johnschrom

Glassdoor can be (and is) easily tainted by submitting fake positive reviews. They have a policy of not letting employers remove negative reviews, but that doesn't stop the company from flooding with "it's a fast-paced work environment, so some people clearly can't handle the heat in the kitchen" style "positive reviews" to reframe the legitimate negative ones.

So, it can sometimes be difficult to get a proper read on signal. However, it seems to be among the best data source out there.

Friendly note: these are H1B salaries, so it's probably not quite the same as all tech salaries.

Amen. I would give you gold if we were on Reddit.

In Minneapolis, they started collecting and retaining ALPR data, but the sunshine laws hadn't caught up to the retention period. So, one of my buddies made a request for all of the data, and it was fulfilled.

If anybody is interested in playing with ALPR data, we put it up on github but removed the license plate numbers: https://github.com/johnschrom/Minneapolis-ALPR-Data

This article only scratches the surface of how messed up our health care system is. I'd be shocked if either hospital system was able to figure out how much money the writer's son actually cost the hospital... the organizations I've worked for take at least a year to calculate cost (if they ever successfully do it), making (as CWuestefeld said) many of their other calculations come largely from guesses. Sometimes that guess is as simple as "just multiply what Medicare pays by 3, and then charge the insurance company for that amount."

To compound this problem further, I've worked on federal grant applications that ask what the "cost of care" is. Since the hospital has no means of calculating this, I've been told to just sum the charges for each patient. As the writer experienced, the charges can often be a full order of magnitude greater than the cost. You can imagine how yucky this gets.

Someday I would like to walk in to a Best Buy, pick up a Playstation 3, and then inform the cashier that I will only be paying $20 for it. I wonder how well that would go over...