So are sales engineer/HVAC engineer/stationary engineer/chief engineer/critical facilities engineer/etc...seems like the word, and required training associated with it, is slowly getting cheapened by throwing the title "engineer" on everything.
I don't buy it. Eich was hardly a wunderkind capable of carrying a browser on his shoulders alone. And in a market for engineers that currently favors labor, do you really want to be on the wrong side of the social issues that your staff generally care about? Maybe they would have left to work on Chrome if Eich had stayed. That doesn't even speak to the myriad technical and resource issues that Mozilla faced prior to that particular incident.
I have a hard time believing that the "free market" can solve healthcare given that the demand for it is more inelastic than pretty much any other product.
It is absolutely NOT as inelastic as everyone assumes.
Most health issues are not emergencies. I as a consumer would be perfectly happy to shop around the market, and find the best deal on healthcare, if my efforts were rewards.
Unfortunately, prices are not transparent, and the costs are not payed directly by me. They are paid by my insurance provider, so why would I bother trying to reduce my bill by thousands of dollars, if someone else is paying for it anyway?
I agree. The incentives are out of whack. Being a self-pay patient over the last several years has been enlightening. The health care people I've dealt with are generally ready to go well out of their way to help make care more affordable. Once I was given an unasked-for 55% discount on an ER visit. (They're happy they don't have to deal with an insurance company!)
I've heard that people with high-deductible plans are now finding it advantageous to just say they are self-pay to get the discounts.
For comparison shopping, healthcarebluebook.com can give an average price for a certain procedure in your area.
No actually it does not. The government subsidizes food production and food for the poor HEAVILY.
Also food is cheap and plentiful to create.
And most importantly, food is easy to steal; the one important factor in a functioning free market libertarians tend to forget about is the natural control at the bottom, for the poor: if the poor need something in order to survive and can't afford it, they act as a check on greed and neoliberalism run amok by ignoring the fake magic pieces of paper that the wealthy wave around as tokens of power and take what they need.
It's a lot harder to steal health care so there's no incentive for the rich to modify the system to help the poor like there is with food.
Maybe its similar. My last 30-day dose of blood pressure medicine cost be 54 cents. And the store had shelves full of medicine all around me, thousands of them, all easily pocketable.
Yes, and this is a bug, not a feature. Food would be cheaper if this were not done. The "subsidies" are to the food producers, to artifically keep prices up. The equivalent for health care would be subsidies to health care providers.
> and food for the poor
Yes, with food stamps. But nobody tells the poor what they have to spend the food stamps on, and nobody regulates grocery stores up one side and down the other telling them what food items they have to provide if they accept food stamps and what they have to charge for every single item. So this regulation is nothing at all like US health care regulation.
The equivalent of food stamps for health care would be to give poor people a flat sum of money per month on a "health care spending card" that they could use at any health care provider they wanted, for any service they wanted. And then no other regulation of health care providers--no rules about what services they have to provide, no regulation of prices, etc. I personally think this would be a significant improvement over the current US system.
> food is cheap and plentiful to create
Yes, and it would be cheaper if the government did not subsidize producers, as above. The reason for this is, of course, that there is a free market in food (or at least much closer to one than the market in health care) and so producers are competing on price, therefore driving them to make food production more and more efficient. A century ago in the US, food was not cheap and plentiful to create. Technology and production processes improve over time if they are forced to by competition. I see no reason why the same would not apply to health care, if it were competitive the way food production is.
> food is easy to steal
This is an interesting point, but I'm not sure how much difference it makes in itself, because even the richest person in the world can only consume a limited quantity of food. So it makes no difference to rich people whether the poor can steal food or not; even if they do, the rich won't be the one to suffer, someone much further down the income ladder will (if anyone does).
A more interesting aspect is this:
> It's a lot harder to steal health care
I would rephrase this as: health care is much less fungible than food is. You and I can trade lunches, but we can't trade, say, gallbladder operations or physical exams. I agree that this is potentially a valid reason to treat health care different from food. What might be helpful is to look at other goods or services that are not fungible and see how they are handled in comparison with health care.
