Posts by Doctor Syntax 33095 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"it seems insurers are mostly raising prices and looking for ways to stop paying out so much to attack victims"
The obvious way - obvious to most of us - to pay less would be to insist on advise customers about adopting better security. Is suppose that's not in the insurers' skill set for stopping payouts.
This was installed some time before 1970. AFAICS it's just buried. There's no sign of a duct where it emerges through the foundations.
The estate where my daughter lived is a similar age. I don't think they're ducted either. Like us they have a good FTTC service.
I'm the only house round here not to have overhead cables strung (by neighbour across the road had a phone burnt out by EMP in a thunderstorm) & I'd like to keep it that way. On the daughter's estate all the houses have phone & electricity supplies underground. I'm not sure what the planners would say if that were to be changed.
Somebody made similar enquiries here a good while ago. I told him it follows the same route as the water and sewer underground: under the hedge, under the orchard, under the greenhouse which has a concrete base, under the concrete drive, under the concrete laid paving, through the concrete foundations and into a crawl space under a concrete floor. It's why I'm not keen on FTTP seeing as FTTC is Quite Good Enough. He left muttering to himself.
I might have excused her without the absolutely and only one of either needs or should. As the quote stands, however, it seems that her focus is in the administering rather than the medicine. Admittedly administration is her role but St Edward's Hospital looms rather large.
Even worse, lurking in the background is the suspicion that "digital" isn't about administration but about data fetishism or maybe about bypassing those medics with on-line self-service diagnosis.
"You still have to deal with wankers in management, what's the advantage?"
Not to anything like the same extent. If you're freelance and doing it right you'll be managing company finances to have a reserve. It's much harder to build up a FY fund as a permie - I know, I've been there. That reserve means that if need be you can walk bring the future forward a little quicker.
Could you explain that comment a little further. I assume from it that you're not freelance. In that case why do you stay on as a permanent employee instead of going freelance yourself?
Is there actually some difference between the two ways of working which means you're not able to do so? If so might that not account for the difference between rates?
And when you were looking at the difference did you take into account that the amount in your pay packet is net of employee and employer taxes whilst those remain to be paid from the freelancer's fee?
"..., expectant mothers etc.
Many people in those groups can now be vaccinated."
The message to expectant mothers seems to be that they can and should get vaccinated. That keeps getting reinforced from mothers who put it off because they were pregnant got infected and came out of their induced coma to find they'd had a caesarean some time ago and are only now being reunited with their child. No such reports from those who didn't survive of course.
I suppose working in your home office is a bit like being in business in your own right in that you can make choices like that. Not in as many things but in some. If you prefer more expensive coffee then you can use some of the money you saved on commuting to buy it.
Personally, I'll keep to tea. Coffee's far too complicated with pods, flat whites & goodness knows what else.
We have a great many viruses that don't pose great problems, that are "stable". Why?
Did the more dangerous ones that emerged in the past die out because, in a time when they emerged fast long distance mass travel didn't exist so they burned through too much of the community where they emerged?
Or did they mutate to a state where they could live with new hosts? Remember, for instance, that in their natural hosts they are "stable" whatever that might mean.
I think that a major problem now is that we propagate viruses faster than they can evolve to adapt to us as a host. Note that - we propagate them, we don't simply allow them to propagate.
"It's not rocket science."
No it isn't. It's not as easy as that.
Undoubtedly fast mass international and intercontinental travel have enables diseases to spread fast than they have in the past. And undoubtedly many diseases in the past burned out completely by killing off the isolated population in which they emerged in sufficient numbers to stop propagation. But the reality is that you'll always be chasing. You don't catch all contacts with testing because putting together the tests let alone the number of test kits in time. On the whole the medical technology came on stream pretty well as fast as it could. But epidemiology, for instance, needs to get data from how the actual disease works - prior to that they only have general-purpose models based on different pathogens. Treatments need to be developed and tested. Test kits need to be developed and tested.
"We will just have to learn to live with it at some point"
I suppose it depends on what the "living with it" entails. If it means learning to live with the notion that you might feel a bit ill and a few hours later the last thing you see is someone putting you into a medically induced coma that might not be an acceptable lesson.
If an alternative is that the cities we have developed over the last century and a half or so and particularly over the post WWII period are not a sustainable way of living then it might just have done us a favour.
We should also learn the lesson that this is not the only disease to come out of nowhere, it isn't the first, it won't be the last. We need to learn the lessons of how to minimise the impact of that. How saving face by denying it exists for a few weeks is a bad idea. How disinformation about treatments is a bad idea. How resisting communal action to slow spread is a bad idea. And how jetting around the world so readily is also a bad idea.
"The proof-of-work part is only required if (a) it's a store of value in itself, i.e. it intrinsically represents money; and (b) the parties want to bypass all the institutions which traditionally control money, to ensure that assets cannot be frozen or confiscated."
And it's only feasible if the price of the work is greater than the value that's placed on it. The fact that the price is x doesn't mean that people are prepared to value it at x/y where y <=1.
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