Eh, they might leverage it for a while. Uber's in a lot of places that you can't get Prime Now, and a quick glance says that Prime Now only works for Whole Foods in numerous of the smaller cities. So, yeah, they're building some last-mile, but they're opening with Whole Foods - which, maybe, is great, if I want to pay Whole Foods prices and have someone else pick out my food. I'd rather see regular Prime bumped up to next-day for items that are located close to you.
Actually, the whole proximity thing was a big bonus for Monoprice back in the day - it turned out that I lived within next-day UPS Ground range of one of their warehouses. Pay for cheap shipping, get it tomorrow. The only problem was that you couldn't shop by warehouse, so you couldn't know when something was coming from across the country. If you needed a thumb drive ASAP, you could get boned by next-day shipping, or you could get boned by going to a brick-and-mortar. It looks like Amazon will only sell you the stuff that you really can get today on this service.
It's pretty good for one use case I can think of: heavy nonperishables. Otherwise, yeah, I just don't see most of the appeal, and they're definitely competing against Amazon in that space. Good luck with that, because Amazon already owns a grocery store.
Haha, totally irrelevant side note: I was at a liquor store (off-licence), heard the clerk mention a question about how old a VP has to be. Said yeah, he has to meet the same criteria as a president - 35, native born. The customer in front of me said “wow, you know your civics”. I looked at her and said yes, you taught them to me. Buying booze with former teachers... priceless. Nice lady, liked her as a student.
Some vaccines are very cheap, nearly free. Not all of them are. Hepatitis B and yellow fever, for example, which cost around $70 per injection at my county health clinic. Neither is covered by insurance because they are considered low-risk diseases in the US, although you generally have to get the hep B series to work as a doctor or nurse.
Well, here's the thing: a lot of "hackable" stuff consists of things like pacemakers, that really have almost no security in place at all - they just rely on the fact that they have failsafe modes (and they do), and on the fact that very few people have a pacemaker interrogator handy.
Aside from that, medical records have to be remotely accessible if there is to be any point in having an EMR - paper charts had their downsides, but physical security against outside attacks was pretty good, and you certainly couldn't do a mass-scale info swipe. My wife and I are both doctors, and she regularly does work while we're on vacations. She's looking up records, reading notes, interpreting labs... sure, you could lock her out, but you will kill most of the value of EMR when you do so. You'll also be requiring most doctors to drive in every time they get a phone call from the ER - which is not going to be a popular move.
Hey, you, IT guy? I'm a doctor. Here's the other side of the same thing:
I didn't want the hospital IT system I got. They asked me (and all the other doctors) what we wanted, then ignored our responses. I went to administration to tell them that I wanted to be part of every committee that had something to do with the EMR purchase and deployment (however bad I may be, I can guarantee you I'm better than almost anyone else you'll get), and got ignored. So... nobody cares what the people who use the thing on a daily basis think? Not a good starting point.
Multi-factor ID: not really a major issue when, say, I'm at home and want to log in to do a bit of work; that's pretty straightforward. But here's the thing about the ten-minute lockout and twenty-second login process: I don't have a desk at work. I migrate from place to place, and I do it a lot. Twenty seconds per login is around thirty minutes of my day, on average. If you can't come up with a faster, better solution that allows me to do my work, the problem isn't with me - it's with your solution. And I'm somewhat unusual among doctors, because I only work at one hospital - many have to memorize information at three or four different hospitals, all with different criteria on what qualifies as an adequate password and different time frames for changing them.
Forced encryption on devices: nothing is stored on my device, so it doesn't need encryption except for during transmission of information. I've seen this play out in very negative ways, because "forced encryption" is generally a synonym for "managed by IT" - which means that the power-mad person in charge of IT is watching what I do with my iPad when I'm at home. My tastes are pretty vanilla, but if you want to monitor everything I do with my devices and read all my email, then (at a bare minimum) you can pay for dedicated devices, ISP, and home office to put them in, and you can give me a work email address for hospital business - I'm not an employee of the hospital, so I don't have one currently.
