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> Sure there is going to be waste, but once you privatise, the 'waste' will continue in the form of profit taking by insurance companies and all the other private actors in the system.

Profit-seeking isn't unique to private entities. State-run programs are still subject to the exact same economic forces; the difference is solely in how they're accounted for.

It's similar to the situation with state-run prisons: the profits are divvied up between the vendors who supply the prisons, the unions representing the correctional officers, and other entities who are required to make a prison actually operate. And even in state-run prisons, these entities have incentives to lobby for the expansion of the prison-industrial complex (which they do). Vendors, suppliers, and LEOs extract massive financial benefit off of the entire system, but because the program itself is state-run, we don't talk about that as 'profit'. Instead, we talk about that as the 'budget' (with a surplus/deficit).

But suppose we turned the state-run system overnight into a vertically integrated, private system, with all the roles served by the exact same people. That is, all the correctional officers are the same (making the same amount of money), all of the suppliers vendors are the same (but many are now owned by the private system). Suddenly, from a discursive (and accounting) perspective, we get 'profit'. The amount of money being traded hasn't changed. The steady-state flow of money hasn't even really changed[0]. The only thing that's changed is which entities we group together as units. But they all work symbiotically in the exact same way, no matter whether you view them as a single entity or a composite system.

As for the NHS - you absolutely bet that there is a profit motive amongst providers (and the agencies themselves). The language is different, and the way it gets assigned to the entities who comprise the system is different, but the fact that it's a state-run program doesn't mean that all that 'profit' magically goes back to the taxpayer.

[0] There would be an overnight, single-time transfer of cash due to the overnight privatization (same thing that happens anytime a company spins out a subsidiary into a separate private entity), but the ongoing cashflow would be the same.
The hardest part is finding out which places are cheaper.

Many times, billing departments have straight out refused to tell me what I will pay.

Everyone else is happy signing blank checks, so they don't see the problem.
>> "I don't understand the American (and it is American) obsession with having a free market in healthcare."

I think part of it is the culture of believing you can be anything you want to be. It's the same reason the poor often vote against their interests in the US - they believe that soon they'll be rich and want low taxes and few regulations. That they are the exception.
Few hackers I know don't have a python environment installed. Let alone numpy scipy pymc and jupyter.
I'm aware of it. But my previous suggestions were in part shaped by the stated goals of Go's designers: to keep the language simple and easy to learn for non-language geeks. 1ML is really cool, but its type system can be intimidating: small vs. large types, incomplete inference, type-checking as elaboration into System F-omega, etc. OTOH, plain Damas-Milner is dead simple.
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I knew a gameplay programmer years ago who got frustrated with a particular designer constantly requesting minor tweaks that required code changes. He built a fancy control panel with a bunch of sliders and dials to adjust all kinds of gameplay parameters and gave it to the designer who happily spent the rest of the project making endless adjustments without bothering the programmer in question.

Of course he never hooked up the controls to actually do anything and the nicely balanced gameplay was entirely due to the decisions he hard coded.
The additional cost is negligible. Current cars don't need placebo buttons because you can drive aggressively yourself.

Current cars do have placebos though. Some newer sports cars would play engine sounds thru the speakers to make users feel more power.
I don't know much about secret management. How does this compare to something like Vault?

Edit: https://www.vaultproject.io/
Also, an unsophisticated mind will think that maybe "the system" will understand multiple presses as multiple people and prioritize the change somehow.

A more sophisticated mind would consider that maybe they interpret short bursts at the button as one (impatient) signal.

Anyway, I find myself hitting those buttons multiple times just because... I'm not really thinking about it, I just press and then press few more times to be sure. It's probably driven more by the knowledge that doing so will not do anything negative, than from expecting a positive outcome.
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You obviously need many fewer managers in that scenario. But I think you would need humans to decide that a business should exist and start it, and to continually set direction and goals (beyond mere financial goals).

It will be interesting to see the first businesses that are run almost entirely by algorithms. If that becomes common, or the norm, why would we even need separate companies? Maybe the algorithms will merge their "businesses." Maybe Skynet starts not via military algorithms but business algorithms.

