I’ve been told that too. But I’ve done self pay for the last year, and every time I go to the hospital they instantly give me a 30% discount.
That makes me think they are artificially inflating prices so that when the insurance company negotiats their discount, well, it might be the same as what I pay
I think that's exactly what they recently got sued for. Car caught fire, electrical stopped working (and therefore the doors stopped working) and a teen burned inside
It's wild how my car won't let me change basic settings while vehicle is in drive (too much menu nav as to be distraction & I've had cars that would only let me edit the navigation destination while in park) yet - this exists as well
You're forgetting the "people who don't care, they just want to be seen looking like they care so they make a bunch of noise" factor.
Once you multiply the safety problem by the this factor it all makes sense.
A small non-problem that every screeching jerk will be exposed to is a bigger actual problem more likely to get addressed than a potential real problem that will mostly go unnoticed.
Also rear doors are kinda optional. They still make 2door 2-row cars. Heck, they made 2-door 2-row SUVs pretty recently. And child safety locks are a thing. So there is an argument to be made there (not that I think it holds up on modern stuff).
> Here’s the thing, if your core business function depends on some capability, you should own it if at all possible.
If I'm building something that allows my customers to do X, then yes I will own the software that allows my customers to do X. Makes sense.
> They’ll craft artisanal monitoring solutions while their actual business logic—the thing customers pay for—runs on someone else’s computer.
So instead I should build an artisanal hosting solution on my own hardware that I purchase and maintain? I could drop proxmox on them and go from there, or K8s, or even just bare metal and systemd scripts.
But my business isn't about any of those things, its about X. How does owning and running my own hardware get me closer to delivering on X?
The OP's point is that if your monitoring solution dies, your customers don't even notice, so you shouldn't build it yourself. But if the service running your actual business logic dies, your customers get cut off, so you should build and maintain that part more directly. (And obviously this is a spectrum — you probably don't need to design your own CPU.)
if the service running your actual business logic dies
In a modern tech business that's everything from the frontend to the database though, including all the bits to keep that running at scale. That's too much for most companies to handle when they're starting and scaling. You'll need to compromise on that value early on, and you'll probably persuade yourself that it's tech debt you'll pay off later. But you won't, because you can't, and that will lead you to dislike the system you built.
It's much simpler and more motivating to accept that in any modern tech business has to rely on third parties, and the fact you pay them money means they probably won't screw it up. It has to be an accepted risk or you'll be paralysed by having too much to do.
No kidding. I just want one that I can use one handed again. I’m on the IPhone SE, have hands that can play an octave + 2 additional keys on a piano, and I can’t reach the whole screen with a single hand.
The trick to this is to attach a handle to the back of it. I'm using one that telescopes from the "popsockets" brand (I'm unaffiliated and have no idea how it compares with other brands). It makes it possible for me to access all parts of my screen holding it one handed. It should be a standard feature.
I want a handle on the back of my phone even less than I want a larger phone. I also refuse to use cases and any other contraption that adds further bulk.
I have had an excellent experience with the OhSnap grip. https://ohsnap.com/products/snap-grip It is significantly smaller than the popsocket and adds a strong magnet which can attach your phone to magnetic surfaces. It looks flimsy, but I've had it two years and even moved phones and it shows no signs of breaking.
That helps with reaching up, but my thumb also doesn't reach the far bottom corner either. I don't have a super-octave handspan but I don't have small hands either.
Thanks to their incredibly poor demos I believed until THIS MORNING that to do that maneuver, you had to start your downward swipe ON the little bar that's about 2px from the bottom of the screen (which works, but is nearly impossible with a case).
I'm glad other people have chimed in. It drives me insane that no one thought to make one-hand mode not change the width as well or be a total aspect change.
I found Nine Sols to be superior, much more engaging combat and more fluid as a whole, also with much darker story and more evil bosses.
Of course taste is subjective, it’s a great recommendation none the less.
Nine Sols was clearly built on top of Hollow Knight, but my take on the combat is a bit different, Hollow Knight and Nine Sols would be like Dark Souls/Elden Ring (HK) and Sekiro (NS), one is focused on fast movement and dodges while the other is more focused on parry and counter attack mechanics.
I enjoyed both games but I found that with the exception of the last boss Nine Sols was a way easier game after you figure out how to parry effectively.
I also enjoyed the whimsical art style of HK a bit more than the (as said in a comment) "taopunk" style of NS, but that's purely subjective.
But if you enjoy metroidvanias both are great games that you should try.
For me it was the other way around. In Nine Sols I got immediately stuck in the boss (mini-boss?) fight against two enemies and the flying gal.
Hollow Knight was difficult at times (Coliseum of Fools, Radiance) but it never felt unfair. Some fights (Mantis Lords, Grimm) are among the best times I've had playing a game
+1 for Nine Sols. Also the setting of the game which the studio dubbed "Taopunk" for its combination of Taoism and Cyberpunk is very unique artistically. Also it had a very endearing cast of characters. As good as Hollow Knight is, story and character-wise it was very hard to follow for me personally.
