• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I feel like most things degrade as a matter of scope-creep, while trying to implement features that are actually complex and non-trivial.

    Take the unholy mess of modern Microsoft Office. MS Office might have been a good tool for a single purpose back in the 80s, but the addition of multiple generation/layers of features that have been halfway abandoned but kept for compatibilitys sake, make any more complex task non-trivial. There are multiple approaches for implementing templating MS Word, none of which are really good. MS Macros have been great… if you are trying to get arbitrary code execution on Windows machines. And collaboretive editing features include halfway abandoned sharing features and a half-baked Web Version of Office 365.

    As a matter of fact I don’t believe this is purely out of corporate greed, but rather a lack of scope limitation during design. People don’t ask if they should, if they simply can do. We shouldn’t have macros inside of Text Documents, there should be another tool for that. We shouldn’t have SQL queries pulling into Excel Worksheets. We shouldn’t use Excel as a database, but people had to change names of biological genes to avoid these being autoformatted in Excel.

    But as a matter of fact, in general one is limited to working with the tools one knows, so convincing someone to use the correct tool for a job will always be harder than just delivering additional features, that we know will make the overall product worse.





  • I’ll start with the German system. Here you are either automatically insured in one of the public insurances (there are many), which marginally differ in their cost (think single digit euro differences) and have to cover basically the same procedures. If one reaches a certain income level, being privately insured is possible.

    If you are publicly insured, you wont see most costs, as these are directly handled between your insurer and the doctor/hospital. For some medications and procedures there are co-pays that are flat fees (5 Eur for Medications, …).

    Access to specialists mostly need a referral from your family doctor.

    In private insurance, often you yourself will be billed and you will need to hand this to your insurance company.

    The good side is that in most common situations I have never needed to worry about cost in public insurance, wait times for referrals can be very long and understanding what you need to get certain care can be very difficult. Private insurance often has better payment schemes for providers and less artificial limits on number of patients or which doctor is able to provide services, so access to most care is faster and more widely available.