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That “distressed baby" Tim Armstrong blamed for benefit cuts? She’s my daughter

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Re: That “distressed baby" Tim Armstrong blamed for benefit cuts? She’s my daughter

#221

Post by shasta »

smtddr wrote: post #202
shasta wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your parent and thus don't want you in charge of "running the medical system," either. But we don't have to have one or the other. You buy your insurance policy that covers whatever it takes to save your fetus and I'll buy my policy that doesn't (and spend the difference on improving the lives of my healthy children).

Cruelty#2... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7204184 This kind of attitude is why articles like this get written: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230366140...

Failure to think critically about how to value life results in harmful abortion and euthanasia laws and is contributing to the high cost/benefit ratios of our healthcare system. We have quite enough people thinking only emotionally about these issues.

Re: That “distressed baby" Tim Armstrong blamed for benefit cuts? She’s my daughter

#222

Post by a3n »

therobot24 wrote: post #219
a3n wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the writer can be forgiven for laying it on thick, since the writer is the mother of one of those distressed babies. And I think it's very useful for our empathy muscles to occasionally listen to "biased" people like this mother.

so i lack empathy because i think an article that primarily uses empathy can be manipulative? classy...

therobot, I can't reply to your reply. (Except now I can, so I moved it. /HN)

No, I don't think you lack empathy, although I can see how my comment could be taken that way. Apologies.

Re: That “distressed baby" Tim Armstrong blamed for benefit cuts? She’s my daughter

#223

Post by bigchewy »

pavlov wrote: post #36
bigchewy wrote: post #25

Tim Armstrong has an incredible ability to say the wrong thing. The underlying topic, however, is fascinating. I do healthcare analytics for a living so I see how often a single neonatal ICU incident can consume 30% of an entire company's healthcare budget for the year (note: if you don't really understand healthcare, e.g. what self insuring means, please don't respond with comments that the insurance company pays th…

The race to keep younger and younger babies alive is fueled with ego and dollars. If you actually look at the global data on neonatal mortality [1], that doesn't seem to be true. Countries like Finland, France and Cuba perform better than the United States on this metric. These countries offer completely free healthcare to babies and pregnant mothers. Frankly, I find your assumption borderline offensive. Maybe you sh…

sigh.

>> Maybe you should take your USD-tinted healthcare analytics glasses off for a while and contemplate the possibility that human lives are worth saving.

FYI - I've dedicated the last 10 years of my life to the cause of saving and improving as many lives as possible. Haven't had a paycheck for going on 4 years. Personal attacks like yours don't bother me but are frustrating because it's an example of the difficulty we face as a nation in our effort to improve our healthcare system. We all (myself included) get emotional over individual stories (e.g. Armstrong's comments over 2 lives) but have a much harder time seeing the invisible wreckage and thousands of people dying because of our distorted economic incentives.

Re: That “distressed baby" Tim Armstrong blamed for benefit cuts? She’s my daughter

#224

Post by [deleted] »

a3n wrote: post #97
therobot24 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not disagreeing with anything here, nor did i in the previous post, merely a light anecdote relating to how thick the writer is 'laying it on'

I think the writer can be forgiven for laying it on thick, since the writer is the mother of one of those distressed babies. And I think it's very useful for our empathy muscles to occasionally listen to "biased" people like this mother.

[deleted]

Re: That “distressed baby" Tim Armstrong blamed for benefit cuts? She’s my daughter

#225

Post by mindcrime »

robhu wrote: post #208
mindcrime wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of that may, or may not, be true. But none of it addresses the issue I was questioning, which is how anybody can claim to understand "Tim Armstrong's attitude towards the lives of his employee's children" based on nothing more than this one news article. I'm saying we shouldn't be rushing to judgment, and creating this caricatured images of Armstrong (or anybody else) and basically screaming "off with his head",…

It's not based on 'one news article', it's based on something Armstrong said (and planned to say) which is /reported/ in a news article.

You're just quibbling over semantics now. It's still just one "news incident" if you're prefer that lingo. And it's still a mistake for any of us to assume that we now know all about Tim Armstrong as a result.

Re: That “distressed baby" Tim Armstrong blamed for benefit cuts? She’s my daughter

#226

Post by adventured »

selmnoo wrote: post #210
clavalle wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My father in law is a neonatologist and was given an ownership stake of the NICU he started in a midwestern hospital. He makes around $4 mil/year. Granted, he does sometimes stay at the hospital for two weeks at a time with only very brief visits home but at this point he also owns apartment complexes, office buildings, a gentleman's ranch with a few dozen horses and staff and on and on. I think it is shameful, perso…

Speaking as someone who is also familialy-related to a neonatologist and a cardiologist -- both of whom earn more than a few million per year, I'd say they deserve every last dollar of it. They had to go to school for some while, and work under very tiring schedules. Hell, their schedules are still to this day pretty sucky -- they often tell me how much they envy me for my startup I'll-do-whatever-I-want-whenever-I-w…

Why is Zuck worth $28.8 billion? Private property rights and a tremendous success. How do you know he's just going to sit on it? You don't, which null and voids your entire premise.

