I will, once again, bring your attention to hashql, which is so pleasant to use. It's so minimal that it is almost more a pattern than a library. Try it out as an alternative to graphql if you are mainly querying a SQL database anyhow (although it can be easily configured to request data from other types of sources.) I don't think it can currently combine results from multiple data sources, but I think it should be within the realm of possible things
I think it comes down to, if you read the history of the American Medical Association, that some doctors simply didn’t like a free market pushing down prices for their services.
The point was nobody likes their own salaries being depressed due to the free market. One difference is that doctors even under very free market conditions enjoy high salaries so it's comparatively pretty easy for them to set aside some money to lobby to tighten up that market - which gives them more money, which makes it even easier to ...
Yeah, but why is the same situation present, and the same explanation given, in Poland, EU? Or, seeing from other comments, plenty other countries around the world?
I'm seconding 'viraptor here - this isn't a good enough explanation. It doesn't stand up to scrutiny, and doesn't mesh well with day-to-day experience. Individual doctors I know seem to have very little influence over anything, and they're first in line to the protests about working conditions and pay.
One way to drive "medical costs" down is to ensure that the supply of medical care is low. This also drives prices up. This means that the incentives of the regulatory body are directly contrary to the incentives of the people supposedly benefiting from the regulation.
(And doctors and hospitals are happy with this, because such a system boils down to telling them "we want you to do less work, but for more money".)
3. (Tangentially, note that the general model of "restrict supply, subsidize demand" is incredibly common. It's popular both ways; the first part helps a small but politically active and highly motivated group, and the second part pretends to help the populace in general.)
> 2. State provision of medical care corrupts the system, as I describe sidethread
How is this at play (from the article we are commenting on)?
The article does not mention once: "medicare", "medicaid", "regulation", "law", "government" - once.
If anything, it's the inverse. You have it bass-ackwards, the private hospital, the for-profit system is driving things like:
> I delivered my third child with my own hands because the obstetrician was stuck in a traffic jam. The following morning I went to work because if I didn’t 12 patients have to miss their surgeries, 2 anaesthetists and about 8 nurses will miss out on their day’s income. More importantly, admin would not be happy because a cancelled operating list is a huge financial loss to the hospital.
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> 1. Doctors have a lot of political influence because they are popular. This means they can get away with things that other industries mostly can't.
Can you clarify how this doctor exerts any type of political influence? They have a sleeping bag in their car they sleep at their job so often and are lamenting they barely get to see their family. I don't see your point at all being illustrated in this article, at all.
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> "And doctors and hospitals are happy with this, because such a system boils down to telling them "we want you to do less work, but for more money".
I get the feeling this doctor is on the verge of suicide from being over-worked. Do you think the person that wrote this article would agree with your statement?
To the contrary, it would be strange if other mixed economies were somehow immune to this. There's a reason agricultural subsidies are corrupt in both the US and EU, and why zoning laws are a problem in both the US and EU. The same incentives will lead to the same outcome.
Your first mistake is assuming that the power used to secure the Bitcoin network is a waste. It is clearly not, since thousands of people believe it is worth paying for.
The second error is implicitly assuming that the number of people Bitcoin serves is correlated with it’s power usage. You could serve the same number of people as the banking sector does now without increased power consumption when you bring layer 2 or 3 solutions into the picture.
Your first point kind of makes it impossible to call anything a waste, right? Everything we do in society is paid for by somebody so it must all be worthwhile.
For the second point, are you talking about Layer 2 solutions that track cryptocurrency in a centralized database, like an exchange, where most transactions happen? Basically just traditional banking but with crypto as the unit of account. Or are you talking about decentralized layer 2 solutions like Lightning Network? I don't think Lightning Network can scale to match what the banking sector does, even if you ignore all the services banks provide other than facilitating transactions. For example you could not pay the US workforce with Lightning Network because it would take several months worth of of blocks just to open a channel to each person, and quickly those channels would run out of inbound capacity and you'd need to open more on top of that, so the Layer 1 capacity still limits the ability to use LN at that scale.
Maybe Lightning Network will scale, maybe not. But VISA or Mastercard could build on top of Bitcoin and allow many more transactions than the base layer does. You would use the base layer for final settlements.
Already now you can get a VISA/Mastercard and use that to spend Bitcoin. But of course, every layer on top of Bitcoin presents its own set of trade-offs in terms of trust and security.
> Your first mistake is assuming that the power used to secure the Bitcoin network is a waste. It is clearly not, since thousands of people believe it is worth paying for.
This is a logic error: securing a financial system is not waste but paying more than you need to is. If my bank secured my money by paying an army of dudes with guns to sit around watching cash and did transfers by putting a check on the corporate jet, I’d say that was wasteful, too.
