We've been using Aspose.PDF for the last 10 years or so in our C# platform, and paying for the license. It's expensive and buggy and has shite support, so a year or so back I decided to see if there was some other library or combination of libraries that could meet our needs. Basically, we needed:
* HTML to PDF
* Compress PDF
* Manual PDF generation
* Text extraction
* No browser engine or other weird dependencies
I researched every library I could find, and downloaded, integrated and tested anything that looked remotely promising.
At the end of all that, I reluctantly handed my company credit card back to Aspose. There simply wasn't any open-source or even just cheaper PDF library that I could actually make work, and all the other paid ones that did work were even more expensive.
Aspose is the library I’ve used commercially in the past, too. My experience was similar. The company I worked for at the time eventually charged more for PDF export as a paid add on. The software is very sticky so the people who truly needed pdf export directly paid, the rest relied on export to word then “printed” the pdf themselves.
I am in the same boat. Aspose has been the go to for Word and PDF documents. Will say, Adobe's PDF Services API offers a ton of interesting features but comes with a price tag and in my scenario, it's not HIPAA compliant.
The post does a good job of describing a phenomenological difference between being broke and being poor, and its account seems plausible to me. But what I'm curious about is the causal difference between the two. I've known working class folks who seem like they're getting by fine, even if they're occasionally "broke", and I've known working class folks who are constantly in financial crisis, and definitely fit in the category of "poor". I wonder why folks who start with roughly the same skills, intelligence and opportunities (and bank account balance!) can nevertheless end up in very different places?
> But what I'm curious about is the causal difference between the two
A majority of personal bankruptcies in the US being caused by medical expenses might be a good place to start looking. You can be "broke" living paycheck to paycheck and "making it", but you're on even more of a razors edge than most. One medical emergency, one car accident, one removal of work hours etc and you start to fall behind, and that's when late fees and compounding interest work to make sure you never get out of the hole.
Thanks for being skeptical, looked it up because of that. Looks like the primary study people cite is this one, which indicates around 65% of people filing for bankruptcy cite a medical contributor of their bankruptcy. That includes medical bills (highest contributor overall) and loss of income due to medical issues.
While we are not at the same state in history, there is a reason why Usury was illegal in many societies. Interest on loans can end up crushing one part of society while enriching another that any feel didn't deserve it. It can actively produce inequality.
Growing up with a single mother we've vacillated between being poor, broke and "getting by".
It was always a reverse slide down.
First, we'd go broke. The meager savings she'd put together would get wiped out. It was generally an impossible crisis that would do it. Something that shouldn't have broken, did. Something that shouldn't have happened, did. Something that should have only cost X cost Y.
If the crisis was a single instance event that year, we'd slowly return to "getting buy". Small savings would get restored. Some debt written off. A windfall from something or other that put our heads above water.
But sometimes, it was too many things at once. We'd go from being broke, to being poor. Every dollar was a trade-off. There was no "even" or "reduced". There was just "no". The water bill couldn't get paid. The mortgage had to be late. The credit card was going to default. There were no options to shave or save. The bare minimum was still too expensive.
The answer is just ... luck.
When you're broke, you're on borrowed time. For some people, at some point, that debt comes due and can never be repaid. For some people, the debt comes due but something balances it. For others, the debt just never gets called in.
> I wonder why folks who start with roughly the same skills, intelligence and opportunities (and bank account balance!) can nevertheless end up in very different places?
I don't want to sound dismissive but sometimes it's just luck.
Luck really can’t be overstated imo. I was genuinely just lucky to be interested in computer programming as a teenager. I wasn’t thinking about careers, I just wanted to make games. If my interest was basketball my life would have been very different.
Don't forget the luck of living in a country where programming was a viable career path that could lead to a decent job, the luck of having the opportunity (and/or money) to attain the higher education that's usually required for it and the luck of living in a time when the tech industry was in an upswing that would allow a person to find a job in this industry. Really, having any of these puts most of us well above the amount of luck an average person gets (at least on a worldwide scale).
