For a couple weeks, I was worried about my health insurance for next year through my state's marketplace and I was considering whether it would be worth the unsubsidized price of $350-450 per month. Ultimately, I don't have enough information about my risks to feel comfortable with my analysis. While it would be mentally soothing to use the calculator, it's not really helpful.
I'm also curious what's going on with insurance prices this year. The health insurance premiums this year are 33% more and just today I got my home insurance renewal asking for 25% more with the exact same coverage amounts. Did something happen to justify these increases?
General economic conditions prevents new capital from entering the market to undercut current insurers.
Behind the scenes much of this tighening of available capital happened more than a year ago but it's being passed on to consumers only now. Nothing in particular has happened this year -- it was fairly ordinary in terms of catastrophies.
> People higher up the chain are insecure because any loss of face is debilitating.
You don't do it in public. There's no face to lose in private (you're a subordinate, face is only lost among peers and superiors).
It is, however, not really a good idea to be 100% blunt out of the gate. There's a dance to it. But in public, I'm there to make my manager look good, and in private I'll tell them exactly what I think. Once they're confident I'm there to be at their back, it's never gone wrong, even in highly disfunctional orgs (I'm a consultant and get brought in to play "doctor" with hopeless projects a lot).
If your superior is managing up well, then it truly doesn’t matter if subordinates lose respect. Probably laying groundwork for new ones well in advance of that becoming a real issue for their status.
Yeah good luck with getting anything, ever, out of folks that feel butt-hurt due to their fragile emotions, in my experience women often go the extra mile to hold grudges, while sporting big smiles publicly.. That gate is closed for good, and you really have no idea what to expect - be it silent treatment or even subversion and backstabbing.
To summarize - each of us is pretty unique, and without going though it you can't know how words can affect other people, even those above you that should know better. But they didn't get to that elevated position via honed skill of listening calmly to their subordinates feedback, did they.
Even if you do it in private, they may take it as a sign of a subordinate who has designs on their job. Or on toppling them at any rate. Insecurity is everywhere.
You might want to read the comments before you decide what they mean. It doesn't say "face can only be lost in public". It says "face can only be lost among peers and superiors".
The Biden case seems like an example of when the senior leader was not given any honest feedback in private and then was humiliated in public. If anything that’s a reason to give feedback to the leader privately without sugar coating.
According to the comment I responded to, the senior leader can't be humiliated in public, because there is no such concept as the senior leader losing face.
Only in the same sense that bottom-level employees are the CEO's superior. Which is to say, they aren't.
Formal structure can stabilize a system and make it resilient to shocks. But there's a limit to how much stability can be provided, and if you provide enough shock, the structure will change.
In fact, given the context we're talking about (having to go debate to try to get their votes), he's below them in the hierarchy in this particular social context.
The president may be more powerful than any individual person, but when facing the public _collectively_, they're quite literally his boss, as they get to decide if he keeps his job.
From my experience, you build that non-fluff boundaries in the first one or two meetings with a senior leader.
I’d advise against going in the first one throwing punches.
Go with actionable feedback and be honest about what it is and what is not something you can solve. From there, if you genuinely care about whatever you’re complaning, you are more likely to be taken seriously.
> I’d advise against going in the first one throwing punches.
I’d advise against going in any one throwing punches. Instead, give actionable, honest, factual feedback with the intent to legitimately help the other person.
Fair enough, while I agree, in real project life, this calm, honest, factual feedback isn’t always enough for senior management to prioritise your issue.
Sometimes you need to a bit more assertive and blunt so that you become the top of the agenda, that’s what I meant by “throwing punches”.
Perhaps it means a much more over the top attitude in your view? (Happy to be corrected here)
If I need an issue prioritized, I'd have a discussion with senior leadership until one of us was convinced of the other's viewpoint, or we understood why we can't agree. For example, if my issue is clearly higher priority than anything else, I should easily be able to demonstrate that to senior leadership, and vice-versa. If we can't agree for a specific reason, we can say "the data is too fuzzy to know either way" and try to minimize risk.
