Around the turn of the century, my grandmother lamented how Wal-Mart had ruined the shopping experience in her small town. When the local hardware store and other stores closed, she ended up only with Wal-Mart where she said the employees didn't know anything and couldn't really help you. Anecdotal, I know, but this is a common refrain throughout the country, that by using their monopoly power they're able to undercut local businesses until they go bankrupt. The assumption is that we're left with is a net win due to lower prices for the consumer, but let me tell you another story.
An older relative had a very successful small conglomerate of businesses. One of them manufactured something costing close to $100 that Wal-Mart was interested in selling in its stores. After extensive negotiations, my relative told the Wal-Mart VP no because Wal-Mart was pressuring them to use cheaper parts that would make the product wear out more quickly. Wal-Mart didn't care because they'd be able to make the sales and then consumers would come back to buy again sooner, but my relative felt that was dishonorable. The VP said it was the first time a potential supplier ever walked away from him. They are notorious for their abuse of suppliers, and the ethical concerns are often very palpable. You might suggest this is simply market forces playing out, but we decided long ago that monopoly power often leads to a market we don't want to see in this country.
We the people get to decide what kind of society we want to live in. Their monopoly power means that in so many of the rural areas where they are, they might be one of the few viable employers. When people are poor, it's not so easy to just tell them to relocate to another geographical area, so it's easier for the entities benefiting from that to maintain the status quo at the expense of others. If we decide that for Wal-Mart to stay in business in the USA they need to pay employees more, with health insurance, then so be it. If they can't, then they can just go out of business and be replaced by a company that is able to navigate that balance better, offering pretty low prices while paying a bit more in wages.
California is the only state that regulates wait times for specialists. When you uttered the words "Bay Area" it signaled that you enjoy better service than most Americans. I know people in states very close to yours (as well as my own) who have had extensive wait times.
FAANG employee health insurance? Something like 1% of American workers get that, if even that many. Then throw in my oil company friends here in Houston and a few other industries which give premium benefits and you still have a tiny subset of the American workforce getting exceptionally strong benefits. Not at all indicative of the experience of most Americans.
The universities I worked for (both public and private) provided the same level of PPO insurance, as did a random fitness startup, a clinical diagnostics company, and a construction company. I invite you to reread the part where I said “several employers [plural] ranging from university to FAANG”.
Here in Houston, my friend who works at UH has excellent insurance. A quick search online confirms that it is much better than average. Different structure for employees at Rice, my alma mater, but still excellent. Gemini describes these employees being in a kind of "benefits bubble" here in Texas, and they're getting something way better from what most Texans get.
You said FAANG, so perhaps you're in California, a state that has laws regulating health insurance to an extent that make it unique in the USA?
> You said FAANG, so perhaps you're in California, a state that has laws regulating health insurance to an extent that make it unique in the USA
That is definitely a confounding factor, although I’m curious how much of that is the urban vs rural split in other states. (The construction company was not in California but oil boom-town adjacent in Texas)
Urgent care would not be urgent if you had to wait months. Hang out with a few elderly people who actually need to see specialists more than people like me. Over the years, I've heard plenty of stories from people I know waiting multiple months to see specialists.
Yeah, and specialists are "usually" not available via urgent care. If not for the like of urgent care, specialties would be worse. The fact that it takes so long for such access is still a demand and supply problem at the end of the day, no way around the knowledge bottleneck - fixing that means shifting demand to different, more plentiful, supply (doing that soundly is not trivial, but likely easier than attempting to multiply the specialists, depending on the specialist). ERs are expensive because they have to have certain specialties "on tap" 24/7, among other reasons. This is not a unique problem of any single health-care system.
When I was at Rice a quarter century ago, I took a 300-level linguistics class called Structure of English. Half a dozen of us sat around an oval table in a little room and I was the only one not majoring in linguistics. It was a delightfully geeky bunch. One of the students later worked on speech recognition at Microsoft. The professor was an older tall thin man who always wore suspenders and a bow tie.
I had always been good at grammar in high school, but this was a different world and I had no idea what I was in for. We spent the first two weeks discussing the differences between the and a, and the next two weeks on the differences between this and that, and the rest of the semester felt more abstract. It was quite illuminating for me.
Safari on MacBook Pro sees the time text wrapping in such a way that when the time is pushed to the next line, it literally overlaps partly with the "Total Time in space" label. The time is halfway up the letters of the label.
