Finally, basic preventative health care — at least for children — could save more than it costs when we take into account the overall economic effects of poor health outcomes. We should consider making it an entitlement.
If medical care is a for-profit industry, wouldn't it be in their interest to reduce preventative care, especially for children, so they will have overall greater health care needs (and bills!) later on?
Individual doctors and nurses etc may very well want people to get good treatment, especially children. But they are just the hired labor, the owners of the medical services and insurance industries just want the money and so likely lobby for the worse outcomes. It also has the bonus of further tying people to their employers who offer health plans making them more pliant workers.
No, health insurers are motivated to keep their premium payers healthy and have a long track record of funding programmes to improve the health of the population. Think about how insurance works. Where I live they paid for the creation of outdoor gyms.
> Individual doctors and nurses etc may very well want people to get good treatment, especially children
It's individual doctors and nurses who are most incentivized to over-treat. They make more money the more healthcare is consumed. It's insurers who have an incentive to keep healthcare costs under control. A big part of the reason US health insurance is so expensive compared to the rest of the world is that Americans stage a massive freakout every time insurers try to control costs. It's a cultural thing and done by both Democrats and Republicans, look at how they call the UK's NICE committee a "death panel".
You realize it would cost a significant resources to make the “accommodations” you are suggesting? Money, despite what you may believe, doesn’t grow on trees. Given the range of worthy competing interests where the money could be spent, the university likely had no practical choice but to take it offline, lest it face the bad press and wrath of Progressives.
You remind me of people who insist every single new apartment must be ADA compliant instead of a reasonable percentage throughout the city. Another example is banning SROs on the grounds they are “inhumane”. The moral purity results in less housing and forcing people to live in the cars or on the street.
Our society is better when the things that are available are available to everyone, not just the privileged. I don't see why accommodations for the disabled are considered some unnecessary burden; they should be considered a cost of doing business, for everyone who does business.
This wasn't business. There were no profits to divert into making better subtitles.
And the ratio of effort between making a recording versus making a recording and then manually subtitling it is completely out of whack compared to the ratio you have in full produced works. There's a reasonable level of accommodation, and the reasonable level is below a doubling in costs.
I'm someone that would significantly raise the subtitling requirements on youtube if I could. But in this case I just don't feel it.
I shouldn't have used the term "business," because that made people think that I was referring more to economics instead of "doing the right thing even when the right thing is slightly more expensive." Look, UC Berkeley is a public university and they have to adhere to certain rules around disabilities and accommodations. It's well established law at this point; the ADA is 35 years old. They should know this, and they should be able to comply. To take down the videos suggests laziness and ignorance on Berkeley's part.
> doing the right thing even when the right thing is slightly more expensive
And that's why I made the argument that it wasn't slightly more expensive. It's possible it would have cost more to add subtitles than the entire rest of the project combined.
I think it's fair to mandate subtitles when there's a certain level of budget. I don't think it's a good idea to unconditionally mandate subtitles.
> UC Berkeley is a public university and they have to adhere to certain rules
In their normal course of action. I don't think this side project was plugged in to the core tasks of the university.
Shutting it down counts as lazy but what do you want a project with minimal budget to do?
We're not shaming other universities for not putting courses online. We're only shaming one that did it "badly" and then gave up. That's unfair. Every other university that doesn't fund similar subtitles and uploads should get the same reaction.
And by "badly" I mean it still had okay subtitles, just not particularly good ones.
Also it's important to note the topic is during school hours. There's a wealth of knowledge to learn at school, and there's also a wealth to learn outside of school. Knowledge about the world can, and will, happen in both. Many hours outside of school to 'grow your knowledge' through your phone.
> For those of us who grew up before 2000, we somehow managed
You had TV, newspapers and magazines - and perhaps more importantly, public libraries. The current generation doesn't, not if you take away their phones.
No we didn't. I never learned how to write games for 8-bit computers in assembler, like commercial games. No source of information would tell me about anything other than BASIC. There was no way to find out.
Not sure how having a smartphone in class would have allowed you to do that, though. And regardless, if you're in a physics or language class, you should be focusing on those those topics, not learning how to write computer games.
My high school did offer a computer science class in the 90s, and students who took it got to use the school's computer lab. If your school didn't have something like that, that's a shame, but that doesn't suggest that you should have been able to ignore the presented curriculum and do whatever you wanted.
We definitely did. You should have gone to a library. I got my first Prolog compiler, C++ compiler, and microcontroller programming manual from Salvation Army thrift stores. There were like a million magazines you could buy.
edit: I forgot the Standard ML book, also from some thrift store. All circa late-80s, early-90s. I still have them all.
