Using the internet with connections that have 5ms latency is a far better experience than 100ms, especially with real time communications. Also, everyone should have symmetric connections, none of this 250mbps down and 3mbps up BS.
We’re talking about equipping fellow citizens with the ability to work from home and have equal opportunity to create and distribute intellectual property, as well as possibly facilitating things such as video appointments with doctors and teachers and whatnot.
The productivity improvements of high bandwidth low latency connections are numerous. Just like building the interstate highway and a network of roads did, or water, or gas, or sewage.
On the other end of the spectrum, why does the federal government spend money on the "interstate" highway in Hawaii? Why does every state (even Wyoming) have two senators?
I think we should have use common sense here. Fiber deployment is expensive but it is probably worth pulling fiber at least to every post office in these United States.
> Do you literally mean internet access in the post office building, or are you using that as a metonym for population centers?
I didn't even know the word metonym but you said it better than I could have. Yes, I mean population centers. I mean we have to be reasonable. If someone moves to the South Pole and demands we run fiber there, we might have to say no. I don't know where we exactly draw the line though. My understanding is that there is a lot of "dark fiber" criss crossing the country that can be "lit up" so the "long haul" isn't so much of a problem as the "last mile". I could be wrong though. I don't know much about these things.
I wonder what the cost would be to run low latency fiber to every single home in the entire country, regardless of geographic remoteness (it is a human right after all, per Bernie).
What are the benefits of wiring up every home with a connection capable of high quality video calls and data transfers? Remote work, teaching, medical exams, etc.
This country built an interstate system 70 years ago involving tons and tons of labor, asphalt, concrete, and continuous repairs. I find it hard to believe running fiber cables to be a challenge.
The biggest cost is Comcast’s share price going down as they lose the ability to rent seek on customers for being a useless middleman peddling “TV” and substandard internet.
Latency to where? Latency is not a metric that applies to a single connection, it can only be measure when you have two systems that communicate to each other. 5ms to your router doesn't matter if everything you are connecting to is 500ms away from that.
The best internet in the world, located in a major city, will have around 15ms latency to the closest datacenter. Wireless solutions can easily achieve that.
I have a fiber circuit for one of my businesses that has sub 10ms and sub 5ms latency to most large websites. I understand that certain latencies are not possible for every point to every point, but I’m using it as a proxy for the quality of the connection. Easiest way for me to discern the quality of my internet connection is to check the latency. All of my good fiber circuits are extremely low latency, and all of the terrible residential cable company connections split between 1,000 homes have terrible high latency (and upload bandwidth).
You must be very close to a large datacenter that houses the CDNs used by those large websites if you are seeing sub 5ms latency.
For any of the users we are talking about (underserved populations in areas without fiber internet), they will never see those latencies even with the same fiber you have.
If you live in rural Wyoming, there are going to be practically zero services hosted within 500 miles of you. You are not going to get 5ms latency no matter what you do.
Yes, I’m in a major population center. But whatever the case, a symmetric fiber connection would be a solid improvement over the nonsense coaxial situation we have now.
I guess, but my point is that for many people in rural and underserved locations, they won't notice any performance difference between fiber and a coaxial connection, for example.
Insisting that EVERYONE has to get fiber, even when that won't change their performance experience, only slows down the actual service of their needs.
This is like any sort of performance engineering problem; focusing on an area that is no where close to becoming the bottleneck is not an efficient use of resources.
So you can never talk to someone across the country? We are limited by the speed of light, you are never going to get sub 100ms latency across the globe.
"Not just the 4th and 17th character - the whole thing"
If any company asks for the 4th character of your password, that means they are storing your password in a reversible fashion, and they should be dumped.
The online account should never be logged in by anyone other than the owner. The person on the phone, if their job requires it, should have read/write access to your account, but that should be audited as "Joe Bloggs" accedsing the account
Using a password that is unique (and highly dissimilar from any other password of yours), can prevent almost all harm from having it stored in plaintext.
While that is true, that's blaming the user for choosing bad passwords, and not the system for keeping the systems safe, which is an implicit guarantee - I'm giving you this secret key, your job is to keep it safe.
The only reason we need unique passwords is because the system can't hold up its end of the bargain.
