I think the thing to remember is that with interest rates being essentially 0 during the (middle/end of) pandemic that made it really easy for a lot of companies to finance a virtually free checkbook. They were at liberty to try out all sorts of new experiments, virally for free (at that moment).
Now those bonds are all coming up for renewal at much higher interest rates, and the companies don't have the growth to organically support the higher head-count (in addition to the interest payments), and so are cutting.
Was this all wildly irresponsible? Yes. But the people who made those decision are never going to personally pay for any of it.
I think this is mostly because they don't care about false-negatives. They have forgotten the idea that our justice system was supposed to hold true to: "better a hundred guilty go free than one innocent person suffer" (attributed to Benjamin Franklin).
This can be seen in the case of ChongLy Thao, the American citizen (who was born in Laos). This was the man dragged out into freezing temperatures in his underwear after ICE knocked down his door (without a warrant), because they thought two other men (of Thai origin I think) were living there. The ICE agents attitude was that they must be living there, and ChongLy was hiding them. That being wrong does not cost those ICE agents anything, and that is the source of the problems.
Do you mean false positives? A false negative would be "we checked to see whether Alice was in the country illegally, and the computer said no but the actual answer turned out to be yes".
But they were wrong about the Thai people living there. That's the poster's point. Not that they don't care, but that they were wrong from the get-go because they don't actually have good information.
>think this is mostly because they don't care about false-negatives. They have forgotten the idea that our justice system was supposed to hold true to: "better a hundred guilty go free than one innocent person suffer" (attributed to Benjamin Franklin).
Putting on my pedant's hat here. Franklin may well have said something similar, but the maxim you mention is broadly known as Blackstone's Formulation (or ratio)[0] after William Blackstone[1], another Englishman.
Many sayings are ascribed to Benjamin Franklin. And some of them, he actually said.
This is misleading. While there are privately owned tanks, they are all old, and lack any weapons (other than as a battering ram).
They likely could cause a lot of trouble for a local police force, but would not stand up to any infantry force in the world.
So in an actual conflict with the U.S. government, none of those tanks would be more than symbolic. And whole a general gorilla insurrection in the U.S. would be nasty, examples like Wako demonstrate that even mid-sized stands would be severely overwhelmed.
The whole idea that a Second-Amendment rebellion in the U.S., absent the military joining on the side of the rebellion, is just a fantasy.
It is misleading, but not for the reasons you state.
There are private tanks in the US with functional weapons, including both mounted MGs and the cannon. In fact, there’s a place in Uvalde, TX that will let you come drive and shoot theirs for a couple grand.
> none of those tanks would be more than symbolic
Correct, but that’s not why. A tank would be worse than useless in an insurgency.
> The whole idea that a Second-Amendment rebellion in the U.S., absent the military joining on the side of the rebellion, is just a fantasy.
No one is seriously suggesting going up against the US military with an irregular force in the US. The point is that an armed citizenry cannot be subjugated without destroying everything worth having. It’s a suicide pact between the People and the state.
I thought the point of an armed citizenry is so that they could shoot at each other as both sides think the other has gone bad. Let’s face it, even right now it isn’t the people unified for or against the government, it’s roughly two groups of people that hate each other, one side has control of the federal government, the other side has control of some local and state governments, either side sees the other as tyrannical, and it’s just luck that they haven’t started shooting at each other yet.
This idea that citizens would somehow unite against a tyrannical government has always been a fantasy, even during the revolutionary war.
I don't think that you understand how that part of statistics works. You are said that we have sampled 64% of the population, so we can extrapolate to the rest. That works if the sampling is sufficiently random. But in this case the "sampling" is people who voted, so an entirely (self) selected population, and pretty much not random at all (i.e.: people who were mostly less decisive about their opinions/vote).
So I don't think we can extrapolate confidently at all. So we really don't know whether it holds for the rest of the population at all.
> So I don't think we can extrapolate confidently at all
But the parent was — the implication being that if the other third had voted, surely they would have voted in greater proportion for Democrats than Republicans. That’s based on nothing but vibes and assumptions. I argue that the 64% share of people that actually did vote give you a lot more confidence in how the remaining third probably would have voted than whatever the parent suggested. It’s at least a starting point for extrapolation.
