Our problem is the cities, and how they have many more people. Representation in proportion to population is pretty kick-ass if you live in New York.
It's a little less kick-ass if you live in North Dakota, and wonder why a few coastal congressmen are able to pass laws which interfere with your lifestyle.
More seriously, our problem is a metastasised federal government. Very little should actually be a federal issue (read the enumerated powers of the United States in the Constitution!), and yet almost everything now is. As a result, every issue becomes winner-take-all: the entire country must comply with me, or the entire country must comply with you. There's no room to allow Massachusetts to go wrong and right in its ways, and to allow North Dakota to go wrong and right in its ways.
> Very little should actually be a federal issue (read the enumerated powers of the United States in the Constitution!), and yet almost everything now is. As a result, every issue becomes winner-take-all: the entire country must comply with me, or the entire country must comply with you. There's no room to allow Massachusetts to go wrong and right in its ways, and to allow North Dakota to go wrong and right in its ways
Saying everything is this way is too much. More like, a few issues such as gay rights and abortion pissed off enough church-going folk to the point they began to rally against federal government overreach.
There are plenty of other things that are managed by states. You don't hear about many differences between state and federal because they aren't contentious. States and the fed are happy with plenty of state laws.
I wasn't really trying to get into the whole liberal/conservative/size-of-government debate.
My experience with most rural towns is that it's like entering a time machine to 1985. When those places set the agenda, we are going to be "behind" when it comes to the metrics economists use (regardless of how relevant or misleading those metrics may be).
When it comes to letting places go their own way (like sanctuary cities, medical marijuana, gay marriage, etc.), I totally agree with you!
> It's a little less kick-ass if you live in North Dakota, and wonder why a few coastal congressmen are able to pass laws which interfere with your lifestyle.
And which laws would those be? I'm curious because the fact is a vote in North Dakota is worth several votes in New York so you're already getting far more power than you deserve in any fair system and the only issues that tend to go federal are issues of civil rights which affects the lifestyle of the oppressed, it isn't oppressing you or anyone else in North Dakota.
I've had much the same experience that the Mr. Marshall describes with many aspects of Common Lisp: repeatedly, I'll discover that something which annoyed me (CLOS, packages, pathnames — whatever) is actually remarkably well-thought-out and pragmatically useful. It really is an amazing language.
I always find myself struggling with programming paradigms, having heard of so many and used so few. I love functional programming (to the extent that my ugly point-free-ish, heavily type-hinted Python is functional), but I also love how OO makes it easy for me to encapsulate logic and data. It seems too good to be true that I could have both, but here I am!
No, no he didn't. None of the information he released revealed anything criminal whatsoever. All he did was violate his oath and the law, and for what?
> They won't consume a lot of public resources (no need of school or of police repression).
Either the host country's end-of-life medical care is not great by American standards (in which case what you write is true, but many Americans wouldn't care to move), or it is, and a retiree would consume considerable public resources. Unfortunately, there's no way to have it both ways.
There actually is a way: move to a country where the same level of care costs less even with no government subsidies. I think this would include most of Europe and the far East.
This is the result of central planning on the part of government. It allowed the AMA to do insane things like stopping new medical schools from opening for DECADES. It allows the AMA to continue to artificially limit the practitioners in all medical professions to keep wages high.
As a specific anecdote of the problem of government in healthcare: in my city a new children's hospital opened up a few years ago. The other area hospitals petitioned the government to not allow them to build the hospital until certain concessions were met. Among the concessions I'm aware of are not allowing the new hospital to own a medical chopper for 8 years. It was also not allowed to build a Level 1 trauma center. And of course that's after YEARS of not even being able to break ground while all this negotiating and concessions were being figured out. This type of interference raised the cost of healthcare for everyone in my city while likely decreasing the quality of care.
There's more to that story. Typically the problem is that there are too many hospital beds, not too few.
Outpatient treatment is increasingly more popular and more cost effective. Hospitals often raise costs by introducing massive capital costs that need to be amortized as well as other overheads.
With the exception of lower-cost, higher value primary care, there are rarely any meaningful access issues to doctors in metro areas. Those shortages are largely being addressed with PAs and NPs.
>Typically the problem is that there are too many hospital beds, not too few.
I'd be interested in a citation for this because it's counter to basic economic theory of supply and demand. If the supply outpaces demand, then the price should be going down, not up.
