This is retarded.

1. It isn't for profit healthcare that is the problem, it's THIRD PARTY PAY.
2. I don't use third party pay, ever, for healthcare. I've been insured nonstop for over 30 years, and NEVER ONCE has my insurer paid my doctor.
3. Even when I've had emergencies, I still called around, negotiated a fair cash up front rate, paid cash up front, and billed it to my insurer. My cash up front rate was sometimes below any co-pay negotiated with my insurer, lol.

I just recently had some elective surgery that would have cost me about $2000 on my annual deductible, but I was able to cash pay a negotiated rate of $400 including a follow-up "free". I submitted the $400 to my insurer and they reimbursed me.

Third party insurance exists because YOU VOTERS demanded the HMO Act of the 1970s, which tied health care to employment, and then employers outsourced it to third parties.

Health care is remarkably cheap in the US (cash pay, negotiated) and I don't have to wait months to see a doctor when I call and say I am cash pay. They bump me up fast.

Class 1 and 2 e-bikes limit assist to 20 mph, not 15. You can ride them faster than that, but you have to provide the power. 20 mph is well above what most recreational cyclists can maintain on a flat course, so if these classes arenâ(TM)t fast enough to be safe, neither is a regular bike. The performance is well within what is possible for a fit cyclist for short times , so their performance envelope is suitable for sharing bike and mixed use infrastructure like rail trails.

Class 3 bikes can assist riders to 28 mph. This is elite rider territory. There is no regulatory requirement ti equip the bike to handle those speeds safely, eg hydraulic brakes with adequate size rotors. E-bikes in this class are far more likely to pose injury risks to others. I think it makes a lot of sense to treat them as mopeds, requiring a drivers license for example.

Would treating them as mopeds be so bad?

What weâ(TM)re looking at is exactly what happened when gasoline cars started to become popular and created problems with deaths, injuries, and property damage. The answer to managing those problems and providing accountability was to make the vehicles display registration plates, require licensing of drivers, and enforcing minimum safety standards on cars. Iâ(TM)m not necessarily suggesting all these things should be done to e-bikes, but I donâ(TM)t see why they shouldnâ(TM)t be on the table.

I am a lifelong cyclist , over fifty years now, and in general I welcome e-bikes getting more people into light two wheel vehicles. But I see serious danger to both e-bike riders and the people around them. There are regulatory classes which limit the performance envelope of the vehicle, but class 3, allowing assist up to 28 mph, is far too powerful for a novice cyclist. Only the most athletic cyclists, like professional tour racers, can sustain speeds like that, but they have advanced bike handling skills and theyâ(TM)re doing it on bikes that weigh 1/5 of what complete novice novice e-bike riders are on. Plus the pros are on the best bikes money can buy. If you pay $1500 for an e-bike, youâ(TM)re getting about $1200 of battery and motor bolted onto $300 of bike.

Whatâ(TM)s worse, many e-bikes which have e-bike class stickers can be configured to ignore class performance restrictions, and you can have someone with no bike handling skills riding what in effect is an electric motorcycle with terrible brakes.

E-bike classification notwithstanding, thereâ(TM)s a continuum from electrified bicycles with performance roughly what is achievable by a casi recreational rider on one end, running all the way up to electric motorcycles. If there were only such a thing as a class 1 e-bike thereâ(TM)d be little need to build a regulatory system with registration and operator licensing. But you canâ(TM)t tell by glancing at a two wheel electric vehicle exactly where on the bike to motorcycle spectrum it falls; that depends on the motor specification and software settings. So as these things become more popular, I donâ(TM)t see any alternative to having a registration and inspection system for all of them, with regulatory categories and restrictions based on the weight and hardware performance limitations of the vehicle. Otherwise youâ(TM)ll have more of the worst case weâ(TM)re already seeing: preteen kids riding what are essentially electric motorcycles that weigh as much as they do because the parents think those things are âoebikesâ and therefore appropriate toys.

That's the press doing its usual lousy job of communicating science.

The predictions aren't absolute, they are sets of scenarios for which probabilities are calculated. The longer we drag our feet, the more the set of plausible outcomes narrows. Take Syria -- Syria was a wheat exporter in 1990, but since 2008 or so has been unable to grow enough wheat to feed itself because of climate change when it had become dependent upon imports from Russia and Ukraine. This was early enough that likely we could not have prevented it even if we heeded early warnings in the 1990s when the current scientific picture solidified. We're not going to lose the entire planet in one go, it's going to be one vulnerable population after another.

It may seem like the climate crisis has completely fizzled to you, living in a large, wealthy, and heretofore politically stable country, but it is catastrophic for the people who have got caught. That's how the climate crisis is going to unfold: the rich and comfortable will be able to adapt to the continually changing status quo by moving their financial assets and supply chains out of the way, although you may be paying more for coffee.

