Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
I recently bought a 2018 edition for the wife because she has always expressed a desire of owning one of her own (my work always provided me with a mac). The keyboard is much improved.
Additionally, watching a "normal" user interact with a Mac and a touchbar, versus me, a developer was eye opening, and I suddenly realized there is a lot more to the puzzle we are so blind to. She loves it. Sure, it is an "emoji bar" when she is in iMessage, but she also loves the scrolling functionality it provides in Photos.
I still don't see much use for it personally, but I am no longer a rapid opponent of it as I once was. There's always been extra ports and features on other laptops I've used in the past, and I never seemed so critical of those as well. Maybe I bought into the mob mentality? Going back to my wife, her work provided her with a Thinkpad Yoga. It has a touch screen, and a stylus. Ok touch screens I am not the biggest fan of, but I happen to think the stylus is cool! I am sure there were many users of the previous Thinkpads at her company that were going "What!? A stupid stylus? Who needs this!" I realized I was doing the same thing with the new MBP.
Touchbar or not, it is still the most quality, aesthetically pleasing, well built laptop I use, and it still remains miles beyond any PC I ever used as well, Inspirons, XPSes, Surfaces included.
Certain lies definitely shouldn't. Denying holocaust happened is illegal where I'm from and it should be.
Dead Comment
The procedure was in December. After the procedure she received a 6-figure bill, which she then had to follow up with hours of phone calls back and forth to the insurance company, hospital, and doctor's office. They sent her a revised bill for somewhere around $8,000, and then another revised bill for around $4,000.
The insurance company says it's because the doctor coded the procedure incorrectly. The doctor says the hospital coded it incorrectly. She has had to file an appeal with the insurance company, and the only reason it looks like it will work out is because the insurance company records all phone calls and was able to get records of her original calls before the procedure asking if it would be fully covered. She has still been told to expect that they will deny her first appeal and she'll have to appeal a second time in order to get it covered. This has been causing her immense stress for the past 4 months as she does not have enough money to pay even the $4,000 bill out of pocket.
My experience is that your experience actually is extremely uncommon in America today. Most people who have to interact with the health care system beyond annual checkups have to deal with something like this.
My father currently undergoing treatment for lung cancer. He has medicare and supplemental coverage through Humana. Bills are still in excess of 150,000, so I definitely understand the other side of it.
I personally would prefer a market based approach to fixing the issues with obtaining medical care, but Congress can't do anything because there's just too much money and influence involved.
So then if it's supposedly more efficient, why do I waste multiple hours dealing with insurance bullshit literally every few months?
Start a new job at a startup, need to go to trainings to understand the health care options and choose one, get new cards and website logins, update my info at every provider
New dentist is having difficulty getting my routine care billed to insurance and calls me every week asking for my insurance information again.
Wifes doctor didn't do something correctly when I updated insurance so now I need to call and deal with this big medical bill that I shouldn't have gotten.
Startup got acquired so I get another training for the new insurance options. And get new cards and logins and update with all providers again
Planning to get a surgical operation but nobody can tell me how much it will cost, doctor says "probably whatever your deductible is" except I have a high deductible plan so is it really going to cost me $2500?
Etc cetera. There's no end to the nuisance. If I could choose to just pay more in taxes (hell I'll pay way more than my current premiums) and never deal with insurance again, I would do it in a heartbeat.
I am either the luckiest person alive, or maybe there is additional benefits not obviously well represented here to working for a stable, revenue producing organization, but I don't seem to encounter what seems to be the well-represented insurance pains documented here (probably a little bit of both, in my guess).
Overpopulation is something that, if real, will have an impact regardless of the motivation for people's concern. It's not purely a social construct like say the wearing of tattoos.
It's lazy to dismiss such serious concerns with appeals to hypocrisy. Even if 100% of the people making such claims now are actually hypocrites, your voice could improve the ratio to only 99.9999%
> Overpopulation is something that, if real, will have an impact regardless of the motivation for people's concern
"If real", that is the key, and I am glad you pointed it out. For the sake of argument, we would first have to define why overpopulation real. It seems to me most people start off with the assumption that it is real.
Who is defining overpopulation? What is the criteria? Not enough food? Well that's not true at all, we know that the US for example wastes more food daily that could feed the entire continent of Africa with 1/3rd of a pound of food. Not enough land for people to expand to? Well even a 5 year old knows that one is false. Is it not enough natural resources? Despite the fearmongering about water and energy resources drying up, we seem to be doing just fine. Capitalists reaping the country to sell to a nation of consumers? This is the most insidious form of the argument, but again, very wrong. Plus it assumes greedy capitalists somehow wouldn't exist with 5 billion people, or 3, or 2, or even 1, that wouldn't cause some kind of destruction to natural resources. The final one is one made more by hard left academics in favor of socialism. They need an easy explanation for why socialism always sounds so great in theory and never works in practice, so they point to overpopulation. If we simply had less people, then socialism would work!. Except, as we now know, this was in part one of the rationales behind the gulags and gas chambers.
So what is the criteria? Not comfortable enough for you and me -- that seems to be the essence of the arguments left after eliminating the ones above.
Plus, even if the above were remotely true, why rule out technological solutions? Seems to me pretty crazy people on a technology focused board would rule this one out (not singling you out, "overpopulation is a problem" is an opinion expressed here often, unfortunately), especially since it was technology that has allowed us to easily achieve our current population levels at the exploding standard of living the globe is currently undergoing.
People who think overpopulation is an issue by just pointing to some things "drying up" or some places "crowding" is by definition engaging in a lazy form of argument. So to me, until there some hard facts and figures on what overpopulation means, please excuse me if I take it for a hypocritical statement, as the great Carlin said, made by bourgeois liberals that have never experienced actual hardships and live in such an advanced society they have nothing better to do than ponder the scenarios where their cushy lifestyles could be threatened.
When you don't have any actual enemies to fight, you have to invent some in your head to keep you busy.