galimaufry

Sometimes it doesn't work and no one can tell.

I wonder if there is a niche to ameliorate this sort of thing by offering payday loans on insurance payouts.

The incentives are pro-social: insurance companies have an incentive to delay payouts, because their profits come from interest (they pay out more money than they take in) so the longer they can hold onto money the better. But that's reversed for this hypothetical loan issuer - they want to make the payout as fast as possible in order to earn as much interest as possible as quickly as possible.

And if there's a systematic tendency for medicaid advantage plans to deny claims that eventually get approved, and if you could predict which ones will get approved 'just' by really understanding what medicaid would approve, then this might be self-sustaining or even profitable?

> Purchasing power has collapsed

But is this actually true, or just something that declining economic sentiment in the newspapers has led us to believe? People are consuming more food, more education, more square feet of house, more travel. My sense is that is surprisingly hard to find a quantitative signal that purchasing power has collapsed.

Maybe it is just that positional goods (access to the best neighborhood in the best city) get harder to obtain as the population grows?

Most threads will include a claim that Gnome is imitating macos poorly, but as far as I can tell it is imitating i3 rather well.

Corrections staff at Riker's island get unlimited, unauthenticated sick leave, which may partly explain the large number here, along with their employment as clerks, bakers, door control, etc.

Incidentally this is what I meant above, about the union being out of touch: unlimited sick leave makes staffing unpredictable, which makes work unpredictable and frankly dangerous, which makes guards take more sick leave in a vicious cycle. The union has weaker-than-expected motivations to fix this, because everyone with seniority does not actually work in the housing blocks.

Riker's island is very poorly designed. A big part of the problem is that it is quite inaccessible from the rest of the city. This has a ton of knock-on effects:

1. There's a severe shortage of guards. Anything that could make working in the jails more attractive will help, and a 2-hour commute is not attractive.

2. Getting medical service, prisoners with court dates, lawyers, etc. on and off the island is really really slow.

3. The jail has insourced a lot of services (for example they run a large bakery). These get staffed by corrections officers. This both makes staffing harder, and the existence of these plum positions has weird effects on the politics of the corrections union (people with power in the union are not actually working as guards and are out of touch with the reality of the jail)

Moving to a model like the Tombs, with the jail directly above the courthouse, makes way more sense.

In addition, the buildings on the island need a serious revamp (e.g. there is no automatic access control, so every major door needs a guard physically standing there to let people through and climate control is broken). As long as you need to seriously renovate anyway, might as well just build a new jail where it should have been put in the first place.

Source: I read a lot of blogposts.

> Is it just me or does ESG feel like a giant virtue signal from companies and investors?

Well yeah, it is explicitly intended as a signal that investors can use to select virtuous companies.

I've heard it called a "non-central example". That has a negative connotation though, I wish there was a more neutral term. The statement "all natural numbers are greater than 1" is false, and it's not helpful to object that 0 and 1 are noncentral examples.

(It's not a motte-and-bailey, that's about a particular sort of shifting goalposts)

Sure, but then they just send you a letter correcting your mistake, you OK it if it looks right, and either they send you a check or you send them a check. You don't have to pay a fine and you don't get audited.

(I am not a tax lawyer nor an accountant, but I have done this 4 out of the last 6 years.)

Ignorant question: is Israel literally an ally of the US? I know they are not in NATO or 5 Eyes, and I don't think they have some other close agreement, like US and Japan.

It's the second one. This kerfluffle was started by Blackrock moving into real estate. Blackrock is a retail investment-management company that everyone from the middle class up invests with.

So, it's not really "you will own nothing and be happy about it", but rather "you will own 0.1% of 1000 houses rather than 100% of 1 house, and be happy about it."

You're not wrong. I guess what I'd like is the ability to apply (up to) two type annotations, with the second one a subtype of the first, and use the first for dispatch and the second for documentation/testing/static analysis...

... which actually seems like it might be doable with some macros? Those are beyond my ken right now, but the goal would be

  @doubly_typed f(x::Number|Integer) = x
  f(6.0)            # Same as g(x::Number) = x; g(6.0)
  @strictify f(6.0) # Same as g(x::Integer) = x; g(6.0)

Then you would use @strictify when running tests to ensure that the stricter types in your codebase are all compatible. But you'd still need to figure out what to do about return types and the help command...

One thing that I miss coming from python to Julia, is typing-as-documentation. In python I often write type annotations that are much more restrictive than they need to be. They work as checkable documentation of how a function is expected to be used (and under what circumstances do I guarantee it will work), without restricting how it can be used.

As I understand it the issue is

* Currently the US welfare agencies will provide ~any FDA-approved drug for someone with the illness for which the drug was approved

* In this case, they probably won't - in the worst case scenario it would double their spending on prescription drugs and seems unlikely to help anyone

* So this is going to sever the link between FDA approval and medicaid spending.

* Now you have an awkward situation where agencies that not really equipped to make judgements on dug effectiveness, and which are not insulated from politics, have to make those decisions.

This could all work out for the best in the long term but may also be very awkward in the short term.

GPL is also a possible alternative. Big companies pay you back by contributing to the project, insofar as it is worth it to them to maintain a fork and add features for their own use.