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Showing content with the highest reputation on 08/11/23 in all areas

  1. I'm an outside observer on this, being in the UK, but it seems to me the basic problem with the US health system is that it is what is called a "broken market". The consumer has no leverage over the supplier and thus it is not a suitable subject for market competition to deliver an efficient outcome. As I understand it, most people in the US get health cover as part of their employment remuneration. The employer pays a charge to an insurer, who adds a mark-up to the charges it receives from the medical providers. So the end consumer of health treatment is 3 steps away from the provider and has no market power. Nobody in the chain has either the incentive, or the purchasing power, to shop around and drive down costs to keep the providers honest. In theory the insurer might have such an incentive, but in practice it is easier just to accept the charges, pass them on to the employers, with a mark-up, and get out on the golf course. In most other countries there is central purchasing of health provision by the government, by means of large and valuable contracts, professionally negotiated, and hard bargains can be driven. But that involves a role for "government" - which is anathema to all the American rightwingers, brought up on the myth of individualism and Ayn Rand.
    2 points
  2. You mean about the time reversal? If so, yes. It is a universal causality relation between events.
    1 point
  3. Simply put the trampoline is a 2D membrane that is distorted in the third dimension by a force acting in that dimension. That's all fine and dandy, but we live in a 3D universe - as far as we can tell there is no 4th dimension - but scaling up the 'trampoline' would require a 4th dim. There are proper astrophysicists here that can offer multicolour explanations @Janus?
    1 point
  4. In gastronomy there is another issue at play. Salaries are typically the highest expense in a restaurant as the work is rather labor-intensive. In addition, the margins on food are often low, especially for freshly produced items. In most of North America (and increasingly elsewhere) there are more and more chains that that are simply more profitable as they have pre-cooked food and require less trained staff. At the lower price scale, often only family-run restaurants (which basically have cheap labor in form of family members) are likely to stay alive for a bit longer. This also means that there is a huge cultural loss to corporations here, which makes me rather sad (and supercharged by the pandemic). Also saves trained staff, similar to the actual restaurants. Also, insulin is dirt-cheap, if purchased in bulk by comparison. Finally even in non-profit systems, hospitals are run by administrators and not that frequently by medical experts. As such it is more about profit or balancing budgets (which is less bad but not by that much). There are a lot of stories from MDs who talk about how stupid administrative decisions interfere with their ability to care for patients. This is especially the case when it comes to atypical diseases. The delayed reporting and initial suppression of information during the early COVID-19 outbreaks is a bit of an administrative (though not operational) example of how checklists are taking precedence over medical judgement.
    1 point
  5. I disagree that the fundamental issue here is "What wouldn’t you pay to save your life?" I think it's "Why should saving lives be based on what you can pay?" Sorry if that's too pedantic. It's for-profit thinking that drives stupid decisions like the one you describe in your OP. Money over medicine. It's cheaper to jab you than to pay an outsourced third party extra to have the right meal on hand. What if the fire department worked that way? "Your house is on fire? What wouldn't you pay for us to put it out?" Me personally, I think making meals friendly to ALL patients recuperating from medical procedures is a big step towards humane healthcare. I can't imagine recovery without the right food to eat. Also personally, I think 11 out of 100 is a huge fraction when it comes healthcare. If it were up to me, I'd make fewer bombs and sink more money into cures. And in the meantime, stop wasting insulin.
    1 point
  6. Well this plays nicely with the other discussion about socialism + insurance. To answr phi the american insurance indistry pioneered the use of Bayesian statistics when everyone else (mathematicians) was ridiculing it. In those days the idea of insurance was a socialist idea of 'collective risk sharing' - that is the many collectively paying for the harm suffered by a few of their number, noting that the harm could be much greater than any individual couls support. The operative word there being risk. I seem to remember an older idea of business in general was the taking of a risk in order to receive benefit (profit). These days business seems to be promoting the idea of "business want certainty".
    1 point
  7. The cost of the extra insulin is less than the cost of maintaining meals for a specialty group. These types of decisions will always be made as long as medical treatment is administered from a privately-owned model. Profit is #1 and healthcare follows somewhere after that. It becomes obvious when you look at the insurance side. Most insurance actually makes some sense. You have a house/boat/car/life that you can figure out the exact worth of in order to insure it properly, but medical insurance isn't like that. You can't know how much or how little medical treatment you may need over your life. I'm not sure how to do it, but medicine in general needs to stop thinking about how much money it can generate and start focusing on helping people live a higher quality, more healthful life.
    1 point
  8. Generally a well mixed life/career probably with lots of interesting stories along the way. As for trigonometry and mathematics in general, we ar estill teaching maths as a series of procedures leading to formulae that most folks then 'plug and chug'. It follows that they need the manupilative skills to chug. In actual fact most folks never need to do this as the outcome is already has already been worked out or in most modern times is available in the form of online calculators. What they actually need is a simple appreciation of what the result means and what they could do with it. This applies to calculus as well as trigonometry. They can very quickly get the hang of sin and cos or dy/dx etc just as they can get the hang of a car accelerator, brake and clutch pedal, without all the fluffy mech eng gear and transmission theory.