At this point it's a matter of degree; we can't avoid problems now like countries being destabilized by climate change and generating millions of refugees. The question is how fast and how big a problem we'll have.

It seems pretty plausible that sub-recreational doses of psychedelics could reduce anxiety, but we have to be mindful that anxiety evolved in our species for a reason. Like inflammation, it’s a natural and critically important protective process that gets out of control in modern lifestyles. It’s unpleasant but pharmaceutically banishing it could leave patients vulnerable.

One of the biggest risks psychedelic therapy will expose patients to are the therapists overseeing their treatment. Psychedelic therapy has an appalling track record of abuse by therapists, including both sexual and economic exploitation. Advocates for psychedelic therapy claim it will “open you up” and I think they’re absolutely correct. But there are other ways to say “open you up” that mean the same thing but set off alarm bells: becoming more suggestible and compliant for example. If the therapist uses psychedelics himself he may have “opened himself up” to some bad ideas about therapist-patient boundaries.

Likewise people microdosing to enhance creativity should exercise caution. Psychedelics absolutely can in some instances unlock creativity by turning down excessive self criticism, but those criitical facilities play an essential role in the parts of the creative process that come after coming up with out of the box ideas. Self reports of microdosing effectiveness should be taken cautiously, due to their potential negative impact on metacognition. Those might be like the drunk who feels more confident driving after a few drinks.

No doubt these drugs have tremendous potential to treat extreme crippling anxiety. They probably even have nootropic potential. But their beneficial effect s come by suppressing natural mental processes that serve important purposes, and the promising results we have come from self reports or clinical reports from advocate researchers. I’ve been following this because I’ve been interested in experimenting with psychedelics for years, but what I have learned has convinced me to hold off until there is evidence and protocols for safe use that would persuade a skeptic.

No, they can just sit idly by and let the Republicans do what they want. If that's your preference, enjoy, because it's what we've got. Depends if you want to solve problems or just enjoy being able to assign blame. I think a lot of people enjoy being able to assign blame.

In many states it didn't really matter, Trump wasn't going to win the electoral votes. But if you live in a state where a republican win was a sure thing, you had better options than just handing over your state's electoral votes to Trump and saying "not my fault, I'm a democrat"

You can always make your own custom Secure Boot key database and sign whatever you want.

It's even easier on millions of Dell and Alienware computers that used the test key as their production Platform Key. You can just use the leaked private key to modify the keys without being easily detectable.

But what if it doesn't require a meeting?

What if I intend to send you an email after the meeting, but might decide to use a group text chat instead and will only resort to scheduling a meeting if it turns out that it's taking too long to reach an understanding via written communications.

"Touch base offline" means "We need to resolve this, but not right now, and we don't need the participation of everyone on this particular call in order to work out the details. The answer or decision is important, but it's a better use of everyone's time to continue on to the next topic right now without agreeing on that answer/decision." but it doesn't imply a specific form of communication or a specific time. "Touch base offline" is a lot more concise than trying to precisely express exactly how that not-right-now decision/discussion will take place.

Oh, and what makes you think that "workflow" and "task" are interchangeable? The workflow might be a diagram I plan to draw and send to you after the meeting which may or may not require a phone call to fine tune the exact steps in the diagram. "Meet to discuss this task" might be entirely incorrect. A workflow might include a series of manual tasks by different teams or it may require some automation to be developed or it may just be how you and I plan to organize and distribute the work between the two of us. It might be that somebody mistakenly thinks "workflow" and "task" are synonyms, but it might also be somebody who actually knows what they're talking about.

Really, if that's the way you want to live, I say have at it. Other people having the option to live differently isn't going to stop you. It'll be decades before it starts getting hard to find gas stations, and by then EVs will have more range than you can handle.

It is pretty hard not to respond to the pure BS that anti-EV types spout. I know it rubs you the wrong way, but the alternative is to let people who don't know what they're talking about dominate public perceptions.

I wouldn't claim EVs are for everyone, but for many of us they are extremely convenient and economical to run. The corner cases where ICE is clearly more convenient are not a concern for everyone, and not a concern for a multi-car household considering making one of their cars an EV. We have an EV and a plug-in hybrid that runs as an EV probably 80% of the time. We hit the gas station with the plug-in about once every six weeks.

Not just your house. In my neighborhood somebody had an ICE car parked in their garage. It caught fire and not only destroyed their home entirely but did enough damage to the neighbors on both sides that their homes were also condemned.

That was probably over ten years ago and it's all been rebuilt now, but it took over a year. It would suck to lose your home for a year because your neighbor parked an ICE vehicle in their garage.

Still, everybody around me does park their cars in their garages and a lot of them are EVs, although fewer than the ICEs, and there was only one fire in the 25 years I've lived in the same neighborhood.