Edit: And in hindsight, I was wrong in calling it a bad password from the user - the only reason it's necessarily bad is because it has been compromised. If I use the same sufficiently complex brute-force proof password everywhere, we can safely say I've held up my bargain, but a single data breach completely removes that otherwise impenetrable defense.
Hashes can't protect the content if it's feasible to enumerate all possible values of the content.
You can't hide individual letters of alphabet with a hash. Not even with a salt and an expensive hash. It's a hopeless case where a brute-force attack takes only 26 times (or 676 for a pair of letters) longer than a comparison you do during normal operation.
BTW: it's also not possible to use hashes to hide/anonymize phone numbers or IP addresses. The attacker can generate hashes of all possible values and see which one is it.
Let's say my password is NmsWQlWj1kzS534ojygJ. The 4th and 17th characters are W and j. Even if those two characters are stored in plain text, how exactly does that compromise my password?
Okay, so now it's a brute which requires, at most, a couple hundred hashes (or less for a typical user's character set). Even for a very expensive algorithm, this is an extremely short operation.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
HN has had countless generic arguments about the US health care system. Turning a thread about something else into one of those is a step in the wrong direction. The major controversies eat up all the smaller topics, but the smaller topics are what actually gratify curiosity.
I went to the US on business - our corporate insurance means there's a $1000 excess that we pay up front.
Went to a hospital for a minor issue. At no point was there any price list shown, at the end I was asked for $390 before been given my prescription. That was the end of it I thought, sickeningly high charge for 2 minutes with a doctor, a 10p tablet, and hours of waiting around. I asked for an itemised bill, but they couldn't give me one.
A few weeks later I get another bill through the post for another $390 (slightly different amount), complete with the entire bill. The whole bill was about $2k. The 10p tablet? $250. In fact they originally gave me a 50mg one for $9, then took it off the bill, then gave me 2x25mg ones for $250. I then had a $1100 "uninsured discount" which brought the total price down to just before $800.
The bulk of the bill was a single line that was fairly incomprehensible but seemed to cover pointless taking my blood pressure 3 times and the 2 minute consultation with a Doctor who barely spoke to me, and renting the chair for a few hours I guess.
In the US, patients should go to urgent care for minor health issues that are unlikely to require a fully outfitted trauma and surgical unit. Conveniently, they’re also much easier to get to in urban areas.
Urgent care would have had something closer to a $100 markup than $2,000, because you’re only paying for a few nurses and doctors to be on call, not for having used the resources that are meant for trauma and acute crises.
That hospitals are required make up fictitious itemized explanations for their very real costs is indeed broken, but it’s a very small part of the overall issue.
If you called the hospital billing department and offered 20% of the overall bill, they would likely have immediately accepted; uninsured hospital billing has expected value on the order of 10% of outstanding balances, so if you give them more than they can get from sending you to collections, they’re usually happy to compromise much more steeply than the 60% “discount” they offered you.
You mean how the Bay Area, which is fairly urban, has precious few urgent care clinics open until 10 pm and, I believe, literally none open after 10pm? I went to one of these urgent care clinics once and got charged $650 for about 5 minutes of doctor time and a single DermaBond stick. The latter costs something like $20.
Oh yeah, I asked how much I would be charged before the doc saw me and they refused to answer.
In LA, Hispanic neighborhoods have 24 hour urgent cares but the doctor quality is all over the place though usually bad.
Urgent cares used to be pretty upfront. I went to an urgent care a couple of years ago, $99 advertised in the window. I go in, fill out all the paperwork and they tell me it's going to be $150. When I point to the window, she says it's expired. I start to walk out and she tells me to come back and gives me price. This is not the only time I've had to walk out over various health things, it's ridiculous. They think you won't do it because you're ill and act that getting angry over this is some sort of insane response. So now I just pretend not to have the extra money.
Anyway, I use Heal now. So happy that the VCs are funding this, hope it lasts.
You went to the doctor for a bandaid? Seriously? Could you not apply said bandaid yourself? Why would you waste a doctors time and your money for that?
I don't like the tone of your comment at all. It's very well possible for a person to end up in the hospital where the right treatment is to 'stick a bandaid on' on one end of the treatment spectrum and a much more invasive or complex procedure on the other when going in with roughly the same symptoms.
