thatfrenchguy

It’s a complex problem because a lot of those hospitals are non profit, so they have zero incentives to have high margins because no shareholders to return money to. Higher salaries for executives though…

They have a failsafe to use (visual) block backup signaling on that line and used it incorrectly. 200km/h is right at the border where you don’t need in cabin signaling.

you have to look at CO2/kwh produced over the lifetime, that's the useful metric here

> - Since the system was frequently failing and proceeding at slow speeds causes severe operational slowdowns, the control center started allowing them to proceed at linespeed instead, possibly with some ad-hoc checks to make sure the track was clear. - That got normalized, and whatever ad-hoc checks (if any) they were doing failed in this case.

This is a 200km/h line, which is right at the limit of the speed where you don't need in-cabin signaling (plenty of lines in France run at 200km/h without it), which explains why a careless control center operator could end up in this spot.

at 30-40km/h, which is where the train controller really messed up there.

have you ever like, gone to San Francisco?

Debt is where inflation is awesome though, if you have 10% inflation and your wages raise 10%, your car loan and student loans become irrelevant quickly.

> Young techie is now 32 years old. Perhaps they marry a US Citizen, and a different pathway opens up.

I mean, one of the reason the green card line is so long for Indians is that they have one of the lowest intermarriage rates for immigrants (not just for Americans, other immigrants as well, if you look at the census data for children it’s very obvious): you can “pick” which country your green card falls under based on either person in your household. If Indians married immigrants from any other countries their own line would not be as long

This is base salary not total compensation, which for a company like Microsoft matters quite a bit. I’ve never made less than 2-4x in a year what was on my perm application 10 years ago, that data is garbage

Once you have a green card you also are not indentured anymore :)

The trick for those companies is that their employees get stuck in the green card line forever

I mean in the LLM era you need fewer employees and you need them to be very good to not become 10x bad engineers, so you could be processing green cards for your super stars while having to do layoffs

Yeah salaries in the US are higher in nominal terms

> Without Prop 13, a big chunk of the NIMBYs who are currently against more housing would likely change their tune if they had to choose between no new housing or much higher property taxe

I mean, the way you make housing units more affordable is to make more of them, but for existing homeowners of SFH, building condo buildings in their neighborhood will increase their property value because the competition for the remaining lots increase. Given we build close to zero family friendly multi family in this country (ie, appartments buildings have zero family oriented amnenities), there isn’t much in there for nimbys. It’s the right thing to do but you can’t except nimbys to join in on a purely monetary basis.

I mean, this is not what the article is about though.

What the author of article is describing is just bureaucracy ever expanding (anyone who’s worked at the same place for a decade knows that bureaucracy rarely gets better), mostly decided by mediocre admin people who have never heard of Goodheart’s law. Bureaucrats loves KPIs, shitty average metrics (because distributions are hard to understand for bureaucrats for some reason), and generally does not have to field the consequences of their actions (notably because they don’t measure them!).

Except you burn the oil once and keep the solar panel and batteries for one or two decades

Real estate is not the only reason why folks have less children, especially in cultures where people don’t mind having less space. Kids are expensive for other reasons in china

I mean, Piketty showed this a decade ago in capital in the 21th century: the higher your income percentile and wealth percentile, the higher saving rate and the higher returns on your investment (which is negative for folks at the bottom of the distribution).

Of course the other problem with the projection is that BLS average expenses aren’t super accurate to project what people are spending on at those income percentiles :)

Single stage forced air / air handlers AC systems are basically only found in North America because they are so grossly inefficient and because most people in the rest of the world realize they can save money by not having all of their rooms ran off the same system. The rest of the world runs on mini splits for that reason.

US person is a tax definition, folks without permanent residency that meet the substantial presence test are also US people. For immigration purposes you use resident alien / nonresident alien.

We do tax gross 1% of wealth, it’s called property taxes. Only applies to middle class folks in their 30s though.

We’re like, a lot richer than before the GFC in California though.

H-1B / L-1 are non-immigrant visas, immigrant visas are green cards yes. Pausing green card processing in consulates after (on sketchy legal grounds) forcing folks to not do adjustment of status for getting an immigrant visa inside the country is, indeed, how the admin is trying to get around doing their job the way the INA intends them to.

> Take "Medicare-level payments to providers". Hospitals have an operating margin of 2-5%. Medicare pays 50% less than private insurance. So doing this would require either layoffs, cutting salaries for doctors/nurses/etc, or both. This may well be the right decision for society as a whole--that's a big part of the debate here--but there's no free lunch.

I mean, admin costs at hospitals are ~25%, around half of that is directly linked to billing. Administrative costs in the US (because of course you have the same costs on the other side in the insurance side) are around 30% of cost in general, which is pretty insane.

The lack of regulation around pricing transparency and generally the lack of one-price-per-code (which the government uses to its "advantage" to get lower medicaid/medicare rates for sure) is what has caused this stupid arms race on both sides.

The fact that everyone in your peer group does it (looking at you, people who are faking research paper contributions by high schoolers) does not mean that it is a criteria for actual college admissions.

I mean, marginally, any data center (or mall, house, but the numbers involved are smaller) you'll build in Texas is going to be a lot of tons of CO2 just from their added marginal power consumption

You don’t get fingerprints collected on departure, just on arrival. Unless you go through automated gates maybe?

Cardiac events from Apple Watches is not “AI” though

Even for upper middle class parents, "using a screen as a babysitter" just means you're more stressed and have less hands around. My kiddo has not seen a screen at the age of 2, but that's just because he has two parents at home at 5pm everyday.

> 100 years old

It’s 2026, they’re more like 140 year old by now :)

> now crammed full of people and cars

Funnily enough, if you look at the 1950 census, in every single building I have lived in in San Francisco, there were more people than there are now :).

The city has so much underdeveloped land (come on, 2% of of the surface of of the second densest city in the US spent on the lowest density sport ever, golf???), tearing down our heritage does not make sense when we have so much usable space.