Category: personal AnGoL

If you’re an American, when you donate your kidney — either to a loved one, as most donors do, or to a stranger, as I did — you pay nothing for the medical side of things. In the United States, Medicare has, since the Nixon administration, picked up the costs of dialysis (where you have a machine replace the normal functions of your kidneys) and transplantation for people with severe kidney disease. And because transplantation saves money relative to dialysis, Medicare is more than happy to pay both the don

Source: Kidney transplant: how Trump could encourage donations – Vox

Saving this as it seems important.

 
That is a new blog by Eric Lofgren, an Emergent Ventures recipient.  Here is an excerpt from one post:

The story was from 1938. It sounds astounding to modern ears. Congress did not earmark money for special projects. Pitcairn was a bit of a political entrepreneur by convincing his representative to get a project funded that funneled money back to his own district.
Back then, the Army and Navy were funded according to organization and object. Project earmarking only started becoming routine with the implementation of the program budget in 1949 (and really not until the rise of the PPBS in 1961).
I often say that the budget should be the most important aspect of defense reform, not the acquisition or requirements processes.
By the way, the French parliament doesn’t earmark defense funding. There’s actually quite a bit to learn from the French experience.

Here is his post on cost disease in weapons acquisition, and more on that here: “It’s clear that defense acquisition costs are growing at least as fast, and probably much faster, than education and healthcare costs. Defense platform unit costs grow nominally from 7-11% per year. Doing some adjustments, DOD production costs probably grow twice the rate of inflation.”
Here is his general post on acquisition reform and the limits of decentralization, maybe the best introduction to his overall point of view.

Source: Acquisition Talk: A daily blog on the theory and practice of weapons system acquisition – Marginal REVOLUTION

Legendary investor and billionaire Warren Buffett has a tip for young people: Focus on learning how to write and speak clearly.
“The one easy way to become worth 50 percent more than you are now — at least — is to hone your communication skills — both written and verbal,” says Buffett in a video posted on LinkedIn on Monday.
The video was posted by Michael Hood, the co-founder of the Toronto based start-up Voiceflow, which enables users to design, build and launch skills for Amazon’s smart speaker, Alexa, without needing to know how to code.

“If you can’t communicate, it’s like winking at a girl in the dark — nothing happens. You can have all the brainpower in the world, but you have to be able to transmit it,” Buffett continues.
“And the transmission is communication,” says Buffett, who is currently worth more than $86 billion, according to Forbes.

Source: Warren Buffett: How to increase your worth by 50 percent

“It wasn’t the best decision we could make,” said one of my old bosses, “but it was the most defensible.”
What she meant was that she wanted to choose option A but ended up choosing option B because it was the defensible default. She realized that if she chose option A and something went wrong, it would be hard to explain because it was outside of normal. On the other hand, if she chose option A and everything went right, she’d get virtually no upside. A good outcome was merely expected, but a bad outcome would have significant consequences for her. The decision she landed on wasn’t the one she would have made if she owned the entire company. Since she didn’t, she wanted to protect her downside. In asymmetrical organizations, defensive decisions like this one protect the person making the decision.

Source: Defensive Decision Making: What IS Best v. What LOOKS Best

And that fact is the thing I can’t quite get past. That a decision I made for a list I put on the internet has impacted a family business and forever altered its future. That I have changed family dynamics and relationships. And it could very easily happen again.

I’ve been asking myself what the other side of this looks like. How do I do this better? Is there a way to celebrate a place without the possibility of destroying it? Or is this just what we are now — a horde with a checklist and a camera phone, intent on self-producing the destruction of anything left that feels real, one Instagram story at a time?

Source: Will Stanich’s Ever Reopen? Why America’s Best Burger Spot Closed Down – Thrillist

And then, in a quieter voice, he started to explain why it wasn’t just two weeks. He asked me not to reveal the details of that story, but I can say that there were personal problems, the type of serious things that can happen with any family, and would’ve happened regardless of how crowded Stanich’s was, and that real life is always more complicated and messier than we want it to be. Stanich explained that, as these issues were going on in the background, it was hard to read the social media screeds attacking them, and listen to the answering machine messages at the restaurant calling him a fat fuck and telling him to fuck himself for closing his own restaurant. He didn’t care about them, he insisted. He only cared about people like that woman who’d shown up, the regulars who live in NE Portland. “I need to take care of the people who took care of me,” he said. “They don’t turn on you.”

This was the same sentiment the chef at Paiche had expressed, and that I’d heard from others. If there was one main negative takeaway from the raging fires of food tourist culture and the lists fanning the flames, it was that the people crowding the restaurant were one time customers. They were there to check off a thing on a list, and put it on Instagram. They weren’t invested in the restaurant’s success, but instead in having a public facing opinion of a well known place. In other words, they had nothing to lose except money and the restaurant had nothing to gain except money, and that made the entire situation feel both precarious and a little gross.

Source: Will Stanich’s Ever Reopen? Why America’s Best Burger Spot Closed Down – Thrillist

With our heavy use of digital media, it could be said that we have taken multitasking to new heights, but we’re not actually multitasking; rather, we are switching rapidly between different activities. Adrenaline and cortisol are designed to support us through bursts of intense activity, but in the long term cortisol can knock out the feel-good hormones serotonin and dopamine in the brain, which help us feel calm and happy, affecting our sleep and heart rate and making us feel jittery.

Source: The lost art of concentration: being distracted in a digital world | Life and style | The Guardian

Many have been crushed. The Berkeley psychologist Christina Maslach has spent years studying the phenomenon of occupational burnout. She focussed on health care early on, drawn by the demanding nature of working with the sick. She defined burnout as a combination of three distinct feelings: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization (a cynical, instrumental attitude toward others), and a sense of personal ineffectiveness. The opposite, a feeling of deep engagement in one’s work, came from a sense of energy, personal involvement, and efficacy. She and her colleagues developed a twenty-two-question survey known as the Maslach Burnout Inventory, which, for nearly four decades, has been used to track the well-being of workers across a vast range of occupations, from prison guards to teachers.

Source: Why Doctors Hate Their Computers | The New Yorker

1. Introduction The SuanShu is a Java math library for numerical analysis, statistics, root finding, linear algebra, optimization, and lots more. One of the things it provides is functionality for both real and complex numbers. There’s an open-source version of the library, as well as a version that requires a license -with different forms of the license: academic, commercial, and contributor. Note that the examples below use the licensed version through the pom.xml. The open-source version is currently n

Source: An Introduction to SuanShu | Baeldung

We’ve certainly seen this pattern with other positions in IT. Just look at how System Administrators have become Site Reliability Engineers (or just simply Developers) with the advent of Puppet and Chef. We are also starting to see database administrators (DBAs) automate their database schema updates and become Data Architects and Data Scientists. They get big fat raises, as well.
But, there’s a catch: if you want a raise, you MUST be a part of the change. Present to management a plan to automate your current tasks and describe the new, exciting, more strategic tasks you will now perform is how you get the raise.
My automation algorithm has not changed since 1997: The first time I asked to perform a task, I just do it; the second time, I automate it. There has never been an end to the amount of work we will be tasked with. It never ends. With Cloud, DevOps, and microservices, we need to be more strategically valuable to our employer. Automation is the key to that.

Source: Automation Replaces Tasks, Not People – DZone DevOps