If you're unhappy with the wait time then get private insurance and go to a private doctor, just like you would in the US. But if you're too poor for that, at least you get something in six to twelve months instead of nothing or bankruptcy. And your insurance will be much much less because you're getting most of what you need publicly. Your US insurance is in the order of three to five times as much as private insurance in the EU, so your taxes are lower, but your costs are too.
The real problem always seems to be that universal health care would leave rich Americans worse off (higher taxes), would likely be about a wash for most middle earners (higher taxes, but none/less health care costs), but would leave the poor significantly better off (who are totally stiffed in the US at the moment).
So, by saying you don't want universal health care you're effectively saying that you're rich enough that you don't care about it, and you don't want poor people to be able to get health care at all, and if some die early or go bankrupt at least it isn't your problem.
> But if you're too poor for that, at least you get something in six to twelve months instead of nothing or bankruptcy.
Depends on the country, Australia triages so that routine, mundane, non life threatening procedures might take six months (or less) - but even a flat broke unemployed person needing an emergency stent placement in their heart gets that damn near over night with follow up hospital watch and after therapy at no cost (might get a $500 ambulance bill, but that's another can of worms - St John's Ambulance coverage is cheap, supports a worthy cause, and prevents that surprise charge).
I think every national health service does something similar (minus the ambulance fee generally), but that might be too incredible for the Americans to believe?
Hard to believe or tainted with the stench of socialist communist welfare grifters as I read it.
From my PoV it reduces stress on society, increases a sense of well being, results in lesser serious crime and anti social behaviour, etc. and means I'm likely getting better value for my tax dollars than I might in the US.
Generally if you get turned away at the destination then the airline is liable for taking you away, so they won't let you fly unless they're sure that you will be accepted at the destination country.
Under UK legislation as the owners, agents or operators of a ship or aircraft you may become liable for a charge of £2,000 for every passenger arriving in the UK without:
- a valid “immigration document” which satisfactorily establishes identity and nationality or citizenship.
- and, if the person requires a visa, a visa of the required kind or other permission to travel. This visa, or permission, may now be in either physical form, or a digital e- Visa; or
- a valid Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA), if the person requires one.
I've been using proportional fonts for programming for more than thirty years. Makes things much easier to read and it's only a problem where people try to make patterns out of the code
I think this is looking at what OOP has become (as implemented by systems and programming languages that don't care a wit about what OO was meant to be) rather than what Alan Kay described.
If you think about something like a web server as an object, it has arbitrarily high cohesion and arbitrarily low coupling. You can only communicate to it through messages (HTTP); binding happens at the point in time that the message arrives (notwithstanding that this may be cached in all sorts of interesting ways in the implementation of any given server); and the web server is fully encapsulated (security flaws notwithstanding).
I think it's perfectly reasonable to argue that much of what gets called OOP doesn't deliver on the promise, but then it doesn't deliver on the premise either, and I think these are inextricably linked.
The Alan Kay variant of OOP is superior in this regard, and I'd argue the Erlang variant even more so (Actors are just asynchronous objects).
But both of them are still suboptimal because they allow objects to instantiate one another and to directly communicate with whomever they come in contact with. That creates strong coupling and you have to "fight the paradigm" to avoid it.
Other engineering domains have this figured out: components can only send and receive data through ports, they are never aware of their siblings. Only a component at a higher level of abstraction can decide how the ports of lower level components connect to one another. That completely eliminates coupling.
(You can of course replicate this type of architecture with OOP, but you can also replicate it with any turing complete paradigm, that's neither here nor there)
Linda and Syndicate figured this out - it’s just that most engineers are not programming language designers or researchers, and most researchers are not designing robust scalable language implementations.
It's crazy to me that Linda came out 40 years ago. I think our field is completely blind to what was achieved in the past.
Smalltalk is to me the most obvious case where people somehow don't realize we had a fully live environment, where the entire IDE (or really the whole operating system) could have open heart surgery done on it while it was running, in the late 1970s!
And that's a language that is at least somewhat in the public consciousness, languages like Linda? Nobody knows them. Synchronous languages like Lustre and Esterel? Some engineers know them (and pay good money for them), but not software engineers.