Not all organizations will work like this, but that's a dysfunction that will need to be corrected. In that case, you should do what works (and that will be different for everyone), my particular situation won't apply to your particular situation.
I don't know what godawful chain you are hitched to but I hope you can find a way off it.
High-performance managers realise they are there to enable the talent. You're Brian Epstein, not John Lennon. The job is to create the conditions for folks at the pointy end to be wildly successful.
One of the most defining characteristics of this attitude is the maxim "hire people smarter than yourself", a very fine sentiment with the only problem being that by induction it makes the CEO the dumbest person in the company.
But I digress. If I'm fucking up, then I hope to god my trusted lieutenants will tell me without any pussyfooting around. It's practically what I hired them for.
Can I suggest there is a difference between feedback and therapy
We are all human, we have biases and blindspots.
Your trusted lieutenants can come to you and tell you you forgot to do X and because doing X is something either within your personality comfort zone or just outside it, you can if reasonably adjusted take that on.
But there will be things you are not reasonably adjusted for, things that require you to make significant adjustments to your world view and personality - things that you need to make serious compromises on
Some people are so maladjusted they cannot compromise on stuff most of the world agrees on - generally we call them criminals. But this is a spectrum - bad managers usually have very poor matching between their personal problems and the needs of the role.
But even good managers reach a point that their instincts and their rational mind cannot take them past.
In short “everyone is promoted to their level of incompetence” is not a skills problem, but a character problem.
I don't know you, but based on what you're saying, I guess you're in a much different environment than I've ever been in. You're probably also more of a "type A" person than I am.
I've always worked in places that are essentially established businesses. People are mostly bureaucrats and lazy. I believe that's a large majority employers. If you honestly can't understand that that's how a lot of people work, then I think you live in a bubble.
I cannot disagree with your assertion that the majority of employment environments have a toxic pathology of hierarchical insecurities, and I've certainly worked within them.
Albeit, yes, with a flagrant disregard for authority (I hesitate to label myself "type A", it's such a reductive term) that worked best when in the second and third decades of my career I was generally engaged on a consulting basis as a fixer/troubleshooter.
So I would admit guilt to an accusation that I have placed myself inside my current bubble intentionally. It's a matter of psychological safety and self-respect. I wasn't kidding when I said I hope you can find a way off that chain, it's an outcome I'd wish on all my peers.
I agree with you in principle that's the correct attitude. However I don't think the comparison to the music industry is necessarily correct.
A lot of managers in tech got there because they are technically strong. We can argue about whether that's correct or not but I think that's typically the case. People who perform well as engineers are the ones who are given leadership opportunities. People who do not are not.
So first challenge is given you were maybe one of the smarter hires, of some smart people that tried to hire people smarter than themselves (let's assume), how do you hire people smarter than yourself? at scale?
Where we end up typically in successful tech companies is with some degree of a mix of trying to make "folks at the pointy end successful" and some degree of "telling the folks at the pointy end what to do". Usually managers and directors are very strong technically and quite sharp, though more distant from the actual work because they don't do it any more. The precise mix depends on culture and circumstances but it's almost never this ideal environment of servant leaders surrounded by immense talent and just facilitating that talent doing great things.
I've been in places that are very close to the "good" end of this spectrum and there's still going to be some pause in giving feedback to leadership that they've done something wrong. Maybe you have a great relationship with your lieutenants where they can be openly critical of you and you reinforce that. I think that's highly unusual in a social environment. It's a lot more likely there are certain things they won't share with you because they estimate the damage to the relationship is larger than the utility of being open.
EDIT: I misread your statement about hiring people smarter than yourself, so I think we agree there. The problem is still that if you're the smartest person there's a bit of tension between that and creating conditions for the people under you to be successful. Btw, I still think you should try and hire people smarter than yourself ;) it's just hard to impossible to scale that - as you point out.
I don't want to rebut anything you say, but I will add one observation.
> I think that's highly unusual in a social environment
Agreed, but in my experience of startups particularly, this becomes more commonplace with older founders. It can also form the basis of an high-performance enclave within otherwise ossified large companies/institutions; these tend to get dragged down by the mediocrity police after a few years, but in the meantime you can get some good stuff done.
