Vietnam is also a communist (which we invaded and got badly defeated btw), dictatorship loving (Cuba, Venezuela, ....) country, whatever you see in China, you also see in Vietnam, media isn't just as vicious with Vietnam. In the other hand, Vietnam have a bright future, they have developed significantly in the last decade, I wish them well.

I'm curious, lets say person A needs a complex surgery, gets a bill for 200k usd, because A uses Pocketero, A only pays 100k, do people actually pay that sum at once, or they just try to get a payment plan, etc...? Because for a low income family(the ones that can't afford insurance) a payment plan for 100k or 200k doesn't really make a difference (is a lot), and most low income family would just declare bankruptcy (they usually have low credit score anyway and are not in the housing market, or anything like that). What's is the point of paying for a service that would only get me a discount of a huge expense, instead of "guaranteeing" that I won't owe hundreds of thousands to a hospital(with an insurance)?

You're right, there are medical expenses so huge that even big discounts won't meaningfully help avoid bankruptcy. But let's not only consider worst case scenarios, let's also consider more common scenarios:

- A non-complex surgery that retails for $20k and is discounted to $5k (hopefully on a payment plan). - A specialist consultation that retails for $1000 and is discounted to $250. - An urgent care visit that retails for $400 and is discounted to $100.

There are 30 million Americans who don't have health insurance [1] largely because it costs $541/mo on average [2]. Aren't these people well served by a "best price" network at $10/mo?

[1] https://www.simplyinsurance.com/how-many-americans-dont-have... [2] https://www.valuepenguin.com/average-cost-of-health-insuranc...

If it is, is kept very secret between Indian employees, most American engineers (at least I would) will raise the issue. I don't care how high the is Director, I would just tell him that he is being racist , at his face, if he gets me fired, I would sue the company in a second. I have never seen this non-sense at FAANG in the 7 years I have worked here (Amazon first, then Google).

It’s not a secret? I recall having a discussion on this with a bunch of SV engineers a decade ago at a potluck and almost everyone observed how Indian managers tend to hire Indians at their respective companies.

Oh yeah, I was referring to discrimination in the workplace itself. So far all Indians I have met are amazing people, and I have not seen any type of discrimination against other Indians, otherwise I will whine very loud for sure.

I would love to have the opportunity to see caste discrimination myself, I swear by god I will get the discriminator fired on the spot, right after making him feel very little. Caste/race discrimination is the dumbest/sickest thing I have ever seen.

If they (Signal) care about privacy, they need to drop the need for phone numbers to use their service, there are many ways of dealing with spam (rate limiting, captchas, ...), a true private/secure messenger app should not require any user identifiable info. And the argument of "Signal was the first e2ee messenger app to go mainstream, so they can keep ignoring user's privacy, .... yada yada..." is naive at best; they should lead by example, right now there are many solutions way more private (Briar, SimpleX, Session, Wickr, ....). I user Signal, and I like it, is just a shame they soft-refuse("We are working on it...") to remove phone numbers from the equation.

I second recommending Briar as a messenger. Codebase is well maintained. Specifications and documents are audited, as well as the official clients.

Briar is nice but I wish it worked through Tor like Tox does.

Zelle in the US is the most common form of instant payment, at least in South Florida.

It's becoming better. But my companies credit union doesn't have Zelle yet. While my state employee credit union does.

Yup, is about learning to say "no".

Which is itself an excellent non-well-defined problem people need to learn to solve.

That also depends on the X, from my experience working at FAANGs, startups, etc... I have never seen a 10x engineer in good teams, I have only seen "10x engineers" on teams without great engineers. The comparison with sports and music is pretty silly, as those are environment where the winner(s) take all (there can only be one Billie Eillish (lol) even tho there are many singers who are better), engineering is often a team effort. In the other hand, the best engineers I have seen, just spend more time than anybody else working on a problem, and often are the ones who like to show off more, and very often lack the skills in other areas of life.

I’ve seen too many prolific engineers who destroy the confidence and productivity of people around them. These are not people you want to aspire to be.

Yeah, I also think is way more common in smaller companies. Also extreme toxicity around tools, editors, .... stuff like "10x engineers" only use Vim (the classic "i dont need a mouse, thats for normies"), the command line, Arch Linux, etc... In bigger companies, with talented engineer, no single engineer can claim to be the best/10x-er or any nonsense like that, because whatever he does, can also be done(and often improved) by the team. That's why I said that depends on the X. You can certainly have a 10Y engineer where Y = 1/10*X;