Medical services are a complex market. It's nonsensical to randomly apply basic economic principles without knowing what you are doing. (Good luck telling congress that) The smart thing to do is to make primary care more accessible -- you'd be able to close many hospitals and improve outcomes.
I see what you mean, but the over-priced beds are just a temporary phenomenon while smaller more agile competitors are killing the large facilities. In the end, cheaper service for health care is still being found from new competitors moving into the market.
Why does the government care what the other hospitals think? Would they stop a new burger bar opening too close to a McDonalds, if McDonalds petitioned them for long enough?
Yes, it's the way the world works. Homeowners vote against new developments (which decreases the cost of their homes). Everyone with a liquor license lobbies against more liquor licenses. Every grocery store lobbies against more grocery stores. Amusingly this causes big issues between state governments (who wants growth) and cities where most voters/business owners want to limit growth to protect themselves.
The cynical reason is because the hospitals are massive tax-bases and the owners of the hospitals are political donors.
The other reason is that the government has an interest in maximizing economic growth, among other things, which is why it has zoning power. Citizens in the area, including local businesses such as other hospitals, may raise any number of concerns about building projects. Further, any citizen (or corporation) can hold up just about any project for as long as it's willing to keep paying legal fees to fight projects based on trumped up bullshit about esoteric zoning laws that were written a century ago that they probably broke when building their own hospital.
Note that with the latest changes to Android, using mitmproxy to analyse the behaviour of apps has become impossible: apps refuse to accept personally-installed certificates.
In the future, we'll see less revelations about this sort of thing, not because it has become rarer but because Google have chosen a course of action which obscures it.
(it also breaks things like personal or corporate CAs, but that's a different problem)
For Android < N, if you install a custom CA, you'll get a permanent "Network may be monitored by an unknown third party" notification that cannot be dismissed and stays across reboots. Android wasn't really "insecure" in that regard beforehand.
Your point is valid, but I think it's a negligible improvement that comes in hand with severe implications for privacy research.
Another problem is that people want an RPC mechanism, when what they need is a state-transfer mechanism.
It turns out that the semantics of RPC — attractive as they undeniably are — are pretty poor for building real-world distributed systems, while those of REST as a pretty good (or at least better) fit.
People need both. REST works well for CRUD operations that don't have complex side effects or constraints. What's often missing in this is intent. I just want to do "the thing" to this particular account or whatever.
Personally I like to very selectively add RPC actions on top of the base resource. Tacking an RPC action onto the resource URI allows you to encapsulate the intent of the user's action, handle all the updates required server side, and then return the updated representation.
I almost always have both. I tend to use event sourcing and the intent is mandatory. There might be 20 reasons to modify one resource, each with its own list of side effects to later perform.
So it's usually POST resource/:id/action
and that's fine.
> So it's usually POST resource/:id/action and that's fine.
There's nothing wrong with that. It's not anti-REST or anything, assuming you satisfy the other REST constraints, ie. each request is self-contained and any stateful resources are designated by URLs.
As an aside, I'm personally not a huge fan of human-readable URLs because it encourages API consumers to rely on/construct URLs client-side, which is not REST.
I think a more properly-REST approach would be to PUT a representation of the resource with the action applied. That is, rather than POSTing to /resources/:id/close, one would PUT a closed version of the resource to /resources/:id.
I don't see why that would be more REST. POST is to be used for side-effecting operations, PUT is an optimization over POST for idempotent effectful operations.
Certainly a PUT solution might have some advantages for replayability in case of network partitions, but REST doesn't this choice dictate one way or the other.
> Except that - unless you're on a tiling WM on Linux - your window manager sucks
Isn't the solution to that to not use systems with poor usability? Linux exists; it's capable of doing everything many (maybe most?) people need — why not just use the superior system?
It's a little less kick-ass if you live in North Dakota, and wonder why a few coastal congressmen are able to pass laws which interfere with your lifestyle.
More seriously, our problem is a metastasised federal government. Very little should actually be a federal issue (read the enumerated powers of the United States in the Constitution!), and yet almost everything now is. As a result, every issue becomes winner-take-all: the entire country must comply with me, or the entire country must comply with you. There's no room to allow Massachusetts to go wrong and right in its ways, and to allow North Dakota to go wrong and right in its ways.