Yes, it's far too expensive. You can get a rental car for $20/day. The pricing scheme mentioned in the article with $1/trip would be far more attractive, along with drop off flexibility.
What I find missing from this discussion is the safety aspect of wholesale ultrasound. Yes, we've been told they're perfectly safe. That was once said of x-rays as well and physicians were routinely x-raying fetuses in the uertus up until the 1970's. That was before the evidence of birth defects from exposure to x-rays became so overwhelming that the practice finally stopped.
See http://sarahbuckley.com/ultrasound-scans-cause-for-concern and references quoted therein for a good overview of the current discussions on side effects of routine ultrasound screening, including tissue damage due to cavitation and hearing loss in fetuses.
I'd be curious if the distribution of salary data from H1-B filings was more or less the same. Anecdotally for brand name companies, eg Netflix, the selection bias of Angel List data to the lower end seems to be confirmed. The database publicly searchable and I had seen a visualization once but can't find the link.
It's heart-wrenching stories like these that prompted my wife and me to have our daughter at home. It was a beautiful birth. Birth is not a medical emergency, but hospital economic incentives are such that they're always trying to make it one.
The only reason it is no longer a medical emergency is because of modern medicine and hospitals. Women and children used to die frequently during childbirth.
The entire mammalian animal kingdom is fully capable of giving birth, autonomously and unassisted (if necessary). Human females, too, can tap into that part of their brains, if you let them, and don't distract or scare them with bright lights, beeping machines, cramped rooms, force them to make complex decisions that require cognitive function. Birth is operating from the mammalian part of the brain, not the pre-frontal cortex. If this wasn't true, mammals wouldn't exist. Think about it. As a male, however, you'd have to have seen it to believe it. I'm a male, and I saw it. It blew my mind.
Your statement is a little ridiculous and I hardly know where to begin. I don't especially care where in the brain things originate (and I think you don't know much about the brain). If I get heart block, I want a pacemaker, even if it's not a part of the "mammalian brain". By the way, a mouse has a prefrontal cortex.
Continue your appeal to nature while I remind you that no one weeps when most mammals lose an infant.
For a lot of biological reasons, it's hard to compare human reproduction to mammalian reproduction at large, and there are even more differences during childbirth.
I'm really glad that your decision worked out for you, but it's dangerous to encourage others to engage in dangerous behavior. If something goes wrong during childbirth without medical attention, people can and do die needlessly.
You seem like someone who might not, but please consider vaccinations for your child.
Your judgments aside, we have and are vaccinating our child.
While it's correct that bipedal locomotion and big heads make childbirth more challenging for humans, it still is not a medical emergency. You'd be surprised, if you did some reading beyond what medical school curricula teach, how many of the medical practices that are taken for granted in managed birth have never been rigorously tested with double blind studies, or have had long term empirical studies about effects much later in life. The routine administration of antibiotics is just one of them. An excellent reference on the matter is this book by an M.D. in Australia, and all the referenced cited therein, many by peer-reviewed journals:
Women with group B strep, chlamydia, or other bacterial infections get antibiotics to avoid transmission during birth because the complications in newborns can be severe and life threatening. Healthy women should not routinely be given antibiotics during labor. I submit again that you are rather uninformed about the subject.
As hard as it might seem to you, going to medical school doesn't make you dumber or less likely to value evidence.
The second Amazon review of the book mentions that it includes too much mysticism, magical thinking, and spiritualism and characterizes it as bizarre and fringe.
I think a good rule of thumb is that in a perfect situation it is more or less safe to give birth at home. However, in the event that anything goes wrong, which frankly is not a rare occurrence, really horrible consequences can be pretty easily avoided by being in a medical setting.
Also, none of the previous paragraph applies to situations of high-risk pregnancies, which are also really not that rare [1] and should be managed in a hospital.
There are biological reasons that humans have higher death rates in childbirth than other animals. Waving your hands and "tapping into that part of their brains" has nothing to do with it.
I had to look this up myself because no one is spelling it out.
In short we developed larger brains than our ancestors (which meant larger heads for infants) at the same time that we also developed an upright walking posture (which narrows the birth canal). Additionally, we also have some adaptations (pointed out in the source below) that decrease mortality, but human mortality in child-birth is still much higher than other mammals.
That depends on the service. If you can afford outages that may be fair game. But if you have a high traffic service that's running hundreds or thousands of hosts, you can't take them all offline at once. Deploys can take hours, so can rollbacks. In that situation with high SLA requirements you can't really "expect" bad deploys.
