In a recent case of someone living in TX learning that their fetus had trisomy 18, there was a whole legal case that had to be fought, and when Judge Gamble ruled that terminating the pregnancy could proceed in this case, TX AG Ken Paxton filed an emergency petition to ask the state supreme court to overturn the ruling, and that blocked Judge Gamble's ruling. Meantime, the woman's condition was deteriorating enough that she left the state to get her healthcare needs met.
So, what can we expect when TX is making it this perilous to provide basic healthcare for such a large percentage of its population? More of the same, I'd argue.
If you care about your sisters/daughters/spouses' access to healthcare, consider other states.
On the second point, I think folks are rightly dubious about the effectiveness of incentives broadly[1]. There's also some hilarious historical examples of incentives backfiring or having unwanted side-effects (like the Cobra Effect [2].)
More broadly, I don't think it's that easy to think that private prisons can even work well as a solution, regardless of whether they should be allowed to exist as a matter of public policy and ethics. Consider one summative look at this issue provided in this evaluation[3] -- it's dubious whether they're even cost effective, one of the strongest pro-private-prison arguments there has been in public debate, and how there's much better alternatives than the kind of perverse incentives bundled with private prisons, like re-evaluating whether parolees should be allowed in public housing, and providing more transition housing so when sentences are complete, inmates aren't forced to spend even more time in prison because they don't have an address to go to.
I'm not sure why but your comment was hidden as dead. I vouched for it because… WTF? It's a totally fine comment. Anyway…
I agree that existing private prisons are wasteful and cruel, but I think that could change if they had different incentives. Right now, convicts can't choose between private or public prison. That lack of choice means that private prisons have no incentive to be better than state run prisons. Private prisons usually charge per head. If no prisoners want to stay at the prison because it's a hellhole, revenue dries up and they go out of business.
I'm familiar with the cobra effect and ways in which adding financial incentives can cause counterproductive outcomes. I'm not particularly worried about that happening with private prisons. Financial incentives backfire in two cases:
1. When they fail to account for higher-order effects. (As happened with the cobra bounty in India.)
2. When they replace social incentives. For example: If a friend asks me to help them move, I'll probably oblige. But if I show up on moving day and I see some paid movers helping, I'll resent that. That's basically what happened with the day care that charged for being late. Previously, parents would show up on time because they felt a social obligation (guilt). When the day care added a late fee, that guilt disappeared because the transaction moved from the social realm to the financial realm.
I think the motivations of wardens and guards in both private and state runs prisons are pretty similar, and I don't think they're motivated by social incentives. For them, it's a job. They want to minimize the amount of stress at work, and that usually means minimizing the amount of violence prisoners do towards one another. Adding some financial incentives isn't going to solve all the problems with prisons, but considering our existing recidivism rates, I seriously doubt it will hurt.
I'm quite taken aback by the vitriol in those comments.
Programs are meant to be read by humans, and language/terminology has a huge impact. If there are cost-less replacements to words that are easy to adopt, why not adopt them? These changes are beneficial to the community, don't hurt the language, and are cheap to adopt in many cases anyway.
Well this change implies that it is not OK to use terms like master and slave. The criticism is founded in fears, that this is used as a precedent to control speech.
An Idea that is not fully unfounded.
Chernoff faces are pretty fun to play with too! A while back, I played with it[1], and they do seem useful. I wonder if more realistic faces lead to better utility as a at-a-glance data visualization tool?
This looks really awesome. I liked that rehydration was factored out with a higher order component like that. That seems like a much cleaner solution.
Overall, I'm really intrigued by Apollo Client and GraphQL in general. My guess is that using them cuts down on a lot of custom Redux related code you'd end up writing, mostly fetches and mutations. And replaces those concerns with much more declarative code. And also handles conventions about the shape of how to handle errors and load states.
But what are the gotchas of a stack that might heavily favor Apollyon Client and GraphQL?
Check out Hyper.sh too. It abstracts away the whole datacenter -- you can use `hyper` instead of `docker`, basically. You don't need to think about VMs ever as a concept, containers run directly on the hypervisor. And they have Hyper Func, an AWS Lambda-like alternative that uses images. And per second billing.
On the downsides, they're small and they have one data center, and they're not Microsoft. But their tech is open source.
We don't want to compete with the big providers, instead we open source the tech to enable more container-native clouds, where the world will become a seamless (portable) network for containers (different clouds are different ports with the same image spec and API).
But Hyper.sh is still competitive, I think, even though it's super young. They already have a high level AWS Lambda alternative (Hyper Func) that uses containers and is fully language agnostic, and they have reasonable pricing-per-minute figured out.
They also have open sourced their tech [1], so for certain companies they probably are compelling.
Perhaps they should provide the kind of ease-of-use on top of the stuff they already provide that will cut open a steady market for them, like a Heroku but with this underlying tech and thus more dynamic on scaling and flexible on tech stack.
For small teams like the one I work in, and for solo work I have dabbled a bit in, I can imagine the following thought process if I have a git repo and sit down to think about how to best deploy it.
- I start researching how to deploy this, but I don't care about optimizing for a lot of scale. I DO care a lot about iteration speed, integration with image registry + code repository + CI/testing services (ideally out of the box), and not making it hard to maintain/deploy/expand for the rest of the team (if an associate engineer can be brought up to speed on the infra and become fairly independent, that'd be wonderful).