Government subsidies are also responsible for a large part of the food production infrastructure -- not only is one of the biggest problems behind food transporting it from production to market, which is completely government subsidized (if food producers had to pay for the highways their trucks use/erode they would go out of business and not serve half the country) food not only is subsidized now, but HAS BEEN subsidized for every moment the industry has existed because it is a necessity. It is impossible to separate the food industry from government interference, they are permanently symbiotically joined. If food production can even now survive now without the government (it cannot in anything near its current form), this does not mean the progress we have today could have been made without it; it just means the government has done a good job of fostering and supporting the industry.
Food is heavily regulated, including the food bought by stamps. The government decides what can be purchased by the stamps, and every item of food sold in any store across the country is approved for safety and health. Without these regulations we would have massive constant food related deaths as producers compete on price and compromise safety to the detriment and possibly death of any customer who cannot afford the high quality "market regulated" product which is exactly what has happened in every unregulated industry in the history of the world. And for higher end products: the calculus of a PR cover up operation and possible civil suit vs. actually safely creating food is done by companies, and currently federal regulators weigh in on the side of 'you had better make this safe or else'. You are proposing pushing the balance here towards "well, if we can save a buck, screw it, we can tie the victims up in court until they go bankrupt and die anyway or blame it on the supply chain and promise we will do better" which makes safety much less important.
A health care spending card is perhaps a natural suggestion but is made all the more insidious because it is so. It is, in reality, an atrocious and murderous idea; the entire crux of health care is not only that it is essential to living and therefore has an infinite price and that quality is almost impossible for consumers to accurately assess but that needs for different people are drastically different, usually for reasons that have very little to do with their choices or desires, which is why it is generally taken care of by insurance while people do not buy "food insurance". Health care spending cards (or HSAs) are essentially a euphemism for condemning any poor person who gets sick to death.
And of course it makes a difference whether poor people can steal the food. Remember that unfettered free market capitalism is the system where a rich man's dog eats 5 course gourmet meals while his poor neighbor's child dies of hunger. Putting something necessary for survival behind an arbitrary chalked in line and saying "sorry, you don't get to have that because you weren't born rich and the neoliberal market economy has transitioned and has no room for your skillset, enjoy your one free death, maybe when you are reincarnated your father will be named Koch" is a very fast way to start riots and anarchy. The only reason the rich are rich is because the poor believe they are and act accordingly, we call this belief structure market society and government; shattering that necessary illusion will likely hurt everyone, but it most definitely hurts the rich. The point is that if food is available but inaccessible to the poor the free market and governmental structure in place will cease to exist -- the market and government have evolved in a very careful way to prevent this from happening.
> It is impossible to separate the food industry from government interference, they are permanently symbiotically joined.
I'm sorry, but I don't buy this assertion of yours, and since we disagree on something so fundamental we're unlikely to be able to have a useful discussion.
> which is exactly what has happened in every unregulated industry in the history of the world.
This is an extremely strong claim which requires extremely strong evidence. Do you have any?
> the entire crux of health care is not only that it is essential to living and therefore has an infinite price
By this logic any action which carries any risk of reducing your life span and is not absolutely necessary should not be done. Do you live your life that way? Does anyone?
> unfettered free market capitalism is the system where a rich man's dog eats 5 course gourmet meals while his poor neighbor's child dies of hunger
This certainly happens in systems that are regulated by governments--such as ours. Where is your evidence that it happens, and is worse, in systems that are not regulated by governments?
> if food is available but inaccessible to the poor
In a free market, what would prevent the poor from producing their own food? In the US, historically, this is how most people got their food--they grew it or hunted it or fished for it themselves. Or they lived in small communities where everyone knew each other personally, so they knew the people producing their food. Our current system, in which almost all of us are dependent on a small number of food producers whom we don't know and cannot influence on our own, is, as you appear to agree, a product of massive government regulation--combined, as you conveniently forgot to state, with massive regulatory capture on the part of the corporations that own most of the food production capacity.
Yes, the government inspects food to see that it doesn't contain harmful microbes--but people knew how to do that before the government got into the act (if not, humans would have gone extinct long ago from food poisoning). The government also subsidizes the production of high fructose corn syrup and factory farmed meat and poultry. It subsidizes wheat and corn so that most of the US's acreage goes to those crops instead of a greater and healthier variety. (And then it subsidizes ethanol from corn so that we can burn food in our cars while poor people starve.) I could go on and on. Why does the government do all these things? Because it has the power to do it, and that power can be bought, and has been.
Of course this system, now that it exists and we are all caught in it, is by no means simple to escape from. But that does not mean it was inevitable, nor that it is good.