I don't hate IT people. You do a difficult and largely thankless job. But from the user's perspective, we have a lot of "tr0ub4dor&3" vs "correct horse battery staple" problems. My current work password is really simple - about as simple as one can be if you have to have a capital letter, a lowercase letter, and numbers, with a minimum length of eight characters, changed every three months, with no recycling of the past nine passwords. I've got a good password for my important personal things. It is not going to show up in a dictionary attack, I won't forget it, and even if you know me really well, it's not an easy guess - but I don't have ten passwords like that.
Technically, I’m not making money off them, but I am getting my rides to the airport subsidized by a bunch of VC’s as long as they keep operating, so... it’s not all downsides.
Flexibility is a big bonus. Talked with one driver whose regular job was OTR trucker, he kept ending up with short stretches at home between his usual assignments and started driving for Uber because it got him out of the house and brought in a little money. No way that guy would have bothered with working a traditional taxi job where you have to pay the company to get one of their cars for the whole day.
It afffects the used-car market significantly, though. Had an Uber driver who mentioned that the rules for an Uber Black require that the car be less than a certain age - five years, I think - and so, in the fourth quarter of the year, all the drivers who had a car that was about to age out had to replace them. Result? A six-year-old car plummeted in value, and he was able to pay for a flight and hotel to buy a car thousands of miles away with how much he saved vs buying one locally.
Which raises the costs, and thus partly determines whether or not they bother to sell it in your country. I've lost track of how many people (mainly Brits, though that's probably just an English-language bias) I've seen on the net complain about how expensive their electronics are (vs. in the US), and in the next paragraph talk about how (e.g.) the consumer-protection laws they have mean that you can always do a warranty return to the store that sold you the device, rather than to the manufacturer. That kind of service isn't free, you know... our consumer protections are pretty minimal, but they are reflected in the lower prices we pay.
You don't have to have flood insurance if you can pay for your house. That's a requirement from your mortgage owner, not the government. And owning a house in hurricane territory is risky.
Maybe your CCP didn’t. Mine did. It was one of the reasons I held out until I was in the database for other reasons. I didn’t like it, but it happened while I was in medical school, and so
I could either drop out and try to find a job that coukd pay off a house-worth of loans without having “MD” after my name, or get printed.
And once you’ve gotten printed, there is no point in not taking advantage of it. You do you.
Lots of jobs make you get fingerprinted - I'm in healthcare. I said fuck it, if I'm already in the database, I might as well enjoy the benefits. Signed up for a concealed carry permit and Global Entry. I can take a gun just about anywhere I want to, and immigration takes about one minute.
Five years ago, the average Uber driver was more likely to be a professional driver. They had no presence in smaller cities, they had a lot less UberX and a lot more Uber Black. Today, in my home town, it's still just UberX - no fancy options, the best you can get is UberXL so you can have some luggage space. But we do have Uber...
As I've said elsewhere, I'm happy to burn VC money for cheap rides, but I'd use Uber or Lyft even if they weren't cheaper than official taxis. I know what I'm getting and who drives it, I never have to worry about bullshit claims that the credit card machine doesn't work, I don't have to carry cash at all. All of those are very valuable qualities. Do they screw drivers over? Probably so, but traditional cab companies are little if any better under ideal conditions.
And every handoff is an added risk. This is well known and documented in healthcare, which is why you may find a three-shift nursing system on regular floors, but all ICU’s run two-shift systems. Fewer handoffs, more familiarity with the patient, better outcomes.
Well, yes, but is that a thing in Spain? It makes sense in the US federal or UK national government, but most local governments aren’t big enough for there to be an “opposition”. Either you win, or you lose, but the losers don’t have anything like the “minority leader” position found in the US House or Senate.