You were lucky to have the genetics that allowed you to have cognitive capabilities to understand computers and programming.
Many people don't and never will.
There is always a bottom % of people who are under the cognitive capacity to meaningfully contribute to society. That doesn't mean they are bad people, but they will always be poor/broke.
Ranting about this is just ranting about human nature. Life isn't fair, some of us will be short, have bad looks, be unappealing to women, etc. And some of us will not have the cognitive capacity to have a job that keeps you above water, forever.
The only thing we can do is be compassionate and help out. Maybe eventually we will have enough mastery over genetics where we can make people truly equal in ability.
>There is always a bottom % of people who are under the cognitive capacity to meaningfully contribute to society. That doesn't mean they are bad people, but they will always be poor/broke.
There's a lot of dumb rich people, too. Sometimes the wield a lot of power and are indeed bad people.
> There is always a bottom % of people who are under the cognitive capacity to meaningfully contribute to society. That doesn't mean they are bad people, but they will always be poor/broke.
The percentage of people so dumb that they can't hold a useful job is staggeringly low.
Unless in your mind anybody of average or below average intelligence "can't contribute to society" in which case I suggest you step off your tech pedestal and look around you.
> The percentage of people so dumb that they can't hold a useful job is staggeringly low.
Sure. OP didn't say otherwise.
OP did say that some folks "will always be poor" because they are "under the cognitive capacity to meaningfully contribute to society" and that "[t]hat doesn't mean that they are bad people, but they will always be poor/broke" and that "Maybe eventually we will have enough mastery over genetics where we can make people truly equal in ability." but until then "The only thing we can do is be compassionate and help out.".
Perhaps you've been so lucky as to never encounter folks who hold the bone-deep belief that being unable to work [0] makes you worse than worthless. If so, celebrate your good fortune, I guess?
[0] Typically, these sorts of folks have carveouts for retirement, pregnancy, childbearing, and maybe a begrudging carveout for short-term injury. Anything else and you're a filthy drain on society.
> There is always a bottom % of people who are under the cognitive capacity to meaningfully contribute to society. That doesn't mean they are bad people, but they will always be poor/broke.
The only reason people like you or me can sit on their lazy arses typing for a living is because there's a small army of people that take care of things like food and other boring tasks. The people keeping the Tesco running. The drivers delivering stuff there. The distribution centre. The farmers. The people building roads. The people maintaining roads. People maintaining water. People maintaining electricity. People maintaining gas.
All of that is just to keep the local supermarket running. I probably forgot some. It expands even more if you include other things.
A lot of this is what is generally known as "low skilled labour". But it's all needed. It's all contributing. I did this kind of work until my 20s and I definitely had a share of coworkers who were dumb, for lack of a better term. Most were not, but some were, a few to the point of being clinically handicapped. But they were all contributing.
Without them one couldn't make privileged elitist statements on internet forums being derisive of an entire class of people. Snobby comments like this is why people hate "the elite".
People don't need your compassion or help. They need a roughly fair system where working a full-time job gives you a decent standard of living. Lets start with that. And I'm not even going to start how the entire post stinks of eugenics. The only way to eliminate poverty is to genetically engineer out the people you been too dumb to exist? Really?
I take your broader point. I didn’t choose my genetics, my parents, or the conditions I was raised in. That’s why I don’t believe in moralizing social class.
I do believe in the idea of meritocracy and competition in general to motivate people. We are far from a meritocratic society unfortunately.
> I wonder why folks who start with roughly the same skills, intelligence and opportunities (and bank account balance!) can nevertheless end up in very different places?
External factors (aka luck), perhaps? Someone gets their resume into a job just after they made the last hire for that position. Or the car they can't afford to fix breaks down on the way to the interview.
Things that are pretty much out of those peoples' control can include health problems, dependents such as kids or needy older relatives, accidents, a long tail of other kinds of bad luck (fires, victim of fraud, etc)
> I wonder why folks who start with roughly the same skills, intelligence and opportunities (and bank account balance!) can nevertheless end up in very different places?