Thank you for pointing me to Linda -- fascinating and my mind is popping with fun projects related to this model. It actually seems quite spiritually similar to "Bank Python" (https://calpaterson.com/bank-python.html), but more elegant.
Yes, for example if you are doing any sort of mechatronic systems engineering (cars, planes, rockets, etc.), you're typically using tools like Simcenter Amesim or Modelica or Simulink/Stateflow to digitally prototype the system.
These tools are all oriented around blocks with ports. They receive data on their input ports and emit data on their output ports. They do not know where that data is coming from nor where it is going. They cannot instantiate other blocks.
To create a new block you either create a primitive one (described directly in terms of differential equations, since these are physical simulations, or as actual code, be it C or MATLAB or whatever else), or you connect blocks together to form a larger block.
This creates a strict hierarchy, connections between blocks can only happen at the same level of abstraction. You can just rip out a component and replace it with another with the same ports, or with multiple components each filling in part of the job, or you can plop another component in the middle that's only used to process the data inbound and redirect it somewhere else.
This makes coupling extremely loose by design. The paradigm enforces it.
'in->func()->out' work cleanly for physical engineering domains because blocks of computations (or functions) have no memory basically. There's no DB and there's usually no global state in the way you'd mean with classes. I've observed that when you work on complex software, you could play by the ear to enforce 'high cohesion and loose coupling' up to the point to where you've now got a data store holding system state. Based on what I've worked on, this system state is actually user data and then some derivative of the system's own interaction on this user data, both of which are necessary for the 'continuity of system runtime'. For example, working with redis as the primary data store, I extracted different types of redis calls for specific keys, (like set [specific_key], get [specific key], etc.) into functions, then I put these functions into a StateStore class so I can simply call StateStore.get_user_data() or StateStore.set_user_data() etc from any module across the entire system. From first principles, this is great modularity and high cohesion but it's very tight coupling around a single module i.e. StateStore. Any change in that module means I'd have to find all references for that updated function and cross check for any contract violations.
It's difficult for me to see how software can purely be 'High Cohesion and Loose Coupling' regardless of paradigm or architectural pattern. There's always gonna be an unavoidable and inevitable principle violation that's simple a result of a large complex system actually doing many little things that come together to actually do one big thing. The software itself, no matter how complex, IS the blackbox where data goes in and something comes out but that's the user perspective not ours as the programmer.
I think the idea I'm trying to hint at is that software cannot have every module independent of every other one. That's impossible. If nothing depended on anything else, the system wouldn't do anything. Rather than have every module know redis keys, States tore actually concentrates coupling into one place, which is exactly what high cohesion tries to accomplish.
I think that's the idea I'm chasing.
It's not really true that components in physical engineering domains have no memory. The behavior of many physical components can only be described with access to a recent history. Other components, specially controllers, are typically state machines (which obviously have state).
But it is true that there will always be parts of a software system that are highly coupled. I'm not even sure if that's even a problem, unless the coupling is also highly tangled (meaning the connections are coming from too many places).
But if you want to decrease coupling between parts of a system, OOP by itself is not particularly good at it. Even something like an Entity Component System is usually less coupled than most OOP codebases because while each System is heavily coupled to the components they do work on, the Systems are usually fully independent from one another and easily replaceable.
Yeah you're right. It's an oversimplification to say components in physical engineering domains have no memory. I was thinking about how logic gates are reasoned about. But that's not the exact point... It's that the argument is usually that OOP cannot decrease coupling. I can't see how exactly. OOP seems to strike a balance between good enough modularity and expressive power enough to keep your system directionally loosely coupled. Infact, I'd say that, I my experience, lots of the coupling between modules is inherent to the 'specifics' of the system's design requirements itself. This is where sometimes within the same logical subsystem/component you could find multiple design patterns all deployed in the bid to reduce coupling. I don't think this is OOP's fault directly as opposed to the 'devil that is in the details'. But maybe I don't have enough experience or exposure yet (I'm a 2nd-year junior)
No it is not a fault of OOP, it is just that OOP does not really provide the tools to help either. It is the fault of people with the wrong expectations or of those trying to sell snake oil.
