Yes, many (if not most?) providers stopped taking insurance for various reasons. The rates provided by insurers are a fraction of the rates they can get charging out of pocket. And insurers try to shorten therapy sessions, or ask why a patient still needs therapy, etc.
I don’t know why mental health specifically has these issues out of all the medical professions though.
A twist on the old “what happens when you type google.com into your address bar and press enter” question. If I were answering I’d talk about a couple areas I can adapt from the repo below, and save some time to also talk about API services and DBs to differentiate it from the usual answer. It is indeed a fun question!
I reactivated to disconnect disqus. But twitter does not share email address with sites so i could not do forgot password. That is why it was my preferred login technique.
I have used Waze regularly since 2014, and my perception is that it plans more aggressive routes (trickier turns, using side streets, etc) to shave off a few more minutes than Maps, whereas Maps will stick to the major, less complicated routes. But I haven't used Maps for routing lately, so I wouldn't be surprised if Waze/Maps are more similar than I realize.
I stopped using Waze (I live in Los Angeles) because it would give a slightly faster route with unprotected left turns that was riskier, more stressful, and ultimately not much faster in reality.
I had wondered about that before. My guess is that Google considers Waze and Maps users to be different type of "navigators", with Waze being a self-selecting group of folks who want crazy routes to shave a few seconds here and there, while the Maps users are more mainstream and just want a sensible route with options. So they may have hesitated to give the "crazy" option to them.
Another thing, I suspect there's a significant resource cost in constantly re-evaluating these few-second saving opportunities that may not scale well to the size of Map's user base. Could be wrong here.
I am exactly one of those users which you describe and only use Waze for long trips and Maps for the rest. Waze urban navigation drives me crazy with the route it picks sometimes, hoping of shaving off a few seconds.
Friend of mine lives in South Pasadena. He mentions that since Waze he has a lot more traffic on the road behind his house, just people cutting through to save 30 seconds!
You're right, but I don't think there's any reason for the sarcasm. People are allowed to personally lament actions of others, while fully realizing and even supporting that they are legal. And even hope for circumstances changing, like I'm fully allowed to complain about the rain and wish for sunshine, without someone putting me down with "Oh no! A functioning ecosystem doing its job!".
People would even be allowed to try to effect change. In this case, it would mean weighing saving a likely insignificant amount of time for a subset of people, against residents of the street dealing with constant traffic. What is "fair" depends on the exact circumstances, but taken at face value, I suspect if one were to effect regulation such that speed bumps are added, or through traffic prohibited, or the path being made less convenient, then almost none of the insignificant-time-savers would even notice much. They'd take the new suggested route and be likely just as happy.
There are a lot of roads in LA that are gated or just dead end. [1,2,3] They drive me insane. It effectively makes a gated community and I doubt the property tax revenue covers the tax dollars that go into these neighborhoods. Roads are a public good and they should be usable by the public. I am fine with the alternative where we privatize them and let the cost of ownership and maintenance fall on the residents, once they're footing the entire bill they can choose who drives on the roads.
The sarcasm will continue until the NIMBYs improve.
Many public residential streets are not designed for heavy traffic use. I don't think it's unreasonable for local residents to be upset by the noise and congestion of people taking a shortcut off the highway to cut 30 seconds off their travel time.
It’s antisocial for someone driving across town to use a road that’s sized for local traffic only. If you’re doing a journey shared by thousands of others you should use the 10^3 capacity road, not the 10^1 capacity road.
The place where I work has a fridge full of beers. Every so often I see someone stick a couple in their bag, on their way home. Oh no! An employee taking beers intended for employees to consume!, right?
> An employee taking beers intended for employees to consume!, right?
In Germany, that is culturally accepted. It even has, as always in German, its own name: "Wegbier" or the pun version "Fuß-Pils" (a play on "athlete's foot").
"City and traffic planning" is a thing. You see, roads that were planned for the vehicle traffic of a neighborhood (=here in Germany, like one car a minute tops or lower) are usually built to lower standards than a road that is planned as a transit route.
The asphalt layers are thinner, ground support is spec'd for low and moderate traffic... that means that should such a road be subject to unplanned amounts of traffic, the roads will degrade way faster, particularly if heavy goods traffic comes into play.
Did you know that once upon a time there was no such thing as a speed limit?
