On data engineering, redundancy, and “looking for hundreds of needles in a haystack approximately the size of Mars.” Reminds me of my Apple days, and the challenges of working in insanely large scale systems. Turquoise is working on some cool stuff.
I listened to this episode while spending a lot of time taking care of my dad at the hospital last year. The different kinds of beeps and boops that were maddening at first ended up just being background noise after weeks in the ICU. Someone should fix this.
Smith is a surgeon in Oklahoma who runs a medical center that does not take insurance. Instead, his clinic posts all its prices online as a way to correct for price distortions that arise from over-regulation and lack of competition in the healthcare market. At the current prices we’re all poor.
A great conversation on the economic tradeoffs of healthcare. I recently discussed this with a good friend who’s dad is going through sever medical issues and is in need of a transplant. It is easy to discuss these things in the abstract, but when you put a face to the problem then discussing whether society should cover the cost of medication that could extend someone’s life for another year or two gets way harder. It’s a tough conversation, but one worth listening to.
Reading this reminded me of this piece on measuring surgeons’ skills and making decisions on who gets to perform surgeries based on that. Medicine is a very tricky industry (is it even ok to call it an industry? or is that healthcare?), where we don’t set up incentive systems that we know lead to better outcomes because it’d reveal that we don’t really trust our doctors. Doctors are people, and if we give them something to optimize for, they’ll optimize for it. Let’s pick the right thing: patients.