Here there be sharks...

To be a fair program it should not cause an undue burden on the participating stores.

Store A could advertise that it will provide a 10% discount to SNAP recipients. Now Stores B,C,D,etc.. have to match or beat to be competitive. This would ultimately introduce competitiveness into the market where it was meant to assist those less fortunate.

Offering a discount is assisting the less fortunate, as far as I can tell: They will get more food per dollar on their bridge card, costing the government less. This is (almost) the same dynamic as forbidding Medicare to negotiate drug prices, isn't it?

I suppose chains could work around this by just lowering prices in neighborhoods with a lot of people on SNAP, which would actually be even better IMO, because it means lower food prices for entire low income neighborhoods, possibly even pushing shoppers from other neighborhoods to shop in these places and bring more money into the community. I would drive to the other side of the tracks if all my groceries cost 10% less.

In Ohio we call that "driving to Kentucky."

To do that without being abused by rich bargain-hunters, you can add in the Costco membership model with geo-discounted signups.

Now you're back to discriminating instead of treating all purchasers the same way, which was the whole point of the theorized workaround.

Geo-discounted membership fees aren’t food stamps pricing discrimination under the USDA restrictions. I’m not trying to unilaterally eliminate pricing differentials based on income, I’m just trying to find a way for a grocery store to lower the costs of food, without being exploited by wealthy people, during a food stamps crisis. I suspect the USDA can’t regulate club membership discounts, but someone else can research that.

...and then they came for me, and nobody was left

My code contains no NOTEs,TODOs,FIXMEs or Comments, for as Programmer, I have transcended space and time to the final abstraction, and no longer write any code, only long complicated manual procedures, which I then outsource to third parties, who in true programming fashion use AI.

Perpetual energy, Zero point energy, warp drive, gravity manipulation, teleportation

They are basically attempting to social-engineer the sale. Building a meaningful relationship over time to eventually exploit into a purchase.

If its Boeing, I'm not Blowing!

And to think I was almost ready to hire you for my branding needs

Basically, this is what college should be teaching you - how to research. What good does are useless facts? I don't want to walk around cluttered with a dictionary - I want to know where to look in that dictionary. Obviously in the sciences there are facts that you should know, but even with math, its more about how to derive the formula, than actually memorizing it. I mean, their called "Research Papers" right?

Totally agree. I remember the phrase “learning how to think” being thrown around.

I also remember not being explicitly taught that.

It sort of seems like trying to find enlightenment by chopping wood and carrying water at a monastery.

If critical thinking is something that spontaneously emerges in a learning environment, maybe we shouldn’t sell it as a benefit. “Some students experience deep insight into the nature of the mind. Results not typical.”

Also, being a coveted occupation ensures that there will always be a pool of people fighting for it. Scarcity drives demand.

Not always.

If I sell garden gnomes wearing knitted hats, but I only make three a year and sell to only people who drive yellow cars, I doubt I could earn a decent living off this

Don’t be obtuse. You’re comparing garden gnomes with healthcare.

I mentioned garden gnomes as an example of how supply side economics and “scarcity drives demand” doesn’t work.

The post you replied to scoped their statement to „coveted“ applications. No one actually believes scarcity drives demand in all cases.

The grammar of the sentence, as written, would really indicate otherwise. Written in the post: "Scarcity drives demand." (exact quote)

The sub-text is that doctors are slightly corrupt and wish to be payed more, and therefore are incetivized to reduce the total number of doctors.

After reading the travails of what this doctor is going through, that seems like a very callous take, insulting even.

It’d be callous and insulting if it was a reasoned position.

IDK if needs to be reasoned or not. I'm imagining someone making these comments to the author's face after having been read the article. The 'callous' part comes from disregarding everything in the article to go on some great tangent about the AMA and artificial scarcity of doctors.

What's more, it seems that this article has triggered a reflexive anti-union stance, when it's more a hallmark of a place where capitalism does not work well. Why doesn't that hospital have more doctors? Surely, they could have found someone additional if they wanted. The hospital did not have to schedule every surgery as if they all required the average procedure time. The hospital could invest in better IT infrastructure and have software that was not a drag to use. Surely the hospital could have someone help the doctor not make 70+ calls over the course of a shift in addition to everything else they do. This blog post is not about a general scarcity of doctors; there's lots that could be done by the hospital investing in its staff and outcomes without hiring a single additional doctor.

Being a business means they have to optimize for profit (to at least some non trivial degree), or die.

Many hospitals are run by non profit organizations to help reduce this problem. However even they cannot run at a loss overall for long. Bankruptcy doesn’t help anyone actually provide services, after all.

Gov’t has different incentives - but then care is strongly controlled and limited by public policy, for better or worse.

And an organization that is able to optimize to produce more value than they consume (aka is more profitable) can take more risks, expand better, have more capital to invest in training, equipment, etc, be more competitive in who they hire, and have better and more comfortable facilities if they want.

And being a Dr. can be really miserable sometimes, and the training is also really hard and miserable.

Some (surgeons, esp. plastic surgery) optimize for maximum $$ for misery, usually. Others (pediatrics) optimize for maximum ‘feel goods’ for misery, usually. Most others are somewhere in between.

Either way, if they didn’t want/need the money, they’d be going to medicine sans frontiers or working in rural medicine eh?

Skipping some quibbles,would you agree that some optimizations for profit would lead to business death?

Eg, businesses that cheat and get caught. Businesses that over consume and can no longer produce.Also, that optimization can have the opposite effect. Eg, optimize revenue by showing max ads, with max ads users start to flee. A hospital could optimize for patientoutcomes, and then do better because the patients stay around.

This overall though assumes that free market principles work in healthcare. Those principles tend to assume consumer choice.

Don't be a pain. All analogies are wrong, but they can still be illustrative

I would be curious if their commits could be analyzed for patterns that could then be used to detect commits from their other account

One thing that is annoying is that many open source projects have been getting "garbage commits" apparently from people looking to "build cred" for resumes or such.

Easier and easier to hide this junk in amongst them.

annoying ... and convenient for some!

There was a DARPA program on this topic called Social Cyber. [1]

1. https://www.darpa.mil/program/hybrid-ai-to-protect-integrity...