Do you think we should return to those good old days? Or is there perhaps an argument to be made that new technologies can lead to suboptimal outcomes when operated within the bounds of regulations that didn't (and couldn't reasonably have been expected to) anticipate their development?
They do not seem to. Not for speeding, distracted driving, drunk driving, etc. There’s basically no traffic enforcement here. When was the last time you’ve seen a driver pulled over on a surface street? I think I’ve seen one in the last 10 years.
I use Waze but that part of it actually bugs me, because it's hard to tell if it's telling me to go on some side route for a real reason (avoiding a big accident) or just because it's guessing it will be 90 seconds faster.
Google Maps is surprisingly bad at handling dirt roads around my area. It has happily directed me down many awful roads and a couple times through open land without any visible road at all. The estimated travel times can be pretty funny too, like estimating 5 miles down an abysmal dirt road should only take 7 minutes.
I know these sorts of scenarios aren't a priority for them, but I'm surprised they don't even have a roughly accurate estimate given how much location tracking info they collect. If 40 people this year have driven a stretch of road with a range of travel times from 25-40 minutes, an estimate of 7 minutes seems pretty obviously wrong and easy to catch.
I've seen Google Maps try to direct people down "roads" that would cause problems on a horse. And some of these errors have persisted for years, despite many reports to Google.
We have this problem in VT. There is a road here called the notch, which is too narrow for a semi truck to pass, and there is no way to turn around once you get stuck in it. This means that if you drive into it, you have to call someone to help you back down the mountain, and you get a big fine.
This results in 5-10 semis getting stuck every year. There is nothing that google is willing to do to help the state out. The state has put up signage telling drivers their GPS is wrong, and they ignore it.
In Northern Austria you find a lot of "no gps" signs at the start of agricultural roads. Seems that many lorry drivers rely on google maps for navigation and those small roads are ill-suited for their vehicles, e.g. due to weight limits or sharp turns.
While not on the same level of dangerousness Google Maps will also route me through a nature reserve, with no street lights, cattle grids and no snow plowing in winter. All while the normal highway is 5km to the east and a little bit backed up.
This highlights that routing algorithms do not understand the concept of safe driving and cannot evaluate how dangerous it is to just pick any alternative route.
I had this problem often with google maps trying to aggressively optimize routes while i lived on the peninsula. Usually involving taking 7 extra turns and hopping on to 101 for a quarter mile in order to save thirty seconds. It took me a lot of extra time to feel comfortable navigating myself (and gave me the impression that a lot of things were much further way) because of the bad navigation… not to mention rage inducting missed turns because of lag or somewhat ambiguous intersections. Very much in favor of a “no crazy uncle secret shortcut mode”. I don’t need to drive through a residential neighborhood or take the exit immediately after the highway entrance or take the next seven lefts, thank you. I moved back to the Midwest where such shortcuts rarely exists and that problem is just one less.
I've started using Waze again because its UI allows me to control music at the same time as navigation is on. But it does aggressively reroute me during heavy traffic. I've started to ignore those though; going off the highway through small side- and country roads might save a minute but it's a lot of extra effort.
The advertisements are getting more intrusive for Waze. You can’t tap the directions area to see the rest of the set of directions until you tap out of the advertisement.
Waze routes have started to look more like maps routes though with the environmental gas saving trip focus instead of the most direct or fastest route.
I may try Apple Maps or something else. The waze directions don’t account for traffic and the capability to follow the directions.
I have had the exact opposite experience, and maps also generally seems to have trouble accurately determining location compared to waze. Last few years, maps tends to suggest routes that might shave a few seconds if you never needed to stop to make turns, but otherwise end up being much slower, not to mention have many more traffic flow changes to manouver through. Maps also frequently places me on adjacent or cross streets to where I'm driving, whereas waze actually seems to realize that no, I did not just jump my car up a 20 foot berm and over a sound barrier to drive down a parallel road.
> maps tends to suggest routes that might shave a few seconds if you never needed to stop to make turns
I've definitely noticed this getting worse; it likes to suggest I do a zig-zag route across rural areas. If I didn't have to decelerate for a 90 degree turn it'd probably be much faster, but I do. Maybe the Maps devs are all in fast-cornering supercars.
Side streets really shouldn't be used as major thoroughfares. That's sort of an anti-feature for me - I don't like ruining a neighbourhood by using it as a shortcut all the time.