They don't have the same skills. One is far more skilled at existing while poor.
This is a massively broad brush with a huge filter bias applied.
1. Many immigrants not from the contiguous countries next to yours were actually rather wealthy and education in relation to where they came from.
2. Immigrants from close countries typically are the ones that are more motivated in the first place (bias filter). It's also common they have relations and contacts in the country they are going to as a means to gain a foothold in the place they are going.
> Many immigrants [...] were actually rather wealthy and education in relation to where they came from.
But they're not wealthy here, and they can't buy the cost of living in NYC or LA with that level of wealth.
With the education point, you're gesturing at something like the real reasons they often outperform very poor Americans (if we compare only equivalent capacity for the sake of argument), I believe: habit, work ethic, drive, belief in improvement. Dom's article about what "poor" looks like makes sense from the inside, but after making it out one looks back and sees all the opportunities everyone around them had to get out of poverty, and it looks a little different, then. Not everyone has all the same opportunities, but a key driver is being open to those that appear, and conducting your life such that they are more likely.
The despair of believing they can't get out of the rut they're in is one of the causes of not getting out of the rut they are in. It's not that the despair isn't real, but it's a self-fulfilling prophecy (and this is true even if they win the lottery, looking at outcomes there).
Well if the poster is not doing drugs and is taking care of their health the odds are overwhelmingly against this scenario even if it would satisfy your schadenfreude.
Oh really? Please cite the sources. I didn't say I hoped it happened. Just that it does happen. And it's an extremely myopic and callous way to look at the state of the world.
> I wonder why folks who start with roughly the same skills, intelligence and opportunities (and bank account balance!) can nevertheless end up in very different places?
I actually think a lot of it comes down to self control.
Can you resist the allure of consumerism and keeping up with the Joneses? Are you buying liabilities that actually make your life harder? Are you living outside of your means?
IMO it matters little how much you earn if you don't know how to spend it.
> Being poor is you already did all those things. You cancelled all your streaming services years ago. You make all your food from scratch all the time. You never go to fucking Starbucks. You fix everything yourself. You already stretch everything to the limit. That is how you have to live every day of your life, for eternity, with no relief in sight.
Yes, the article says that, but I have direct experience which says the article is not telling the whole story. Some people are making all the right decisions and are still poor due to bad luck trapping them in a cycle of financial ruin. But also, some people really are poor due to their own crappy decisions. I've known them! They exist and must be accounted for in any productive discussion about poverty.
Many, many people try to act like only one of these two groups of poor people exists. For some people, that means they claim that if you're poor it's only because of your own bad decisions. For some people (including, to be frank, most of the commenters in this thread), it means they claim that if you're poor it's only because of systemic issues. Both claims are wrong, however, and both hamper us from finding effective solutions.
Whether one is poor due to external causes or their own bad decisions, they deserve to be treated with compassion and for us to try to help them. But the solutions for those two failure modes look very different and helping one group isn't going to do anything to help the other. Thus, trying to effectively solve problems of poverty in our society must include a balanced view, recognizing that both causes of poverty (systemic issues and bad personal decision making) are quite real.
> You make all your food from scratch all the time. [...] You fix everything yourself.
What stands out here is that if someone finds out that you can cook or fix things in my circles, they'll be knocking at your door trying to throw money at you. These are hotly desired skills. Of course, it is conceivable that if your circle is other poor people that can't offer you a good job, you'll never find those opportunities. Does this suggest that the company you keep is most signifiant? That is certainly not a new idea.
Being able to hobnob with the world's richest billionaires is probably a function of luck more than anything. But what about the moms and pops that are found everywhere? Is getting into their good graces also limited by sheer luck, or does self-control start to dominate?
> Being poor is you already did all those things. ... You make all your food from scratch all the time.
If poor americans did this they wouldn't be so fat, so that is wrong. Food stamps lets the poor eat unhealthily even though they are poor, while most of the world poor means you have to make your own and not get all the industrial crap.
The other interpretation is that people who don't make their own food aren't really poor, which would mean there are barely any poor Americans. But I doubt that is what they mean.