EDIT: I recently left a medical device company, whose products without a doubt save and improve lives. This business was started decades ago, with two obvious goals: make money, and improving lives. Part of the direction and goals for that company has always been service to society (humans), and I know that many or most of the people working there think of it in exactly that way: they're serving society (and happily making money while doing it). That's how I felt about it.

What incentive would an algorithm have for starting and running a business like that? Particularly as fewer humans are required to serve that and other "businesses" (processes?), might such a company be seen as a waste of resources? Why not just let most of the humans die?

But then, following that thought to its sci-fi conclusion, once human civilization has all but disappeared, what would the purpose of any Skynet-like business algorithm be? Would it start shutting itself off, business/process by business/process?
That was my first thought too. Sonic the hedgehog and his sidekick Tails was a fox.
Yes. The best way is probably to physically/temporally separate the phase of working on the design and product from the phase of working on the code. This has some conceptual benefits (thinking more freely when you don't have your tools in hand) but I also find there's a more straightforward issue of energy or cognitive stamina.
This whole thing reminds me of my favorite Heinlein quote:

“There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.”
Reasons are historic and idelogical. A free market is considered sort of a religion here. In other words we don't usually evaluate and consider things based on their own merit (what is the best way to provide healthcare, what is the best way to fix infrastructure, like bridges, etc), but rather how will this make free market happy. We treat it as sort of a deity and if we don't abide by its likes we'll be severely punished.
Sort of. The premiums aren't all that low (they are intentionally high to subsidize care for other patient groups) and the fees have only a vague connection to the costs of providing the services.

We have an insane system where mandated government care is underfunded and then the hospital is expected to make up the difference by charging the people that need medical care. People that are having a bad day pay for the people that are having a bad year.

Of course I have no way of giving any weight to such a statement, but I'm pretty sure I would have paid 1/3 to 1/5 as much in a reasonably competitive marketplace...
Sometimes personal stories help deliver a message better than charts and graphs.
yet signals and streets continue to give preference to cars and other motorized vehicles

I don't know about NYC, but in SF this is not necessarily the case. Signal timing can be optimized for pedestrian rates of speed, or bicycles. Planners do think about this stuff.
Not disputing that, but in undergraduate labs you're likely to find research cast-offs, though the only plastic scintillator experiment I've known (albeit 35 years ago) was purpose-built. There was also a Ge(Li) "jelly" counter, and demonstrators who didn't understand pile-up...
I don't think he's saying it's a bad thing, just that it's not a good idea to say "See I got my injury sorted in 4 hours!" and use this as an example of how great the NHS is.

i.e. If the article read: "I had an issue with my ankle, waited two weeks to see a GP, then was in the waiting room for an hour after my appointment was meant to start, then had to wait a week to a referral for a scan." It wouldn't be such a clickbaity story.
We get a lot for the money, compared to the cost of other systems. I absolutely don't want to see more privatisation of the system despite most governments nudging towards this. All is not perfect though. Every government wants to be seen to be "doing something", so fiddles. Constantly. Staff is overworked and mostly underpaid.

Emergency and cancer care seems to be very good. I'd recommend not needing a non-emergency or mental health treatment in some of the poorer regions of the country though.

For instance. If you need Aspergers help for your child, or referral to some CBT for depression in some places you can wait 12 months. Sometimes more.

Even so I prefer it to anything like the US system as you can;t fall through the gaps entirely for being broke. I'm glad to pay more tax as a result, rather than an insurance premium or in-work benefit.
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For a bit of context on what is Pony: http://www.ponylang.org .
Are there any users of the language that would care to comment on using the language?
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I agree, Doctrine has performance problems. I did some microbenchmarks too. But you could try to optimize (or write your own custom) mapping code, or maybe you could load less entities or write a better ORM. Sometimes you have to use SQL queries too (when the result of a query cannot be mapped to entities).

The "SQL and arrays" approach is much worse and doesn't scale. Without ORM and classes you will get undocumented JSON trees (or arrays) passed around.