I've had that issue with maps TBH driving up and down 35 in Texas(among other things). Taking me off the interstate on a detour through the hood with a dozen turns, stop signs, speed bumps, unprotected street crossings... To save 2 minutes on a 4+ hour trip.
It's well-accepted in psychology/sociology that moral development extends beyond simply following the law, i.e. using the law as a stand-in for moral principles. E.g. in Kohlberg's stages of moral development[1], there is a post-conventional stage where an individual develops a moral code independent of laws, and views laws as a social contract that can be disobeyed if it violates his/her morals. Laws are a good guideline, but are not an absolute moral framework.
This has been my experience also. I finished the Nix Pills, and got some personal Python/Haskell projects built using nixpkgs by following the nixpkgs language-specific documentation, but anything off the beaten path is going to involve lots of blog posts and clicking through source code. For example in the Haskell world there are so many blog posts that go in different directions from the nixpkgs docs, using flakes, haskell.nix, etc.
We adopted it in an organization of ~100 engineers, and the only way it’s been possible is having a full-time Nix team writing custom Nix functions specific for our environment and projects. That team also does “Nix help desk” work for one-off questions.
Once it works, it does a great job of hermetic builds, easy Docker images, easy to add cross-repo dependencies mixing C++/Python etc. But there are too many rough edges I can’t recommend it in the general case over Dockerfiles, Bazel or language-specific tooling, Cmake, etc. Pick something simpler, ideally whatever is popular for your language.
Agreed, I see this often where people confuse their marginal income (e.g. $0) with their total income. Most are paid a salary and don’t just choose to work an extra hour on a moment’s notice. Let alone the possibility of working 24x7 and having billable hours like a switch they can flip at any time.
The framing of something “costing me my time” has never made sense to me especially when someone tries to actually quantify it.
Even if you can't make money during that time, time is inherently limited and most people value their limited time on the planet. Some may value that time more than some arbitrary dollar amount.
You can't reallocate time and money "on a moment's notice", but why does that matter?
Most events can be moved around, so even if there's a big delay on changing your work hours you can still exchange extra free time with extra money.
And people generally can choose how many hours they want to be paid for.
It's easy to quantify, it's just something that happens in bigger shifts. One hour by itself probably doesn't make you change your work hours. But as more and more hours pile up, eventually you might chose to reduce your work week by half a day. Or if you find yourself doing unimportant and uninteresting things very often, and with a shortage of cash, you might increase your work week by half a day.
Tailscale has been a godsend for my team, saving us quite a bit of effort with VPN/firewall administration. There are very few rough edges, and it tends to just work (at least at our scale of a few thousand nodes). We moved over about 8 months ago and have had no issues since. I’ve also moved my home network (RPis, NAS, etc) to their free tier so I can access it remotely.
Some features that are basically effortless and made me choose it over WireGuard and other VPN solutions: easy provisioning, key exchange, IP assignment, ACLs
Employers are setting GPA cutoffs and checking transcripts for some of the competitive jobs for fresh grads and interns. Not unusual to see a hard GPA cutoff of 3.7, and the employer wants a copy of your transcript sent directly from the university.
As always, when an arbitrary metric becomes a goal, it will be gamed. Especially with the path dependency nowadays where your first job sets the course of your early career. Just as your academics/leadership in high school can make or break whether you get into the prestigious universities, which will quite literally pay dividends ten or twenty years down the line.
Sometimes, the most driven students are the ones cheating because the stakes are too high. If an employer has two viable candidates, one from MIT and one from a state school, they’ll go with the MIT grad as a heuristic. Or similarly if FAANG is inundated with resumes for entry-level jobs, they’ll use school/GPA as an easy first-pass filter.
I don’t see cheating changing until the incentives are minimized. Lower GPA cutoffs + casting a wider net for the entry-level roles and setting a fair skills-based bar.
First job out of college (July 2013) was w/ an employer (Bay Area company whose name rhymes w/ Crisco) who marketed all of these things (GPA cutoffs, checking transcripts, etc). My college transcript was....less than exemplary but I made a point not to mention my GPA anywhere and bet on the interviewers not asking about it (they didnt). Got the job by speaking w/ a recruiter at a career fair despite not having the degree they were looking for.
Three months after starting the job, I got an email from HR asking all new grad hires to send in their transcripts which I conveniently "forgot" to do. Never heard from them ever again after ignoring that first email.
My feeling here is that these are just vanity metrics that companies like to parade around to signal how "prestigious" their employees & hiring practices are.