Food is extremely predictable. Expensive medical care is not. Unfortunately the emergency / end of life care is by far the most expensive. You can get maybe a thousand flight physicals for the cost of one really good heart attack.
Also once "the system" has its claws in you, you can't leave in practice even if its theoretically legally possible. My MiL goes in with stomach upset vomiting urgent care, next thing you know she's getting admitted something to do with gallbladder removal. In theory she legally could have vomited her way out of the hospital with an IV attached into the parking lot to another, cheaper hospital to have her gallbladder removed (or whatever it was) but in practice this isn't happening.
Emergency care, yes, that's unpredictable, and that's the sort of thing that health insurance should cover.
End of life care is not always unpredictable. In fact it rarely is in terms of the general need. Yes, you can't predict the exact point in time at which an 80-year-old person, say, will have an event that makes them require assisted living or a nursing home, but you can certainly foresee well in advance that such a need will arise at some point around that age. So this is not an unexpected need in the sense that emergency care is. And there's no reason why the same health plan should have to cover both needs, yet that is what the US health system does.
> you can't leave in practice even if its theoretically legally possible
Yes, this example of yours is an case of an unexpected need that health insurance should cover. However, I don't know of any "health insurance" in the US that only covers cases of unexpected need like this, and does not also cover everything else that is in any way involved with health care.
People like to think competition results in variety, like the difference between Walmart and Nordstrom.
The reality is the unified vocational training and the court system and malpractice insurance system and fluidity of employee transfers and government licensing standards mean the variety in care available is more like the difference between McDonalds and Burger King and this aspect is extremely carefully avoided in the debates. Price competition simply will not happen in medical care, theres a lot more required to initiate it than merely messing with the insurance system, it goes very deep.
I think you miss the difficulty of walking out in mid treatment. Yes sure in theory its possible for people to get reservations at three restaurants and eat appetizers and drinks at one, the main meal at the second, and desert at the third. In practice roughly zero people do this even though in the restaurant marketplace they're hopefully not in pain or dying or semi-senile or some other medical distress, and their family isn't panicking. To get the restaurant marketplace analogy correct above, you'd have to use McDonalds, Burger King, and Wendys as your examples, so even if you wandered back and forth between restaurants, the bill would be about the same in the end if not higher on a system perspective from all the paperwork and increased transactional costs. The main, possibly only, effect of playing patient "hot potatoe" would be increasing suffering of sick people.
> the unified vocational training and the court system and malpractice insurance system and fluidity of employee transfers and government licensing standards mean the variety in care available is more like the difference between McDonalds and Burger King
In other words, regulations, mostly from the government, prevents competition from resulting in variety. I propose to fix it by less regulation--letting more of the benefits of competition be realized. You propose to fix that--how, exactly? With more regulation?
> Price competition simply will not happen in medical care
In the current regulatory regime, you are correct, it won't, because there is no incentive for it. But that's not because price competition is inherently impossible in health care? Or is it because the regulations are removing the incentives for it?
> I think you miss the difficulty of walking out in mid treatment.
I agree that it's hard to change providers in mid treatment when it's urgent, yes. But urgent care is not the only opportunity you have to evaluate providers. In a competitive environment, smart providers would view ordinary care like annual physicals or shots as opportunities to show potential patients their competence, and smart patients would take such opportunities to evaluate the competence of providers. Plus, families and friends can pool information--people do that now. The value of such information is limited now because there is not much choice in the marketplace, yes (hence your McDonalds vs. Burger King analogy). But, once more, why is there such limited choice? Because competition is inherently impossible in this domain? Or because it's regulated out of existence?
There is a great book by a marine biologist that goes into detail about these topics. It's called The Ocean of Life - The Fate of Man and the Sea by Callum Roberts. It was recommended to me here on HN several years ago, and I think that recommendation bears repeating. He goes into great detail about conservation topics for half the book, and the other half has to do with climate change and its effects on the oceans (and how that affects humanity).
For those of us not familiar with this particular financial product (is that even the right term?), could you elaborate on the $30+ billion dollar figure? How do you arrive at that number?
I rounded down a bit to compensate for some of the lower volume cryptocurrencies and any potential issues with market cap that it might not be reporting correctly.
