> ...eliminating the health insurance industry and moving to some form of socialized system...
I empathize with the struggles from the hassle and bloat. But what is it about socialized healthcare that is so dynamically opposed to insurance? In my experience insurance has a lot of attributes that mimic socialized healthcare: exclusivity to actual care, (intention of) spreading risk, and very very regulated.
Seems to me insurance is "socialized health care, lite version." But I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise.
Health insurance payouts are socialized, but the health insurance company and healthcare providers are privatized. The insurance company and the healthcare providers are now incentivized to increase pricing of policies and services, since the cost is shared anyway.
Couple that in with laws that hamper the effectiveness of health insurance (can't negotiate drug pricing, denial of necessary care, absurdly high deductibles) and many quickly see that health insurance really just feels like a scam.
The regulations are in the favor of the insurance providers and major healthcare corporations. There have been decades of erosions to regulations on both the patient and healthcare provider side.
Couple that in with the recent announcement that many nursing and healthcare degrees are no longer considered "professional degrees" and are therefore now further restricting access to these career fields, US healthcare is about to get a lot worse.
Add in the fact that insurance companies are legally allowed to (and would be stupid to not) heavily lobby the politicians that decide how much money they can make. They are allowed to donate essentially an unlimited amount of money to the campaigns of politicians running for office thanks to the Citizens United ruling.
Turns out unlimited money from bad actors flowing into the pockets of those that write the laws isn’t a great system!
Interesting to me that all of your pain points involve legislation and certification, as well as insurance. Is socialistic health care not subject to legislation and certification? Or is it that legislation and certification don't contribute to the pain?
It is subject to legislation and certification, but it's harder to lobby when you can't privatize the direct costs. Still, scams are common (e.g. inflated medical equipment costs). I guess hustlers gonna hustle in any system.
Insurance is basically adding a middleman to socialized healthcare, one whose sole motive is to make more profit for its investors. Which in itself is a sore contradiction to the very idea of socialized healthcare.
There are 2 routes of providing socialized healthcare - either create a top down centralized model like the UK NHS or like the usually general EU model of creating an ecosystem of private and public players with heavy regulation.
The first model is expensive, prone to bloat and administrative spend and inefficiencies of scale, but allows for healthcare to be institutionalized. Any political party can try to weaken the NHS, but dismantling it even 80 years after its formation is political kryptonite for that party (Tories or Reform). Just like defunding Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid would destroy the Republicans perpetually.
On the other hand, you have the regulated model, which works much more efficiently compared to the former, but if regulations are weakened (which is much easier), the entire model becomes ineffective. Take a look at Swiss healthcare model, one of the best examples of a regulated private market with an insurance mandate, but slowly turning into USA-lite, as insurance premiums creep up and become unaffordable for growing families and low-income residents, because the SVP has been captured by insurance interests.
Obviously, because of the above inherent natures, the first model is often much more preferable than the latter model in hindsight, especially in a country like the US, where regulations are constantly weakened.
That's indeed how we have it in Germany: everyone is legally obligated to have health insurance, and then basically all your medical costs are covered (except dental).
Dental is technically covered, but only the cheapest ways to treat any issues (which used to involve mercury but AFAIK doesn't anymore), so most people who can afford it choose to pay more for better quality.
Costs aren't covered. They are obfuscated. Which is why in the US, socialistic health care is not a good alternative to our current insurance situation.
Money goes from patient (or patient's employer), to government, to insurance, to health care provider. With a lot of opaque mechanisms and transfers in between.
>Money goes from patient (or patient's employer), to government, to insurance, to health care provider. With a lot of opaque mechanisms and transfers in between.
You're describing our current system in the US. It's so complicated to navigate a fucking cottage industry has sprung up to help navigate it.
If you want to regulate it the point where it's just socialized healthcare with extra steps, sure.
The fundamental problem with insurance as a concept, is that their entire business model is structured around not providing the service you pay for. By design they want to payout as little as possible to the insured, otherwise their model falls apart. That's not limited to health, that's insurance in general.
In the health industry that means they are incentivised to pay for as little actual healthcare as possible. In the last they balanced risk by just simply not covering certain people. Essentially excluding segments of the population from quality healthcare to keep it affordable for the relatively healthy segment.
Post Obamacare they can no longer deny coverage for preexisting conditions. In order for this to work in a profit driven structure, that means either the government had to massively subsidize the industry, mandate everyone get insurance so healthy people can help offset the cost of the unhealthy, or the insurance companies have to raise their prices. Thanks to the slashes made to Obamacare we ended up with a pretty shitty version that had elements of all three.
