One of the B2B newsletters I used to help manage costs $25k per year to subscribe to. When email security systems started auto-clicking, we fielded a bunch of angry phone calls before we figured it out.
I know there’s a vocal contingent here on HN that hates all email, but the reality is that email is heavily used for things that people want.
It's fairly common to see old techniques demonstrated, as those are the ones practical on an artisanal scale. I would guess the modern techniques are practiced in fewer locations, although obviously they account for the vast majority of glass production. But I'd have thought a pool of molten metal is not the kind of thing a small workshop can just keep around .
I try this anytime I get tired of a phone tree, works about half the time. Useful trick I picked up from someone twice my age and has paid dividends in time saved.
A follow up question(s) that occurs to me are: “Do neurons die?”
What is the lifecycle of a neuron? Does it get replaced? Will a neuron, whose connections to the broader brain decayed or otherwise went away, continue to “live”?
I’ll go ask ChatGPT, but spare this rigorous community the unreliable answers to my passive interest.
So without sharing what ChatGPT said, I will say that assuming it is correct it makes a lot of sense on this topic alone why individuals engaged in lifelong learning live longer and are less prone to Alzheimers.
And yet they do nothing for the auxiliary staff that the medical industry demands to provide the unskilled labor that often play a critical role in patient outcome.
Please do me a favor (yes, me, the stranger on the internet) and look up how much a CNA makes at your local hospital, and compare that to the cost of living for your area. Now check how much your facilities staff makes.
I know you’re talking about the AMA, and I know my grievances are not necessarily well directed at that organization, but I’m at a loss as to where change for these critical workers will come from if not the physicians who hold the most leverage against the bean counters.
Turning patients to prevent bed sores, emptying catheters, providing the most basic of care all falls down to the CNA in a modern clinical setting, who in my wife’s firsthand experience makes less than a barista at Starbucks. Literally, she left her CNA job doing all of the above and more, to make more as a Barista. Your auxiliary staff is critical in preventing hospital acquired infections, and ensuring adequate care is provided for vulnerable patients who cannot assist themselves.
If you get the opportunity, go to your nearest oncology ward and interview some of the CNA staff about their experience as a CNA. Ask them how often a nurse is available to assist with turning a bariatric patient. There is a world of exploitative labor below you, supporting the high profit margins of the American medical system.
The rough edges in Windows are like cheap plastic trim pieces in a BMW. The rough edges in Linux are like scuffs on the dashboard of a well loved farm truck. One is an insult, the other is a testament of character.
Unless you double dip by increasing your on-paper costs via R&D / capex and decreasing your required expenditure via optimization of the former (while also increasing your revenue potential via infrastructure buildout). While on paper your costs are going up, in practice your profit potential is skyrocketing yoy.
How so? You have to keep paying for everything, or your profits will be taken away. Your profit potential is always and only limited by your ability to cover costs in advance. Saving on necessary expenditures brings you zero benefit, because any necessary expenditure that you eliminate must be replaced by an unnecessary one, or profits will go down instead of up.
The same way the tech industry currently does it. You spend all your profit on research, product development, marketing, etc. to increase your overall revenue when (in the short term) you could simply stop spending money on all those things and keep only enough engineers on-staff to keep your existing products stable and customers happy.
By comparison, a construction company cannot stop buying materials in order to continue generating revenue, and they cannot reduce their workforce significantly and continue taking on the same types of jobs.
In the instance of Bell Labs, those researchers were the 'unnecessary to business' route through which to increase revenue (by both increasing costs and also building a technology-based moat) and since those who control a company typically only profit by 'skimming the cream' increasing revenue without increasing profit seems like an excellent way to increase the value of the company to those who are interested in doing so.