I suppose that depends on what you mean by "from scratch". If first you must invent the universe, starvation is certain. If you have to produce the food from the ground by yourself, you will struggle to scrape enough calories out of it to survive. There is no hope of excessive weight gain here.
If "from scratch" means going to the grocery store to buy a bunch of prepared ingredients that you go home with to mix up in a bowl, sure. Then it starts to become much easier. Where does the line get drawn?
Uh. We can pretty confidently say that ancient civilizations had fat folks, too.
Also, butter, processed animal fats (such as lard), fatty meats... none of these are recent inventions, and they're all good at helping you to grow fat. I feel very confident in claiming that they (or things functionally just like them) have been around for a thousand years, and I expect that they've been around for several thousand.
> We can pretty confidently say that ancient civilizations had fat folks, too.
Not without a lot of extra help. That is why I said by yourself. If you include the input of many other people building things like a tractor you could also grow enough of your own food from the ground to exceed your normal caloric requirements without much trouble, but you're a long way from doing it from scratch at that point.
Unless, like before, you consider throwing some prepared ingredients into a bowl to be "from scratch", at which point anything goes. Perhaps opening a bag of chips is also "from scratch"? You did have to exert the effort to open it, after all.
> Not without a lot of extra help. That is why I said by yourself.
One guy can totally make butter, lard, and harvest fatty meat by themselves. While it's far easier with help, it's not as if you're asking the fellow to -say- change the orbit of the sun. Fat people and high-calorie foods substantially predate modern industry.
> One guy can totally make butter, lard, and harvest fatty meat by themselves.
Theoretically it is possible that one person could, on their own, produce enough calories with cattle to feed around two people. So in a vacuum it is true that you could gain excessive weight.
But it still isn't actually possible in reality. The time commitment to produce that much is expansive. There isn't enough time in the day for you and you alone to both produce it and also eat it to excess. If you cut down on your time commitment to the animals so that you can focus on eating, then your caloric production plummets.
That is, of course, much easier to pull off with the modern tools we have, but then you're back to requiring the help of many people. Those tools don't magically appear out of nowhere.
> Theoretically it is possible that one person could, on their own, produce enough calories with cattle to feed around two people.
Right. This is the same species as the "birthing in olden times was fatal 50% of the time" assertion.
Anyway, I see what you're driving at.
Yes. I agree that a lone, naked, unarmed human surrounded by a couple dozen wolves looking to eat him right now is almost certainly going to be eaten by those wolves.
Though, what that has to do with a lone farmer getting fat off his own produce, I have no idea.
> Though, what that has to do with a lone farmer getting fat off his own produce, I have no idea.
Me neither as it has never happened. Said farmer was typically burning around 4-6,000 calories per day. If eating butter and fatty meats as suggested, we're talking a pretty significant time commitment just for maintenance, never mind pushing yourself over the time. You can't exactly guzzle down a slab of meat like it is a Coca-Cola. If you wanted to start packing on the pounds, ignoring the challenge of even just getting that much food down your gullet in the first place, when would you actually find time raise the animals in order to provide that much food?
It has always been possible if you have a lot of help, sure. Even the aforementioned bag of chips was made from scratch by a group of people — unless we're counting the need to invent the universe, I suppose. That's probably not what earlier comments were talking about, though.
Yes, there were always fat people around in history, but not at the same rates and severity as modern Americans.
Cooking your own food reduces how fat you are on average, American poors wouldn't be one of the fattest groups in the world if they made their own food.
What consumerism? Someone falling into the "poor" category the OP describes has already forgone all of that out of necessity. There is no money for consumerism.
Has nothing to do with self control and "maybe don't go buy a coffee." They weren't doing that in the first place.
There are places in this country where the minimum wage is still a paltry $10/hour or less and rent for a family is $2800+. The math doesn't work. There's a systemic affordability problem
Is the discussion about only one particular kind of poor person?
The system is a trap to keep people poor. A lot of people make the wrong decisions that keep them there. Can we not talk about that? It doesn't belittle the subset of folks that it doesn't apply to.
