COBRA means you’re still getting insurance through your (former) employer. How much does the same insurance benefit cost if you buy it fully on your own?
In my experience you can’t even buy a similar plan as an individual. And definitely not at the same price.
Apples to apples comparison is very hard because the plans are all different. But having bought insurance from the state marketplace it two US states, I'd say around $500 USD/month.
This matches my recent experience. I researched plans on Washington state's health marketplace and found that while the available plans were generally much cheaper than COBRA, their coverage for out-of-network or out-of-state care was limited (e.g. "emergency" care only, where the definition of emergency is vague and up to the insurer). And even if you are careful to get taken to an "in-network" hospital, there are plenty of horror stories about inadvertently getting treated by an "out-of-network" provider while inside and being on the hook for the entire bill.
I couldn't find a marketplace plan that didn't give me real doubts about the possible financial impact of traveling to other states(!) so I decided to suck it up and pay for COBRA for peace of mind. Of course, COBRA will run out after 18 months, but I plan to get another corporate job before then.
TL:DR if you have (or recently left) a fancy corporate job here, you have access to a group plan with nice coverage. If you have to buy an individual plan, it seems you cannot get the same level of coverage even if you're willing to pay for it, and the available coverage leaves you with the risk of huge medical bills if you suddenly need healthcare while simply traveling within the country.
> . And even if you are careful to get taken to an "in-network" hospital, there are plenty of horror stories about inadvertently getting treated by an "out-of-network" provider while inside and being on the hook for the entire bill.
This is no longer legal in any state as of July 1st of this year.
> Bans out-of-network charges for ancillary care (like an anesthesiologist or assistant surgeon) at an in-network facility in all circumstances.
I got a plan from the marketplace in Washington state for around 550/month. It was called a Silver plan, but it didn't cover very much. I kept getting bills a year after my services for things that I thought were covered and that my doctor said would be covered. And I looked into the benefits sheets while choosing my healthcare. Yes, I didn't get the highest priced one, but if Silver doesn't cover very much, I'm not confident "Gold" will. Also my experience with some corporate plans is that even though technically things are covered, sometimes the waiting times of a few months for urgent things mean they basically aren't.
It seems yes there is a reason if you need integrals. From TFA: "You can also try having Wolfram Alpha compute it, and it will time out. We will need to be more creative."
Mathematica/Maple/Sagemath don't have a freemium timeout mechanic and can solve a lot more. Truth be told I think that integration techniques are much less broadly crucial for everyone to learn than they used to be, although you need to have some clue of what's going on because you need to be able to guide yourself towards posing problems in such a way that the integrals that can be solved.
But there are integrals that you can easily solve by hand but both WolframAlpha and sage will (effectively) timeout on them. And I’m not even talking about something made deliberately hard for computers to symbolically analyze.
Sometimes you are looking for deeper insights in some equations that can only be achieved by finding symbolic solutions.
You would never figure out that black holes are a solution to the Einstein field equations of you just threw a numerical solver at it, for example. (Bad example because that's arguably the easiest solution to them but I hope you get my point.)
It's probably best to return a function that takes alpha as a parameter and numerically integrates for whichever finite set of alphas are required by the caller.
One of the editors of that book wrote about Derek Jones’s book “I think (at least I hope) this will influence software engineering education [more] than anything I've ever done”
Something like "But I'd suggest..." is a good example for using "'And' NOT Bbut'" [0] to avoid the connotation of contradiction implied when using 'but'. Very useful like in this case where the intention is amendment rather than contradiction.
The distance from earth to the moon is 384,400 km, and in the smaller detail picture that earth to moon distance is about 23 pixels. Or about 16,700 km per pixel.
And note they describe that small picture as "zoomed in", So I figure 400km is about 23 or maybe 24 pixels at most =D (or a diameter of less than 50 pixels).
Waiting for someone to find an even better estimation!
You are overlooking one major thing: From the perspective of the camera, the position of the moon relative to the earth matters for the number of pixels. For example, if the moon was directly between the earth and the camera, the earth-to-moon distance in pixels would be 0, but the real distance would still be ~384.400km.
You cannot use the earth-to-moon distance, unless you also know the exact position of the camera, earth and moon in the 3D plane.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Steve Blank has been saying this since 2011 when the economist hosted a debate between Blank and Ben Horowitz. All respect to Steve Blank though for his other work.
Given that Steve Blank is usually correct about startups, not incorrect, wouldn't a better analogy be "even a working clock is wrong twice a day"? (Which of course is a nonsensical analogy.)
It seems like a bubble could take more than 5 years to pop. Blank makes an analogy to the housing bubble, in which housing prices grew somewhat steadily from about 1970 to a peak in 2007. Economists started claiming a bubble in the early 2000s, and housing prices after the bubble popped only went back down to about where they were in the early 2000s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_housing_bubble#I...
The thing about the housing bubble is that while housing prices didn't decline to a normal level, the way that decline was prevented was through the massive injection of money into the system as whole (qualitative easing) and government loans to the largest banks.
This permanently broke the house-buying process as a whole to various degrees in that most people can no longer afford to buy a home to live in.
But also, it's plausible that the flood of money coming into VC is a part of this general flood of money - a flood that supports the US economy but not a "healthy" condition but with jobs around growing these inflated capital assets taking up a large number of well paid jobs, etc.
> is usually correct about startups, not incorrect, wouldn't a better
... phrase be "prematurely correct".
Not a good position to be in, but some people insist in telling the truth, poor asses.
("Premature antifascists" was how the US communists and sympathizers of the 1930s were designated later, when WW2 got underway. Embarrassingly enough, those people were highly agitated when the Axis powers were chasing communists and making trains run on time, but calmed down for the couple of years that the German-Soviet pact lasted. History is more fun than a barrel of monkeys, except for the bits where people get killed.)
Thank you for the most insightful comment on this story. I find it bizarre that so many are unable to understand that making the decision to 'kill' wasabi today does not necessarily mean that it was a mistake.
This whole story is a fabulous insight into software development for business over the long-term.
In my experience you can’t even buy a similar plan as an individual. And definitely not at the same price.