Whether the music industry analogy is valid may be debatable, but I've had the privilege of seeing it first-hand, music was/is the family business, I grew up knocking around recording studios. So this mindset is engraved on my expectations of all talent-based professions, and I try to remember it whenever I fail to be humble.
The phrase “hire people smarter than yourself” is a platitude that is intended to foster an attitude, just a useful way of framing & thinking about people, mainly aimed at the manager, but has the byproduct of making ICs feel good about themselves. It’s not really a literal measurable specific requirement or goal. One way to see that nobody is taking it literally is that nobody is reporting IQ on their resume, and nobody is giving standardized IQ tests during job interviews. (And of course I mean statistically nobody, I’m not claiming that it’s never happened.) Often in hiring ‘smart’ doesn’t really mean smart anyway, it means wisdom, experience, attitude, skill, communication, knowledge, motivation, creativity, adaptability, friendliness, culture-fit, etc., there are many different ways someone can be ‘smarter’ than you on at least 1 axis of whatever ‘smart’ means, and it’s generally not hard to find them if we’re realistic about how smart we are on all axes.
I agree. And the insecurity that these managers feel makes them very poor leaders. They tend to be overly subservient to higher-ups and just pass all management decisions down the chain without too much thought. And they like to punish any disagreement (no matter how reasonable) from their subordinates. Insecurity is the opposite of a culture of trust. And where there is no trust, there is no real leadership.
As someone who never used Twitter, I made a Bluesy account and it was okay. I learned that I have no idea how to engage with that style of social media.
One thing that put me off is how so much of what I saw was just talking about Bluesky vs Twitter. I hope they can move past that.
Blue Sky feels like a cocktail party where half the guests are knitting sweaters for their cats, the other half are debating how to save democracy, and I’m just standing there wondering how I got invited.
It’s like scrolling through a group chat where everyone forgot the topic but kept texting anyway.
Honestly, it’s impressive how they’ve managed to create a platform that feels simultaneously too niche and too random.
Idk, I spent a few hours over a few days trying to find something cool about it, and couldn’t.
I joined twitter like 3 years ago, so also quite late to this type of game. Compared to forums, hn, reddit etc it's quite difficult to get your voice heard in the beginning. Anything you post is just shown to no one when you have no followers. Takes some time interacting with others and hope they follow or repost to get some traction.
> One thing that put me off is how so much of what I saw was just talking about Bluesky vs Twitter
That was a huge turnoff with Mastodon for me. Seemed almost everyone was just saying “wow, isnt it so much better here than on Twitter?” over and over and having everyone agree. By comparison Bluesky isn’t so bad, at least right now anyway.
I hope so too. I had to leave threads because my wall was 90% people talking and complaining about Twitter and Musk and memes about the same stuff. Dude, I was here _precisely_ to avoid this, but it's even worse!
Scrolling through the first couple dozen posts on my following feed, I see a selfies, science educators, artists, makers, a couple naked people, a complaint about days getting shorter, and a few people talking about health conditions they've gotten under control. If you don't want to see people talking about Trump, follow people who don't talk about Trump. Or add "trump" to your list of muted words.
What you see is up to you. If you don't like what you see, there are a ton of levers in your control.
Open https://bsky.app/ in incognito mode and you get to see the front page.
Currently the top post on the latest refresh is:
>I'm honestly surprised he hasn't started selling stool samples. His followers have been buying his BS for years, so it seems like a natural next step...
This is not a network I want to join if this is the popular content. We've been told to curate our own garden for reddit, twitter, mastodon, etc. It never works because people who see that and like it join by the millions and those who don't don't.
You seem to be advocating going to a party where the lobby is full of people yelling about something annoying, and then pushing past them to some separate room where those same people are talking about something else, for the moment.
Except there's not really "a" lobby. It's a building with equally sized entrances on the red light district, wall street, silicon valley, and capitol hill. A lot of people happen to be coming in from capitol hill at the moment, because a pretty significant event just happened. Just because you know there's an entrance to the building on capitol hill, doesn't mean that's where you're coming from when entering the party. As soon as you have an account, you never need to acknowledge that entrance again.