I’ve seen this in action. A locally-owned shopping center was sold to a large retail management company a few years ago. They immediately started pushing out the locally-owned businesses and filling the spaces with national retailers. Why? Big companies don’t ever miss the rent. I used to go there at least once a month; I haven’t been to a single one of the new places. It struck me as a penny-wise, pound-foolish move, but I guess they know their business.
The average person I know certainly eats a non home cooked meal at least once a week. How many people do you know who never buy breakfast or lunch at work? I mean, never? It doesn’t have to be a steakhouse to count. You can get two small burgers for under $2.50 most places; not good quality, but it’s cheap, it’s reasonably filling, and it takes almost no time.
If you want a completely unlocked iPhone, you have to go to Apple. Don’t know if they carry them in their stores - at least at first, you had to order online to get an unlocked X (with free ship-to-store). Also, the unlocked ones were not available on launch day. Maybe six weeks later.
Yep. Hell, twenty-some years ago, I was dating my chemistry lab partner. She took a senior elective on “Women in Science”, taught by the women’s studies faculty. She said it was a joke, making a huge deal out of relative nobodies as though they were all Marie Curie.
Your thoughts are undoubtedly true, but: it’s open to the kitchen (so, noisy) , and there’s nowhere to put floor speakers that would not be staggeringly ugly. Also, cats live in this area, so you can pretty much write off anything scratchable. Thanks though; if I ever buy a house with a media space, I’ll keep it in mind.
I can’t speak for everyone, but my house came with in-ceiling speakers that would be a nightmare to get to, and the primary TV room is open with the kitchen - so it has tile floors. A good stereo system would be wasted in there even if I could figure out how to get good speakers in.
Assume every surface is dirty. Dispense paper towel, turn water on, dispense soap, wash hands, take towel. If inadequately dry, use existing towel to operate dispenser again. Throw towel away after using it to open the door to the bathroom. None of this process is improved with those scanners.
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Eh, they might leverage it for a while. Uber's in a lot of places that you can't get Prime Now, and a quick glance says that Prime Now only works for Whole Foods in numerous of the smaller cities. So, yeah, they're building some last-mile, but they're opening with Whole Foods - which, maybe, is great, if I want to pay Whole Foods prices and have someone else pick out my food. I'd rather see regular Prime bumped up to next-day for items that are located close to you.
Actually, the whole proximity thing was a big bonus for Monoprice back in the day - it turned out that I lived within next-day UPS Ground range of one of their warehouses. Pay for cheap shipping, get it tomorrow. The only problem was that you couldn't shop by warehouse, so you couldn't know when something was coming from across the country. If you needed a thumb drive ASAP, you could get boned by next-day shipping, or you could get boned by going to a brick-and-mortar. It looks like Amazon will only sell you the stuff that you really can get today on this service.
It's pretty good for one use case I can think of: heavy nonperishables. Otherwise, yeah, I just don't see most of the appeal, and they're definitely competing against Amazon in that space. Good luck with that, because Amazon already owns a grocery store.
Haha, totally irrelevant side note: I was at a liquor store (off-licence), heard the clerk mention a question about how old a VP has to be. Said yeah, he has to meet the same criteria as a president - 35, native born. The customer in front of me said “wow, you know your civics”. I looked at her and said yes, you taught them to me. Buying booze with former teachers... priceless. Nice lady, liked her as a student.
Some vaccines are very cheap, nearly free. Not all of them are. Hepatitis B and yellow fever, for example, which cost around $70 per injection at my county health clinic. Neither is covered by insurance because they are considered low-risk diseases in the US, although you generally have to get the hep B series to work as a doctor or nurse.
Well, here's the thing: a lot of "hackable" stuff consists of things like pacemakers, that really have almost no security in place at all - they just rely on the fact that they have failsafe modes (and they do), and on the fact that very few people have a pacemaker interrogator handy.