I grew up this way and saw it first-hand. A dead-beat step dad who didn't work for literally _years_. A mother with the only income of less than $40k/year for 3.
Cigarettes and beer every night. Fancy, financed cars with ridiculous interest rates because their credit scores were shit. Rent-a-center furniture payments. The newest phones and other bullshit that they couldn't truly afford.
So many people in our circles lived this way or worse. And I'm not trying to come forward and say "I got out of it so everyone can!" - just that people have a small amount of control and they regularly make the wrong decisions.
> Is the discussion about only one particular kind of poor person?
Yes, according to the OP. The article already describes the people you are talking about as "broke," not "poor." We already know that those in the broke category can, in most cases, make better decisions and reduce their spending and possibly get ahead.
The ones not in that category can't, which is who the article is about. The discussion is how do we address and help eliminate poverty, not how do we help educate people who are broke because they make bad choices.
I don’t think you understand how little some people have. Especially in rural (or really, anything that isn’t urban) areas, where you have to have a car for transportation, because public transit doesn’t exist.
Keeping an old car running and insured isn’t cheap.
> Especially in rural (or really, anything that isn’t urban) areas
What isn't urban but also not rural?
I've seen disagreement over exactly where urban begins. A density of ~400 people per km², with a minimum of 1-2,000 people is a common definition, although the OECD targets a density of 1,500 people per km², with a minimum of 7,000 people, to capture all the variation throughout the nations it tracks. Regardless, in all those cases "rural" always encompasses that which falls short of what constitutes urban.
I've never heard of this alternate state you speak of.
The sub-urban regions. All the suburbs I've been in (and I'd wager nearly all of the US suburbs in existence) require you to have a vehicle to go about your day... unless you work from home and have everything delivered to you, I guess.
Correct, but irrelevant. Suburban is a subset of urban, not the other way around — originally referring to the portion of an urban area found outside of the wall.
The physical walls aren't often found anymore, but the term still refers to an urban area that surrounds where a wall might have been placed historically.
Like you said, this is irrelevant. Cities aren't planned or built like that, and really haven't been... since the founding of the USA, at the very latest. (If they were, the Brits would have had a much more difficult time capturing D.C. than they did.)
Nice history lesson that you've written for absolutely no reason, but we still don't know what there is other than rural and urban. Pointlessly pointing out obvious things like that there can be suburbs within urban areas, like there can be hamlets in rural areas, does not answer the question or serve any purpose whatsoever.
> Nice history lesson that you've written for absolutely no reason…
This you?
> …originally referring to the portion of an urban area found outside of the wall.
The physical walls aren't often found anymore, but the term still refers to an urban area that surrounds where a wall might have been placed historically.
> I strongly suspect that if you polled random people, they would say something along the lines of b or c.
Yes they would. Absolutely. Which means that they clearly see it as being outskirts of a city or town, not the outskirts of an urban area. You even say so yourself. It is literally written as such.
> There are also exurbs, whose definition further drives home the point that it isn’t binary:
You did the same thing again: Outside a city, not outside of an urban area. Of course there are different community types within urban areas, just as there different community types within rural areas: e.g. hamlets, villages, small towns, it is even technically possible, albeit unusual, for a city to be rural! For example, Greenwood, British Columbia is both a city and rural.
Dude, take it from someone who is mildly autistic, and spent a very long time being staunchly prescriptivist: you’re being ridiculously pedantic, and no one cares.
If you don't care, why take time out of your day to formulate a message?
But, regardless, it is quite delusional to think that I would write for anyone but myself. Nobody is paying me to be here. It can only ever be for myself. As I care, that is more than satisfactory. It makes absolutely no difference what other people have to say about it. It was never for them.
> I wonder why folks who start with roughly the same skills, intelligence and opportunities (and bank account balance!) can nevertheless end up in very different places?
I am answering this question.
Perhaps you could reply with something useful instead of attacking my comment.
