I'm adding onto this -- I have a 2017 edition of the MBP for work, and I have a faulty keyboard. I hated it. "The touchbar is stupid", I proclaimed.
I recently bought a 2018 edition for the wife because she has always expressed a desire of owning one of her own (my work always provided me with a mac). The keyboard is much improved.
Additionally, watching a "normal" user interact with a Mac and a touchbar, versus me, a developer was eye opening, and I suddenly realized there is a lot more to the puzzle we are so blind to. She loves it. Sure, it is an "emoji bar" when she is in iMessage, but she also loves the scrolling functionality it provides in Photos.
I still don't see much use for it personally, but I am no longer a rapid opponent of it as I once was. There's always been extra ports and features on other laptops I've used in the past, and I never seemed so critical of those as well. Maybe I bought into the mob mentality? Going back to my wife, her work provided her with a Thinkpad Yoga. It has a touch screen, and a stylus. Ok touch screens I am not the biggest fan of, but I happen to think the stylus is cool! I am sure there were many users of the previous Thinkpads at her company that were going "What!? A stupid stylus? Who needs this!" I realized I was doing the same thing with the new MBP.
Touchbar or not, it is still the most quality, aesthetically pleasing, well built laptop I use, and it still remains miles beyond any PC I ever used as well, Inspirons, XPSes, Surfaces included.
I don't think people would be complaining nearly as much if they simply added the touchbar above the existing keys rather than replacing them. Or left the esc and power keys while putting the touchbar in between them. Lots of things they could have done.
The replacing the existing keys is a good point. I don't feel the pain of the ESC key since I remap caps lock to it, I always thought "Function" keys were relics of a bygone era, (and unergonomic to use), and the little black doodad functions just as well as a power button as any other one I have ever used.
For me, father of a 6yo daughter, the "emoji bar" is worth every penny.
Thinking about it, I've spent almost half of my career on computers that didn't have function keys (even though they usually had ESC as a physical one).
I don't mean this to be snarky, but if what you are saying is true (Congress can't do anything), why do you think the governmental disfunction will not carry over to an expanded medicare-for-all program? Medicare is not without issue and is wrought with fraud that needs decisive congressional action to help fix, yet they have shown inability there as well.
I think your phenomena might be due to startups? Obviously this is a startup focused board so I am not saying this to mean go one way or another, but I ditched the startup, job hopping life a little while ago, and had to deal with "insurance bs" roughly two times in 7 years.
I am either the luckiest person alive, or maybe there is additional benefits not obviously well represented here to working for a stable, revenue producing organization, but I don't seem to encounter what seems to be the well-represented insurance pains documented here (probably a little bit of both, in my guess).
My partner has been employed with the same large international company for 8 years. She had an elected procedure done that is required by law to be fully covered by insurance. She had 3 calls leading up to the procedure with her health insurance company each time asking them if they were certain it would be covered 100%. I thought that this was overkill but she was worried to the point of being paranoid about it. They assured her each time she would not have to pay any money at all for anything.
The procedure was in December. After the procedure she received a 6-figure bill, which she then had to follow up with hours of phone calls back and forth to the insurance company, hospital, and doctor's office. They sent her a revised bill for somewhere around $8,000, and then another revised bill for around $4,000.
The insurance company says it's because the doctor coded the procedure incorrectly. The doctor says the hospital coded it incorrectly. She has had to file an appeal with the insurance company, and the only reason it looks like it will work out is because the insurance company records all phone calls and was able to get records of her original calls before the procedure asking if it would be fully covered. She has still been told to expect that they will deny her first appeal and she'll have to appeal a second time in order to get it covered. This has been causing her immense stress for the past 4 months as she does not have enough money to pay even the $4,000 bill out of pocket.
My experience is that your experience actually is extremely uncommon in America today. Most people who have to interact with the health care system beyond annual checkups have to deal with something like this.
She is lucky she is getting that even partially covered if she only got a verbal agreement. My insurance policy has a clause that anything they say over the phone is not a promise to pay. You have to call AND get something in writing to even be eligible for a dispute later.
