He touched someone's face once like eight years ago "in a way that made her feel uncomfortable". A stupid, asshole, casually sexist move? Yup. Worthy of being raked over the coals despite bending over backwards to make amends in the years since? Uhhh... no, not really.
Don't get me wrong. The other stories are really, really bad. Insanely evil, even. But the idea that Sacca's extremely minor dick move almost a decade ago deserves to be lumped in with the monstrous stories of serial stalking and sexual battery is pretty ludicrous. Makes me think the writer just wanted to shoehorn in a TV star to inflate the piece's reach.
He, himself, admits that this sort of behavior was a pattern. I don't think he has been or will be raked over the coals, because he seems to exhibit genuine remorse.
I respect him, but my sympathy isn't with him.
I'm sure it's deeply uncomfortable to be under this level of scrutiny and lumped in with people who have been caught doing things that seem skeezier. But you know what's worse? Not being a billionaire and trying to make a living in a world where people you need are more interested in having sex with you than your business value, or at the very least, are more than willing to tie one to the other.
"Seem skeezier"? We're talking about serial stalking, harassment, and sexual assault with multiple victims. Unless there are major facts we don't yet know, what Sacca did, even if part of a "pattern", pales in comparison.
And yet it's his face splashed over the "SEXUAL HARASSMENT SCANDAL" headlines, siphoning energy and criticism from the actual monsters, because he is a TV star so his being mentioned is more sensational.
Dave McClure is basically being given a slap on the wrist for obviously firing-worthy offenses. Would that happen if a celebrity wasn't taking the brunt of the press?
This is only the tip of the iceberg from what I've heard. He's rather well known in circles around Twitter for his harassment and there are several texts I've seen firsthand showing far worse harassment. He preemptively posted this not knowing what they'd disclose in the paper and I'll bet he's breathing easy now that it's "only" this face touch.
>If regular, predictable events are covered, it is not insurance. Regular, predictable events are not insurable.
The problem in the U.S. is that we have this bizarre system where hospitals charge exorbitant prices and then insurers haggle them down to something halfway sane. So when you're paying for "insurance" you're (ideally) getting both catastrophic coverage (i.e. actual insurance) as well as access to a cartel that negotiates prices down from impossible heights on your behalf -- even for routine care.
Since most people who regularly access medical care do so through these cartels, care providers have no incentive to make care more affordable than what they can get away with -- and insurers have no incentive to allow the price to drop either, since people being able to afford care outside the cartels would ultimately undercut their profits.
This system is fundamentally unworkable. There's really no way to detangle the perverse incentives here in a way that will bring prices down to a level comparable with single payer healthcare.
The ultimate reason behind hospitals attempting to charge exorbitant prices is due to Medicare and Medicaid paying under cost for services. Hospitals need to make that difference up somewhere. Surprisingly, if you remove the profit hospitals make on ancillary services like the gift shop, parking fees and investment income, they are losing money.
Isn't the overly-litigious nature of the U.S.A also why costs are so high?
The malpractice insurance that docs and hospitals need to carry in order to defend themselves should they be sued is passed onto consumers in the form of higher medical costs.
Or at least that's how someone once explained it to me. Is that not also a contributing factor?
Anybody in the entire health care system can point their finger at someone else and claim that they're the ones who are gouging us. I suspect that they're all gouging us.
One thing I've read is that states with caps on malpractice claims do not have lower medical costs.
"Payment rates for Medicare and Medicaid, with the exception of managed care plans, are set by
law rather than through a negotiation process, as with private insurers. These payment rates are
currently set below the costs of providing care, resulting in underpayment. Payments made by
managed care plans contracting with the Medicare and Medicaid programs are generally
negotiated with the hospital.
Hospital participation in Medicare and Medicaid is voluntary. However, as a condition for
receiving federal tax exemption for providing health care to the community, not-for-profit
hospitals are required to care for Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries. Also, Medicare and
Medicaid account for more than 60 percent of all care provided by hospitals. Consequently, very
few hospitals can elect not to participate in Medicare and Medicaid."
That quote is misleading because it implies that the cost of care is static, that it's not also heavily influenced by spending choices made by the hospital that don't affect patient outcomes. Or heavily influenced by the consequences of the broken healthcare system, like the overuse of emergency rooms by people who can't afford to see a doctor.
Hospitals could easily afford to provide care at Medicare/Medicaid rates — if they're willing to have less impressive lobbies, marketing materials, corporate facilities and shareholder profits. Citation: all other first world countries.
Do intelligent people ever go to for-profit hospitals? I'd group those with for-profit universities and for-profit prisons as "nope, not touching that, stay as far away as possible and hope they all disappear".
Maybe, but for the same expense I'd rather go to (non-profit) Harvard than (for-profit) Trump University.
All the best universities are non-profit, for the obvious reason that it allows them to keep massive endowments, which are spent on better education instead of being paid out to investors.
