denis bider

Principles, nearly by definition, are rules that when they are adhered to, lead to good results. Group loyalty, then – loyalty to specific preferred people over principle – necessarily produces worse results. The two are not the same, so to maintain loyalty to a group, one must depart from principle.

Countries differ on the ubiquity of group loyalty over principle. Prosperous countries tend to be more loyal to principle; shittier countries tend to have more loyalty to groups. It takes a prosperous environment to be able to afford to be loyal to principle, but loyalty to principle also makes a prosperous country. In comparison, people in shitty places feel like they need to be loyal to their families and local groups, but it's also the group loyalty – and lack of principle – that makes those places shitty.

You can find shitty subcultures where group loyalty dominates even in prosperous countries. Compare inner city ghettoes with the "snitches get stitches" mentality. Or t…

The US runs a degenerate health care system, with abhorrent symptoms that are too many to enumerate. I offer a small tasting sample:
Drug companies that lobby to ban older inhalers whose patents are running out, so they can continue selling new patented ones at high markup.Drug companies that lobby Congress to create demand for a product, then jack up prices to $609 per unit to deliver $1 worth of a drug.Private insurance companies created as an accident of history, lobbying to perpetuate a system that routinely denies health care to people who most need it. Before the Affordable Care Act, they would deny coverage to people who they knew would be a net loss. Now, they offer poor people plans costing $1,000 per month, where they don't even cover anything under $5,000.Health insurers may engage in shady practices. Just one, now deleted comment:
[Insurance company] had my parents sign a bunch of stuff that absolved them from paying for my burn unit bills just days after [I] was burnt. …

I've said this before, but I need to keep saying it until the US patent system is reformed. This may mean forever, if necessary.

The existence of patents for software is not okay. There may be a so-so argument for patents where things cost $1 billion each to develop. Even there, publicly funded research could deliver solutions that focus on more real problems, and help more lives.

But there is no argument for things where the cost of development is cheaper than defending a patent, or even filing for one. For software, there is no reason to have patents. It's a pure intellectual land-grab.

Software that takes years to develop will not be founded on a single idea. It will rest on tens of thousands of ideas.

Each individual idea in a software product is low value on its own. The value is in building software that combines the ideas, and then maintaining that software to respond to users' needs. Most of the value of software development is in this process.

All software is prot…