It's an utter waste, and entirely inefficient. At best the insurance companies are just a middle man between the government and healthcare providers and add a shitload of red tape. What's covered, what's not, who's in network and who's not, premiums, deductibles, max spends... And all that gets duplicated three times since medical dental and vision are all separate.
The system could be massively simplified if absorbed by the government. Taxes pay into a large fund to pay for healthcare. You get sick you go to whatever Doctor you want. End of story. Obviously it won't be that simple, but we can eliminate huge swathes of red tape and bs.
> Calling it "tree shaking" is web development term AFAIK.
I think that's backwards. Lars Bak and the other V8 folks came from the Smalltalk world and brought the "tree shaking" term with them as far as I know.
In any case, before the JavaScript usage, it seems that treeshaking applied to objects to be included in a runtime image. The JavaScript usage is actually more akin to the dead-code elimination and link-time symbol removal of compiled and linked languages.
Tree shaking in this context is not unlike a compiler: it looks at all the code and determines if it will ever run in the image, eliminating any unnecessary code and delivering the minimal image needed. The code is in a “tree” format like an AST, and you’re shaking the tree to test what can be removed.
> The reason I put “gate” in scare quotes in the illustration is that the circuits are not readily composable to implement more complex digital logic...
Any good suggestions on resources talking about building complex digital logic out of something more suitable?
While diodes alone are not suitable for complex logic, they were instrumental on making computers cheaper in the late vacuum tube era. Vacuum tubes have fairly low reliability and short usable life so having too many of them in your computer is really bad for the cost and reliability of your system. Early transistors were not much better. They would get better over time, but cheap, reliable mass produced diodes were available long before transistors got there.
And while diodes alone cannot do it, a system with a few vacuum tubes to provide the gain and driving a whole lot of diodes made a lot of computers possible at price points that vacuum tubes alone could only dream of. An example is the hacker folklore sweetheart LGP-30, of The Story of Mel fame. 113 vacuum tubes driving 1500 diodes made for a computer that was the size of a fridge, weighed 800 pounds, drew 1.5kW and cost $50k (~500k in modern money), which made it pretty much a personal computer for the late 50's.
They might be referring to RTL (resistor-transistor logic). A transistor in the circuit can maintain the same output current that was input. (A transistor in fact a diode and a half.) RTL was superseded by TTL (transistor-transistor logic) but, hey, the Apollo computers that put astronauts on the Moon used RTL logic.
You could start with the late Don Lancster's book [1].
I have a little "breadboard helper" that I am wrapping up (that includes a project manual) for creating RTL circuits and others [2]. (I hope to sell a few.)
> Illustrates the relationship between the maximum keystroke distance required to navigate between two letters in a text and the number of randomly inserted newlines:
I'd love to see a comparison between Vim and Kakoune or Helix.
I'd like to submit this has no practicality from a Vim tutorial perspective. However, from the perspective of anyone wanting to learn about graph theory and who understands the concepts of typing efficiency incorporated in Vim key movements, this could be very interesting.
Kind of like many other things using Wolfram - a personal notebook that someone found interesting or useful, take it or leave it.
Analyzing the typing experience in vim by looking at pure keystrokes would be a mistake if you don't understand the tradeoffs and benefits of having a modal system and operating the editor without leaving the home row or needing a mouse.
Good remappings/config would also significantly alter your experience.
In the example, why would you even move with single chars and not words or to the end of line? I think it's definitely a poor example because the point of the diagram/investigation is not clearly described.
> In the example, why would you even move with single chars and not words or to the end of line?
If you expand the "Scope" section you'll see more examples. The reason the initial example is restricted is probably because of how noisy those other graphs are when all (or more) movement commands are available. They make poor initial examples.
Noted. Probably the best thing would be simplified color coding in separate graphs showing 3 types of movements from worse to more efficient. And a good statement around what's the point.
Conveying information through images is all about making something understood, not about graph completeness.
Yeah but MS Word is also designed with the guidance of an army of accountants and corporate shareholders. Your study plays into that, but there's a much bigger picture when you talk about analyzing how any product came to be that has MS as a prefix.
> It takes a single strong-willed defender, or some sort of onerous management structure...
I'd say it's even more than you've stated. Not only for defending an existing project, but even for getting a project going in the first place a dictator* is needed.
I'm willing to be proven wrong, and I know this flies in the face of common scrum-team-everybody-owns approaches.
I empathize with the struggles from the hassle and bloat. But what is it about socialized healthcare that is so dynamically opposed to insurance? In my experience insurance has a lot of attributes that mimic socialized healthcare: exclusivity to actual care, (intention of) spreading risk, and very very regulated.
Seems to me insurance is "socialized health care, lite version." But I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise.
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