OOP allows to create decoupled systems but it doesn't help in creating them. It is not an inherent property of the paradigm, but many people sold it as such.
"Use OOP and your application is now magically more modular! Buy my latest book to find out how!"
Since you mentioned you are a junior I guess this sort of nonsense is from before your time. No worries, that just means you won't have stupid dogma shoved down your throat. Use whatever paradigm if it helps you and avoid whatever gets in the way.
This comes across a lot like you're saying that your personal feeling of safety for you and your family is worth more than the actual safety of innocent schoolchildren who are being mass murdered.
I am personally concerned that I may be the victim of genocide, and far more people have died from genocide perpetrated by governments than by school shootings. I’m not trying to be dense, I’m simply saying that history of demonstrated this. I’m also concerned that I will be the victim of violent crime and I’ve also had to defend myself from violent criminals in the past. Have you had any of these experiences? I’m curious to hear your thoughts if you’ve ever feared for your life in this way? Call me selfish, but I personally don’t want to be hurt. Thank you for your response.
You've talked about your feelings a lot, which is the point.
Guns make people feel safe.
They don't actually make you safer.
You're more likely to be killed by your own gun than someone else's.
Realistically, you have no hope of protecting yourself with a gun if you're surrounded by gangbangers with a bunch of guns all pointed at you.
Etc, etc...
The gun debate isn't a debate about facts, it never was. It's a debate about feelings, and scared people won't change their minds unless they stop being scared.
Nobody in America right now is trying to make people feel safe, not in an era where the President of the United States feels it is appropriate to personally attack... anyone for any perceived slight, in public, with verbal violence and in the case of anyone looking even vaguely hispanic, physical violence.
I get where you’re coming from, but I lived in Portland for years where the police were essentially suppressed by the district attorney Eric Schmidt (and other factors that were occurring during this time in Portland and in America). This led to violent criminals essentially controlling the city at night and which lead to unfortunate outcomes for my family. Simultaneously this came at a time where the previous president was threatening my job and livelihood with mandates and I was receiving emails from our national HR that we may lose our jobs if we did not comply. These two events did not make me feel safe for years, I do feel safer with the current president.
I have had a gun pointed at me, and I've been where guns have been fired in anger around me.
I'm kind of surprised to hear somebody in America think it's a likely enough thing to happen to be worth the obvious societal cost of the wide spread weapons.
Realistically, if they did come for you, how much use would your weapon be? Do you believe that it would mean the difference between your life and death, or just that you'd feel better going having been able to put up some defence? Several genocides have happened in neighbouring countries from where I live in living memory, and it isn't at all clear that having access to a weapon allowed anybody who was targeted to survive.
The cost in mass shootings (now nearly two per day in the US) is a real cost borne by society at large. Your cost is still only hypothetical, and of unclear value if the worst did happen.
It seems you have been around violence but have concluded differently than I have.
I think that all rights are hypothetical until they are used. People in America have the right to free speech and assembly but depending on your perspective these rights are hypothetical for most people because they don’t use their speech or right to assembly very often or to the fullest extent. In some states, women have the right to have an abortion but many don’t use that right so hypothetically for them it doesn’t have any value. I think with the right to keep and bear arms it’s the same, for a good person defending themselves with a gun this hypothetical right becomes applied and has an immeasurable value to them. I don’t think we should discard any of our rights even if they are rarely used. I don’t think the risk of a genocide or civil war is infinitesimal, I think these sort of events happen often and are guaranteed over a long enough timeline. I think that people who are well armed would be better off in these situations and may even be the people who put something like a genocide to a stop.
You're misinterpreting what I said. I said that your ability to defend yourself and your family with a gun was hypothetical.
I can see that you like to think of yourself as a rational thinker about this, but you're refusing to answer the actual criticism: actual people are being killed every day due to the availability of weapons in your society. There are nearly two mass shootings per day. So far this year that has led to 250 deaths and more than a thousand injuries[1]. These are not hypothetical abstractions, which is all you seem interested in engaging with. These are real people, many of them children, who find themselves victims of gun violence. You are arguing that your feeling of safety is more important than their actual safety. All of your arguments amount to a continuation of your position that you put your own feelings ahead of the actual deaths of people in society around you. This is a very selfish way to engage in your society.