It's because in addition to the reimbursement, hospitals are paid a bonus fee by US taxpayers called a DSH to subsidize the subsidies. This serves to incentivize providers not to drop Medicare/Medicaid patients and also covers up the losses incurred.
Hospitals charge high prices because they can. They are often local monopolies, and behave accordingly. And with an utter lack of price transparency, which makes the idea that patients could shop around a joke.
There is a simple reason for the "cartel": it's called moral hazard.
You have the monopsony that comes from collective buying power on the one hand. (An argument for SINGLE PAYER insurance.)
On the other you have the usual moral hazard which says, if the customer ain't paying, try to charge as much as possible.
So it's this game of bigger and bigger armies. Same as when countries can't make a peace deal where neighborhoods and individuals long ago could have. A single person can torpedo a deal. It's all or nothing.
It's also why some British bureaucrats in the NHS face the choice of dropping coverage for a drug because the company just won't play ball and charge a low enough price. When are you willing to walk away when you represent a lot of people??
I'm 1.5 years out of a coding bootcamp I paid about $12,000 for.
At a 17% rate, I would have paid $11,500 already, and would be on track to pay $22,950 more if I stay at my current job for 1.5 more years with no salary increases (I expect salary increases).
There were some students in my cohort who reverted back to their previous careers after bootcamp, but most became developers. I would bet the Holberton plan is far, far, far more lucrative than an upfront fee, as long as they are discerning in who they accept.
"At a 17% rate, I would have paid $11,500 already, and would be on track to pay $22,950 more if I stay at my current job for 1.5 more years with no salary increases (I expect salary increases)."
If the bootcamp is going to shoulder that much risk, expect them to get paid for it. If you can afford to just pay for it up front, expect to pay less net money, but then, you're shouldering more risk that it won't be worthwhile. If you consider the distribution of both money and risk it looks more balanced. Whether it's precisely balanced or something doesn't have a unique answer because people have different valuations on the risk vs. the money. In particular, someone with no money to speak of at all is obviously going to prefer the single option that is available to them for the chance to come out wildly better off than they started, even at a 17% salary cut for 3 years.
(Also, I note you were not making wild accusations or anything, so I'm not being accusatory either, just elaborating.)
> I'm 1.5 years out of a coding bootcamp I paid about $12,000 for. At a 17% rate, I would have paid $11,500 already, and would be on track to pay $22,950 more if I stay at my current job for 1.5 more years
But you needed that $12,000 upfront, which means you spent time in crappy jobs to save up for it. Time that could have been spent in your new job making more money, so you're not accounting for that wage difference, ie. if it took you 6 months to save that $12,000, how much faster could you have made it at the new job had you started code camp earlier?
> But you needed that $12,000 upfront, which means you spent time in crappy jobs to save up for it.
That's what loans are for. The question is, do you want to take the risk or do you want to offload that risk?
Maybe the factor is more than just risk. By giving someone a vested interest in your success, they might also be there with other support after the class is done, such as job hunting.
I know it's not a fair comparison anymore since I realize that Holberton is 2 years and not a "bootcamp" but most bootcamps offer a certain period of time for you to repay the tuition fee.
For example, at the bootcamp I did, I think there was a 1000 fee due before 1st day of class, a couple more during the bootcamp, then 5k due 6 months after the last day of class.
Hey pharrlax, current holberton student here. So happy to see that a bootcamp worked for you! I have a few friends who are going through or just completed galvanize's gschool and hackreactor. About your comment, you totally right! 17% for 3 years seems like a lot! However the program is for 2 years. I view it as a college replacement rather than a bootcamp. Therefore I feel like what i will be paying is 150% worth it!
That was my exact thought as well. I paid $8000 for my bootcamp. I'm 18 months into an average of 65k over that time. So in that 18 months I'd already have paid in the area of $16k, and assuming I don't get a raise double that over the 3 years.
Also, I'm curious the arrangement for contract work that the developer does on his own time. If they charge a percentage of that, I'd have paid them more than a downpayment on a house over the course of 3 years.
That's fair. Any official statement by a corporation is total horseshit 100% of the time.
Corporations literally exist only to protect and grow their bottom line, and are engineered to reflexively throw everything else under the bus--employees, the environment, the general public, reason itself--to defend that goal.
Their statements will never come out and admit this, however, because it compromises that goal. Thus literally, literally everything corporations say in an official capacity is a lie, almost without exception. The subtext is always "we are doing this primarily because we believe it will help us make more money".
The best we can do in a capitalist society is create smart regulations that channel that inevitably self-serving motive to align as closely with what's good for society at large as possible.
US voters are impotent. Millions are about to be kicked off Medicare and Medicaid because of the signature of a man who repeatedly pledged over and over again that he would not ever cut them. Politics has become a metagame of tribal signaling with only a tenuous connection to actual policy.
> US voters are impotent. Millions are about to be kicked off Medicare and Medicaid because of the signature of a man who repeatedly pledged over and over again that he would not ever cut them. Politics has become a metagame of tribal signaling with only a tenuous connection to actual policy.
