It’s kind of a sci-if/fantasy mashup. It takes place on Earth one billion years in the future. Eight great civilizations have appeared and disappeared in that time, leaving the world full of ruins and starnge technology, all of which is inscrutable to the people who live there now. The game materials have high production values, on the same level as the D&D books, and about the same level of complexity of game mechanics. The thing I particularly like about Numenera is its emphasis on exploration and discovery rather than killing things. There is still fighting, if you want there to be, but the focus of the game is on going out into the strange world and uncovering it’s weirdness.

One downside of getting US citizenship is that if you later move to another country (your original country or a third country), you will obligated to continue to file US income tax returns, and potentially pay US income taxes. Depending on your circumstances, your tax filing might be trivial or it might be complicated, and you may or may not actually owe taxes to the US. So this might be a minor annual hassle, or it might be a painful, time consuming and expensive process. It is possible to later give up your US citizenship, but it takes time and costs money.

Thanks for posting this recommendation, I've been looking for a static blogging tool like this.

Secure websockets (wss://...) works fine for my company's service that runs behind haproxy (version 1.6).

I love Eclipse for working in Java, and I love IntelliJ for working in Kotlin.

My impression is that people who don't like IDEs haven't put the effort into figuring out how to use them effectively -- modern IDEs have incredible power to increase productivity, but you have to learn how, and you have to make some accommodations in how you work.

I say this from experience: I started my career coding C/C++ in Emacs and I didn't get the fuss with IDEs. Then 10 years ago I started working in Java in Eclipse and I realized what I had been missing. But in order to realize the full benefit of the IDE I had to adjust to how the IDE wants to work, e.g. spend time configuring the automatic code formatter, and let go of some of my formatting quirks that the automatic formatter couldn't handle.

Here's what Chris Lattner said about Kotlin this past June:

"Lattner: Swift and Kotlin evolved at about the same point in time with the same contemporary languages around them. And so the surface-level syntax does look very similar. … But if you go one level down below the syntax, the semantics are quite different. Kotlin is very reference semantics, it’s a thin layer on top of Java, and so it perpetuates through a lot of the Javaisms in its model.

"If we had done an analog to that for Objective-C it would be like, everything is an NSObject and it’s objc_msgSend everywhere, just with parentheses instead of square brackets. And a lot of people would have been happy with that for sure, but that wouldn’t have gotten us the functional features, that wouldn’t have gotten us value semantics, that wouldn’t have gotten us a lot of the safety things that are happening [in Swift].

"I think that Kotlin is a great language. I really mean that. Kotlin is a great language, and they’re doing great things. They’re just under a different set of constraints."

https://oleb.net/blog/2017/06/chris-lattner-wwdc-swift-panel...

WW2 made Europeans and east Asians anti war -- the people in whose countries the wars were fought. It's only Americans and Canadians who view WW2 as the "good" war. Our countries got to play the hero role and beat the super villain, we were largely untouched (relative to what other countries suffered), and at the end there was years of economic prosperity. What's not to like?

what exactly should be done with the program?

While the US is already committed to the F-35, discussion of the plane's shortcomings is important for NATO and other allies who haven't yet signed up to buy the plane (e.g. Canada). Maybe the plane will mature into an effective platform, or maybe it will never be anything more than an expensive turkey. Right now it seems like the right thing to do is hold off making a purchase.

Yes, you're right! My father was an Air Force pilot and then flew a private plane into his 60's. for 40 years he religiously followed the checklists, calling out and pointing to the relevant part of the plane for each item on the list: "windows and doors, check; wing flaps set for takeoff; seats latched; seat belts locked; etc."

http://www.mooneyland.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Mooney_...

I work on medical software now. It's kind of a well known story now how doctors are resistant to using checklists, like pilots do, even though it has been proven in studies to reduce medical errors.

It's an interesting idea that maybe we could employ a form of point-and-call checklist system in software development or operations.

Yes, particularly for the HiDPI support for Windows. If Java 9 slips to summer 2017, I'm going to have to bite the bullet and manually scale our Windows GUI on HiDPI (shudder) unless Darcula (https://github.com/bulenkov/Darcula) comes through for us.

On my Yosemite system /usr/local was created by default when the OS was installed.

Hopefully in a couple of weeks WWDC 2015 will tell us that it's in.

Having the index page prominently display large icons for an erect penis, a vagina, and various breasts seems like a terrible decision. And aside from the whole NSFW aspect, is that really what you want to lead with? Is there a large pent-up demand among medical websites for vagina icons? Surely you want to lead with something that website designers actually need.

I use the MAS version of the Authy BT app. It pairs correctly about 90% of the time. The remaining 10% it refuses to pair up, even with the iOS app open, but I'm pretty sure that's Apple's buggy BT drivers, not Authy. That 10% failure is a minor annoyance, but (90% of the time) the convenience of being able to easily paste codes into my browser already make the UX much better than Google Authenticator.

Thank you very much for posting these documents! This will save my small medical tech startup a huge amount of time and pain.

I particularly liked one of the points that Grey made towards the end: what do we do about all of the people who will be "unemployable through no fault of their own"? Right now our economic system is predicated on rewarding those who deserve wealth (as judged by ability or hard work). The converse of that is that we as a society accept that the undeserving (stupid and/or lazy) will be punished economically. We rationalize this because we convince ourselves that it was their own fault, therefore it's "fair" . But what happens when intelligent, hard-working -- and therefore deserving -- people are unemployable? It's going to be a massive shock to people and to the system. (Or we will enter a state of mass cognitive dissonance and convince ourselves that the majority of the population has become stupid and lazy and so is getting what they deserve.)

Which is great! My business is based on cloud computing. I totally see the value of syncing my business notes through the cloud to my other devices. But I need the option of flagging certain notebooks as private and not to be synced. So I guess I'll stick with Yojimbo for personal notes.

I guess it depends on what you keep in your notebooks. Business notes in the cloud, fine. Personal stuff I keep notes on -- medical history, financial info, etc. -- all in the cloud, possibly encrypted with some key owned by MS also in their cloud, living forever? Nope.

I've been looking forward to OneNote on the Mac for years. I installed it and found out there is no option for offline notebooks; all notebooks appear to be synced through the OneDrive cloud. WTF? There's not even the option to encrypt notebooks in the cloud. I'm just not going to share all my personal thoughts and notes with the NSA. I'm disappointed.

I'd be interested too.