It just seems weirdly petulant to make a stand based on that. Even more so considering the post about Trump winning was similarly a front page post here, and that thread got more votes and comments than almost any I've ever seen here. And here there really is only one "front page".
What do you call the place where everyone has to go through to get to every other place?
The lobby.
This is a UX decision that the blue sky team made to make signing up more streamlined and its one that's very poorly thought out. Given its the same people who almade twitter it's no surprise they are making the same mistakes.
Nvidia is $3.42T market cap. AMD is $246B market cap. Nvidia makes up over 5% of the ETF I use. AMD is less than 0.5%
There's a lot more wealth tied up in Nvidia, so there is more interest and worry. They are also more associated with hyped up tech like Bitcoin and AI. Whether you believe in those technologies in the long term determines whether you're likely to think Nvidia can maintain.
With everyone dumping on Intel lately, AMD also looks like the primary CPU manufacturer.
It really is annoying me how much Nvidia is now tied up into almost every ETF, which means that it’s becoming “too big to fail” but also will drag things down horribly if it doesn’t keep delivering the huge earnings growth or suffers competition or AI doesn’t really deliver the goods in a meaningful way.
Right! AMD could double its share of desktop / server CPUs without a huge change in the industry but its much harder for NVIDIA to double its revenue of GPU cards, AI chips.
I have no idea what will happen, or what either is worth. But like Apple, at some point the market is the limiting factor, not the company.
You'd be surprised how people will stick to a name.
At my last job, we spent 3 years building an electrical systems product with the same name as an eye scanning company. We had invested in marketing and sales that was practically useless once the executives finally agreed they needed to rebrand. It was the sort of thing that was pointed out on day zero, but the man in charge was too proud of the name. It wasn't even a very good name for our product.
And that was a bet-the-company type of choice. Lingo here is just some little library of no import to Gitlab's business.
I did this as well for 3 domains that use the same EC2. There were random connectivity problems from my phone for a couple months, but it works perfectly for the past 6 months. I have no idea why the issues went away.
> Straight edge (sometimes abbreviated as sXe or signified by XXX or simply X) is a subculture of hardcore punk whose adherents refrain from using alcohol, tobacco, and recreational drugs in reaction to the punk subculture's excesses. Some adherents refrain from engaging in promiscuous or casual sex, follow a vegetarian or vegan diet and do not consume caffeine or prescription drugs. The term "straight edge" was adopted from the 1981 song "Straight Edge" by the hardcore punk band Minor Threat.
I've always been pretty much straight-edge. Don't drink much alcohol, and recently went off caffeine.
I'm naturally tired at around 2am. I barely dream, or can't remember my dreams. I struggle to wake up at 6:30 even after 7+ hours of sleep.
I do like an afternoon nap, but Sunday's are almost the only opportunity. As a bad consolation prize, I involuntarily micro-sleep at my desk, working from home or in the office, a handful of times most days, generally at peak afternoon nap times (1:30pm - 3:30pm).
I wouldn't say I'm productive, but I would say that the work I produce is generally of a high quality.
Well assuming we’re talking about Elon Musk, he has admitted to using prescription Ketamine for depression, which seems to have a negligible effect on cognition for therapeutic use
Interesting, I have seen some pretty scary interviews with Elon. If I had noticed a family member acting the same way I would have taken them to the ER.
At my last job, there was a frontend developer who added a linter rule that variable names must be at least 2 characters long. The project already had 20,000 lines of code. Every time anyone made a change to a file, they would have to rename all the one letter variables. Usually, this meant all the for loops in the file. I tried to explain how pointless this rule was, but he wasn't having any of it.
Most people just renamed variables like i > ii, which was worse.
a good linter rule would have exceptions for loop variables by context by just by name like i, j, k. Often just by name is good enough at least for a solo dev or small team. I require them to be at least 3 chars EXCEPT those.
What is even the point of digging in deeper, did they not see everyone around them doing the i>ii workaround? You've lost, call it a failed experiment and move on.
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