> http://solnic.eu/2015/09/18/ditch-your-orm.html

It seems to me that author wants to replace complex approach (OOP and ORM) with even more complex one. So instead of having one object representing an entity we can have ten objects representing the entity at different moments in time. So we have to find out which one is the latest. And we will need even more memory to keep them.

He writes:

> There is no User but it’s very likely there is SignupUser.

And soon there will be LoginUser, GuestUser, ProfileEditUser, UserForReport and others. And a bunch of methods to convert between them.

I don't understand what is the problem with mutable entities. They are supposed to be mutable. I never had problems because of functions modifying arguments given to them.

I don't believe functional programming can be use instead of OOP. Can you represent a DOM tree, collection of GUI widgets, a graph of related database entitites, a form with validation rules with functional programming? You will just end up emulating classes and objects.

The author probably just likes the idealized concept and did not try to apply it to a real world application (but if anyone did it would be interesting to see the code).

I also took a look at Ruby Object Mapper he mentions in a post and don't really like it. It uses arrays (that are called ROM::Struct there) a lot and I don't see much functional programming there.

I also have read this article http://seldo.com/weblog/2011/06/15/orm_is_an_antipattern and I partially disagree with the conclusion. Using key-value storage instead of a database is generally bad idea. It doesn't solve "N + 1 queries" problem, it doesn't provide foreign keys (and often transactions), and you have to write messy custom code instead of shorter and better readable SQL query (example: https://www.kchodorow.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/SQ... ).
The readme doesn't say what databases are supported, and similarly the config example config file doesn't have a field to configure this either.

The only clue is the example SQL for creating the table appears to be MySQL. Is Postgres supported?
/rant

On 3rd street in SF (effectively 6 lane road with 2 lane roads intersecting) they have this setup at most intersections. It makes sense for crossing the 6 lane road, especially since it makes the crossing light extra long to allow for crossing the wide road in time. There's not too much cross traffic, so no point in slowing the 6 lane traffic down unless there's someone crossing.

But they also have the no cross light until the button is pressed for the 2 lane crossing and I think it actually makes things more dangerous. If you don't hit the button early in the cycle, you of course have to wait until next cycle.. Which can be a while! Not that many drivers are turning.. So most people in the neighborhood jaywalk. Which means that drivers looking to turn see a red hand and probably think it's okay to turn even if it's not.
I hope he was not. As a 'power user' I use GleeBox for keyboard navigation to links that match the text I enter. And as a power user, I've occasionally accidentally navigated away from a page by using space/enter while I was focused on a link without realizing it. Or backspace in the wrong context.

Considering that I never intentionally used the space/enter action to navigate to a link, I wouldn't mind browsers removing this.

I rarely encounter people who are so incredibly unsympathetic to the difficulty others face in using technology (even 'power users' like myself, apparently). Surely there's a point where perhaps we should at least consider changing our approach, when what works for us does not work for many (most?) other people. I haven't met a single non-power-user who actively used backspace to navigate back to the previous page, for example.

At the risk of getting too personal, but with the memory of seeing my mother and grandmother actually crying because something they cared about disappeared for some reason that only I understood: please find something else to feel superior about, or just shut up and feel smug by yourself. It's difficult and frustrating enough already for many people to adapt to the rapid technological changes around them.
An inode, traditionally, is the per-file data structure on disk (or in memory) that contains the user/group IDs, file type (plain/directory/device/etc; not jpeg/png/executable/etc), permissions, file size, and the location of the content (either a list of block numbers, or the address of a block containing the list if it wouldn't all fit into the fixed-size inode), among other things. These structures were identified by a number. This is an implementation detail not specified by POSIX.

A directory, historically (on systems with 14- or 30-character file name limits like we had in the 1990s, at least 4.2 or 4.3 BSD-derived), consisted of a file containing a list of (16-bit inode number, file name) structs, thus making a nice round 16 or 32 bytes per directory entry, evenly dividing a 512-byte block. On some older systems you could see this structure by opening and reading a directory with open and read (I think every system everywhere prohibited writes to a directory because modifying a directory would allow you to access files in unreadable directories, uncleanly delete any file given its inode number, etc). The only special thing about a directory on disk was that its inode said it was a dir, so the filesystem code would trust it as a source of inode numbers and otherwise use it as a dir.

