I don't understand this take. There is no real way in which a private person can make law enforcement "more expensive". The government can always find means as long as it is supported by a sufficiently big fraction of its people.
Sure, they won't go out and arrest all one million, but from an individual perspective it's basically security by obscurity.
Once that's the case, otherwise legal activities (e.g. protesting, or making political statements) run the risk of making you a target. Law enforcement can then punish you for your legal activity by selectively enforcing this other law.
The resulting situation is one where everyone knows to some extent "you better shut up if you know what's good for you", and puts a chilling effect on otherwise legal forms of civic engagement.
You might point out that there are already laws on the books that let them do this, but I'm sure they wouldn't mind another.
4 to 20mA signaling is only the start of a very specific rabbit hole. Someone had the brilliant idea to encode digital signals on top of the analog current loop. The result is the HART communication protocol, which is old, bloated, confusing, quirky - and it is really popular in industrial automation.
ChatGPT tells me thats very likely Puya PY32F002A and that can be as cheap as $0.0682 a piece if you order 5000 and upwards, which should be fairly the case for a mass market vape.
Hearing the term microcontroller makes you feel like a lot of compute capacity is being wasted. This is what you get in that microcontroller-
Puya PY32F002A: Cortex-M0+, up to 24 MHz, up to 20 KB Flash, 3 KB SRAM, ADC, timers, I²C/SPI/USART; available in QFN20/TSSOP20.
Its basically a small battery, a display and a microcontroller to show you battery charge and vape fluid levels. Mostly ADC work and display.
It's still one or more PCBs, a battery, the LCD, the microphones, the microcontroller and the small components on the board. The capacity of the chip is besides the point. Each one of those components has a very deep production chain and cost a lot of resources to produce. ICs are created through chemical processes that use a bunch of substances that are themselves not manufactured, for example. The bottom line is, those electronics are wasteful.
I remember running into issues with link-style clickable text in some parts of the UI that was almost unidentifiable as clickable because it stood alone with no similar text in non-link style nearby for reference.
There were other issues that I clearly remember. There was some remarkable jank when moving the mouse cursor across screen borders in a multi-monitor setup. If you were moving towards the edge of the current screen, Windows would under certain circumstances trap the cursor there instead of moving it across the border. I believe this was done to give "hot corners" a bigger mouse target, but that feature was almost completely DoA on desktop.
But no business is going to fix it. The market is captured. Only a radical change of insurance laws is going to have any impact. Mandate that insurance must be not for profit. Mandate at least decent minimal coverage standards and large insurance pools that must span age groups and risk groups.
These solutions are often proposed as easy fixes but I'm skeptical that they actually will do much to reduce healthcare costs. Healthcare is fundamentally expensive. Not-for-profit hospitals and for-profit hospitals don't really substantively differ in terms of out-of-pocket expenditures for patients; I find it difficult to imagine that forcing insurance companies to be nonprofit would do much to reduce costs.
> large insurance pools that must span age groups and risk groups.
What you describe (community rating) has been tried and it works. But it requires that a lot of young, healthy people enroll, and seniors receive most of the care. In an inverted demographic pyramid like most Western economies have, this is a ticking time bomb, so costs will continue to rise.
> Mandate at least decent minimal coverage standards
I think a better solution is to allow the government to threaten in negotiating prices with companies as Canada does; it greatly reduces rent-seeking behavior by pharmaceutical companies while allowing them to continue earning profits and innovating. (I understand a lot of the complaints against big pharma but they are actually one of the few sectors of the economy that doesn't park their wealth and actually uses it for substantive R&D, despite what the media will tell you, and countless lives have been saved because of pharma company profits)
Essentially the gist of what I'm saying, as someone who has been involved with and studied this industry for the better part of five years, is that it's much more complex than what meets the eye.
There are a lot of not-for-profit insurance companies and they aren't noticably cheaper, though I'm not in HR and they may well be cheaper for the employer.
Many hospitals are already non-profit. That doesn't seem to bring down prices. Why would you think that this would work for insurance?
Profit isn't even a big part of the overall revenue.
> Mandate at least decent minimal coverage standards
I assume you want higher coverage standards than what currently exists? Independently of whether that would be the morally right thing to do (or not), it would definitely increase prices.
