Here in Switzerland if you don't give proof of insurance the state will pick one for you. Then if you don't pay, it's like with any other bill, you'll get into troubles really quick.
It really depends on your definition of "work". Being forced to subscribe to a paid service is not the same as getting access to healthcare. Your examples only show that if a state resorts to authoritarian measures then it can force everyone to subscribe to a paid service.
There's always stragglers, hold outs, conscientious objectors, cheats, freeloaders, randos, or whatever.
Just think of them as "overhead".
Spend a little on "enforcement", because rules are important. Call it audits, compliance, metrics, or whatever.
But not more than would be saved without enforcement. Because diminishing returns.
And at some tipping point, ratcheting up cost of compliance backfires, leading to more cheating.
So strive for some happy equilibrium. So that the general population (taxpayers) feel the system is reasonable, if not exactly fair, and overall friction is minimized.
Its send to collections. So you're only fine if you are poor enough to not have anything they can take from you. And at that point you are eligible for gov support to your healthcare bill anyway.
Here in germany you can actually kind of get away with not paying for a while when not consuming. But coverage has to be continuous, so if you need insurance since you want to go to the doctor a few years down the line, you have to pay up for the entire period.
Hospitals already charge higher rates to those without insurance because of those payers high default rate. Collections is expensive, and they might not be able to collect anything at the end, so they price that risk into the prices.
Before it was stripped from the ACA, the price for not having insurance scaled with income. At the lowest end it was irrelevant because of Medicaid eligibility; above that it gradually increased from below-healthcare-price to above. So some people could still save money by opting out, but it pushed them towards the market by making the effective cost of insurance smaller.
(Technically speaking, it was a tax rather than a fine. That mostly mattered for legal reasons, but it did also work that way in practice. It applied to everyone, so insured people had the obligation waived, but the people paying it weren't in violation of any law or regulation.)
I think it's already part of proposal [1] to generate a healthy chunk of the power required for the six North Sea countries. The video [2] is pretty interesting.
The XKCD method of generating passwords [1] does not imply 'best case' entropy of crackers going after each individual character. Instead it clearly states 44 bits of entropy which is the 'worst case' entropy when the attacking knows your exact method and dictionary used when generating the password.
I'd argue that when targeting the same number of bits of entropy the XKCD method is still easier to remember than a bunch of fully random characters.
I think the rough IPv6 equivalent of a single IPv4 ban would be to ban a /64 subnet. This bans all users in that subnet which is the same as banning an IPv4 subnet hiding behind a single NAT address.
I agree. Nuclear fission power seems to be associated with a negative learning curve [1][2]. This means that as the newly installed capacity goes up, price per unit actually increases. As solar is already becoming competitive and is experiencing a positive learning curve (costs going down rapidly as production expands) it would be pretty silly to invest in nuclear at this point.
Not really although you probably need to use quite a bit of traffic before it becomes a problem. Your example of personal use only seems fine.
There was a post here a while ago (that I cannot find anymore) about the devs of a package manager of sorts who were asked kindly by Github to do something about their excessive data usage. So it's probably not a good idea to build a company on it.
They do, yes. Rounded up to the nearest 100ms, scaled for chosen RAM capacity: https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/ Note that this doesn't measure actual RAM use, although they do display it after lambda runs.
Data traffic is already measured and priced accordingly in AWS so that's not something new for Lambda.
That's not exactly what marktt was asking. For example, calling sleep (explicitly or implicitly while waiting on network input) would not incur much CPU cost under marktt's accounting method but does incur wall clock charge under Lambda.
(It's totally understandable and fair that it does; it's just different than what he asked.)
One could think of Lambda as charging for (A * network bandwidth + B * RAM usage * wall clock time + C * CPU time + D * Disk IO) where C and D are both zero.
From a capacity planning perspective, your goal should be 100% cpu utilization per box. Allocating excessive, unutilized wall clock time is wasted capacity. Same applies for ram/heap per call. These are the same considerations that played out in client/server vs mainframes for so many years.
Mainframe budgeting of cycles, memory, an IO was highly effective and efficiently utilizing resources. It's a model of computation that has disappeared, but is still relevant. When google app engine first came I had hoped it would utilize this model, but instead went the containerization route.
I always wonder if there's easy way to know where current global internet interruptions are, anyone know? In this case it apparently was Telia [1] but how do you figure that out? Top Google results for 'global internet status' aren't really usable.
Realistically, this isn't solvable due to information asymmetry. Any one company only knows if their services are up, but doesn't really know what's going on upstream or downstream of them. That's why tracing an incident like this takes time, and most people blame the wrong party at first until the true cause is found.
But Twitter has become the de facto platform where you announce stuff to people, or shout into the ether saying 'is Cloudflare down?' Signal-to-noise ratio isn't even that low -- most baseline chatter is noise, but there should be a MASSIVE, near-simultaneous spike when a high-profile site goes down.