@@ -12,6 +12,8 @@ The 90s gaming console experience was:
1. Grab your game cartridge.
+1.5. Blow into the cartridge slot for some reason to make the game boot on the first try. But in reality you are slowly destroying the contacts and making the problem worse.
+
2. Insert cartridge into console.
3. Turn on console.
Fixed it.
Honestly though, the experience of just turning it on and being in game was great. I had access to an NES and an SNES growing up and have a lot of great memories playing games with friends.
1. buy your second game (130 DEM in 1995 / 109 EUR inflation-adjusted for 2025 / all the money you saved for weeks age-adjusted) for your new Sega Saturn.
2. notice it doesn't load on your console
3. be told that you have to send everything in to have it repaired (in retrospect find out that Saturns often had faulty CD drives)
4. wait three weeks (an eternity age-adjusted for a 12 year-old) until you get your console returned
In the early 90s a friend bought a five or six chamber Aga. He had lived in a house in Europe that had had one and he loved it. It cost a fortune to acquire and to install as the house had to be structurally reinforced to accommodate the weight of the oven. I remember that it took at least a couple of days to come up to a stable temperature across the whole oven. Each of the cooking chambers had a different temperature.
a subgenre of the family saga genre of literature ... typically interpreted to refer to "a tale of illicit rumpy-pumpy in the countryside" ... it offers a "gingham-checked world" associated with "thatched English villages" and "ladies in floral dresses".
with predictable results w.r.t. quality-of-living when your house already has central heating.
Agas used to be a very rural middle-class thing: it was how I imagine most countryside homes' heating and cooking worked, and it scaled from a modestly-sized cosy cottage to being in expansive stately homes. But postwar, and especially since the 1960s, Agas are just a status-symbol appliance to me.
Like, in North America, you know you've made it when you have a Wolf range and a Subzero fridge in your kitchen. In the UK, it's when you've got an Aga.
...probably because the only comfortable way to run the thing is by also having central air-conditioning installed and running full-blast while you use the thing.
Semi-related, but they aren’t the status symbol they used to be. I know a guy who did quite well out of removing Agas for a few years because they are so expensive to run. Apparently up to 20x the cost of more sensible equipment. They were sold for scrap metal value because people weren’t buying them any more. He charged them to remove it and got paid scrap value.
The worst one I heard was someone who paid £10k for their top end Aga, found it was costing £700 a month to run and it was scrap in under a year.
They'd be better off installing a small data centre.
But yes - AGAs are ridiculous Veblen goods, literally coal-fired technology repurposed for modern fuels, with modern fuel costs.
They stopped making the always-on models in 2022. The UK has ludicrously high energy prices because of regulatory capture by the fossil fuel lobby. So Agas remain a status symbol for a decreasingly small segment of minor aristocrats who don't care about running costs. But the bulk of the market used to be the aspirational middle classes, and they've mostly moved on.
For smaller cooking jobs an air fryer cooks faster and better, and costs a tiny fraction to buy and run.
> The UK has ludicrously high energy prices because of regulatory capture by the fossil fuel lobby.
I can't really agree with that. It's true the UK's energy (surely "power"?)-mix is depressingly natural-gas heavy, but I don't believe that's not due to regulatory capture: it's because natural-gas plants are what get approval to be built because 15 years ago no-one in the Lib/Tory-pact wanted to sign-off on new nuclear.
You're right. Wikipedia says 425kWh per week which in the UK would cost 26 pounds for gas. That's the two oven model, maybe he had a bigger unit which let's say used double, which comes to about 200 pounds per month still far away from 70o euros, but also pretty expensive to just run your oven.
The electric ones are just regular ovens in the traditional aesthetic, not on all the time.
They can be solid fuel, possibly oil too, but in recent decades mainly gas - not sure new solid fuel ones are even made, that would just be people who already have them or buying them second hand.
Up until the late 20th century, British homes were very poorly served for heating during their long damp winters. No insulation, no central heating, etc.
Coal was the usual source of energy, and coal fires were usually continually burning, being "banked" at night. In this context, the "always on" AGA was not so unusual.
So the AGA stove served not only as a cooker, but also as a source of heat, similar to masonry heaters. Many were also connected to a hot water tank.
The sales manual above states that the cost of running an AGA stove in 1935 was £4 per year, or £247 (~US$330) per year today.
And the inventor was blind! From the same article:
Dalén lost his sight in an explosion while developing his earlier invention, a porous substrate for storing gases, Agamassan. Forced to stay at home, Dalén discovered that his wife was exhausted by cooking. Although blind, he set out to develop a new stove that was capable of a range of culinary techniques and easy to use.
I would love to know how the blind guy who invented it did his day to day work of tinkering. The Wikipedia entry just says he made it but it seems like a big deal to do that when he did.
The link on the repo takes me to some site that wants me to “compile” papers for some reason.
Edit: nvm I found them hidden lower in the read me with a link to a different document.