These are being sold on Apple's AppStore, and there the model is that you get all of the updates for that App. Of course there is the work-around that some apps use, which is to create a new App (i.e.: MyApp vs MyApp2), which Apple could do at some point in the future.
The best one to watch at the moment is if Pixelmater Pro license holders from before it was bought by Apple get access to any of the new improvements.
I don't agree that it was a "bad management decision". The Trump administration has demonstrated that it will play dirty with grants if they perceive that the receiving organization is not towing their political line as closely as they want.
Not only will they not grant future funds, but they have shown that they will not pay out previously agreed monies, and will even try (with government layers) to pull back funds from groups they have decided "do not align with the governments interests", for however they define that at that moment. There are a long list of court findings that these have been arbitrary and capricious, but every one of those findings (wins) cost the grant receivers a lot of money in court and later fees.
So any money taken from them is incurring a risk. You can disagree with the Python Foundation's calculus on this (saying it was not that large a risk), but please don't pretend that it was not an actual risk.
My wife's previous job was as an accountant with the endowment foundation at a mid-sized public university (San Jose State University). A lot of her time was spent making sure that the spending from the endowments many different funds corresponded to the rules that the donors had given when donating that money. Much of that was working with groups to shift spending around between accounts when they invariably made "mistakes".
One of her biggest projects was shepherding a large group of very old donations through a legal process to remove provisions in the donation agreements that were now illegal. In these cases the donors were long deceased, and the most common rule that needed to be changed was targeting race or ethnicity (e.g.: funds setup to help black people, or Irish, etc...).
The sheer number of different variations on "donor intent", or even just the wording on that legal document was astounding. There was always a tension between my wife's group and the group that was bringing in the money ("stewardship"), her group wanted things to be simpler and the "stewarding" group wanted nothing to get in the way of donations. It was remarkably similar to the tensions between sales and engineering in many software firms.
It allowed for both HTML applications and Java apps (both JNLP and completely local). And before the transition to Java it was ObectiveC, and I think even had a scripting language (WebScript?). It was beautiful, fast, and for lots of things you could just wire up a small app to a database with almost no code (then later add the business code after the demo).
One of my first jobs was writing a web app using it, and those were fun days.
The EnterpriseObjects part (the part that managed data to/from the database) survived for a long time in parts of Apple's web back-end. And I have always thought that WebObjects was the model that Ruby-on-Rails was designed to mimic (in many ways, but not all).
This is a longstanding problem. I worked at the receiving dock of a retailer long ago, and the amount of procedure and double-verification involved was a bit of a drag, all of it obviously aimed at making sure that neither I nor the guy driving the truck could make things "fall off the truck" without it being obvious.
But even then, it was common knowledge that most "shrinkage" (generic term for stolen/damaged/expired/destroyed merchandise) was from employee theft (except in grocery stores... there it is second to expired goods).
This is true, but frontline healthcare staff wages are only one part of the problem. For specifics you can see details here (e.g.: US average front-line healthcare worker salary: €74.450, Germany: €40.522):
But even absent any movement there you have a lot of savings to be had away from that:
1. The U.S. medical administration costs have ballooned, in large part because of the highly adversarial billing system between insurers and practitioners. Medicare/Medicaid is much less (but not completely) unpredictable. Doctors complain bitterly about the prices at times, but the system is much more efficient.
2. U.S. insurance companies are woefully inefficient. To the point that companies complained bitterly when the ACA required them to pay out 80% of premiums as medical payments. Before that there were companies making more than 20% profits. The most efficient insurance companies today use about 12% of their revenues for non-medical care. In comparison Medicaid uses about 3.9%.
There are lots of other parts you could address as well:
1. Fraud drawn to the huge payouts for medical bills. If people's accidents were just covered as a normal part of life those payouts, and most of that fraud just goes away.
2. Malpractice insurance. This is like the first, but would mostly be solved by a combination of single payer and a working medical review system (seriously, what we have now is the definition of regulatory capture).
Now those bonds are all coming up for renewal at much higher interest rates, and the companies don't have the growth to organically support the higher head-count (in addition to the interest payments), and so are cutting.
Was this all wildly irresponsible? Yes. But the people who made those decision are never going to personally pay for any of it.
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