> IMO it matters little how much you earn if you don't know how to spend it.
which implied you were also commenting on the condition of being "poor", rather than distinguishing those who are "broke" from those who are not with the same pay.
I take it you really mean:
"IMO, after a baseline, it matters little how much you earn if you don't know how to spend it."
You should feel embarrassed for “thinking” so callously and uncritically. Do you need everything handed to you? Family issues, natural disasters, medical events, house fires, abuse, wage theft, fate. I’ve worked with the destitute, there is no safety net.
Poor people don’t have control of their situation. You are literally victim blaming and surprised that rubs people the wrong way. Victim blaming is rude, offering your flippant two cents is rude. There, your ideas are challenged, rather than tone police go think about it.
suggestion: give people the benefit of the doubt instead of assuming they are out to get you, trying to blame you, or trying to attack you. Especially on hacker news.
Was it a “dumb” question? Yes. Maybe they are dumb. Maybe they are just totally out of touch because they don’t know any poor people. I don’t know because i’m not a mind reader.
I’m wealthy but I wasnt always. When I was 22 through 30 I didn’t take a single vacation that wasn’t driving to a long weekend. My wife and I both pulled 60 to 70 hour weeks for our entire 20s (I still do).
No one “deserves” free time. If you don’t want to work 70 hours a week and want to watch Netflix instead, go for it, but don’t bitch to me
Careful. It sounds an awful lot like you feel you "deserve" to be wealthy from your hard work, but in reality it was the type of work you were doing that got you there, because there are a whole lot of people working 60 to 70 hour weeks decades out of their 20s and will never be secure monetarily.
(leaving aside the pricklier philosophical aspect that a particular type of work being valued so much more than another type of work is also fairly arbitrary in a very similar way to whether or not a human "deserves" free time)
I'm not sure what this contributes? Not being rich and experiencing absolute poverty are radically different things. Of course, in America as everywhere else, there are millions who work sixty hour weeks and remain in poverty, often extreme poverty. Especially those undocumented, incarcerated or working in circumstances where minimum wages do not apply.
I wonder if you've examined your own evident anger and defensiveness and why you've responded in that way?
No they think "its bullshit that you can't get out of it, since I did it myself". The argument from the left is not "we should help poor people since they are miserable" its that "its impossible for poor people to help themselves", why do left wing people try to make that bullshit claim that will just create more oponents?
I think we should help poor people, but I also think that its not hard for poor people to work hard and stop being poor today. If you want my support just say you wanna help poor people, don't try to tell me that its impossible for poor people to help themselves because then I will argue against you.
Like, why equate the two opinions "you can work yourself out of poverty" and "we shouldn't help poor people", those are two entirely different kinds of opinions.
If you had actually been impoverished, you'd have worked 60 hour weeks, and still be working 60 hour weeks with nothing to show for it. If you think "didn't take a vacation that wasn't a long weekend" is poverty, you're delusional.
The "prosperity bible" turn that America has taken is truly saddening.
Such bullshit. Don't continue to glamorize the mentally and physically harmful hustle culture that invades this country, and ignores the very real factor of both luck and privilege that not everyone is blessed with.
What's the point of society if everyone needs to bust their ass 70+ hours a week to get by? Might as well go homestead in the woods and be a subsistence farmer and do it on your own at that point.
Just fuck having time for creative pursuits and hobbies outside of working and making someone else rich?
If your attacker controls the data you're exporting to a CSV file, they can take advantage of a memory safety issue in your CSV exporter to execute arbitrary code on your machine.
Thankfully the “trust” you need out of a compiler is very very different. It would be closer to claiming you need to compile it on a Rust OS too because you’re trusting a large C/C++ app.
Separation of concerns solves this because the compiler has minimal impact on the trustedness of the code the Rust compiler generates. Indeed, one would expect that all the ways that the LLVM compiler fails are ways any Rust implementation would fail too - by generating the wrong code which is rarely if ever due to memory safety or thread safety issues. There may be other reasons to write the compiler backend in Rust but I wouldn’t put the trust of compiled Rust code as anywhere near the top of reasons to do that.