You can get to $30 billion just by taking the current total number of Bitcoin + Ether outstanding and multiplying by their respective token prices. Admittedly both numbers are inflated some amount due to tokens being unknowingly lost/destroyed, but I think we're still in the ballpark of $30B.
There is also a few hundred million (possibly low single digit billions) of venture capital in startups based on cryptocurrencies.
Of course not, but that's true of every asset. Apple would drop from $790 Billion in market cap to a tiny fraction of that if shareholders started trying to sell their shares enmasse.
If political correctness means not making demeaning jokes about women in your code, then yes, it's absolutely mandatory. Even if you were the most sexist business owner, it should still be obvious that behavior like this invites sexual harassment lawsuits in a professional setting.
And there are plenty of people who manage to be both unconventional and creative without making a juvenile joke that amounts to little more than slut shaming women for using a dating app.
My open source code is riddled with jokes of all kinds on all kinds of hairless monkeys. Demanding dignity you shall have none, because you got none, disserving dignity because you stumble around naked of any - you shall have.
And you know- those professionals tend to have a scope-creep when it comes to professionalism. Do not talk about this its offensive, do not talk about that its offensive, do not talk about this invention, it could offend our buisness-partner XY. No, i demand the right to offend. And to be offended. Call me animal names. I prefer that much more to that mental-graveyard of smiles and conservation.
Insult is preferable to insulation.
Always.
If the church still had power, it would be insulted by da-vincis drawing claiming that humans could handcraft angel-wings. And those intestines- what a insult.
And that darwin guy, claiming we where ape-decendants.
Insult upon insult.
How can any professional gentleman take this kind of talk into there mouth and not demean himself. Outrageous.
Take your silk-sheated scissors and censor somehwere else.
Also sorry, but the whole process of human sexual interaction is demeaning, always was always will be. You have drug dealers and drug buyers, trades that go bust, and the attempt to cram the whole messy affair into contracts that should outlast the varous value-curves the trade-goods in the relationship perform. Its hillarious and hellirious. To not joke about this existential absurdity is to not be a selfaware human.
> My open source code is riddled with jokes of all kinds on all kinds of hairless monkeys. Demanding dignity you shall have none, because you got none, disserving dignity because you stumble around naked of any - you shall have.
K. Make those jokes about a protected class in a workplace and you might be looking at a lawsuit and lawyer telling you to cool it.
> Call me animal names. I prefer that much more to that mental-graveyard of smiles and conservation. Insult is preferable to insulation. Always.
I don't see why going to the other extreme is any sort of solution. Obviously you don't want to work in a PC culture so you can just avoid those workplaces. There are different levels in various fields and locations.
> To not joke about this existential absurdity is to not be a selfaware human.
I think we all get the joke now. We just don't find it funny. So, forgive us if we don't laugh while you continue exercising your right to free speech, and we can continue living side-by-side.
I think it depends on the kind of code. If it's some random experiement done in private away from work for personal exploration then I'd be sort okay to see such demeaning comments in the name of free speech. Professional Work is a no-no.
There are dozens of cities in the U.S. that want to be the next hub for young tech entrepreneurs, and most of them have more financial options than Kentucky, which is among the most dependent state budgets on federal dollars. Additionally, young people are socially and politically liberal, while KY voters overwhelmingly elected staunchly anti-LGBT representatives and were strongly in support of Trump.
I think it would be pretty hard to convince even the most disillusioned Bay Area or NYC software developer to move to rural Kentucky over e.g. Pittsburg or Portland.
I'm totally with you on that. There are all sorts of charming towns in socially progressive areas of the country that I would move to long before Kentucky if I ever got disillusioned with NYC. There are some amazing towns in Vermont that I've been to with great access to nature, skiing, and locally farmed food. And they've also accepted the Medicaid expansion under the ACA, they aren't homophobic, and they aren't trying to strip government to the bone at the expense of providing important services like infrastructure and public education. And if drug criminalization is something you care about, Vermont is a lot more friendly as well.
Techies tend to be socially liberal, or at the very least, libertarian, and the appeal of a place like Kentucky just isn't there.
>> Additionally, young people are socially and politically liberal, while KY voters overwhelmingly elected staunchly anti-LGBT representatives and were strongly in support of Trump.
also, while the 20-30 year olds did vote primarily for Clinton - definitely not in an overwhelming fashion by any stretch of imagination.
that said - yes, it would be pretty hard to convince a native New Yorker to move to KY, but then again that person might be a Midwest transplant living in NYC to begin with...