I am fortunate to have had the experience of growing up with a rabid Greek mother who would get to the bottom of any shenanigans with any sort of insurance agency, bill collector or anything. I now have my own experience. Yes the first time was stressful, but reading your story, trying to put myself in your partner's shoes this would not have ended up causing me any stress, especially if I knew the law is on my side. I certainly wouldn't paid any bill until it was all sorted out. I also have experience where a medical charge that was suppose to be covered as a legitimate procedure was not and charged off onto my credit (because again, I refused to pay). I was easily able to negotiate with the credit reporting agency to remove this negative mark on my credit. (Negative marks due to medical bills affect your credit much less than say missing a credit card payment, IIRC, I was still able to obtain credit cards, get loans, and generally had decent overall credit).
My father currently undergoing treatment for lung cancer. He has medicare and supplemental coverage through Humana. Bills are still in excess of 150,000, so I definitely understand the other side of it.
My previous employer had my insurance totally wrong. According to everything I signed at open enrollment, I had a $6k deductible and $6.6k Out-of-pocket max. This was for the family, no individual deductible.
When I go to the insurance site, it lists me with a $2k individual & $4k family deductible. It says my OOPM is $7.5k. Of course I hit my deductible this year, so I'm getting billed an extra thousand.
My employer and insurance company both swear it's the other one's fault and even filing a complaint with the state insurance commission doesn't seem to have helped. :(
I'm not at a startup and have better than average insurance, however it's still a clown show.
For example, I recently got prescribed a medical device, but was then told that if I didn't have a follow up appointment between certain dates I'd be billed out of pocket for the device.
The prescribing physician, of course, has no open appointments until a couple months after the given follow up interval, despite knowing the potential issue and prescheduling the followup.
And of course the device provider, the physician, and the insurance company all tell me completely different things about the situation.
The current "solution" is "just see your primary care instead," not sure how it'll go.
Not due to startups necessarily so much as changing insurance a lot. I'm on my 6th insurance plan in 4 years (Job 1, not a startup, lasted 9 months. Job 2, a startup, changed insurance 2 months after I started then again the next year for a total of 3 plans over 2.5~ years on the job. Job 3, a startup, had better than average insurance (with a weird/awesome reimbursement plan so I pay 0 deductible and 0 premium and get to cover my wife for free too!). Then one month after I started we got acquired and so in 2019 I now have a normal (still good) corporate insurance policy.
On top of that insurance frustrates my wife so before we were married when she was on PhD student insurance I generally managed that too, plus her transition to my insurance after marriage.
So I'm definitely out-of-norm on this. If anything I like to think that means I'm more qualified to call out how bullshit the world of insurance is, atleast in terms of end-user UX, but obviously that's just my opinion.
I think it depends on your state's insurance market as well as the priorities of your employer. If your state has a plethora of plans available, your employer is tempted to shop around more often. In that case, it depends on the priorities of your employer, weighing the cost savings versus the cost (financial, employee morale, time) were they to switch to a cheaper plan.
I've worked for employers of varied sizes and profitability (self-employed, small nonprofit, very large health system [including its own insurance plans], midsize for-profit), and I haven't noticed a consistent pattern that would differentiate them in terms of health plan stability. In all cases, the goal is to minimize cost while providing an acceptable level of coverage.
Of course, job hopping and employer-provided coverage are a painful combination. My family had to reach our deductible twice last year, which wasn't fun (the increased salary and other benefits of the new job made it worth it).
I'd love to see health coverage detached from employment. If traditional Medicare-for-all isn't feasible, then let's go with Medicare-Advantage-for-all instead.
The phenomena is linked to how often someone switches jobs in the United States irrespective of the type of company or employment (full-time, part-time, self-employes etc).
No matter what an individual’s stance is with respect to another individual’s professional history in terms of frequent changes or gaps, I don’t think that has to correspond to level of healthcare that the latter individual is able to obtain.
I find HN more rewarding than any other social site I visit.
Healthy discussions, engaging topics and interests, no clear political slant in either direction, with multiple groups and opinions represented (you know, real diversity of thought). Finally no ads being shoved down my throat unless its engaging content disguised as an advert that reaches the top, in which case I am OK with because at least the advertiser tried, and it got support enough to be upvoted and shared.
And the option to choose the algorithmic filtering based on my needs, in the rare cases that the number of individuals or volume of their tweets may be too large to take in chronologically.
