You people do realize that Elon Musk had actual rocket scientists working on the original Hyperloop paper, right? Whether or not Mr. Musk's own physics degree is worth anything or not, the degrees of his employees definitely are, or SpaceX rockets wouldn't fly. They did modeling of vacuum evacuation of the tube. They did modeling of stresses on a basic pylon, using the same software they use to model the stresses on SpaceX rockets. They did modeling of the capsule. The math and engineering have been vetted pretty seriously.
I think you slightly miss the overall point of the video. The math is one thing, and surely no-one's claiming it's impossible to build a system that works with enough effort, however the real question is whether or not such a system will be worth the advantage, which, as the video explains, will not be much more than an hour cut from the travel time when you take into consideration that the system will likely have to have close to airport-level security anyway.
The cost calculations they've been showing thus far are vastly understated, they assume no maintenance costs whatsoever, and the costs for the building of the thing are sketchy at best.
Overall the whole project of HyperLoop One as it's been thus far presented is heavy on hype and light on facts and doesn't inspire a great deal of confidence because of that. For example as mentioned in the video, they currently waive the challenges caused by thermal expansion of by saying they can have a moving tube at the endpoint, that is, that they'll just allow the whole thing to expand few hundred meters and just move the station with it, but it should be obvious that you can't have 600 miles of solid steel tubing without any expansion joints and assume that this thing won't buckle at all and cause issues... I'm no engineer but this still seems very sloppy if they want their project to be taken seriously.
Simulating these things is one thing since in simulations you can simply assume a working system (ie. a working 600 miles long vacuum-tube), the video is talking about the difficulties of actually building/maintaining such a system using current technology while keeping the costs sensible.
This is not to say some version of the hyperloop is physically impossible, just that given all the challenges present in actually building and maintaining one, it looks to me at the moment like it's not really worth it.
The biggest issues are speed and scale. The Hyperloop was pitched as faster and cheaper than alternatives like cars and trains, but even small shifts in those numbers can dramatically change how it stacks up. It's easy to imagine safety concerns limiting Hyperloop speeds to just a fraction of its theoretical top speed or right-of-way issues keeping stations far from urban centers. Would we still be excited about the Hyperloop if a 30-minute trek became a three-hour one? What if it cost $60 billion instead the promised $6 billion? After enough setbacks, it might not be worth developing the technology at all. Those deployment details are life-or-death issues for the Hyperloop, but as long as the tests are focused on small-scale loops, it's not clear we'll ever get answers to them.
SpaceX's latest round of tests doesn't seem likely to change that. The test track is only 5 miles, nowhere near the distance it would take to reach 700 miles per hour. Another test track built by Hyperloop Test Technologies will have the same problem, aiming at a 200mph top speed. For the same reason, these test tracks can’t address the unique safety issues that come with near-supersonic travel. The result is just a tube-powered version of conventional transportation tech like maglev and rail. That doesn't mean that useful work can't be done on this round of test tracks, but it means the central question of the Hyperloop — whether it
This is why Zimbabwe dollars don't have value too. This is why as I said above and got modded 0,Insightful so far
No, the reason you got modded to 0 is because you do not seem to understand that there are actual practical reasons for why fiat money is used: namely that the global economy is of such size, that we don't have anywhere close to enough precious metals to produce coins or representative bills for all trade to be conducted, that way. Like, just as a rough estimate: according to wiki's 2011 numbers there's about 62500 tons of gold currently held as investments and by reserves. At the same time, there's about 1,46 trillion american dollars in circulation
At the current prices of gold, even if ALL of those 62500 tons would be either melted into coins or held in storage to be used as a gold-standard, the value would not cover that of all the dollars in circulation. And that's just the US dollars, the global money reserves combined are about 42 times larger than the amount of US dollars in circulation, so that should give you a ballpark understanding of why we don't use precious metals for currency anymore: there simply aren't enough of them, they're a finite resource and they have other functional uses in industry.
When subprime mortage crisis, Lehman Brothers fail, etc hit. Banks shut their mother fucking doors on your face. You call them, nobody answers. That is called...
wait for it
Fractional Reserve Banking
Fractional reserve banking doesn't mean if the bank goes your money goes with it. Countries have deposit insurances to deal with this risk. Even if your bank crashes and burns tomorrow the money you have will not be gone with it, your fund are insured up to 100 000 dollars. Of course, stocks and investments are not covered by this because those are at your own risk, Banks fail all the time, and deposits are backed by deposit insurers all the time. In 2010 alone the US lost about 157 banks, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation paid out about 97 billion to the customers of those banks.
Moreover, Lehman Brothers & al were investment banks not consumer banks, nobody had their deposits lost because these institutions fell. Investors who made risky decisions lost some money, but that's how the market operates
Who ripped you off though? Jesuit CIA, Jewish media, and homosexuals. There you go wise guy.