Voters are ignorant, not impotent.
They just don't care enough to stay informed with their other life responsibilities and/or pleasures. The dangers of slow strangulation in the form of bills like Republicare is something they simply don't care enough to track. It'll be fully felt around 2021-2022 and by the time people realize its a problem the Republicans will have control of the government for 6-8 years.
If people genuinely cared the prescription is still rather simple:
A) Organize voting blocs to end careers on the issue of gerrymandering to prevent statehouse control == Congress control.
B) Organize voting blocs to end the careers of anyone who lowers services below Obama-era levels.
C) Organize voting blocs to end the careers of anyone who violates Constitutional liberties.
I don't think reasonable people really want people in power who are willing to do those things, they just don't care enough to do anything about it.
Americans are the test bed for modern media and political manipulation strategies. What you guys invented are being exported around the world.
Stop putting your political compatriots down, and please read your political history with some empathy.
Post the cold war, the triumph of rationalism seemed to be entirely in reach. "religion is the opiate of the masses" was a common enough refrain, and we seemed to be on the verge of beating out all sorts of old superstitions and ideologies.
And then came the combination of mass media, evangelicism, and politics.
Over time people saw that the media allowed religious folk to reach out to target markets which were hitherto blocked from their reach, by the structural systems, checks and balances imposed by the strictures inherited from the Enlightenment.
With the revelations pouring in from psychology, and the significant improvements in advertising and marketing techniques, it became possible to target, poll, and build markets.
Startups use these tools today, and all the time. Theres no reason that the psychology for marketing an app should somehow prevent the marketing of a regressive, progressive, or authoritarian idea.
Details aside - the creation of that system worked as a proof of concept.
Now people around the world realized that with a tv station, and the right kind of messaging, you too could beat back science and facts. You just needed to work on the right message.
Of course there were road blocks, but eventually America was able to create a strong conservative movement, and finally Fox news. "a place for the persecuted majority".
You can trace all your problems to this arrow, this realization that you could mass produce emotional agreement, curtail information, using TV and now social media.
Look at who's on the ticket. Look at their record. Look at their campaign funding. If you can convince yourself that voters have any real choice, then I admire your optimism.
> Look at who's on the ticket. Look at their record. Look at their campaign funding. If you can convince yourself that voters have any real choice, then I admire your optimism.
At the end of the day, grass roots change is possible if people are willing. The problem is, they just aren't right now because things seem to be "OK" and so they care more about tribal signaling.
If I genuinely thought it was hopeless, I'd seriously consider abandoning the US and living out my life elsewhere.
To bastardize Churchill (or whoever he was quoting), it's a horrible system, and it'd be the worst except for all the other governments I could move to.
That's fair. To be honest, if I lived in a country where police officers had a habit of being filmed murdering law-abiding citizens with impunity, cleaning up IP law wouldn't be real high on my to do list. I think we'll need to look to the EU to see any real movement on fixing this. If OA Journals become de rigeur there, we'll see similar shifts in North America.
>The doctor wanted to prescribe an appetite enhancing drug but my father explained he can not simply gain weight by eating more. It's as if his digestive system is already at a maximum threshold.
It's more likely that his weight set point has been lowered, and now his hormonal hunger indicators are defending that set point.
He needs to power through it and eat more, even though it's going to feel like he's uncomfortably full all the time. I went through the same thing. It's all mental. It has nothing to do with the digestive system.
Note that he doesn't need to eat much more. A few hundred kilojoules a day will do the trick over time - he could reverse such a slow trend by something as small as switching from low fat to full cream milk, or having a couple of Tim Tams with his morning coffee.
>that companies, corporations, organisations use it to market and advertise themselves, for free.
Another phenomenon I've been seeing more of is a company that gets in early to a niche gaining control of the subreddit around that niche, tilting the scales in their favor.
Two examples I can think of are /r/nootropics, whose mod team is led by the owner of nootropics supplier Ceretropic, and /r/amazonmerch, whose sole mod is the owner of MerchInformer, a SaaS Amazon Merch research product.
They're each careful to never moderate in an overtly heavy-handed way that would cause a user revolt, but nonetheless, their companies are mentioned in the each subreddit far more often than their competitors. It's an inherent conflict of interest, and one that will only worsen as these niches grow in popularity.
Video game subreddits have this happen a lot. A new game will hit the market, and the company will already have set up a subreddit with all of their staff in control. It's an "official" subreddit, but that means it's no better than any other official forums and lacks any ability to hold counter opinions.
Don't get me wrong. The other stories are really, really bad. Insanely evil, even. But the idea that Sacca's extremely minor dick move almost a decade ago deserves to be lumped in with the monstrous stories of serial stalking and sexual battery is pretty ludicrous. Makes me think the writer just wanted to shoehorn in a TV star to inflate the piece's reach.