Something I picked up online is that lots of young people didn't want to vote for Clinton, as they felt she wasn't progressive enough, and they didn't fully understand how to best achieve their goals within the current political system.
Not sure how that translates going forward, if the left leaning young people split their vote or don't bother voting then that really helps the opposition, but it's different from young people being more conservative.
Looks skewed because majorities in a bunch of liberal states chose the third option (and several red states, though for the most part red states were very red): would not vote in this election
You say that like regulations are inherently bad. I can assure you that the industrial firms are not pricing negative externalities into their products unless the government forces them to.
Do you have any data that supports the assertion that liberal politics are on a strong downward trend? That struck me as odd and my (admittedly short) googling found a lot of evidence that the opposite is true.
Did you miss the November election? That should be proof enough.
Compare the anti-Vietnam-war protests of the early 1970s to the anti-Iraq-war protests in the 2000s... oh wait, there were no anti-war protests in the 2000s; everyone in America was all for that.
Compare the birthrates for liberal, irreligious people to conservative, religious people.
>Did you miss the November election? That should be proof enough.
Liberals won the popular vote...
> Compare the anti-Vietnam-war protests of the early 1970s to the anti-Iraq-war protests in the 2000s... oh wait, there were no anti-war protests in the 2000s; everyone in America was all for that.
That is a disingenuous comparison. The support for the Iraq war was so high because a the biggest terrorist attack in US history had just happened and we were going after the people we thought responsible. If you compare a similar situation WWII and Pearl Harbor, there were not protests for that either. In fact support for Japanese internment was high.
> Compare the birthrates for liberal, irreligious people to conservative, religious people.
Birth rates for people who typically "vote liberal"(minorities) in the united states are much higher than those of "conservative voters" (white people).
Irrelevant. The Electoral College doesn't work that way, and also, Republicans won elections across the board in all the other races: House, Senate, governors, state legislatures, etc.
Basically, the liberals clustered into a few coastal cities were numerous enough to win the presidential popular vote, but that doesn't affect much except the mayoral races in those cities, and the California state government (1 of 50).
>The support for the Iraq war was so high because a the biggest terrorist attack in US history had just happened and we were going after the people we thought responsible.
Only a complete moron believed at the time that Saddam had anything to do with 9/11.
>If you compare a similar situation WWII and Pearl Harbor, there were not protests for that either.
It was no secret that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Their planes were military planes, and had the Japanese flag on them. They even tried to send a warning first but screwed that up somehow.
Not so with Iraq. Despite what chimp Bush said, it was all too obvious to anyone with half a brain that there was no relation there, and the 9/11 hijackers were all Saudis anyway. And the Iraq war wasn't about 9/11 (that's why we invaded Afghanistan, something that wasn't really protested for pretty good reason since Osama really was there), it was about "WMD" which didn't exist. The whole thing was a giant sham and lie, and it was obvious.
>Birth rates for people who typically "vote liberal"(minorities) in the united states are much higher than those of "conservative voters" (white people).
The high-birth-rate minorities are very religious and are in favor of extremely socially conservative policies such as banning abortion. They only "vote liberal" because the GOP panders to white racists and anti-minority voters, for now. As soon as that changes, liberalism is dead in this country. Lots of those minorities are already voting GOP because of social policies and religion.
Moreover, you sidestepped my challenge. I said to compare the birthrates for "liberal, irreligious people" to conservative, religious people. The minorities in this country are not irreligious by a long shot; in fact, they're frequently a lot more religious that the average conservative.
>Irrelevant. The Electoral College doesn't work that way, and also, Republicans won elections across the board in all the other races: House, Senate, governors, state legislatures, etc.
Your argument was that liberalism was on a downward trend. On the US's biggest election stage, more people identified with the liberal politics than the conservative ones. Those other races have much smaller turnouts on any given day than the presidential election.
> Only a complete moron believed at the time that Saddam had anything to do with 9/11. not the same yada...
You can say that as your opinion, but the national sentiment at the time went with that as fact. Check the history.
> Moreover, you sidestepped my challenge. I said to compare the birthrates for "liberal, irreligious people" to conservative, religious people. The minorities in this country are not irreligious by a long shot; in fact, they're frequently a lot more religious that the average conservative.
Social conservatism does not imply political conservatism...