- I probably care about burstable, pay-for-usage infra. But it'd be great if that was somewhat abstracted away. Perhaps even based on requests-per-minute, and I set up limits about how far it should scale. (This would immediately put this far and above Heroku -- good, cost-efficient auto scaling)
- I really care about not having to maintain my own DB cluster myself. And similarly for key/value storage and block-file-storage (like s3). And I'd absolutely love to not have to myself tweak and implement something common like cron or logging.
- And I'd probably care about integration with error-detection services and performance monitoring services.
- It would be absolutely amazing if there were default stacks/recipes with load balancers, so the common cases were easy (a common case like a standard RDBMS-backed JSON REST Api using cron and background jobs, or a static website (which basically covers all SPA-like frontends, if you add in a flexible reverse-proxy URL-rewriting solution))
Then, I could pick it up and be fine depending on it, since costs would scale down to my level (plus some premium I guess, but hey I'm even okay with Heroku for some things). But I could probably continue to stick with it for a long time. Inertia in ops means that if you get green field projects early and sustain them, my guess is that they stick around longer than they really even should -- but that's just an unverified guess on my part, idk.
ps -- the thing that really strongly drew me to hyper.sh was that I could abstract away the whole cluster behind `hyper`, like `docker` on my own computer. That was an amazing selling point, coming at after the popcorn machine of container management solutions with their very own intricate towers of complexity. It's what I like about sandstorm.io in part -- abstracting away a lot of complexity about hosting apps. But there's other complexity that could perhaps be eased or simplified, since running a software project is not simply the same as running an app on a computer, networking, load balancing, data security, backups and so on add up to a lot. So it's not enough that `hyper` abstracts away the data center, because there's scope for some more simplification for a certain slice of market: smaller teams who can't afford a full ops team, or teams with a small ops team who want to tackle a monstrous tech project.
Thanks for the detailed input. They are tremendously valuable.
Part of the reason we chose to open source is that we want the community to innovate. We are continuing to build the feature set, however I need to say that the workflow varies from app to app. Therefore, by providing the base building block and allowing others to create different solutions, we could enable more options to the market.
Yeah that makes sense. If there's enough of an enticement to adopt the infra service and you standardize the API at the bottom, any developments/contributions on top of it could co-exist and be more share-able. I'm reminded of the addon marketplace in Heroku. The underlying infra was consistent and general, which made third party plugins/addons/contributions easier (even to make money). Heroku ended up getting a lot of specialized support for platform customers that they probably couldn't have built out themselves.
I could totally see even seeding a possible 'marketplace' with your own services. Like perhaps Func as a service, powered by Hyper. And others also benefiting from the underlying infra being so simple. Why wouldn't a platform-provider use an infra service that's flexibly scalable on perf+price? They probably have the skillset on hand for that too and don't need any more finesse than already exists, beyond stability.
Anyway, that's just my own ramblings. Hope you're having fun with Hyper! It sure looks like a lot of love/tears went into it.
Sorting by the second column gives a good picture about which country has more dangerous drivers. And Thailand is #2... so your claim tracks well against this reality.
Also interesting: The US has about two thirds the amount of fatalities by 100k people compared to India. I.e. the US should first improve its own stats before trying to school anyone else, especially considering that countries like the UK show that it could be improved 4-fold.
Comparing fatalities per 100k people seems like a pretty useless statistic when we're talking about safety standards. If you look at fatalities per 100,000 motor vehicles it's 12.9 compared to 130. So 10x as much. An even better statistic to use would be fatalities per 1 billion vehicle miles. But that data isn't available for India.
Non-motorized transportation options aren't counted in vehicle miles. So accidents involving pedastrians, bicycles and other bystanders would skew this some. Since car accidents don't just hurt other motorists it's useful to measure this against the total population.
Is it not useful to look at both the statistic you mention along with the ones you responded to? They may not be equal in importance, but merit some consideration, no?
Also, looking at accidents per distance driven hides hides the fact that more time spent on the road is a societal choice that also leads to more fatalities.
To get a decent idea of what's going on, you need to know VMT per capita, fatalities per vmt, how many crashes are fatal, and ideally quite a few other things (urban/rural mix, etc.).
One of the best ways to make roads safer would be to just let people drive less. The US has fairly safe roads per VMT (by world standards), but people end up driving a lot more than in most other places, which negates this somewhat.
Agreed - thus my comment that this is comparing to the world. Western Europe has remarkably "safe" roads (scare quotes because we call them safe despite tens of thousands of people dying per year).
I was considering the first column, which does list Thailand as second highest in terms of road fatalities per 100k inhabitants. By second column, I didn't mean to say skip the column with country names -- that may be the mixup. Here's the source data too: http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/road_safety_st.... I think considering the number of road fatalities and accounting for population seems like a good enough comparative measure.
For fender benders or even total car writeoffs, sure. But for fatalities? From my admittedly narrow and predominantly first-world view that doesn't sound plausible.
I saw two fatal accidents in Vietnam in the three weeks I was visiting. This wasn't unusual, other tourists saw similar numbers.
I'd guess wealthy drivers simply paid the deceased's family (and the police if necessary), or in other cases the pedestrian or cyclist was blamed entirely and the accident not recorded as a motor vehicle accident.
There is also such a thing as a representative summary of what the article is going to be about. It's about how DIYGirls worked with a group of high schoolers, part of an all girls club, to make a solar powered tent.
And it's an NPR article, at that.
Not everything requires the cached thought: "mo' views mo' $s"
So, what can we expect when TX is making it this perilous to provide basic healthcare for such a large percentage of its population? More of the same, I'd argue.
If you care about your sisters/daughters/spouses' access to healthcare, consider other states.