> By one estimate from the California Department of Housing and Community Development, the state needs to build 1.8 million units over the next seven years just to keep pace with population growth
You need to build about 257k just to keep up with growth, not to address any sort of shortage. This to me should sound like a builder's gold rush. Why are builders not flocking to CA to build? Are there some stringent set of regulations that greatly reduce the economic feasibility? Is this Prop 13 proving to be a failure?
NIMBYs. Builders want to build, but the people who already own won't let them in most cases. I live in Cupertino. They want to build 2000 units next to my house. Most of neighbors are against it because it will "change the character of the neighborhood". That is true, it will. But I'll be the farmers who lived here in the 1960s said the same thing when all of our houses were built as the farmers sold their land.
The main difference this time is that the current residents can't get rich selling their land because the developers want to build up, not out.
CA tried to solve this with SB 827, which would force upzoning near transit. Sadly, it was poorly written and failed to pass, but it was a good idea. It would have forced pretty much all of San Francisco to allow building medium size buildings in place of existing single family homes. And a lot of the rest of the Bay Area too.
I have heard the NIMBY argument many times before but I just don't buy it. It's too easy of a target. Plus there is so much land. Ok fine, won't build in your backyard, I'll build in the next yard over. We have this exact situation in a town called Davidson, NC where I am from. Builders can't build there. So they built in the hundreds of thousands of acres immediately right next to it. Problem solved.
Plus people exercising their right to let things happen or not happen on land and electing to do what is in their own best interest sounds fine to me and nothing to be vilifying. It sounds like to me the "NIMBY" finger pointers are just upset that low cost housing isn't built in neighborhoods they want to live in -- that is, it is being portrayed as some altruistic goal but really has self interest in mind.
Even if I conceded your point about NIMBYism, it may explain a very small part of the problem, but it absolutely does not explain why builders are not flocking to a state with a 117k/yr housing shortfall to figure it out.
They've already done that. Average commute times in the big cities are 70+ minutes each way. There is only so far people will commute regardless of price.
That 117k/yr shortfall is not evenly spaced. All the jobs growth (and therefore the need for housing) is localized in the cities. They can build 200,000 units in the central valley where there is a ton of land, but no one would go there because there are no jobs, and it would be a 3 hour commute each way to the city.
The only solution is to build up, not out. We've already done all the building out that we can. And the NIMBYs are blocking the "up" growth because they want their cities of single family homes.
NIMBYism alone also isn't the problem per say, it's zoning plus NIMBYism that makes things hard. A vocal minority can effectively block zoning changes, which prevents developers from building high density housing. This is exacerbated by CA's so-so to terrible public transit. High density housing is far more annoying for whoever lives nearby when everyone living there has a car or two and the builder didn't also build a parking structure for those cars.
This is mostly a problem for coastal California too because land is limited and expensive. In inland California a developer can just buy and build someplace else.
Builders seem to be following the same playbook as the private equity firms who bought up homes to rent/flip, which is to limit supply to keep upward pressure on prices.
I've seen regulations brought up as a reason why there isn't much new construction, but other states with similar building code/environmental regulations don't seem to have the same problems.
The exception to this IMO are zoning regulations. When those limit high density housing, eg condos/apartments, they can serve to substantially increase home prices. But, that's assuming builders are willing to build enough units fast enough to actually reduce unit prices, and they've consistently shown they will not do that.
Prop 13 could contribute somewhat too, but I imagine it's effect is also much smaller than private equity and builders limiting supply.
People's problems with taxes typically fall into two buckets, sometimes both.
1. On a fundamental economics level, the Government is an inefficient third party spender: it spends other peoples money on services it doesn't utilize. There is no feedback loop there besides bureaucracy.
2. We actually have a pretty moderate tax burden already, mostly footed by the average US worker. Everyone talks about the top rate, or federal taxes, but we also have sales tax, property tax, estate tax, in some areas a county tax on top of city or municipality tax, and additional education-related taxes, not counting the outlier states that have even more taxes on top of that. (There's a saying in NYC: Every day is tax day). The common worker pays the majority of the taxes, and they are the ones who are most sensitive to any increase in taxes, and feel pinched already, so they naturally, and very expectedly are against being taxed more. (Realize that the typical HN'er is not the average US worker, making ~60k median salary with few benefits)
76% of voters favor higher taxes on the wealthiest americans, 61% favor Warren's "wealth tax", and even 40% support a marginal tax rate of 70% on americans earning $10M or more:
It’s like asking somebody if they want free stuff. Of course they say yes, it costs them nothing.