So the score is:
1 ICE fire destroyed three homes
0 EV fires destroyed zero homes

I heard an economist pose this question once. Why do companies have employees at all? Why not use contractors? Then you could hire just as much labor as you need, when you need it, then not pay for labor when you didn't need it.

His reason was the costs involved with finding contractors then negotiating agreements with them. I think there are other reasons, but for sure that's part of it.

But I think technology is pushing us into an intermediate position between the semi-permanent, often lifelong employment of a generation ago, and a world of contracting for everything. I think this is evidenced by a pattern I have seen where companies who are currently successful lay people off. It's not just in the tech world, this is happening in the service industry too.

When technology allows you to monitor the financial performance and cost of every department in an enterprise down to a fare-thee-well, it's easy to identify people you don't need so much in the upcoming quarters and let them go. Then with Internet hiring and automated application screening it's easy to hire those positions back in a year.

Now there's a lot of holes in this rosy (for management) scenario. Automated application screening is dog shit, for example. But you can do it, and you will find people; probably not the *best* people, but then you'll never know, in fact *nobody* will ever know. People will never get to know their jobs well, but again you won't ever know what you're missing. Most of all you will never have anything resembling loyalty from the people you hire; young people these days look at every job as transient. But you can't *measure* loyalty and in most cases, job competence with any precision. But you can track costs down to the penny.

In this case this wasn't about AI underperforming what was promised, but AI performance being exaggerated to cover the company's tracks as it offshored jobs to India. The intent was to use AI as an excuse to let Australian workers go, then to quietly replace them with Indian ones.

I don't think AI promises are "empty", but there is a lot of irrational enthusiasm out there getting ahead of the technology. I think for sure there are plenty of technical failures arising from technlogical hubris and naivite. And I think more instances where the technology is blamed for company failures or unpopular policies -- that practice goes back to the very early era of "computerizing" things like invoicing, so I don't see why this round of technological change would be any different.

But for sure, AI is coming for a lot of jobs. Past forms of automation haven't ended employment; they were just ways of increasing worker productivity. Companies still hired workers until the next marginal dollar spent wouldn't bring in a marginal dollar of revenue. But this time may be different. AI is replacing human thinking. It may be mediocre at thinking, but so are most humans. It may be an opportunity for companies to leverage a small number of humans with advanced cognitive skills, but I think for many companies the siren call of mediocre but really cheap will be too hard to resist.

Nah.

Iâ(TM)m 51. Iâ(TM)ve had health insurance continuously for 35 years and have used it exactly ZERO TIMES.

I am self pay. For everything but true life threatening emergencies, which Iâ(TM)ve had zero.

Even the ER is cheaper when negotiated self pay.

My urologist is stunned that I pay $85 for his visits. Self pay. Including labs. My colleague goes to the same urologist and his insurance pays $550 for the same visit and naturally it comes out of his deductible lol.

Insurance is a scam. All insurance is legal gambling and gamblers never win.

I think this gets to the old debate about language learning vs acquisition. If you learn the gender of the noun âoe MÃdchenâ, that will prevent you from making errors, which is a good thing. But the language acquisition approach doesnâ(TM)t worry about you making mistakes. If youâ(TM)re exposed enough to the word being used correctly, âoedie MÃdchenâ eventually just sounds wrong. You will have acquired the gender of the noun without technically learning it. You donâ(TM)t even have to understand that nouns have gender.

It sounds great, but there is no way youâ(TM)re going to acquire enough German this way playing a game a few minutes a day to have a functional level of German in a short time, say for an upcoming trip. The company isnâ(TM)t as up front about this as they should be, but common sense should tell you that.

Duolingo is a way of putting time youâ(TM)re spending on useless phone activities like playing Candy Crush towards something useful. After say two years spending fifteen minutes a day on Duolingo French, youâ(TM)ll be able to read things like the train schedules in France, get the gist of simple newspaper articles, understand people who speak slowly and distinctly about things like directions to tourist sites. In other words a useful amount of French. Youâ(TM)ll have a leg up (I suppose) on more intensive ways of learning French.

But the idea you will reach B2 proficiency with Duolingo seems far fetched to me, given that Iâ(TM)m working on B1 and doubt I can pass the A2 exam. Youâ(TM)ll have covered the material by the end of the course, sure, but at this point itâ(TM)s pretty clear to me that actually mastering it requires actually communicating with fluent French speakers.

Which is fine. Nobody is stopping you from using more effective ways of learning. Duolingoâ(TM)s job, and its economic incentive, is to keep you engaged. This is why course content quality is important, and building courses out of AI slop is counterproductive. As a game, Duolingo isnâ(TM)t that much fun that youâ(TM)d play it even if the content is bad.