The stuff you are describing is what bothers me the most. There is a lot of talk about how we should have a free market system. But there is no real market for patients. Most people can't pick an insurance plan for themselves because the employer picks. Then it's extremely hard to get an estimate for anything. And even if you get an estimate, it's most likely wrong. Then the billing is totally opaque. Insurance and providers constantly make mistakes or lose things.
I went through this with my ex after a surgery. It was totally insane to figure out where the numbers are coming from and basically a full time job.
Even if we don't want to go to single player or similar, I don't understand why it's not at least possible to mandate clear and binding estimates and billing a normal person can understand. And let the market work its magic through competition.
That’s true. The ideal case of elective MRI or planned surgery (like a hip surgery) are the exception. In most cases you have to make a decision on the spot. In our case we were basically told to move forward within 3 weeks or mortality would be much more likely.
Moving to another provider is like starting over with paperwork, records , diagnostics tests, building relationships . We already did one transfer due to insurance requirements and lost about 90 critical days that we can never get back. Images were lost preventing a proper diagnosis.
I’m not against free market medicine in principle but the current billing, records and regulations make it impossible with our setup.
The crazy thing is that if you are a low rank Congress staffer or other government employee, the anti corruption rules are actually quite strict. It only loosens up the higher you go.
Totally agree. For the average federal employee there are (or at least were) a huge amount of checks in place to weed out corruption. That was sort of the entire point of the inspectors general, to track down and weed out fraud and corruption.
Even for the FBI and most of the other police agencies there was a decent amount of checks in place to make sure they weren't acting out of pocket. It's ICE and the CIA that have had much less restrictions.
That such a thing is even possible shows how messed up the system is. Basically they are charging some fantasy amount of money. I would love Medicare for All but if we want to keep doing some kind of free market approach, let’s at least make sure there is a real market where everybody knows the price of things and can make an informed decision. Right now it seems you have to go to a hospital and just hope for the best.
Making new products is very hard. Just look at the innovation output of the tech giants. Compared to the resources they have it’s pretty pathetic. They are simply out of ideas.
There aren’t enough opportunities to make the profits they need to keep the stock price up in an ethical manner. So they have to use dark patterns. It will keep getting worse with these trillion dollar behemoths having to maintain their growth rates. Ads everywhere. AI will become more and more of a tool for manipulation.
Copilot is getting better - I'm getting fewer of those than I used to - but it's still significantly more stupid than other agents, even when in theory it's using the same model.
Ha ha, but seriously unlike other nutrients the human body can't really store protein reserves for any length of time. So you do need to keep taking in quite a bit every day or the body will break down muscle in order to sustain other tissues.
The protein doesn't necessarily have to come from beef, although that is one of the highest quality sources in terms of digestibility (for most people) and essential amino acid balance.
You need protein for sure. But unless you want to win Mr Universe you will probably get enough through regular nutrition. And there are a lot of other things besides protein you need in your food. The current “Protein in everything” trend is just a fad created by industry
How much is "enough" exactly? Can you quantify that for us? There's a huge difference between enough to avoid acute malnutrition in a young person versus enough to optimize healthspan in an older person. Did you even listen to the podcast I linked above?
It is totally possible to get enough protein (by whatever metric you choose) through regular food. And yet the reality is that many people don't.
The upper limit seems to be 1g per lb (454g) of body weight. This is for people who lift heavy regularly to build and grow muscle. The lower bound is about 1/3 of that.
A 165 lb person needs about 55g of protein daily for maintenance. This is about one cup of black beans and 3 eggs. Huevos rancheros for breakfast will cover most or all of an average person's daily protein needs and that's before even counting the protein in the cheese or tomatoes.
While vegetables don't have much protein it still adds up. A single medium tomato has 1g, a potato has 3g, 1g in an onion, 0.5g in a carrot, and so on. Eat your daily portion of veggies and you can get maybe 10g of protein. That's nearly 20% of what you need!
Carb-heavy foods such as breads and rice also have some protein. More than veggies, less than lentils, eggs, dairy, and meat. A standard serving of pasta has 7g of protein. A cup of cooked brown rice has 5g.
All of this is to say even vegans who eat a healthy, varied diet are not deficient in protein. If they are ovo-lacto vegetarians it's a layup. They may need to supplement with whey and creatine or eat some chicken a few times a week if they want to squat 3 plates.
Insufficient protein is mostly not a problem in the first-world. The problem is eating crap. Eating grass-fed steaks every meal doesn't compensate for a crap diet.
Lots of sources of complete protein on there besides beef. Don't limit yourself. A combination of quinoa, buckwheat, eggs, soy, pea, milk, whey, beans, and nuts will provide all the amino acids you need. Even beef, despite being a complete protein, is deficient in tryptophan.
I like meat. I'm not a militant vegetarian or vegan or anything like that. I dislike the laundering of people's love of eating meat as "essential for health", when it's anything but (special dietary needs aside). Eating meat is a mostly a choice.
I'll repeat again: varied diets are essential. A single protein source won't cut it. And most people get enough protein going just by raw numbers.
I don't know why you felt the need to post that little rant. No one here claimed that people should only eat beef as their sole source of protein. You're arguing against a strawman.
I'm very pro-protein - we just tend to see better metabolic health outcomes when we eat more of it. Diets with higher proportions of protein result in better body composition, less fat, less chance of diabetes, etc. I think the vast majority of people in America at least would be better off with higher protein diets.
But "Did you even listen to the podcast I linked above" is an insane thing to say in a random online conversation. No, you cannot expect people to listen to a whole podcast to make whatever random unsubstantiated point you have. Explain the important things you took away from the podcast and link it as a reference for if people disbelieve you for whatever reason.
The difference in life expectancy between the USA (where beef is heavily consumed) and India (where you may get lynched on suspicion of eating it) is 78.39 - 72 = 6.39 years at birth.
Most people attribute this difference to the GDP/capita ($89,600 vs. $12,132 PPP) or the number of doctors per capita (36.082 vs. 7.265 per 10k), not the diet.
At the risk of stating the obvious, meat is not the only difference in diet.
But agreed that diet is also not the only link to longevity. Although a Mediterranean diet is higher on plant based foods, considered healthier, and those countries do have better life expectancy than USA.
This stands against the evidence. Beef is causally linked with the largest killers of Americans, including heart diabetes, diabetes, and obesity in general. "a mostly plant-based diet could prevent approximately 11 million deaths per year globally, and could sustainably produce enough food for the planet’s growing population without further damage to the environment."
A "Mediterranean diet" is more healthy than the average American diet because it is more plant-based.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01406...https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/with-a-little-planning-v...
Isn’t that basically how a rocket works? Throw stuff out one side to get the thing on the other side moving. Not sure how this would compare to a rocket engine with hyperbolic fuel.
No. Very much no. The spring system would literally throw away half the mass of the craft for, maybe, a 10m/s delta. Fireworks would be more efficient. A pitching machine attached to a huge pile of baseballs would be more efficient (ie the baseballs could be thrown faster).
You can think of the hypergolic fuel as a type of spring. The chemical energy stored in the bonds of the fuel is what pushes the fuel products apart when it reacts. This is what pressure is, it's nothing more than KE of molecules.
The 'spring action' of fuel is very good because there's a lot more energy (per unit mass) stored in the bonds. Orders of magnitude more than a mechanical spring.