Yes, but I didn't know the word "assembler". I was completely bewildered about why BASIC produced clunky results and I could barely phrase the question about how proper games were made. Local libraries didn't have relevant books. I didn't know there was help in magazines. The most clued-up adults wouldn't know either, and would be trying to get me interested in programming turtle bots with LOGO. What I needed was to ask the internet (which didn't exist yet).
A lot of you guys in the AI industry are going to lose your jobs. LLM and prompt ‘engineering’ experts won’t be able to score an AI job paying as well as a barista.
I have no idea why they did, but some pros: X200 is less expensive, (I think) it has a little more room, and it doesn't have the X220's crazy design flaw with the lid shell.
I also had better luck getting genuine replacement keyboards for the X200. Half of the X220 keyboards I stockpiled arrived as substandard garbage, even though I was trying to avoid that.
Yes, if you look at a photo of the X220 lid, what looks like a cosmetic accent across the lid near screen-top is actually a seam, between the nice alloy traditional lid, and some plastic that's barely held on, painted to look the same. Even minor impact can break the little plastic screw hole tabs that hold the screen-top edge of the lid. Absolutely not what you want from a ThinkPad, which has a legacy of being durable.
A disappointing thing about this is that someone changed the design, to this, to be more fragile and non-ThinkPad. In this way, it's similar to the series of regression changes to the keyboard, and now the TrackPoint.
Speculation on my part, but the X220/230 had a simplified design (e.g. clickpad, no lid latch, fewer blinkenlights) compared to the X200/201. These FrankenPad mods are typically for die hard classic ThinkPad fans.
Have you admined a Google Apps account and an MS365 account? I'm curious why you think Microsoft is more secure? For me they are completely different, Google is secure by default, Microsoft is not. Do you have "Direct Send" enabled on your account for example?
Because outside of a handful of nerdy tech companies, all small businesses need to use Microsoft Office. From there, it’s a no brainer to stay in the MS ecosystem and use Sharepoint etc…
For a small business without a dedicated IT team, simply hire a IT contractor to harden the tenant (MFA etc…), have them review every six months and be done with it and focus your resources on running your business.
My father’s decidedly non-nerdy logistics consulting business with roughly 20 employees ran (and runs) on Mac OS since the founding of the company in the mid 1990s with my mom being the „IT team“. There are some situations where companies rely on certain compatibilities requiring windows. But most could do completely fine without, especially nowadays.
You can run a logistics consulting business without windows, but you will struggle without Excel and PowerPoint, and 365 with SharePoint is basically needed for collaboration in any consulting business.
Im also a logistics consultant… try to parse a multi-million line orderlines extract in Google Sheets compared to excel.
I’m also on Mac but to be honest it’s a challenge - there are still enough industry specific tools that are windows only so I have to run a parallels VM to get by.
Collaboration with Sharepoint is I think the biggest issue with M365. It’s impossible to figure out where a file is stored… on your hard drive? One drive? Teams? Sharepoint?
And the biggest problem I have is managing revisions with multiple editors. If I were talking to Microsoft about strategy, this would be the thing I’d suggest. I know it’s common to use Sharepoint for collaboration, but it’s such a Frankenstein’d system that it’s going to be a problem for everyone sooner or later.
It's still better than anything else and the de-facto standard so you need it.
Clients will send you their PowerPoint template and want you to use it. They will send you their complex spreadsheets riddled with VBA macros and you will need to fix them. They will invite you to a Teams site because that's where their project updates go. I just don't see how you can avoid it as a consulting company!
For things like Excel - We can say it's 'bad' but I've not seen anything do the job it does better. And besides, even if it was bad, it doesn't matter - as a consultant you need to use it because your clients probably want your workings as part of the deliverables, and if it's on Google Sheets they often won't want that.
Many of the 22-25 year old-ish people in a grad school class I was part of recently had no idea where a shared project document was or how to edit it outside of Office 365’s online editor. Many didn’t know that the “attachment” from email was actually a Sharepoint link and not a file. This becomes a problem when you need to use some features in the desktop Word program that aren’t in the online editor.
Honestly, I’m less interested in how things work on day one. When systems are fresh or new, it’s easier to keep working. The mess always ends up happening after things have had time to accumulate cruft. Working on a collaborative manuscript in the current Microsoft shared system is normally a nightmare.
Trying to manage/accept/reject edits and revisions between different people is still difficult. That is unless you can use a source code repository like GitHub. But good luck trying to convince people to do that. Sadly, this means that emailing files around is still the easiest way to keep things straight.
Just another confirmation that the majority of the IT industry depends on spying in order to be profitable and for developers to make a good living. It’s a disgrace really.
Between MAGA blocking wind and Progressives blocking nuclear, the US is left with solar and carbon.
Solar is fine, but it needs a 24/7 base. Unfortunately it increasingly appears that base will remain carbon.
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