Similarly, the argument that the current system could be matched by L2 systems is both speculative and conceding defeat: even if that worked as well as the sales pitch claims it’d be using more power, and we know that there’s no plausible scenario where usage goes up while power consumption goes down.
The argument that L2 systems is the answer is also directly undercutting your earlier marketing pitch. If the justification for the inefficiency is that it’s needed for security, telling people that they should switch to your I Can’t Believe It’s Not A Bank is either admitting that the security benefits are either not real or necessary, or that they can be provided more cost effectively.
The only people who are committed to using Bitcoin are the people who’ve already bought in: everyone else is going to look for advantages relative to what they’re already using. It’s not just enough to handwave about how the system might at some point be less distant from parity, you need a serious plan for being better at something before you’ll see any significant adoption. Parity might seem like a far off goal, and it is, but it’s not enough to get most people to switch.
What you call inefficiency (I guess in terms of power consumption) is a misuse of the term in a world where value is subjective. It is efficient and necessary for the use case and value it provides. You can argue it is ineffecient compared to Proof of Stake for example, but Proof of Stake is a completely different system and has a completely different incentive structure.
I’m saying also that L2 (and L3, … Ln) is a way to scale the number of users without increasing power consumption. Every time you add a layer, there are other trade-offs for the benefits gained. But at the base layer you still have the benefits of not having a central authority censoring and controlling exchange of an economic good.
> What you call inefficiency (I guess in terms of power consumption) is a misuse of the term in a world where value is subjective
No, it’s simply recognizing that competing systems match or exceed on security without the same cost. You’ve effectively acknowledged this by saying that the system will be more usable and affordable by using something better designed which eventually clears in Bitcoin to reduce the number of expensive transactions.
No, not something better designed. Something augmenting Bitcoin to make it cheaper to transact while maintaining a base layer for final settlement that is secure and decentralized.
You leave out other characteristics that make Bitcoin an attractive economic good, when you think that matching or exceeding the security at a lower cost is a valid argument against Bitcoin. If it was all about power consumption, Bitcoin wouldn’t keep increasing in demand and price.
Look, you can theorize all you want about the inefficency of Bitcoin, but the market has spoken and continues to speak.
> thousands of people believe it is worth paying for.
Except, in good old libertarian fashion, they tend not to pay for it. First, the vast majority of the around $100 it costs to process a BTC transaction comes not from explicit fees, but from (invisible) money supply increase (the mining reward). That still neglects the environmental externalities, which are probably in the $30+ region.
Ah modern Society. You say not theft, but they force it from us and spend it on wars to extract whatever they can from the ones they can't tax without a fight. The alternative where we don't let the already too powerful take our property looks worse?
Anyone in favor of taxation is either afraid of challenging the status quo, or of the belief that they'll ultimately get more by stealing from others than doing anything productive themselves. That's quite sad. If it was really true that it was better for society it could simply be voluntary, and not coercive. You wouldn't pay nowhere near the same amount which is taken from you now, you'd very likely shop around for a less shitty option.
Others have done that very nicely for me, so if you really are genuinely curious I would suggest you read the following two books. Now you can start off with "Ethics of Liberty"[1] if you would like to begin with the Ethical Parts of the reasoning, but if you're more into how / why it would work (which it seems you are), I would suggest starting out with "For a New Liberty"[2]. Now these books are straight to the core, no sugar coating, so I hope you'll read them with an open mind.
Now since you're on this site you'll probably also find the related book "Against Intellectual Property" interesting.
If I'm going to spend the time telling my visions, I'd prefer a better platform since this thread is getting quite long. You can find a way to contact me in my profile.
I recommended those books because you clearly can't comprehend humans working together on a voluntary basis, so changing your world view in a couple of sentences didn't really seem likely.
What's really insane is that we allow so many people to die in public traffic every year. Talk about insane!
Use fzf for file navigation and perhaps vim-vinegar. When you open Vim, use :cd to change to your project directory and you’re ready. Use :term to start stuff, e.g., a local web server or whatever. Use fzf to navigate between open buffers.
There was no lag. You just didn’t see dramatic price increases in consumer goods. But you saw substantial increases in the price of stocks and real estate for instance. Also in healthcare and education.
Now new money is being spent on consumer goods while supply of goods and services have been severely restricted during the corona panic. Of course soaring energy prices is now also contributing.
I remember vanilla vim doing some weird stuff, like leaving the buffer open even though I've exited the shell, requiring me to close it manually. I don't know if it's been fixed since.
Currently Dollars only serve the Chinese government as a way to put pressure on the competition (USA). They are still eating their own food and living in their own technology based buildings built from their local resources by their local workforce. America doesn't help keep Chinese from poverty, because China isn't incapable of it in the first place. If anything, the political pressures just created perverse incentives there.
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