Copilot is getting better - I'm getting fewer of those than I used to - but it's still significantly more stupid than other agents, even when in theory it's using the same model.
If you think that insurance companies have "light regulation", I shudder to think of what "heavy regulation" would look like. (Source: I'm the CTO at an insurance company.)
Light did not mean to imply quantity of paperwork you have to do, rather are you allowed to do the things you want to do as a company.
More compliance or reporting requirements usually tend to favor the larger existing players who can afford to do it and that is also used to make the life difficult and reject more claims for the end user.
It is kind of thing that keeps you and me busy, major investors don't care about it all, the cost of the compliance or the lack is not more than a rounding number in the balance, the fines or penalties are puny and laughable.
The enormous profits year on year for decades now, the amount of consolidation allowed in the industry show that the industry is able to do mostly what they want pretty much, that is what I meant by light regulation.
I'm not sure we're looking at the same industry. Overall, insurance company profit margins are in the single digits, usually low single digits - and in many segments, they're frequently not profitable at all. To take one example, 2024 was the first profitable year for homeowners insurance companies since 2019, and even then, the segment's entire profit margin was 0.3% (not 3% - 0.3%).
Insurance companies vote with their feet. The practical reality is that if insurance companies are able to make money in a given state, they'll stay in that state. Insurance companies fleeing states like CA or FL in droves is a really good indication that the actual, hard reality on the ground is that they can't make money when the regulations are stacked against them. That's fine for insurance companies - they'll just go somewhere else - but it's really bad for the people who need insurance.
So it's weird to see folks on a tech site talking about how enormous all the profits are in health insurance, and citations with numbers would be helpful to the discussion.
I worked in insurance-related tech for some time, and the providers (hospitals, large physician groups) and employers who actually pay for insurance have signficant market power in most regions, limiting what insurers can charge.
I agree, and I can see where it comes from (at least at the state level).
The cycle is: bad trend happens that has deep root causes (let's say PE buying rural hospitals because of reduced Medicaid/Medicare reimbursements); legislators (rightfully) say "this shouldn't happen", but don't have the ability to address the deep root causes so they simply regulate healthcare M&As – now you have a bandaid on a problem that's going to pop up elsewhere.
I mean even in the simple stuff like denying payment for healthcare that should have been covered. CMS will come by and out a handful of cases, out of millions, every few years.
So obviously the company that prioritizes accuracy of coverage decisions by spending money on extra labor to audit itself is wasting money. Which means insureds have to waste more time getting the payment for healthcare they need.
Nah, if I manufactured my own silicon, I'd be infinitely more hackable than I am right now - just like if I wrote my own crypto code. 99.9999% of people are going to be more secure if they just rely on publicly accessible cryptography (and silicon). Otherwise you're just going to be making stupid mistakes that real cryptographers and security folks found and wrote defenses against three decades ago.
If you could make your own silicon, you could create a guild or a federation to audit it, and then your trust circle would be smaller and therefore safer.
>Otherwise you're just going to be making stupid mistakes that real cryptographers and security folks found and wrote defenses against three decades ago.
Yeah, thats the point, learn those same techniques, get it in the guild, and watch each others backs.
Rather than just 'trusting' some faceless war profiteers from the midst of an out of control military-industrial complex.
Among other things, the attack space for npm is just so much larger. We run a large C# codebase (1M+ LOC) and a somewhat smaller TypeScript codebase (~200K LOC). I did a check the other day, and we have one potentially vulnerable nuget dependency for every 10,000 lines of C# code, but one potentially vulnerable npm dependency for about every 115 lines of TS code.
* HTML to PDF
* Compress PDF
* Manual PDF generation
* Text extraction
* No browser engine or other weird dependencies
I researched every library I could find, and downloaded, integrated and tested anything that looked remotely promising.
At the end of all that, I reluctantly handed my company credit card back to Aspose. There simply wasn't any open-source or even just cheaper PDF library that I could actually make work, and all the other paid ones that did work were even more expensive.
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