I understand your position, it is terrible that adults and children die by the hands of others. Genocides have happened all over the world and have led to tens of millions of people dying. These events aren’t hypothetical they’re historical but happen in big chunks rather than uniformly distributed and frequent but comparatively small events. I would suggest the statistics indicate that a person is likelier to die from a genocide than from a mass shooting by a factor of >100 and that small arms ownership and competence is more helpful rather than harmful since these tools can enable individuals to defend themselves against state actors or violent groups, or by their existence prevent groups with malicious intent from acting out on their genocidal or authoritarian desires. Something I agree with is the FBI’s assessment that people don’t commit crimes if they thinks it’s likely that they’ll be caught. I think that the collective individuals in our government (these United States of America) wouldn’t want to mandate concentration camps or a genocide because of the concentration of citizens with diverse mindsets who would provide feedback through resistance. There are of course other factors like recency bias that come into play.
Rhetorical: What does it say about America that a large portion of its citizens (assuming OPs feelings are not unique) fear being a victim of genocide? Can't say I've met anyone from any other "developed" nation who share the same dread by simply existing as part of their country.
In other words, the sum total of America's values have resulted in a citizenry that lives with existential dread. Maybe those values need a second look?
My thoughts on this is that genocide has been common outside of America in the last ~100 years and that Americans need to act differently than the rest of the world in an effort to keep it from happening here.
This of course plays into the fear US gun advocates have of any attempt to remove their gun rights. If it were to happen though, then maybe as a prepper type with a house and lands in the woods you'd stand a chance against an armed mob that came for you, but certainly not the government. If you're defending your sub-urban house (or even worse flat), I suspect that the gun you have for self defense would make very little difference to the final outcome, but might make you feel a bit better about it.
This is what makes securing this stuff so hard when you don't have proper review. What seems like a good idea from one perspective opens up another gaping hole somewhere else.
Off the cuff suggestions for improving UX in secure flows just make things worse.
Soviet apartments had a separate rooms for the toilet and the area with a bath/shower/sink. The area behind the toilet was usually a hinged wall that could be opened to reveal the entry point for utilities.
I assume toilet hands were an unspoken issue, because there was no possible way to traverse from the toilet room to the washroom without touching anything.
For a complete tangent, I’ll mention that Soviet toilets had a “poop shelf” so that people could eyeball their stool to gauge their health. One flaw of this design is that there was no odour suppression offered by toilets that immediately immerse stool in water.
I’m in europe so I am all in on the metric system. But “about a foot” per nanosecond is so easy to remember, understand and reason about that it is worth the exception. If you prefer something European, think of a sheet of A4 printer paper: the long side is 29.7 cm. “One length of A4 per nanosecond” is within 1% of the actual value of the speed of light.
The original comment used imperial measures, following comments kept to that for consistency.
To put things into proper units: speed of light in vacuum is approx 1.8 terafurlongs per fortnight, and electricity in wires has a pace of similar magnitude, and sound in normal atmospheric conditions shuffles along at approx 2.1 megafurlongs per fortnight.
If you're unhappy with the wait time then get private insurance and go to a private doctor, just like you would in the US. But if you're too poor for that, at least you get something in six to twelve months instead of nothing or bankruptcy. And your insurance will be much much less because you're getting most of what you need publicly. Your US insurance is in the order of three to five times as much as private insurance in the EU, so your taxes are lower, but your costs are too.
The real problem always seems to be that universal health care would leave rich Americans worse off (higher taxes), would likely be about a wash for most middle earners (higher taxes, but none/less health care costs), but would leave the poor significantly better off (who are totally stiffed in the US at the moment).
So, by saying you don't want universal health care you're effectively saying that you're rich enough that you don't care about it, and you don't want poor people to be able to get health care at all, and if some die early or go bankrupt at least it isn't your problem.