Some of the 14-byte-name systems supported symlinks. As there was no space in the directory entry for anything other than an inode number, the link contents would have to be accessed through an inode. (I think I've heard of systems that could store very small file contents like typical symlink target names in the inode instead of allocating a data block, but can't name one).

The number you see in ls -i, which is sometimes called just the "inode" (and apparently also called the "file serial number"), is the number in the directory entry that's used to find the inode. I guess someone somewhere had or intended to have a system that could store symlinks in the directory instead of consuming an inode.
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The illusion of control is not limited to the placebo effect. When you consider that our Universe is causal and that all actions (including that of a human) result from a set of conditions determined by previous actions, it is quite easy to discount the existence of free will.

Without getting existential, I would like to raise that not only does pushing a placebo button give you no control, but the choice even to press that button was not one you took but one which was predefined. This means that even if that button wasn't a placebo, you would still ultimately have no control over what happens as the choice to push the button is not yours.

This extends further questions as to who you are as you are defined by your actions which were not your choice to make. This obviously has serious implications with our legal system where by a person could not be held accountable for commiting a crime however it is also worth noting that the notion of awards would be invalidated as a person had no choice in doing good thing X.
What are you talking about? Most of this data is publicly available. You can download it and run your own analysis right now if you wish.
I Lived in Spain for a couple of decades, and I much prefer their government run hospitals to the way the US works. However, I do not believe that the US could just flip a switch and go to a public hospital system, so I would be happy with a more transparent, more competitive hospital system.

The question here is not what system to create in a vacuum, but the road in the middle. I live surrounded by a whole lot of ultra-expensive, luxurious hospitals, staffed by extremely well paid professionals (and not so well paid residents), which, in many cases, have six figures worth of debt for the privilege. To move to a public system, all of those things would have to change: Those luxurious, privately owned hospitals are never going to give great prices to a single payer system. The doctors are not going to be happy with lower wages. Medical schools would have to change drastically, so they can actually provide a number of doctors that resembles the rest of the western world. This level of disruption is what makes major changes like that in a system that employs so many people unpopular: It's a bit like how the US military can't take big cuts, as they are political suicide.

So overall, the change would be huge, and would be hard to make slowly. Therefore, I'd much rather solve it in the US through markets. Once the system has a whole lot less rent seeking behaviors, and the incentives are better aligned, a public option would actually be easier than from the catastrophe we live on now, where prices are secret, and yet, a hospitalization will often involve 10 to 20% coinsurance.
Does anyone have a short, paragraph or two summary of why you might choose Pony over Erlang/Elixir or Akka with Java or C#?
What is the better language that you found?
It's doesn't logically follow that every business that has internal inefficiencies will stop making a profit. They may make less profit than they could if they were more efficient. My father-in-law works for a very large corporation and he's always complaining about the wasted time to get simple tasks done, but they aren't going out of business any time soon.

Every company I've worked at with lots of red tape got there because they were actually trying to solve a problem due to the lack of "regulations" or rules.
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> A blight on the land.

Talk about having an opinion that over half the U.S. population in behavior (and likely a hell of a lot more) simply don't share. The suburbs when done well, and especially now with the promise of solar and electric vehicles is a wonderful place to be. Wonderful even when done imperfectly. Why would you want urban if you could have greenery? Why would you want close quarters when you could have space? Why would you want loud and bright when you can have peace and quiet.

When I walk the urban downtown area, sure there are food vendor smells, but there is also inescapable rotting sewer smell in the streets. When I walk the suburbs, I smell fresh air. I see the greenery that was planted by the people who enjoy the extra space to have freedom to do so. Distribution of the population is a great thing for a lot of health reasons, even if it's supposedly less efficient for travel to work. The more companies get their head out of their ass, the less driving people will have to do anyway.
Fair point.

Though I would argue that those options are only marginally better, and may as well be the same.

For example, most people can't tell the difference between a 20 dollar wine and a 200 dollar wine. So the rich and poor effectively have access to the same thing.