For instance, if you work a lot with tools and dirt then there is a fine line between blood poisoning and a mere scratch, they will both start out the same but you won't be able to tell what's in your bloodstream until it is too late if you're going by symptoms alone. By the time the choice is amputation above or below the knee or you've gone into septic shock you've lost the window where you might have been ok. More people die from this stuff than from heart attacks or strokes.
So in some cases, when the exact contaminant is not known it can be a good decision to go to the hospital to have something looked at, and it shouldn't cost an arm and a leg (pun unfortunately not intended) to do so.
Nobody goes to the hospital for fun except for a very few individuals that have something wrong with their heads rather than with their bodies, and that's before we get into things like people with compromised immune systems.
DermaBond is not a bandaid. I personally did not have a container of sterile saline, a pack of sterile gauze, a DermaBond cartridge, and the expertise to evaluate exactly what was needed.
Agreed and the real costs support major bloat. A friend of a friend who's previous job was a phone salesperson for a small, local sign shop got a job in the sales department for hospital software. Within months she was being flown across the country to the companies headquarters monthly and traveling around selling a product she clearly had no understanding of but was following the pitch which was taught to her. Not that she isn't a great person, but I cannot think of another industry where I've seen so many resources going to an entry level, zero experience position that could be handled locally or even remotely rather than sending this person out and paying for nicer hotel rooms than my friend who is a major airline captain stays in.
Outside of large cities, urgent care facilities operate on the standard 9-5 and are very selective when it comes to which insurance plans they take.
It's entirely possible that you're insured, but no facility within an hour's drive will take your plan, and if your kid becomes ill outside of business hours, tough luck. For liability reasons, they'll refer you to the ER anyway if you have symptoms beyond a sore throat.
The last time I had to go to an urgent care clinic in a state where no one took my insurance plan, I had to pay $700 out of pocket to talk with a doctor for 10 minutes and get prescribed a z-pack. I then paid $90 for 6 pills at the pharmacy.
In theory urgent care would be useful, but for anything non-obvious you have to go to ER. Abdominal pain? ER. Head injury? Dislocation requiring pain management? ER.
Urgent care can get you antibiotics and test for strep, and I think x-ray and set simple fractures, and stitches of course. What else is within their scope, I find it fairly limited.
If your symptoms are acute enough that you really can’t wait until the morning, then yes, you’re going to pay for access to round the clock in person medical professionals in the US.
Irrational yes. Broken, no just optimized differently than other systems. The system is optimized to serve those who can afford it and those who are very poor and get it for free, but not those in between. It is optimized to generate profit, but also new treatments. Rich people from all over the world come here for surgery and treatment.
The pricing system is intentionally designed to be opaque so that everyone except the consumer benefits. It is not uncommon for a top surgeon to make 500-750K per year, nurses are paid well above the median and can make over 100K with overtime, hospital administrators, insurance companies... the way pricing and billing is handled protects all those interests.
Sounds like something you would want to fix, right? Well that too is complicated. Healthcare is one of the only sectors that is growing middle class jobs. A hospital is one of the only places someone with an associates degree and a certification can make 60K per year.
Furthermore, it is one of the only growing industries that provides many opportunities for women. Not many women want to move to Montana to frack shale oil.
Start socializing medicine and all that job growth and opportunity disappears.
It is a tough problem to solve. The utter irrationality of it used to drive me nuts and still does sometimes, but I prefer it to the alternatives.
Growth occurs organically in a market system. It does not in a socialized system. I was not associating growth with inefficiency - I was associating high pay with it.
The premise of your argument falls apart if you really think about it for a minute. Switching to a single-payer model doesn't mean healthcare jobs disappear. It would kill off the insurance companies, but it would not reduce the demand for skilled healthcare workers. It seems like you are arguing that 'socializing' medicine requires that we get rid of hospitals entirely. We could still have for-profit hospitals if we drastically reduced the size of the private insurance market.
I feel like you are making a lot of assumptions about how we would fix our health care system that are unfounded.
Just because the industry is good at generating revenue doesn't necessarily mean that the quality of service is any better. Do you have some data to back up your claim that medical services in the United States are world leading? Are they better than what one would receive in Europe or Japan or South Korea?