Spreading money out, ie redistribution of previously existing funds through service based consumption industries, is a very mediocre example of "keeping the economy going." Production is what bolsters an economy, not consumption. The faltering US economy has been demonstrating how that works in practice for decades, while China's production-centric economy demonstrated the exact opposite (and the same principle that the US economy was originally built on: production creates wealth, consumption destroys wealth, which is easy to deduce logically).

And sitting on wealth is a tremendously benevolent thing: it removes that purchasing power from circulation, boosting the net purchasing power of every other person holding, for example, dollars. If Zuck puts his $28.8 billion in a bank account, it does two wonderful things for the economy: it becomes available to be lent out by the bank in question, to help fund businesses or similar, and it temporarily removes $28.8 billion worth of dollars from the economy, increasing what other people's dollars can buy.

Re: That “distressed baby" Tim Armstrong blamed for benefit cuts? She’s my daughter

#227

Post by ekidd »

pg wrote: post #157
scotty79 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes it's not about what you say but about what people infer about what you think from what they've heard.

Depends what you mean by "about." Do you mean 1. People often attack you for some belief they mistakenly attribute to you. or 2. What you actually say or believe doesn't matter. If people want to make up some belief to attribute to you in order to attack it, that's fine. If you mean 1, I agree. But I would hope that here, at least, we wouldn't sink to that sort of mob behavior.

In my case, I read the mother's article first, and then Tim Armstrong's original remarks and followup statements. This substantially colored my reading, and not for the better.

If I brought political biases to my reading, they had more to do with a pre-modern conception of loyalty: true authority is built on loyalty towards those who are led. And I looked at this from the perspective of a parent, and from that perspective, the lives of children often weigh heavier than things like self-survival.

AOL absolutely did not desert these parents, and that's where my post was is undeniably in the wrong—and where I wanted to revise it shortly after posting, before I got caught by noprocrast.

Now, I've said things in my life which were dumb and out-of-place. (In this thread, even.) And upon re-reading, I'm willing to extend Tim Armstrong the benefit of the doubt: he may have hit upon a spectacularly poor way to explain why employees were losing benefits, despite having the best of intentions. But his remarks could be easily and predictably de-anonymized, with obvious consequences:

On Thursday, within minutes of Armstrong’s utterance, my husband began fielding questions from colleagues: Wasn’t the CEO talking about his baby?

And not did these remarks effectively single out a specific employee, they also singled out a specific 1-year-old girl—who already has significant problems—and they linked her to the company-wide benefit reductions (at least for those coworkers who knew the parents). And this is where I got too angry to read Tim Armstrong's actual words accurately. Which I regret.

Re: That “distressed baby" Tim Armstrong blamed for benefit cuts? She’s my daughter

#228

Post by waps »

shasta wrote: post #217
DanBC wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm assuming you'd be annoyed if you had a hand or foot amputated? And they're just lumps of cells that have never had a coherent thought.

Did you really think my argument was that anything that is a lump of cells that has never had a coherent thought has no value? I can understand a sense of loss in losing an infant at birth. You make plans for the child and are excited to meet the person they will become. It's a miscarriage. A similar loss is learning that your spouse can't get pregnant in the first place. It's not the same as losing a child of 3, 6,…

Just correction a misconception here. The human brain "boots" on the 18th day after conception (you can set your watch to it). It is obvious on echo pictures that coherent thoughts are present on the 21st day after conception (e.g. if awake, most kids are aware that they're being pictured and attempt to find and play with the source of the sound, I think that qualifies as coherent thought).

It is quite obvious on the 23rd day that fetuses are swimming around and exploring their environment purposefully. They are at least as alive and coherent at that time.

The reason for this is that your DNA does not contain a plan for a human being. It contains a plan for a bilobite (an very old and presumed extinct form of life), and a way to transform a bilobite into a trilobite, a trilobite into something that resembles a fish, that fish into something very similar to a frog larva, and so on and so forth until you get a human. Other species have the same evolution in the womb/egg, except it diverges at some point.

The fish has a working brain (and it is unknown whether the trilobite does, it grows active neurons), generally referred to as a neural tube. That brain is working during the whole gestation period.

Re: That “distressed baby" Tim Armstrong blamed for benefit cuts? She’s my daughter

#229

Post by [deleted] »

shasta wrote: post #217
DanBC wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm assuming you'd be annoyed if you had a hand or foot amputated? And they're just lumps of cells that have never had a coherent thought.

Did you really think my argument was that anything that is a lump of cells that has never had a coherent thought has no value? I can understand a sense of loss in losing an infant at birth. You make plans for the child and are excited to meet the person they will become. It's a miscarriage. A similar loss is learning that your spouse can't get pregnant in the first place. It's not the same as losing a child of 3, 6,…

[deleted]

Re: That “distressed baby" Tim Armstrong blamed for benefit cuts? She’s my daughter

#230

Post by waps »

sgk284 wrote: post #197
gwern wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the child lives to 80, she only needs to contribute $12,500 worth of value to civilization per year for this to make economic sense. No, that's not correct. You're not thinking at the margin.

Still makes sense at the margin. Updated wording slightly to clarify.

Have you looked around lately ? Worldwide, I'd say at least 50% of the population does not make economic sense. That number is going up, fast.

What do you intend to do about them ?

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