Recently, my wife was going to be out of the country about a week-and-a-half. Her prescription for a medicine to manage arthritis would run out at the very beginning of that time. But insurance company policies refused to allow her to fill it even a little bit early. As a result, her only option was to go without the medicine for several days.

Policies should be set by organizations whose primary goal is to provide effective health solutions, not organizations whose primary goal is to minimize costs in order to make a profit.

I wasn't (until reading this thread) aware of the deletion policy, so I certainly couldn't have discovered where the configurable setting is and adjusted it.

Yes, it is American exceptionalism (and quite foolish) to make the claim that "This could never happen in the US".

No, the American government is NOT more authoritative than the UK in the way they handle freedom of websites. The grandparent comment is correct: the US government does not (currently) order ISPs to block specific websites.

Yes, those in the US should protest the current government (many of us already are doing so).

That was why the government decided to ban mail, and since that didn't cover all cases, they also banned people handing things to each other.

At least, I think that is how I remember it going in an alternate world where physical laws mimiced electronic laws.

Languages that correct the problem have two separate types (eg: Foo & Option) meaning "definitely a Foo" and "a Foo but it might have no data". Java just has Foo, meaning "a Foo but it might have no data" but no way to represent "definitely a Foo".

Thank you for sharing; I'm so glad for you that it worked out.

That would have a bunch of advantages such as sounding familiar to leaders whose heyday was in the 1970s, of not making us feel bad about the state of the world, and occasionally giving financial kickbacks to government leaders.

Or... if you don't like this approach, maybe making changes in political leadership is the single most important thing to do.

If, indeed, the park was rented out for a private affair and the person managing that affair asked that someone be removed from the property, then like any case of trespass, it is within the purview of the police to remove that person.

It doesn't make the US look good, but I don't think it reflects poorly on the behavior of the Belgian police.

Admittedly, the term is unavoidably subjective. But what I like about them is that they are distinct, and that each one has character. Honestly, the fact that they looked like pictures I could find in a child's book is the main part of what I like about them: they have simple ideas ("a bird") and forms so distinctive a child could tell them apart.

Not exactly. The close buddy with the owners of several other AI companies who has a known dispute with Anthropic and who has seized near-absolute power in the US is doing something that damages Anthropic. The fact that it also destroys long term prospects for the US overall is irrelevant because the individual can't think ahead and also doesn't care about the future of the US.

It's nearly the same thing in the end, but helpful to understand the cause.

I always felt that Python's "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." was a bit of a mess.

Obviously (to anyone who was around at the time), that plank was written in response to Perl's motto: "There is more than one way to do it."

Zig's original take on this, "Only one obvious way to do things" seems even worse. You see, both languages agree that Perl had it wrong: it is unhelpful to have several different ways to write any future. But they went a little too far: it is not actually bad for it to be possible to write the same thing in more than one way.

Zig's new phrasing: "There is an idiomatic way to do it." captures the CORRECT alternative to Perl's motto. It is not important that there be no alternative ways of writing something, Rather, it is important that there be a single idiomatic way to write it.

Then the rules were changed.