Personally, I think it's unethical to keep a process inefficient even if the inefficiencies are profitable. And healthcare in the states is anything but cost-efficient.
About 5 years ago I took a health care policy class and we looked into this. In terms of outcomes, the U.S. was thoroughly mediocre, except for breast cancer and diabetes, where we were at the head of the pack (in terms of treatment) but not, say, better by a multiple.
The fact that the US has many leading medical research institutions is often abused to argue that we have the best care, but it's largely irrelevant for the overwhelming majority of delivered care and even more irrelevant for outcomes.
> Furthermore, it is one of the only growing industries that provides many opportunities for women. Not many women want to move to Montana to frack shale oil.
Is this supposed to be a good argument to drive desperate people into bankruptcy?
Did I ever argue against improving the system or imply these bankruptcies should happen? I just said I’d take this system over alternatives not that it couldn’t be improved.
I get the point, but that's a joke. She didn't wake up and see a bill. You don't get the full blown, by the way, the anesthesiologist actually charges $20k+ for less than an hour of care bill, until a few weeks later.
One of the reasons why I don't go to the USA anymore. Past 50 the chances of something medical popping up are higher than they were in the past and I just can't afford worrying about this. The total list of why I don't go there anymore is much longer but this is definitely one item on the list. This sucks because I have more friends in the USA than I do anywhere else and I miss them.
That shouldn't stop you. Comprehensive travel insurance can be had for short and long trips for $50 - $150. Prices for US travel insurance are around the same as insurance for visiting other developed countries such as Japan or Switzerland. All the terms are clearly spelled out.
Yup, makes sense because although the phrase "heart attack" generally has a worse connotation, the immediate reality of a full cardiac arrest is actually much worse - the entire heart stops instead of only part of it.
"In summary, there is a difference between a heart attack and a cardiac arrest. A heart attack occurs when the blood supply to part of the heart stops and thus causes a section of the heart muscle to begin to die; whereas a cardiac arrest occurs when the heart stops beating as a whole.Jun 25, 2019" [1]
https://www.news-medical.net/health/Heart-attack-and-cardiac...
My at the time 8mo daughter was in the ER for breathing issues and had to be life-flighted to a hospital with better facilities to treat her condition. I'm thankful my insurance covered it, because the initial bill was $27,000 for the flight (excluding the hospital and ER visit costs).
One thing that really harms the utility of cameras is face coverings. Over the last 20 years the two most prolific face coverings in the UK have been attacked in society - Hoodies and Niquab/Burkas. For various reasons the UK populatino has been conditioned to see a face covering and think "Crime". The UK's equivalent of Trump has denigrate people wearing veils, the media has spent a decade attacking "hoodies" [1]
> Massive campaign contributions is not as common in Europe
Also far more complex - the political groupings in europe (EPP, ALDE, etc) are far looser organizations than the US parties, and power is spread in lots of different levels. Most Euro countries are coalitions of smaller parties too, defence in depth.
The US and UK suffer from having just two parties that from time to time get all the power. Infiltrate one party and your time will come. Infiltrate both and you're safe.
I reckon I've seen a single open cut coal mine that's probably 10% of that size... Leigh Creek in SA. Actually, I just looked it up on GoogleMaps. It's "only" about 8km x 3km or so, or 2.5%. I still wonder how much electricity we could generate if we covered every coal mine in Australia with solar panels?
Carmichael coal mine is planned to be 447 square km [0], over half being "surface disturbance area"
Insolation at that location is about 2.1MWh per square metre per year, or 2100GWh per square km per year. [1]
Solar panels are around 20% efficiency, so lets call it 15% to include things like support areas.
The area used by that coal mine could generate 2100 x .15 x 447 = 140TWh per year
Austrailia currently uses 190TWh/year [2], so an area the size of that one mine could generate the majority of Austrailia's electrical requirements.
That's just back of envelope numbers, if we look at existing solar plants though, Solar Star in California generates [3] 526MWh/acre, or 130GWh/sqkm -- so this plant would generate 58TWh a year, still over 25% of requirements
There are many problems with solar power, but space use in Australia is not one.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2018/12/contents
Which is still in force