(There's a shout-out to HN in the article.)

Two years ago, HN was the first to pick up on a post I wrote about my son's preliminary diagnosis via experimental exome sequencing:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4038113

Two years ago, he was the only known NGLY1 deficient patient in the world.

By spreading the story, we've found 16 cases worldwide.

We've organized.

We've found preliminary treatments.

Clinical trials are in the pipeline.

In some cases, we've saved the lives of previously undiagnosed patients.

And, these children's cells are turning into gold mines for the basic science of glycobiology.

From the bottom of my heart and on behalf of the entire small but optimistic NGLY1 community,

Thank you.

> in this case, since Level3 is pushing more data, they would be the ones paying

No. That's not how the internet works. Nobody PUSHES data. People PULL data.

Verizon has customers who pay for internet access. Those customers make REQUESTS to Netflix for data and Netflix RESPONDS with data.

They happen to be streaming movies which use a lot of bandwidth, but on average it's about 3Mbps per concurrent stream. That is WELL below the 25/3 or 50/5 or 100/10 that Verizon advertises for purchase.

If someone were pushing data it would be called a DoS or DDoS. An attack is when someone sends unrequested data to try and break your network.

But this data isn't unrequested. Verizon's customers have requested it from Netflix as they are within their rights to do since they have literally paid for it.

This is Verizon wanting to bill their customers once and then their customers' vendors as well. Double billing for a single service is a neat trick if you can pull it off. But it tends not to engender goodwill.

"If that’s the case, we’ll buy one for them. Maybe they can’t afford the small piece of cable between our two ports. If that’s the case, we’ll provide it. Heck, we’ll even install it."

That's what I would call a mortal wound to Verizon's arguments.

Its good in theory, but in practice it doesn't work. Those guys who mastered the political process. They don't get fired. Not getting fired is what they do. Thats the thing they're really good at.

Any company that has been around for as long as Microsoft, has a huge amount of dead weight in its mid-level management. I mean people whose main skill is mastery of the internal political process.

Lest people think I'm singling out Microsoft specifically, this same problem is present at Google as well, but is less of a problem because Google has not been around long enough to pick up the same amount of dead weight personnel.

The first generation of people at a company were fighting for market, and they rose due to their ability to deliver value to colleagues and customers. But when a company becomes successful, the resources available to teams within the company becomes somewhat decoupled from company revenue. Soon, political skill becomes as important or more important than impacting the company's bottom line.

Microsoft and Intel alumni in the late 90s used to tell me that they knew managers whose main goal was to grow the headcount under them, in order to grow their own prestige.

Today at Google you can see some of this same behavior in its nascency. Most of the deadweight is outside Engineering teams because its hard to bullshit when you have to deliver a product. Still, there are peripheral functions like business development, marketing, intellectual property, privacy, policy, etc., where you can always find a few deadbeats that talk slick, but don't seem to have much to show for their time except hiring more people and making a few high impact appearances at meetings. You can go a long way if you can talk the talk, look the part, and kiss the right asses.

Microsoft has been picking up useless deadbeats for nigh on 25 years now. They really need to shed these people.

One company you have to admire is Facebook. I don't know if its true, but I'm told you basically get fired at Facebook in the first year if you don't know how to deliver something of tangible value within that time. That is hardcore.

If that metric was applied at Microsoft and Intel, you'd see the companies shedding 25% of their workforce immediately.

I suspect even Google would shed 10-15% of its people.