And these are the biggest ads I've seen obscuring a webpage in a very long time!
I wonder how many trillions in GDP we missed out on due to them building a monopoly in the browser space and then abandoning it. You can't imagine how happy I was in 2005 when Microsoft announced they were resuming development on IE. I was already a fan of Firefox by that point, but a lot of web dev was such a drag because you couldn't just use modern browser features--you had to accommodate all the users still browsing with that dinosaur.
Definitely makes sense for a large org with massive resources (such as Shopify) to do this. But for everyone here pondering what to use for their startup or a smaller project, there are still important trade-offs. In the past few years I've launched multiple cross-platform Flutter apps and multiple native iOS and Android apps using Jumpstart iOS and Android (native templates from the GoRails guys which leverage web views from your Jumpstart Rails server). The latter gave me web, iOS and Android out of the box and was vastly less costly to build, even with AI. For entrepreneurs who like Ruby on Rails, Jumpstart is my favorite for launching rapidly, and since the mobile apps are easy-to-modify iOS and Android projects, it's designed so you can either add more custom Hotwire Native Bridge Components or just write Swift and Kotlin to replace functionality with native code. Eventually you could write away all of the Jumpstart webview stuff, but you'd only do that if you had more runway, like if you have plenty of time or you start making lots of money. I've worked for clients whose ideas failed--not because of my code, of course. :)
It's better to find out quickly if you can get traction rather than building something requiring more maintenance. For most bug fixes or enhancements, you make them in the Jumpstart Rails side and they should up instantly in the mobile apps without going through app review again! Most projects are not being built in companies the size of Shopify, so I caution anyone who wants to just get the project out there to use platforms that give them more leverage. And no, I'm still not a fan of low-code or no-code, because I know what it's like to have to maintain apps over many years.
Oh, and I still always warn clients to stay away from native mobile unless they absolutely need it, because even with AI, maintaining just a web app is still light years faster, and far more pleasant. I know from very, very, very recent experience that testing subscriptions is still annoyingly cumbersome in the flaky Apple and Google sandbox environments, and Stripe for web apps is night and day easier to test. Testing on mobile is better than it used to be, but sometimes when I'm waiting for builds onto a physical device or for confusing settings in App Store Connect or Google Play Console to take effect (or just fine where they've been moved to), I think about how a manager 20 years ago was telling me how slowly his development lifecycle was when he used to burn software onto ROM chips. So web is still the way to go, and native mobile only if you absolutely have to. And if you have tons of time or money, sure, start with plain native.
Edit: As a web developer for decades, I still find both Jumpstart iOS/Android and Flutter to be preferable to React Native.
Those rules exist because of cars. Before cars, we didn't have red lights or stop signs, and we didn't need them.
If we got rid of the cars, we could get rid of the silly requirement that everyone needs to come to a complete stop at every intersection, which only makes sense in a world where people drive 2000 pound death machines.
I’m a native Texan, and I can deign to go to Austin for a couple days even though I live in a much bigger city in Texas which has delicious food from far more countries than Austin does. Plenty of Texans, and plenty of room for people from everywhere.
An older relative had a very successful small conglomerate of businesses. One of them manufactured something costing close to $100 that Wal-Mart was interested in selling in its stores. After extensive negotiations, my relative told the Wal-Mart VP no because Wal-Mart was pressuring them to use cheaper parts that would make the product wear out more quickly. Wal-Mart didn't care because they'd be able to make the sales and then consumers would come back to buy again sooner, but my relative felt that was dishonorable. The VP said it was the first time a potential supplier ever walked away from him. They are notorious for their abuse of suppliers, and the ethical concerns are often very palpable. You might suggest this is simply market forces playing out, but we decided long ago that monopoly power often leads to a market we don't want to see in this country.
We the people get to decide what kind of society we want to live in. Their monopoly power means that in so many of the rural areas where they are, they might be one of the few viable employers. When people are poor, it's not so easy to just tell them to relocate to another geographical area, so it's easier for the entities benefiting from that to maintain the status quo at the expense of others. If we decide that for Wal-Mart to stay in business in the USA they need to pay employees more, with health insurance, then so be it. If they can't, then they can just go out of business and be replaced by a company that is able to navigate that balance better, offering pretty low prices while paying a bit more in wages.
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