Ah, there it is, I knew the illuminatus gay-jewish-conspiracy side would enter into this sooner or later, since the 'FIAT MONEY HAS NO VALUE OH MY GOD' -card is usually played by people who aren't exactly the sharpest tools in the shed (such as yourself). Wrap the tinfoil tighter, the gays are coming to steal your money and guns with the ancient Chinese invention called paper money!:D
The whole bonus system is counter-productive for performance by its very nature. Think about it: most bonuses are tied to short term performance and goals on a quarterly or yearly basis. So by their very design they encourage the CEO to make whatever changes possible to meet that target, no matter what it does to the company 2 years or 5 years or 10 years down the line, because chances are he/she won't be in charge at that time.
These studies have been done numerous times in different countries with similar results and people and companies should start to wake up to this: if you don't want the guy to come in, fire 30 % of the staff to cut the costs for a temporary boost in profit that then backfires in a year, then don't explicitly make these types of deals that guide them towards such solutions. Change the timescale: pay bonuses retroactively if the company is doing better after 5 years, or in decade. The guy doesn't need to commit himself to work there for that long; if he knows he'll get a sum of money in 5 years if the company is still doing great then, he will be encouraged to make his decisions on that timescale, and not just think about the next 4 months.
we don't want to use it because you don't want to be out in the boondocks if you don't have people to work and play with. That's already changing now that we have some level of virtual communication..."
People don't just live in the cities because they want to be around other people for work and play, cities are also handy in that all sorts of crucial services are nearby. There's a reason cities developed as trade hubs to begin with: people are lazy and would rather walk a couple hundred meters and take a subway to go fetch their laptop from the shop rather than driving long distances for it. Likewise, being close to emergency services is something that only cities can offer. Here in Finland the average response time of an ambulance in cities is about 8-10 minutes in emergencies, whereas up north in Lapland it can easily be an hour even with a helicopter. Libraries, schools, hospitals, post offices, drug stores, etc, all of these and much more are something you can find in nearly every part of any larger city but you might have to travel a couple hundred miles to out in the countryside.
I'm not saying Ray's wrong overall: it's true that living out of cities has become more viable with technology, but it's a bit shortsighted to assume that the only reason people are concentrated into cities are social reasons and entirely ignore the benefits provided by the kind of service infrastructure that cities offer and sparsely populated areas do not.
I understand perfectly well how investment works, I was merely referring to the fact that the guy in question does not have to personally do much work at all for his wealth to increase.
My argument was not that investments are useless for the economy, just that accumulated wealth generated by investing and passed down is taxed in a way that makes little sense if you want to try and keep the gap between the rich and the poor sensible.
So I glanced through the article and it seems to me that they're making a few bad assumptions about UBI to arrive to their conclusion. One is that they're saying it's bad because it's not tied to working like most existing social programs and there's little experience from social systems that are not tied to work. However the very reason the western world will need UBI or something like it in the close future is that across the board the western countries are facing a situation were automation is making many, many jobs obsolote and the rate at which these technologies create new jobs do not match that. It is pretty much agreed by economists at this point that a 100 % or close to a 100 % employment is an impossibility when you start seeing jobs such as driving and data-entry etc. disappear in the coming decades.
Secondly about the cost: they're saying that the cost of 219 billion would be too much, but really, it's not if you actually started making sure the companies and super-rich paid what they're supposed to. Look at the corporate tax revenue for example, in 2014 you got around 320 billion dollars out of it. However, we know that the effective tax-rates of corporations are far below the nominal 35 %, at 27,1 % because many corporations pay nothing or close to nothing in taxes.
Just by making sure corporations actually paid the required 35 % instead of the 27,1, you'd get an extra 95,5 billion. And we're not even talking about raising the taxes, this is the amount you're currently missing by allowing corporations dodge taxes. and that alone would fund nearly half of the program.
A simple calculation shows that our estate tax system is broken. Assets that are passed to relatives or other personal relations are often badly misvalued relative to what they cost on an open market. The total wealth of American households is estimated at more than $60 trillion. It is heavily concentrated in very few hands. A conservative estimate given the lifespans of Americans would be that 2 percent ($1.2 trillion) is passed down each year, mostly from the very rich. Yet estate and gift taxes raise less than $12 billion, or just 1 percent of this figure each year.
So you're essentially taxing 1 % of the 1,2 trillion dollars that gets passed down from generation to generation every year. This is insane. The whole point of the estate tax is to try and prevent income inequality from exploding since wealth once accumulated can create more wealth for its holder without the holder having to do any work for it. As an example say someone who is 35 inherits say 6 million today. Let's suppose he's not some financial genius but simply puts it to some safe index fund to sit and generate profit, let's assume 5 % PA, and let's also assume the guy in question pays his taxes, which for long therm investments at that size would be 20 % if I've read the US tax code correctly (and do correct me if I'm wrong), and after that spends half the profit he makes on living, buying things etc... so the total profit he'd be making every year after taxes and living expenses is 5 % * 0,8 * 0,5 = 2 %.
