furburger

Can we discuss health care without the science fiction and doomsday scenarios?

only if you travel back to 1981 before these costs started their long-term snowball

NO ONE WANTS A FREE MARKET SOLUTION FOR HEALTHCARE.

get over it.

a free market solution means dying baby gets turned away when parent has no money. otherwise it is not a market solution. no one wants this. no one. move to somalia, you can implement your plan there, life is cheap.

healthcare is not a business. no civil society is going to let you decline cusomters who cannot pay when it comes to keeping the baby alive.

some points:

- healthcare is not a business. get over it. the law says you cannot decline emergency care. there is no business model here, any more than there is in running the navy. its a cost.

- you care about public health. meaning, you care if other people are healthy. do you go to the mall or restaurants? if you do, you care if the person next to you has TB. infectous diseases doesn't care about your fully-paid premiums...it matters if other people are also healthy. this once again goes to the fact that healthcare is not a business.

- single payer is the only model that works. or would you prefer to spend another century experimenting with craptastic half-baked business/public hybrids? all health insurance companies must go. the government itself chooses single payer when it needs to run large healthcare plans. the VA, military, federal govt...they all go through single-payer.

- healthcare will be rationed. deal with it. water is rationed. the carpool lane is rationed. bandwidth is rationed. why would healthcare not be rationed?

viva *bsd. and the linux kernel is progressing nicely as well. its a great time for free OSs.

i don't know anything about cal's departure, but i can say that any large co like yahoo, google, msft, apple etc is more or less impervious against the loss of one or a few technical individuals. his departure may have symbolic value but the machine that is chugging there will keep chugging, for better or for worse

raw io? facebook better go ipo soon, they're running out of abstraction layers to code through

where was thiel bitching about the Fed and its liquidity binge when it was goosing his facebook stake into the billions? haha it will be amusing watching this guy circle the drain with all of the rest of the lauded paypal mafia, whose paper-tiger web2 "empires" are individually going nowhere fast

i wonder if amazon will stay on the "wholesale" side of this equation or eventually move into the retail side...seems gdrive or whatever it is google is planning might upset the amazon/N-front-ends racket

i thought 3des was still used in ATMs? my (limited) understanding was that its weakness was balanced by its otherwise maturity...and that a potential hacker had very little time in which to make the crack and make use of it

it doesn't matter. employees only become rich if the stock goes crazy. lots of profitable companies have craptastic stocks.

well the point is, and i think this is the original poster's point...questions like this are not relevant to what facebook is doing, and even if it is, its the kind of thing you look up.

haha the amusing thing is that he himself likely only looked up the newton-raphson method ten minutes before phoning you. sadly that is the case for many of these mensa-test mental masturbation questions...if you had asked your interviewer the day before, they too would have drawn a blank.

you would think it would suffice to just tell him, yeah, i am aware that the newton-raphson method exists, and what it is supposed to do.

facebook is indulging the exact same hubris we engaged at yahoo in the late 90s. after an initial cadre of so-so developers rode the wave up, we decided to believe the hype that we were uber-brilliant and suddenly no one was smart enough to pass our interviews. we made sure of it. in the end we hired mediocore talent because we had pissed off anyone with a brain with our retarded brain teasers and "did you memorize page 478 of stroustrup" type questions.

my interview with them was pointlessly difficult, i pretty much hung up on them because it was obvious that the point of the interview was to provide amusement for the caller.

this is a good. college tuition costs need to not just drop, but crash. they won't until people stop propagating the idea that they are required.

yeah its called yahoo groups. there are thousands of little neighborhood groups out there using yahoo groups, google groups, etc. you don't need a dedicated site, all most people really want is a mailing list with a web ui

i'm starting to think angels are just dumber, poorer VCs

i defy you to spend ten minutes on basho.com and actually know WTF their product ACTUALLY does. no wonder the VCs passed on this fluff

okay come on you have totally warped expectations of what a work visa provides. work visas are not created to allow you to wonder silicon valley looking for cool startups to join. nor should it. thats what residency visas are for. a work visa should be tied to an employer. you seem to think you need a work visa in order to get a residency visa...no. tens of thousands of people every year become US citizens simply because they want to.

border guards are one step up from prison guards. just hold your nose, blow some sunshine up their asses, and move on.

there is no ranking of the applications; Apart from requiring they meet the minimum requirements they are just processed in the order received

okay, all H1-B holders who want their applications held up for a year while a reasonable basis for comparison is accumulated, raise their hands

search is no longer a technical problem, it is a marketing problem. yahoo continues to throw money at search and has good people...yet their search marketshare is going nowhere. microsoft bought powerset, pours a bajillion into research...they're still likewise making no inroads against google. its possible that skrenta knows something no one else does, but i doubt it. the challenge isn't building a search engine, its getting people to use it. for 99% of the market, search === google, and i don't see that changing

no permit = ripped down at owners expense, pure and simple

yes because someone else coming over to the house may not realize that this is dangerous, craptastic, etc. dude may actually be setting himself up for a huge liability should this ever fail on an unsuspecting guest....his house insurance won't cover it, its non-permitted work

in any case he'll have to remove it if the house ever goes up for sale, there's no way that would pass inspection. the first thing an inspector will ask for is the permit for the work

good luck passing a housing inspection there dude...presuming he wants to be buried in the house after this bit of idiocy, cuz he'll never sell it

oh cripes can we just kill these stupid stereotypes already?

actually one common form of nicotine is in fact a deadly poison

smoking is partially beneficial? i'm interested to see the hacker response to forty years of medical research to the contrary

yeah like gangrene cures cancer

don't forget the fifty trillion or so to pay their entitlements til (avg) age of death. or the extra three trillion they'll peel off of the stock market when they are forced by law to start liquidating their 401ks faster than we can make contributions to ours.

its not even an issue of features. 99.99% of internet users have heard of google. my guess is 0.001% have heard of simulscribe. this doesn't mean simulscribe can't compete or doesn't have a kick-ass product, but users still have to be able to find them.

i suspect the best way for simulscribe to compete with google is to be folded into an entity that is well known, and has the marketing budget to remain in the minds of potential users

apache is perfectly capable of saturating the outbound connection on static content on any reasonable setup. you may save a little on memory with nginx but you aren't saving on speed (how can you deliver more content than the outbound connection can carry??). this is why the in-kernel http servers went nowhere. in any case most people use CDNs these days for static content.

note that by not using apache you give up a lot of security hardening, add-on-modules, and mindshare that nginx does not have.