pcai

A vehicle is driven on public roads and can kill people, that’s why licenses are required.

Outlawing certain kinds of math is a level of totalitarianism we should never accept under any circumstances in a free society

For this argument to work you have to believe that decreasing the price of service delivery wouldn't decrease the price of health insurance.

I think we are talking past each other. My argument is not that lower prices for medical services wouldn’t lead to lower insurance costs. My argument is specifically that increasing supply doesn’t necessarily lead to lower prices for medical services. It would be quite a finding if US cities with more doctors per capita have cheaper medical services but if anything the opposite is true

I think you’re still missing the point - it’s NOT classic supply and demand because the mechanism by which that works is prices, and in many healthcare markets including the US — the buyer isn’t the payer, and shortages lead to rationing (via wait times) rather than increased prices, so often increasing supply doesn’t change prices even as it increases aggregate costs (because there’s still excess demand and rationing).

I 100% agree! It's almost like income stability is valuable!

Hmm if this is true why is it so rare that software devs quit their jobs and make more money freelancing or starting their own companies?

Sigma Squared | Senior Software Engineer | Cambridge, MA | Full time | ONSITE

Sigma Squared is a mission-driven data science platform for making better people decisions. Companies use our software to make better hiring and promotion decisions - based on merit, not intuitions. This leads to fairer outcomes and less bias.

We recently raised $10MM series A from 8vc and are launching in food&bev and law enforcement this year.

We're hiring senior (full stack) engineers (and in customer success, sales, marketing, and product management).

Our stack: React, Typescript, AWS (we also work closely with data scientists so we dabble in python)

To apply: https://sigmasquared.io/careers?ashby_jid=92adf2c5-8bed-466b...

Note this is hosted on gh so you can open a pr to add yours: https://github.com/ruby-conferences/ruby-conferences.github....

I’m on mobile at the moment otherwise I’d do it myself

This list is hosted on github, contributions are welcome: https://github.com/ruby-conferences/ruby-conferences.github....

My point is that carrier locking is about managing credit risk and fraud, not an evil plot to trap customers, and not a mechanism for discouraging street theft.

It’s only complicated if people conflate issues or fail to understand the mechanics of carrier locking. You can just call up a carrier and ask to have the phone unlocked and they’ll oblige if its paid off. Sometimes people confuse carrier locking with imei blacklists, which is for stolen handsets. Sometimes people confuse phones with modems or firmware that only work with specific carriers as “carrier locked” but again, that’s not the same thing

It’s not speculation - this is literally why cell phone locking was invented. The imei blacklists were created much later specifically for theft, not to manage credit risk of customers getting subsidized phones.

You can literally just call your carrier to ask how to get your subsidized phone unlocked. There’s no need to speculate- it’s not a secret!

This is incorrect. You can pay off a phone early and simply ask that it be unlocked - the carrier will happily comply because you are no longer a credit risk. You can also just purchase phones unlocked by paying cash upfront. You don’t need to be a genius to deduce how this works.

The imei blacklists for theft were created much later and aren’t honored globally

It’s impractical to “repossess” phones so in practice the carriers wouldn’t be able to stop people from deliberately defaulting on the contract with no repercussions (they can bring it to a different carrier who is indifferent)

It is 100% an anti theft mechanism - it prevents people from stealing phones from carriers. The scam is: - get a new iphone from tmobile that costs $30 over 2 years. - don’t pay them anything: you just got a free iphone. Tmobile is mad and won’t provide service to that handset because you stole it from them. - You open a new line with at&t and tell them you’re bringing your own phone.

Carrier locking prevents this. If someone steals your phone on the train that’s a different problem with a different solution

I never understood the argument that “locking in your losses is actually a form of tax evasion” - or am I misunderstanding what you are trying to say?

Actually caffeine is a well known and widely studied performance enhancing drug, for example in endurance sports

Even in those larger numbers, sponsors are flighty and often unappreciative.

Can you elaborate on what you mean? In my experience running meetups, sponsoring is an expensive and thankless activity akin to a donation

TCP solves for “when i send a message i want the other side to actually receive it” which is…fairly common

I think this is conceptually wrong from a layering perspective because youre punching through the abstraction and making it leaky on purpose. This just moves the problem down one layer in the stack - there will be legitimate new use cases for “sim card ID spoofing” and then we’re back to square one. Also from a usability standpoint “getting a new phone” is precisely the wrong time to lock users out of their accounts

A perfect analogy would be trying to implement security with mac addresses but applied to internet. It just makes a mess of an abstraction layer and then you have to rebuild it because those abstractions were useful (mac address spoofing has legitimate uses because mac addresses were used for security and then people realized they needed to be able to transparently swap things out)

Have you considered not speeding

I understand where you’re coming from but the thing to understand is: most startups are incredibly marginal to begin with. If you tilt the field such that the entire distribution is now ~5-6% lower expected value for any given outcome, you can easily wipe out 80%+ of the startups that might’ve been “worth trying” but don’t make any sense now on a risk-adjusted basis. The entire asset class can become unfundable because the same money taking the same level of risk simply generates more returns elsewhere

This is wrong because you are speaking on an accrual basis but you have to consider cash. The cash (salaries and taxes) is paid out in year 1 regardless of what year you try to book it in your p&l statements

imagine in year 1 you grossed 100k, spent 200k on salaries, but the new irs rules say you owe taxes on 60k of profits.

To slightly simplify: it forces startups to pay taxes on profits that only exist on paper, with cash that is now much more scarce

sorry that happened to you. most likely they had a candidate deep in the pipeline with an offer out, and they were hedging their bets in case they declined. this is surprisingly common, though its shitty behavior for the recruiter to ghost you

one seldom-mentioned reason employers ghost candidates deep in the process SEEMS silly, but is selfishly rational: they are hedging their bets. you came in second place, and they are waiting to see if their preferred candidate accepts before getting back to you.

This is correct, but its uncharitable to call it a "hack" in many contexts. In oauth, for example, the access token / refresh token concept is literally spelled out in the spec. It's not a workaround, its how you implement eventual consistency in a loosely coupled system where the IDP can't push updates to clients because it doesn't know all of them by design

Actually no, me pointing out that “a literal anon in their armchair probably hasn’t thought through a challenging legal problem as thoroughly as the billion dollar company making the decision has” is not actually the same as saying that “every big company is infallible” but nice try

Consider for just a moment that they have almost certainly thought about this much more deeply and thoughtfully than you have

Just buy 2 of the 0.33L! You already did the math!

Author here. I will admit to having severe…let’s call it “gastrointestinal distress” the first 24 hours or so, until my body acclimated to the new diet. I would recommend easing into it over a few days, instead of the hard cutover I did.

Author here: I actually discuss theories for why ~500 calories ad libitum is satiating thus leading to weight loss. Your “shocking alternative theory” is already an embedded assumption and requires no discussion.