> and large insurance pools that must span age groups and risk groups.
Why does your insurance need a pool? An actuary can tell you the risk, and you can price according to that. No need for any pooling. Pooling is just something you do, when you don't have good models (or when regulations forces you).
> Why does your insurance need a pool? An actuary can tell you the risk, and you can price according to that. No need for any pooling. Pooling is just something you do, when you don't have good models (or when regulations forces you).
Wuh? The more diverse the pool, the lower the risk. Your way of thinking will very quickly lead to "LiveCheap: the health insurance for fit, healthy under 30s only" for dollars a month, and "SucksToBeYou: the health insurance for the geriatric and chronically disabled" for the low low cost of "everything you have to give".
There's insurance which allows you to convert an uncertain danger into a known payment. And then there's welfare and redistribution.
By all means, please run some means testing and give the poor and sick or disabled extra money. Or even just outright pay their insurance premiums.
But please finance that from general taxation, which is already progressive. Instead of effectively slapping an arbitrary tax on healthy people, whether they be rich or poor. And please don't give rich people extra stealth welfare, just because they are in less than ideal health, either.
Just charge people insurance premiums in line with their expected health outcomes, and help poor people with the premiums using funds from general taxation. (Where poor here means: take their income and make an adjustment for disability etc.)
We _want_ the guy who loses 5kg and gives up smoking to get lower insurance premiums. That's how you set incentives right.
> The more diverse the pool, the lower the risk.
No. The diversification comes from the insurance company running lots of uncorrelated contracts at the same time and having a big balance sheets. For that, it doesn't matter whether it's a pool of similar insurance contracts, or whether they have bets on your insurance contract, and on the price of rice in China, and playing the bookie on some sports outcomes etc. In fact, the more diversified they are, the better (in principle).
But that diversification is completely independent of the pricing of your individual insurance contract.
Have a look at Warren Buffett's 'March Madness' challenge, where he famously challenges people to predict all 67 outcomes of some basketball games to win a billion dollar. Warren Buffet ain't no fool: he doesn't need a pool, he can price the risk of someone winning this one off challenge.
This is going to pretty rapidly devolve into cheap for healthy and insanely expensive for those that aren’t. Genetic propensities will be a lifelong financial burden. Cancer patients will get priced out and die.
If you want to subsidise these unfortunate people, please just do so openly. Don't be all sneaky, sneaky about it by banning accurate risk assessments.
In any case, what you are saying is only true, if you buy your health insurance second to second on the spot market.
Insurance companies are more than happy to enter long running contracts, where you both agree today on (the algorithm for) the premiums for the next twenty years or even until the rest of your life. That's pretty common with life insurance and disability insurance already.
The above already exists, but if you allow some speculation: you could even envision people buying insurance for their kids before conceiving them. That way you don't have to worry about pre-existing conditions.
(Well, if the parents already have heritable conditions that would make the kids more likely to have expensive medical problems, those would push up their premiums. But then: perhaps these people should think twice about burdening a potential kid with these issues.
Compare how in Cyprus where sickle cell anemia is prevalent, even the Catholic church demand you get screened, before they'll marry you.)
If you really want specialised in-kind welfare, you can get people a voucher for the catastrophic version of 'unconceived baby insurance'.
Basically, you can buy insurance against insurance premiums being expensive.
I wonder how many of these bugs are actually situations where the underlying algorithms are simply confronted with situations outside their valid input domains. This can happen easily with 3d surface representations of geometries.
Not necessarily. Sometimes, the desired final shape is clear, but the path there isn't when using typical parametric modeling steps with the desire to get a clean geometry.
Async/await should do a little more under the hood than what the typical OS threading APIs provide, for example forwarding function parameters and return values automatically instead of making the user write their own boilerplate structs for that.
Other languages also have non-local qays of influencing compiler behavior, for example attributes in rust (standard) or compiler pragmas in C (non-standard).
When reading working code, it doesn't matter whether the language mode allows variable reassignment. It only matters when you want to change it. And even then, the compiler will yell at you when you do the wrong thing. Testing it out is probably much faster than searching the codebase for a directive. It doesn't seem like a big deal to me.
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