    1 point
  9. Depends on the teacher. I’d use a suspended blanket and a series of progressively larger weights. A small weight would create a small depression in the blanket, and eventually you’d get to a point where a sufficiently massive weight would break the whole dang setup. Seems like a fair way to visualize it. Another fun way to put it, Black Holes = Hotel California. We are programmed to receive…but you can never leave.
    1 point
  10. I have the book. https://www.awesomebooks.com/book/9780333248270/connections/used?gclid=Cj0KCQjwuNemBhCBARIsADp74QRYfZaxv6ZvzE_ud5NC1V6sTKAcQqAxhOyYu3aSa96MQeqH8jpp1XcaAk5YEALw_wcB
    1 point
  11. Why? Autonomous mass transit is perfectly feasible. The autonomous trucks don't need any more roads; there are way too many roads already. Of course I know what you're fretting about. You think the only way to be free is the Davy Crockett way. Well, he was an ass. Having a constitution ought to mean that laws are based on the welfare of the entire polity, not that some people run off with a fragment of text and do whatever the hell thy like, because they have a powerful lobby and craven, corrupt politicians. if I'm emotional, it's about people exercising their gun rights school-children. I have no designs on their doors, nor on their houses, or whatever other property you're worried about. Just the guns. That's not negotiable. And be warned: I'll be demilitarizing the police next. Yep. Pretty soon, I'll demand to see those kids who have not been gunned down in their classroom properly fed and given adequate medical care, even if their parents are poor. Catastrophe is sure to follow. He's an ass, too.
    1 point
  12. I watched it and liked it. A lot. I clearly remember that I liked it. Don't remember much more than that, but some vague images. Well, it happened before you were born ...
    1 point
  13. 1. You never really explain what an "atmosphere lamp" is. 2. Given you then talk about regular LED bulbs it's not clear what new effect you seem to have found. 3. You don't explain why positioning them at the poles matters. 4. Your claim that your small scale local tests has "already prevented multiple apocalyptic warming scenarios" is an extraordinary claim that you provide zero evidence for. 5. You "haven't been able to exactly describe the phenomena just yet" - so what exactly do you expect us to discuss? 6. Your claim that the orientation of an LED bulb "instantly and definitely has a dramatic effect on correcting the layers of the atmosphere" is an extraordinary claim that you provide zero evidence for. 7. Your claim "When I did this I think it may have corrected a disgusting amount of disorganization in the atmosphere from all the atomic bomb testing in the 50's, 60's" is an extraordinary claim that you provide zero evidence for. 8. With "firing a gun causes cavities in the atmosphere" ... what exactly do you mean by "cavities"? 9. Your claim "which otherwise would last for an indefinite amount of time until something disturbs where the cavitation occurred" is an extraordinary claim that you provide zero evidence for. 10 You never explain why "light is good for doing this." [fixing these "cavities"] 11. What's Newtons first law got to do with these "cavities"? Basically, it's all gibberish. You might as well say a hovercraft full of eels will fix climate change.
    1 point
  14. Me too. Das Kapital is essentially the algebra of capitalist microeconomics and should imho be essential reading in any education system. It is not particularly 'political'. The Communist Manifesto should also be essential reading in view of its historical impact and amazing prose, but it is definitely a child of it's time.
    1 point
  15. As I have mentioned many times in this thread, right from the early on in it, you need to be able to anticipate the results of any rules you might make. I don't know how many times I have pointed this out to Swansont when he keeps asking "where are they?" while citing current low numbers and ignoring obvious evidence that XY athletes have known advantages. As they move away from testosterone targets, as they should, the numbers will surely go up... as society becomes more accepting of transgenders, as it should, the numbers surely will go up... ...unless of course there are other rules in place to prevent it.
    1 point
  16. Access to birth control would be big. Not misrepresenting what birth control is (e.g. calling it an abortifacient when it’s not) would be a good social change. This seems pretty obvious, but is opposed by some so-called pro-life proponents. Which suggests the ones opposed to contraception have an agenda beyond abortion.
    1 point
  17. Right. But at this point in the science of biology I believe that for the human species, 99+% of us can be clearly divided into biologically male or biologically female regardless of more overlap in secondary sex characteristics, and that division is so significant with regard to physical sports that there are demonstrable differences between the top performances of the two groups, in the range of 6-12% in many events. With gender, as we now define the term gender, no such clear division for top performers exists, notwithstanding medical science's ability to intervene. Essentially this means that unless XX athletes are given their own space, they cannot be competitive at elite level without very serious restrictions put on any inclusion of XY athletes.
    1 point
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