Ask the same question where their own taxes go up and see what the answer is.
Reminds me of the HN thread about the 2018 tax changes (limited SALT deduction). The same people who call for higher taxes (many of them in the top 5% income range) start complaining about their taxes going up.
Everyone is fine with higher taxes when it’s someone “richer” than they are.
> It’s like asking somebody if they want free stuff. Of course they say yes, it costs them nothing.
OK, why don't you ask these same people if they think taxes should be raised on people poorer than them. Do you think 71% would agree with that also? Because that also costs these people nothing, right?
In other words I disagree with your assertion that Americans cannot tell, or care, for the difference between an under-taxed wealthy person and an over-burdened poor person.
> Reminds me of the HN thread about the 2018 tax changes (limited SALT deduction). The same people who call for higher taxes (many of them in the top 5% income range) start complaining about their taxes going up.
that is because property taxes vary wildly across different states due to policies of the local state governments governments and it amounts to punishment of states that have more comprehensive taxation and social services for their populations, in other words, have a larger number of Democratic voters. Taxation should not be distributed based on political affiliation. The states that have higher property taxes are less of a burden on the federal government since their populations are more educated, less desperately poor, and have better healthcare.
As you won't be surprised, I live in a SALT-sensitive state, but even people here who live below the poverty line in a house that was long ago paid for are being killed by their property taxes. They are poor people who are over-taxed and the recent changes made things worse. My taxes did not go up at all since my property taxes happen to be quite low in any case. However, I still oppose the changes in the SALT deduction, for the reasons above. So another anecdote of someone that can actually apply reasoning about the common good to a taxation question rather than caring only about myself paying more.
pitchforks and torches is also democratic. Just because something is democratic, doesn't mean that it is unassailably good. Democracy is another name for mob rule and provides zero protection for minorities against the majority. There is a reason we are a republic and not a democracy.
I favor the representative democracy with checks and balances that America has, and a strong bias towards preserving minority rights over majority rules.
Are you trying to change my mind or just insult me for not sharing your worldview? There are plenty of shades between where I sit and plutocrats, just as I'm aware there are shades between where you sit and the gulag.
Reducto ad adsurbium just lets anyone sit comfortably inside the edge of the boundary you've set. It's an extremely uncompelling form of argumentation.
Going to the bank costs something, if not the opportunity cost lost. When you are poor, every opportunity or cost matters much more. Most banks require some form of ID or address verification, which again could require travel somewhere. Finally, even if you assume the most seamless, easy to sign up online-only bank, you are assuming a stable, reliable way to access the internet, which again, can be issue if you are poor.
You also have to spend time putting in our card, then your pin, then signing something, all the while waiting on their slow connection on each step. IMO, it's faster to use cash in most cases.
I recently bought a 2018 edition for the wife because she has always expressed a desire of owning one of her own (my work always provided me with a mac). The keyboard is much improved.
Additionally, watching a "normal" user interact with a Mac and a touchbar, versus me, a developer was eye opening, and I suddenly realized there is a lot more to the puzzle we are so blind to. She loves it. Sure, it is an "emoji bar" when she is in iMessage, but she also loves the scrolling functionality it provides in Photos.
I still don't see much use for it personally, but I am no longer a rapid opponent of it as I once was. There's always been extra ports and features on other laptops I've used in the past, and I never seemed so critical of those as well. Maybe I bought into the mob mentality? Going back to my wife, her work provided her with a Thinkpad Yoga. It has a touch screen, and a stylus. Ok touch screens I am not the biggest fan of, but I happen to think the stylus is cool! I am sure there were many users of the previous Thinkpads at her company that were going "What!? A stupid stylus? Who needs this!" I realized I was doing the same thing with the new MBP.
Touchbar or not, it is still the most quality, aesthetically pleasing, well built laptop I use, and it still remains miles beyond any PC I ever used as well, Inspirons, XPSes, Surfaces included.