Aside from that, medical records have to be remotely accessible if there is to be any point in having an EMR - paper charts had their downsides, but physical security against outside attacks was pretty good, and you certainly couldn't do a mass-scale info swipe. My wife and I are both doctors, and she regularly does work while we're on vacations. She's looking up records, reading notes, interpreting labs... sure, you could lock her out, but you will kill most of the value of EMR when you do so. You'll also be requiring most doctors to drive in every time they get a phone call from the ER - which is not going to be a popular move.
Hey, you, IT guy? I'm a doctor. Here's the other side of the same thing:
I didn't want the hospital IT system I got. They asked me (and all the other doctors) what we wanted, then ignored our responses. I went to administration to tell them that I wanted to be part of every committee that had something to do with the EMR purchase and deployment (however bad I may be, I can guarantee you I'm better than almost anyone else you'll get), and got ignored. So... nobody cares what the people who use the thing on a daily basis think? Not a good starting point.
Multi-factor ID: not really a major issue when, say, I'm at home and want to log in to do a bit of work; that's pretty straightforward. But here's the thing about the ten-minute lockout and twenty-second login process: I don't have a desk at work. I migrate from place to place, and I do it a lot. Twenty seconds per login is around thirty minutes of my day, on average. If you can't come up with a faster, better solution that allows me to do my work, the problem isn't with me - it's with your solution. And I'm somewhat unusual among doctors, because I only work at one hospital - many have to memorize information at three or four different hospitals, all with different criteria on what qualifies as an adequate password and different time frames for changing them.
Forced encryption on devices: nothing is stored on my device, so it doesn't need encryption except for during transmission of information. I've seen this play out in very negative ways, because "forced encryption" is generally a synonym for "managed by IT" - which means that the power-mad person in charge of IT is watching what I do with my iPad when I'm at home. My tastes are pretty vanilla, but if you want to monitor everything I do with my devices and read all my email, then (at a bare minimum) you can pay for dedicated devices, ISP, and home office to put them in, and you can give me a work email address for hospital business - I'm not an employee of the hospital, so I don't have one currently.
I don't hate IT people. You do a difficult and largely thankless job. But from the user's perspective, we have a lot of "tr0ub4dor&3" vs "correct horse battery staple" problems. My current work password is really simple - about as simple as one can be if you have to have a capital letter, a lowercase letter, and numbers, with a minimum length of eight characters, changed every three months, with no recycling of the past nine passwords. I've got a good password for my important personal things. It is not going to show up in a dictionary attack, I won't forget it, and even if you know me really well, it's not an easy guess - but I don't have ten passwords like that.
Technically, I’m not making money off them, but I am getting my rides to the airport subsidized by a bunch of VC’s as long as they keep operating, so... it’s not all downsides.
Flexibility is a big bonus. Talked with one driver whose regular job was OTR trucker, he kept ending up with short stretches at home between his usual assignments and started driving for Uber because it got him out of the house and brought in a little money. No way that guy would have bothered with working a traditional taxi job where you have to pay the company to get one of their cars for the whole day.
It afffects the used-car market significantly, though. Had an Uber driver who mentioned that the rules for an Uber Black require that the car be less than a certain age - five years, I think - and so, in the fourth quarter of the year, all the drivers who had a car that was about to age out had to replace them. Result? A six-year-old car plummeted in value, and he was able to pay for a flight and hotel to buy a car thousands of miles away with how much he saved vs buying one locally.
Which raises the costs, and thus partly determines whether or not they bother to sell it in your country. I've lost track of how many people (mainly Brits, though that's probably just an English-language bias) I've seen on the net complain about how expensive their electronics are (vs. in the US), and in the next paragraph talk about how (e.g.) the consumer-protection laws they have mean that you can always do a warranty return to the store that sold you the device, rather than to the manufacturer. That kind of service isn't free, you know... our consumer protections are pretty minimal, but they are reflected in the lower prices we pay.