The doctrine of "consideration" means that both sides have to be getting something out of a contract, or else it is not a contract at all. Lots of people have argued for or against it, and the main rationale is probably just the fact that it is traditionally defined that way. This is why you often see people selling things for nominal values like $1 or whatever.
This is actually BMW's second foray into ride sharing stateside. They ran their Drive Now service in San Francisco for a couple of years. It never took off, because there were too few places to pick up and drop off cars, and their all-electric fleet never solved the fleet management aspect, eg charging, etc. Their mobile app also was clunky at best. Coincidentally Drive Now works fantastically well, eg in Berlin, where you can find a car on pretty much every city block. You drive it where you want to go and can drop it off at any public meter. You only pay the distance traveled, in the neighborhood of 0.40€/km. Typical inner city rides work out to a few bucks. It's cheaper and faster than cabs or Uber. It didn't take off in San Francisco, I would speculate comma because they never cut a deal with the city to let them use any parking meter as drop off point.
You can't build a career on that behavior. Especially if you stick around a place for a decade or so, you'd be surprised whom you run into and whose help you might need down the road. Unless you're leaving town and the industry for good, don't burn bridges.
Hell yeah you can. I'm the first to recognize that tech (and especially tech in Seattle) is a small town. But, really, who is going to remember the one person who quit on their first day because of a bullshit exploding offer? The hiring manager, recruiter, and probably no one else. As an everyday grunt, this stuff wouldn't even be brought up to me.
Having a 2 people added to a blacklist is fine. I've done far worse things to my career.
You shouldn't do it because it's wrong, and as a result you should feel bad about yourself. You cheated at the game we're all playing and added to the general mistrust that makes negotiating employment so shitty in the first place.
Wow. Should one got an exploding offer, the correct behavior IMO is to tell the recruiter to eat sh!t, or possibly, tell the recruiter that his attitude sucks, and because of it, you'll be waiting until the day after the deadline to make your decision. Alternatively, there is nothing about the GP or GGGP's comments that make the described behavior wrong. That's incredibly naive. You use the word _cheating_? "Cheating at the game we're all playing" is what you said. What the hell are you talking about? The game is negotiation, and if you can't do that, maybe you need to leave. If negotiating employment is shitty to you, you're doing it wrong. Learn how to do it right, and maybe that will adjust your attitude in the right direction.
edit: ok, you don't need to be as rude as I am, but I'm a known asshole, so ymmv.
Cheating = going back on something to which you've agreed. Once you sign, you're done negotiating. You can tell someone to fuck off before you sign a contract, but once it's signed, telling them to fuck off is cheating.
If someone wants to trounce all over your labor rights, and if telling them not to trounce on your labor rights counts as burning bridges, then burn, bridge, burn.
Last time I was looking for a job I ended up with offers from both places I was interviewing at. I renegotiated and signed one of the offer letters.
When I called the other company, they asked me to sign with them even though I'd already signed a different offer. Because this is tech and people do it all the time.
It just felt dirty. I had already made my choice, and would not have changed my mind. But I've got an older mentality where it feels like I am burning bridges if I reneg after signing an offer.
As someone who has been on the other side of the table hearing the news that a great candidate has just taken another offer, I share your mentality. I'm not going to try to get a candidate who has made up their mind to break their newly-signed contract. And a candidate who would accept an offer only then to instantly break it because someone threw a few more dollars at them isn't the type of person I want to work with.
It's one thing if someone says they are debating between a couple offers (as you did); at that point I'll fight hard for the candidate that I want. But the instant someone commits to an offer somewhere else they're entirely off limits and I wouldn't ever counter-offer at that point even if they would take it.
People absolutely remember stuff like this, and the justification of "well, it was a shitty exploding offer" doesn't hold up. 99% of the time, the hiring manager is using a boilerplate offer that their whole company uses, and would probably kill the due date in a heartbeat if you just asked.
If you ask, they say no, and then you reneg on the offer, it's kinda shitty but somewhat understandable. If you don't ask about the exploding offer in the first place, that's 100% you being a passive-agressive dick.
Sure, my point is, it's not something that's on your hiring manager, or even necessarily the HR department. In 100% of cases when I've run into this, from both the company and candidate side, the offer expiry was something that was more-or-less in there by default and no one had a problem removing when asked.
Hm, good point. Thanks for the inside info. It just seems that usually when something is described as corporate policy it implies that it's not the managers decision, so if in reality it's 100% optional then that's misleading.
You're adding details. I don't think that anyone is advocating tricking companies who don't care either way into making exploding offers through your own feigned indifference to whether the offer expires or not, then quitting on the first day.
