yold__
Joined 8 years ago
Joined 8 years ago
GLP-1 drugs may be a game-changer for obesity and diabetes, the same way that cholesterol (statin) drugs have greatly improved heart health. Hopefully reversing a long trend of increasing waistbands in developed / developing countries. Unfortunately, America will pay the highest price (including Medicare). I'm all for anything that makes them cheaper, including the many compounding pharmacies currently exploiting the loophole the author takes issue with.
Tort reform in Florida is a bandaid. The state-run insurer is creating serious market distortions by undercharging for the risk, accumulating very large proportions of the state homeowners insurance policies (since no one else will), and then offloading the policies to undercapitalized insurers while looking the other way about their poor financial condition. When Citizen's claims are in excess of its reserves, the legislature steps in and taxes the rest of the state to cover the shortfall. I'm guessing when the other insurers become insolvent, the shortfall is offload to the state guarantee fund (possibly on the taxpayers dime). This is all covered in the paper.
I really don't want to keep googling things for you. The police are not judicial officers. Yes, I've read the article.
The police are breaking federal law and the article is wrong. This is not a gray area.
Solving this communication problem is uncomfortable. Connecting software developers with end-users is hard. It means software developers have to have courage to ask "dumb questions" when the end-users explains something too quickly in jargon-laden terms. It means that end-users have to be patient, with the time to teach and explain enough about the problem domain. People with strong communication *and* technical skills are hard to find, and creating ongoing mutual respect and cooperation between end-users and the oft-hated IT department is only possible when employee attrition is low enough to create long-standing relationships.
Software development is fun when it is a high-momentum, self-contained exercise. So we direct our energy to complexity, because its fun and safe. We don't need to stop and engage with end-users who speak a language we barely understand. We don't need to create consensus among disagreeing end-users representatives. We just need put on some good music, drink some coffee, and solve clean technical problems, rather than messy people problems. I'd guess most software developers would say "you don't pay me enough to deal with people", and walk away.
It's often even less in my experience. Despite having a "unicorn" skillset (soft-skills, advanced degree, domain experience, and SWE experience), I make about as much as a vanilla SWE. There are a huge number of inexperienced PhDs that want into the field, and we are flooded with resumes every time a DS leaves. Also, most of the time, models don't really matter. What makes or breaks most DS projects is soft-skills, stakeholder management, and data cleaning / feature engineering.