I worked there right before they sold to Oracle for a bit—my impression was a lot of brilliant engineers but no unified product story.

Are you saying it needs less? Why do you think that?

The 'fake' price is due to the negotiation of reimbursement between major healthcare chains and insurers. The most regulated piece - Medicare - is the only piece where there's fairly transparent pricing.

> reimbursement between major healthcare chains and insurers

And why is this so prevalent? It's subject to huge subsidy and regulatory capture

> And why is this so prevalent?

Because the law doesn't force them not to?

It's very wild to me that you're like "This organization is lying to me, so what we need less of is people telling them what to do."

How is less regulation suppose to fix any of that?

> Ask an American hospital how much something costs - you will get a completely fake price back

You think the government tells hospitals to lie to you? The hospitals lie because the government doesn't force them not to. Laissez-faire capitalism causes that. Regulation is needed to fix it.

I need you to help me connect the dots, because a bare URL is not the same thing as communication. What does the airline deregulation act have to do with hospitals giving you fake prices because nobody forces them not to?

What do you think would force hospitals to give you real prices if not the law?

Because in a fair market they would be competed away - prices of food, computers, bonds, etc are not transparent because of regulation - it's largely because of the tax incentive as far as I've read from healthcare economists.

healthcare isn’t really a market economy and neither should it be.

we should make it a public a service without a profit motive

A and B are due to regulations?

And we’ll all suffer if the merger goes through.

(Who is this study for?)

why is flock good?

> desperate to get out of the squid games and quarterly layoff fears

"If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, employee morale will decrease. I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world."

— Satoru Iwata (former Nintendo CEO)

Too bad they weren't unionized--I assume that would have helped.

The workers who built the company and created its worth (obviously not evenly distributed) now get a "thank you very much goodbye" e-mail. I think they deserve ownership and to take part in these decisions.

It might have helped draw out the layoff process, potentially. Still not convinced unions would optimize overall outcomes for employees _while_ employed.

Maybe a better conversation to have as we keep moving through this AI Engineering era and a bunch of new companies are created. If you are considering founding a company, would you start it as a union shop? If not, why?

Founders are management, unions protect employees from management and shareholders. If you can build without employees, go for it.

Investors want to get wealthy, founders want to get wealthy, employees are just fuel for that machine. The examples are robust of how startup employees make out the vast majority of the time.

Union support is at record highs, there will always people who think they can do better without, best to not argue with folks who ignore data and stats. Their belief system won’t be swayed with logic and reason.

(a potential solution to this is for unions to turn into cooperatives and accelerators over time; they could build their own investment funds with their pensions an investor in their portfolio companies, if Bending Spoons was a union cooperative if you will, for example)

Replying again to say: A union isn't the real objective. Greater share of profits and more democracy in the workplace is. So maybe that's union-shaped or maybe something else.

Start as a union shop? Or a cooperative? (see peer comment) Good question--not sure at what size it makes sense to have a union? Is it 1 employee?

Agree. This is also what Swift uses.

also—this is public review for data centers not, say, housing.

Right. But what about the cases it is used for good?

In many environments it ends up acting like a generic "don't build things" mandate. Such a mandate's wins are by accident more often than by target, and it does more harm than good.

I mean, this is way too vague to really talk about usefully, but like, adding some friction to certain processes can be pretty useful.

While that is true, the current default situation in the US is way too far on the anti-build side.

Hey man Sam and Elon gotta eat