> Re: roads, I agree that not all roads are toll roads. The good news is that roads are relatively inexpensive to build and maintain (for example, the federal transportation budget is only 2.3% of total yearly spending, 28 billion dollars).
Wow, so you have an extra half-billion or so just sitting around? ($28 billion x 0.023 = $460 million) How fortunate for you!
Beggin' your pardon, M'Lord, but the peasantry doesn't consist of multi-millionaires. And they need to use roads to live their lives in a modern, industrialized society.
So, no, you can keep your libertarian dystopia where everyone has to build their own roads, hire their own police forces, etc. Go build your own civilization, away from ours.
You must be fortunate not to have any preexisting conditions or to not need any medical procedures that, without insurance, can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars.
The real question is why are medical procedures so artificially expensive.
The only thing I would really need medical insurance for is a rare emergency procedure like an appendectomy. Information online says an appendectomy can cost anywhere from $1,500 to $150,000.
Why is there such a deviation? This is how insurance companies make their money.
When we consider that medical insurance in the USA is several hundred dollars per month, $1,500 out of pocket seems completely reasonable.
> The only thing I would really need medical insurance for is a rare emergency procedure like an appendectomy.
If you need an appendectomy, then you do not have time to fiddle around and comparison shop for medical insurance. If an appendix needs to come out, then it needs to come out ASAP (otherwise, the appendix could burst, causing sepsis). And there's no insurance provider on the planet that will take on a new customer and cover a procedure done before the customer's policy goes into effect.
Let me guess: you also think car insurance is a sham, and that you shouldn't be required to have it. And if, heaven forfend, you get into a car accident, you can just call up State Farm (or whoever) and get them to retroactively approve a claim for the accident. Am I right?
> And exactly how many people do you think have $1,500 laying around? (Hint: not many)
If you're paying $300/mo and are reasonably healthy (i.e. not going to the doctor regularly) then you'd save that up in now time. The real fix to all of this is to remove day-to-day care from health insurance and let it be just "insurance" (i.e. not healthcare). They have a bit of that with catastrophic plans but there are limitations on who can sign up for them (which I personally think is really stupid).
> Q: What data formats does Amazon Athena support?
> Amazon Athena supports a wide variety of data formats like CSV, TSV, JSON, or Textfiles and also supports open source columnar formats such as Apache ORC and Apache Parquet. Athena also supports compressed data in Snappy, Zlib, and GZIP formats. By compressing, partitioning, and using columnar formats you can improve performance and reduce your costs.
Not only do I not see a problem with this, but I don't think Twitter went anywhere near far enough. They should have suspended Trump's account well over a year ago.
This argument is seemingly related to Gregory Chaitin's views on noncomputability and nondefinability. Chaitin observes that almost all real numbers cannot be referred to, or singled out, by any mathematical method available to us -- for example because definable numbers using a language or notation must have the cardinality of the natural numbers, but we know from Cantor that the cardinality of the reals should be larger.
Chaitin simply thought this was an impressive fact about the reals and the limitations of mathematics -- a way in which mathematics contains randomness and that many or most facts are "true for no particular reason". This author instead seems to conclude for a related reason that the reals don't exist because we have (and could have) no usable technique to distinguish most real numbers from one another. His complaint in this video is a Chaitin-like observation that we have no way to distinguish real number A from real number B in a finite amount of time or with a finite amount of reasoning or information, and an un-Chaitin-like conclusion that maybe we then have no reason to believe that these numbers exist and are distinct from each other.
Edit: and he emphasizes later that if we believe in the reals, numbers must exist that we can't actually do arithmetic with (which I would suggest is sometimes for the Chaitinesque reason that we can't name or define them, or other times for the weaker Chaitinesque reason that we can't calculate their values), so he seems to ask what good such numbers are to us or what reason we could have to believe that they are real.
It is definitely not a standard or mainstream view, but it could be a flavor of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finitism which has been defended by a very small but not infinitesimal :-) number of professional mathematicians and which isn't a logically inconsistent position.
By that I mean that I believe that physical systems can be completely described by constructive mathematics based on intuitionistic logic[2] operating on computable reals[3]. I believe that any other kind of mathematics, e.g. classical logic with axiom of choice can create unphysical models.
That being said, I don't object to classical logic as a purely abstract concept. Everything proved in ZFC is certainly true in ZFC! And I don't think any finitist will contest that.
Indeed, there are an almost infinite number of crank theories because they don't require logic, evidence, or proof - just belief. One crank can churn out a hundred nonsense theories in the time it takes someone to validate one scientific idea or mathematical proof.
This has a corollary in the startup world: everyone has an idea, what matters is execution.
The linked video is largely a critique of Dedekind cuts, arguing that they don't in general let us recognize, distinguish, or perform arithmetic on most real numbers. (Almost all of the informational input to a Dedekind cut for a randomly chosen real couldn't be written, remembered, or specified in any way by a human being.)
I think the presenter in the video is trying to justify a kind of finitist attitude based on the inaccessibility and unspecifiability of reals-in-general to us. This could also be advocating a position something like
> Almost all of the informational input to a Dedekind cut for a randomly chosen real couldn't be written, remembered, or specified in any way by a human being.
I understand where you're coming from, and I empathize. I'd like you to try to see the world from my eyes, where that exact same statement applies, word for word, about Hillary Clinton's stance on gun rights.
Reputable recruiters charge employers, not candidates. Any so-called "recruiter" who takes their cut directly out of your salary (as opposed to charging the employer a percentage of a candidate's salary in a lump sum payment) is a con artist. Period.
But on the other hand, that sounds very similar to the arrangement wherein a contracting firm hires you at $100k/year and bills customers for your services at $100/hour, even when you work at the customer's site, using the customer's equipment.
If the customer drops the firm, you just get fired instead of benched.
That is exactly how hundreds of "Beltway Bandit" firms operate. Charge the government double what it costs you to employ someone, and spend most of your workday recruiting on behalf of your customers.
Recruiters get paid by the employer, and not off the candidate's pool. It's
employer who bears the burden of paying the recruiter in our current setting.
This is why your situation was deemed scam (a.k.a. unusually sub-par for the
environment).
Who the hell works for a company (remotely or not) and uses their own equipment? I'm not a lawyer, of course, but a developer exposing their personal system to company data could be a significant liability risk to the company.
In particular, my last employer gave everyone the option to use an app[1] for easy access to email on their personal phones. I refused to install it, since it gave my (then) employer the ability to remotely wipe my phone at the press of a button.
Depending on relationship if you are a contractor usually you have to provide your own equipment and software. I prefer it that way - if company provides equipment it is usually minimum to get job done which doesn't make it pleasant most of the time.
That's a fair point. I wasn't thinking of contractors when I wrote my reply above. Hmmm, in that case, are there protections other than an NDA that are employed to minimize the risk of exposure of company data to a contractor's personal systems?
"Good" is a horrible app, but the wiping functionality is restricted to the data within the app. That's why the app is popular with companies for private devices, because it is very hard to export data from it.
Wiping a personal device to delete business data within one app would be illegal in a lot of countries.
"Good" is a horrible app, but the wiping functionality is restricted to the data within the app.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't - the point is that you need to give your employer the permission to wipe your entire device. And even if you trust them - whose to say there will never be a bug that triggers that code path?
Which is it?