Honestly, I doubt it, they’re incredibly beholden to the insurance companies themselves. Plus medical malpractice insurance, which they can lose if they break the terms and breaks their protection for every patient they’ve ever treated

Private practice was also gutted by the Obamacare hand outs to the insurance companies. They literally spend more time dealing with insurance requirements than actually seeing the patients. So on top of all that, they’re also restricted by the healthcare groups that employ the majority of them

They know the system is broken. The really conservative ones think it’s simply how it has to be, but honestly they’re also put through a ridiculous system themselves to even get a license to practice, let alone keep it.

The main exception is the doctors who work for the insurance companies. They’re essentially forced to break their oath just to keep their job, I don’t know how they live with themselves

If you really mean that I envy you. I’d like to live in a place like that

I’d buy a mountain and build a nature retreat so friends and family could visit. I’d probably only spend a million or two on it, after the land and off grid infrastructure I’d build it myself, making cabins and gazebos over time. I’d curate the land to be full of fruit bearing trees and make animal friends

Then I’d make more friends and invite people to stay. I’d look for damaged people and offer them a refuge from the world for as long as they want

I’d probably buy a significant amount of silver, yuan, and euros as insurance. The rest I’d hand over to a financial advisor after taking time to find someone I can trust, then I’d try to never think about money again

I’d spend most of my time enjoying a life surrounded by nature and friends who are free to live without worries. Travel occasionally to meet new friends and see more of the world, but mostly I’d just be happy to live freely

I miss how cool I smoke cigarettes. I don’t miss the taste, or regret that people now tell me I smell like candy

Not sure how violence is going to improve that. Doesn’t seem like it’s ever helped in the many times we’ve tried

Maybe we should try literally anything else? Just spit balling here

Post programming questions online and you’ll inevitably get someone saying, “don’t reinvent the wheel.” Why is it so bad to step outside the box?

This is totally different… That’s not deference to authority or conformity, that’s fundamental best practices

If you want to do more than play with code puzzles, the first question you should ask is “how have others solved this problem”. And the second should be “how have others approached similar problems”

Code is castles upon castles built of sand… Even the language you use and the rock that runs it are entirely manmade. Coding is a fundamentally collaborative process, and if you want to innovate you need to understand how and why things were done the way they are first.

Otherwise you’re going to write really shit code, even if you’re the cleverest coder to ever live, the code will be shit because it’ll be a huge pain in the ass to work with for everyone else. And probably for yourself too, once your realize why things are done a certain way and understand that it’s usually there’s been a ton of thought and discussion that led it to being the way things are done

If you’re asking questions without comparing the proposed benefits of your new solution to the normal approach, you’re not yet prepared to enter the discussion on how things should be done

So of course the correct response should always be to remind you that you should first learn how others did it. That never goes away, it’s something we remind each other constantly even at the deeper levels of understanding

It’s good life advice too. Humans aren’t nearly as creative as we like to think, as a species we hardly ever have truly new ideas. The way our creative process works is by rearranging the concepts we already know in new ways. If you want to be an innovator, you should be constantly finding wisdom in others and the world around you

As for the deference to authority? That’s because we live in uncertain times and people are scared. It’s more comforting to think someone knows what they’re doing instead of acknowledging the truth… We have very big problems that we are not confronting as a species in any meaningful way.

That tendency as a species is one of those very big problems in fact

As in the money in the UK is not freely flowing through the real economy, the one where money has a healthy velocity (eg the same pound flows from the carpenter to the baker to the electrician to the cafe worker and leaves everyone involved enriched by goods and services)

Instead, the lion share of the money is tied up in London playing games with math. It’s not even investments that create more economic activities… It’s just making money on paper

It means that while the GDP looks good on paper, the velocity of money continues to drop and the real economy is being starved

It’s also a severe problem in the US, but long story short, when the US economy pops the UK economy is going to also be thrown into chaos

Wild over-financialization?

Iran is probably cool with it. Closing the straight is all or nothing, it’s a powerful card to play, but ultimately it’s better as a threat than actually using it

Iran doesn’t actually want to cut off the supply of oil, they want leverage. If the flow of oil out of the Gulf stops, eventually the world is going to keep turning. It will do a lot of damage, but eventually either the world is going to find new suppliers or alternatives

This gives them a way to get some oil out without reopening the strait, and in doing so diminishing their credibility in using that card in future negotiations. They also want to continue sell oil to most of their customers, at least enough to maintain relations while continuing to allow global pressure on the US to grow

At any time they can attack a few more tankers using this workaround, all it takes is to increase the perception of risk to levels insurance or investors are willing to underwrite

So yeah… They’re probably happy to look the other way on this

I think there’s two distinct concepts at play, thin skin and thick skin. I do not consider them interchangeable concepts, even if they sound like it

I think a good church is great for hobby projects ready to be taken out of the basement

You do have to belong to such a church already though

Because the world Bank and IMF fucked them when they resisted selling off their country through outside investments, leading to their currency being debased and ultimately giving them weak footing for international trade

They’ve never really recovered from that, and they’ve also flitted back and forth between wildly different economic interventions desperately trying to fix things

If they wrapped that in the right spin it might just give Putin enough wiggle room to back down without losing his head

Yes?

A domain is a url, like oaksprout.com. A provider is a server/computer that the domain points at. Many services sell both together at an upcharge, but a domain itself usually costs like ~$15 a year

If an IP address is a mailing address, imagine a domain as a way to pay the post office so people can just address it to oaksprout. You could have them forward your mail to your house, or you could send it to a PO box or business address, and change it whenever you want

The provider is like the mailbox in this metaphor… It receives the mail and holds it for you

They’ve already pitched the idea of a 10% toll

Nah, like a couple weeks. They ship in a team along with the equipment and then they go to town

Something like deep water rigs can take years to build, but actually tapping a well is pretty quick. But then you can’t just seal it back up - or at least humanity has never bothered to learn how to do so. So companies will sit on them for years to keep production steady, if the cost of oil falls they might move it to a sacrificial shell company and leave it leaking for tax payers to eventually clean up

I’ve heard more than enough of it. They just repeat the same lies over and over

We have tons of untapped oil fields easier to drill in the US that oil companies are sitting on, and we already get something like 1/3 of Venezuelan oil as is

But we still need the oil from the middle east, we mix our heavier oil with theirs in the refining process. We’re draining our reserves to keep the price low domestically, that and the statements that the strait will be reopened imminently is keeping the price relatively low… For now. Our economy is all speculation after all.

It probably has a lot more to do with the job market, the military is always hiring. The poverty to grunt pipeline has basically always been a cornerstone of military recruitment

And reenlistment rates have been consistently falling, especially with MAGA at the helm. Especially among more skilled roles…I mean it’s one thing to want to fly planes or be a tech when the US was untouchable, now planes are falling out of the sky