You don't have to have flood insurance if you can pay for your house. That's a requirement from your mortgage owner, not the government. And owning a house in hurricane territory is risky.
Maybe your CCP didn’t. Mine did. It was one of the reasons I held out until I was in the database for other reasons. I didn’t like it, but it happened while I was in medical school, and so I could either drop out and try to find a job that coukd pay off a house-worth of loans without having “MD” after my name, or get printed.
And once you’ve gotten printed, there is no point in not taking advantage of it. You do you.
Lots of jobs make you get fingerprinted - I'm in healthcare. I said fuck it, if I'm already in the database, I might as well enjoy the benefits. Signed up for a concealed carry permit and Global Entry. I can take a gun just about anywhere I want to, and immigration takes about one minute.
Doesn't help if he's up front about it.
Five years ago, the average Uber driver was more likely to be a professional driver. They had no presence in smaller cities, they had a lot less UberX and a lot more Uber Black. Today, in my home town, it's still just UberX - no fancy options, the best you can get is UberXL so you can have some luggage space. But we do have Uber...
As I've said elsewhere, I'm happy to burn VC money for cheap rides, but I'd use Uber or Lyft even if they weren't cheaper than official taxis. I know what I'm getting and who drives it, I never have to worry about bullshit claims that the credit card machine doesn't work, I don't have to carry cash at all. All of those are very valuable qualities. Do they screw drivers over? Probably so, but traditional cab companies are little if any better under ideal conditions.
The locals are still around, they just moved. The replacements weren’t even in the same lines of business, so they didn't take anything away.
And every handoff is an added risk. This is well known and documented in healthcare, which is why you may find a three-shift nursing system on regular floors, but all ICU’s run two-shift systems. Fewer handoffs, more familiarity with the patient, better outcomes.
Well, yes, but is that a thing in Spain? It makes sense in the US federal or UK national government, but most local governments aren’t big enough for there to be an “opposition”. Either you win, or you lose, but the losers don’t have anything like the “minority leader” position found in the US House or Senate.
I’ve seen this in action. A locally-owned shopping center was sold to a large retail management company a few years ago. They immediately started pushing out the locally-owned businesses and filling the spaces with national retailers. Why? Big companies don’t ever miss the rent. I used to go there at least once a month; I haven’t been to a single one of the new places. It struck me as a penny-wise, pound-foolish move, but I guess they know their business.
The average person I know certainly eats a non home cooked meal at least once a week. How many people do you know who never buy breakfast or lunch at work? I mean, never? It doesn’t have to be a steakhouse to count. You can get two small burgers for under $2.50 most places; not good quality, but it’s cheap, it’s reasonably filling, and it takes almost no time.
If you want a completely unlocked iPhone, you have to go to Apple. Don’t know if they carry them in their stores - at least at first, you had to order online to get an unlocked X (with free ship-to-store). Also, the unlocked ones were not available on launch day. Maybe six weeks later.
Yep. Hell, twenty-some years ago, I was dating my chemistry lab partner. She took a senior elective on “Women in Science”, taught by the women’s studies faculty. She said it was a joke, making a huge deal out of relative nobodies as though they were all Marie Curie.
Your thoughts are undoubtedly true, but: it’s open to the kitchen (so, noisy) , and there’s nowhere to put floor speakers that would not be staggeringly ugly. Also, cats live in this area, so you can pretty much write off anything scratchable. Thanks though; if I ever buy a house with a media space, I’ll keep it in mind.
I can’t speak for everyone, but my house came with in-ceiling speakers that would be a nightmare to get to, and the primary TV room is open with the kitchen - so it has tile floors. A good stereo system would be wasted in there even if I could figure out how to get good speakers in.
Assume every surface is dirty. Dispense paper towel, turn water on, dispense soap, wash hands, take towel. If inadequately dry, use existing towel to operate dispenser again. Throw towel away after using it to open the door to the bathroom. None of this process is improved with those scanners.