You don't understand how insurance works

The real problem is that "health insurance" isn't insurance, it's just a means for moving money around. Unless you wander off into a forest and die or fall into a volcano or a vat of molten lead, there is a 100% chance that you will require medical care. As for pre-existing condition clauses being required, imagine if Homeowner's insurance had "fire" as a pre-existing condition that followed you for the rest of your life. You have one grease fire in the kitchen and you can never get home insurance again. Unlike a house or a car, you can't yet replace a body. Once your roof is on fire, it's on fire forever. Except that with health "insurance" we expect insurance companies to keep replacing the roof as it burns and then watch the new roof burn too.

The REAL real problem is that modern top-of-the-line healthcare is incredibly expensive, and we're losing cheaper older technology that was generally "good enough", largely because of the enormous opportunity cost of manufacturing an older generic drug versus manufacturing a new patented drug. Good luck finding a doctor under 60 with the knowledge and mix to make a plain old plaster cast, because charging a % overhead on a $1000 fiberglass epoxy cast is way more profitable than on $5 worth of plaster of paris. Plain old insulin is another one that suffers from constant improvements - each slightly more expensive than the last.

are expensive because the vast majority get their insurance through their place of employment. Like any product, if demand is low, not many companies will provide it and it will cost more

Like "any" product? Are you sure about that? Someone is at the grocery store sitting there adjusting the charges as you browse because you pay more for the exact same apple because you're self-employed than if you worked for Ford? I'm sure you imagine that a Ford employee's apple must somehow be less nutritious or valuable than a self-employed person's apple, but I'm not seeing the difference from here. Generally employer-provided insurance is cheaper because they pay some portion of the premium for you (and get a tax deduction for doing so). That's why people get sticker shock when they leave the company and sign up for the COBRA extension: It's the exact same insurance but now they have to pay 100% of the premium themselves.

Joins are not webscale.

MongoDB can do joins now. Joins have always been webscale. We have always been at war with Eastasia.

I own a OP3 as well, and this is definitely the steel beam that broke the camel's back. It'll be the only one I buy.

At this rate, though, I'm thinking my next phone will be a cheap candybar if I can find one (didn't someone say they were bringing back the Nokias?). I got into One+ because of the promises of (almost) stock android and getting timely updates and now that I've had it for a while, I've come to the conclusion that I was honestly happier with my previous HTC Evo that never got an upgrade past android 2 or so. At least I could pick up the phone and answer a call without having to guess what the fuck the gesture is this week. I hung up on the boss last night because suddenly I am now supposed to drag down to answer a call, instead of drag to the side like last week. Two updates before that, it was drag up to answer, one before it was drag up to hang up and send an "I'm busy" text message. Further, in the last several versions, touching the white spot to answer would display icons that clearly identified where I should drag to answer or hang up the phone. Now, there's a tiny green arrow below the icon pointing down (obscured by my thumb).

We used to have additional modifiers to add/remove points based on the category, so people would do things like make Funny posts -5 points so they could skip the jokes.

> relatively hard to forge

We have 50+ relatively hard to forge ID cards, but there's millions of kids in college with tons of disposable income that want to get beer with one of those ID cards, so they're pretty regularly forged. Replacing the 50+ cards with one card solves the problem of a guy at Washington State trying to pass off his Arkansaw driver's license as valid, at the cost of having 50 times the resources going into cracking it. Meanwhile, I have to hand out my Social Security Number to every bank, every employer, every credit card, every phone company, the water company, the doctor, and so on. Once I have my new Super Secure Number and provide that number to my bank, employer, credit card, phone company, water company, my doctor, etc... is it still secure?

I like the other idea posted of having a single-purpose Virtual SSN. Just like foo+slashdot@yahoo,com, I can tell who leaked the SSN since only one person had it.

That, or a Marxist. Time wasted on frivolities means less that can be taken from you according to your abilities.

But with AI we can finally unleash the full force of Roko's Basilisk on them and tell hackers that the AI will torture a simulation of themselves for billions of CPU cycles if they're caught!

I'm looking forward to a haircutting machine just like in the Jetsons, lower a hood over your head, listen to it hum for a few minutes then... Presto! A new do!

We'll call it the Flowbee 2.

I just wish we could hear a few wise words on this subject from our now-retired chiropractor troll.

They built theirs, and they have every right to decide who gets to say what on it.

Remember what you just said. It absolutely will come back to bite you in the ass when network neutrality falls.

has a hard time finding people before we even discuss salary. Once we find someone qualified

Obviously your company's HR department messed up and hired underqualified telepaths. How do you expect people to psychically know that you have openings available and are willing to pay competitive rates if you aren't discussing that?

I have seen zero evidence that there is a vast pool of qualified techs sitting on the sidelines

With "the national jobless rate near a 16-year low" nobody's "sitting on the sidelines" except for the "16-year low" number of people on the dole. Your "qualified techs" are busy working for other people because your psychics are giving themselves hemorrhoids from all the strain as they try to make them magically want to work for you without you having to compete against their existing employers.

We pay fresh grads with a BS in CS an average of $90k to start

Well, there are plenty of grads every year all around the country. Either you have some qualification you're not listing here to explain why you can't find any "qualified" people, or you have something else wrong that is causing all these fresh grads to work for someone else.

therefore can't extract profit

Can't extract profit from THEIR OWN (nonexistent) employees, you mean. Please do try to read what I say before insulting me. RoboFord will get plenty of profit selling cheap trucks to RAM employees.

What's that about "when they've driven every other company out of business or to robots?" Sorry! Can't hear you over the sound of my quarterly earnings report going KA-CHING!

why capital will not chase new opportunities

Of course capital will chase new opportunities, but it will do so while considering the opportunity cost of chasing human labor (for instance: less efficient warehouses and processes) versus chasing mechanized labor.

what's the theory that total work is a constant?

Total work isn't a constant, but in total work = mechanized work + human work, when "mechanized work" is more productive and efficient, guess which term will drive the increase in "total work"?

There would be no incentive for complete robotic production

Bullshit.

The first company to go 100% robotic and have 0 labor costs will make a fortune selling to the employees of the remaining companies at prices their employers could never hope to meet, leaving them either going bankrupt or ditching the humans.

This is why I stick to whapping people I know on whatsapp: there's no question of what the correct term to call it is.