The average life expectancy in the US is about 79 years, so let's assume a period of 44 years from 35 to death. At 2 % a year, this comes down to 11,72 million dollars that's left in the fund, and this figure obviously does not include all the assets and mansions the guy has bought with the yearly ever increasing half of his profits I've assumed above, so in reality the wealth to be inherited is even greater than 11,72 million, that's just the cash.
This is the reason the estate/inheritance taxes are important when you have as much super-concentrated wealth as you do
Completely agreed. I don't get why anyone would do it the way they did to begin with?
I mean, it's not being actually used for anything during testing other than testing, so why can't they just create the number of test transactions they need, and then wipe the history after testing is done and it moves to production? That's what we're doing here (working on building an ERP for hospital/patient logistics): the test-environment is a sandbox in which we just create any types of orders we need, and prior to launch all of these mockup orders will be nuked,
Hell, the usual answer tends to be laziness, but even that can't be the case here, as they had to spent more effort doing it the way they did rather than in a way which would be sensible.
can think of nothing better to do with capital than return it to investors.
Also known as 'making a profit for its stockholders' which is the primary purpose of any for-profit corporation.
There are different types of companies and different types of investors for sure, and many don't seem to mind holding stock that pays no dividends but saying that paying dividends is the same as 'running out of ideas' is just frankly silly; it's entirely possible to come up with new ideas and start developing them and still have enough money to pay dividends. Tesla is obviously a company with rather heavy R & D and manufacturing costs so it's understandable that at this stage of their existence they're not doing it.
But the point the shareholders ARE the company. so if they want the corporation to pay them a share of its profits then that's what the company will do and it doesn't automatically equate to 'we're out of ideas'; any new idea carries a risk, so it's a decision between 'pay out X now' or 'Invest Y in this idea at a risk to possibly pay out more later, or lose the money'.
This isn't a problem coming out of Russia or China, it's a problem coming out of every authority group or special interest.
Agreed.
However, at the same time this rhetoric itself is at the core of the Russian propaganda: essentially the message is 'since the US does it, we can too"
As a Finn I've engaged in a lot of discussions with both Russians and my fellow countrymen about the situation in Russia ever since Crimea, and this comes up quite frequently from the pro-Russian side. If you try to talk about the annexation of Crimea and how it's worrysome they throw 'Iraq'-card in your face. Nevermind that we had nothing to do with Iraq, and that despite the fuck-up and unjustified nature of the war in Iraq and for all their incompetence, the US still did not add Iraq as a new state.
From this, it's not a long way to the idea presented by some in the Kremlin that countries simply cannot want to be in NATO for the sake of their own security. Like, if an unallied country at the border of Russia looks at the recent actions of Russia towards other unallied border states (first Georgia in 2008, then later in Ukraine/Crimea) and concludes that it's safer by allying itself with someone other than Russia, then it obviously must because of Washington and the corporate illuminati controlling the popular opinion and seeking to threaten Russia, despite the fact that the risen interest in military co-operation is a direct result of their own actions. This is of course intentional. All authoritarian regimes need enemies, and to Russia it's 'western values' (ie. gays and sexual deviance primarily) from within and NATO from without. To help achieve this they treat the whole of Europe as a unified block ('the west') that's nothing but an extension of the US when it suits them, basically telling us Finns (and Ukrainians) here that we cannot have an opinion of our own, unless we agree with them.
They want to keep and even increase the tension because that's a convenient trick to distract people from the failings of their domestic policies and the rather dismal state of their economy, pretty much fascism 101 stuff. And the fact that in some sense the US is doing the same with the war on terror, war on drugs etc does not make it okay, or justifiable.
Unfortunately that's not right. The left does actually NOT say "mind your own fucking business". It says "I tell you what fucking business you should mind!" and more important "I also tell you what business you MUST NOT mind".
And that's where I had to detach myself from being "left". I do not feel that I have the right to tell people what they are allowed to fucking THINK.
This is a perfect example of why a one dimensional left/right -divide is utterly useless. I live in a globally very heavily to the left country (Finland) and adhere to many leftist ideas such as the universal health care and education systems we have here, as well as progressive taxation etc...
However, I do not buy into, nor support, any of the SJW crap about forcing people to feel/think/speak a certain way, and I say this as a part of one of the minorities (disabled since birth) that this crowd so often claims to be defending. There are loads of us. If you look at popular anti-SJW youtube chnalles such as Sargon of Akkad who has over 300 000 subscribers and over 74 000 000 views with numerousvideos critizing and debunking this SJW thoughtcrime BS, and you take a look at the channel demographics, you'll note that the vast majority (55 %) of his viewership falls into the same category as the man himself (and me as well): a left-leaning libertarian. Ie. people who do not believe in letting the free markets decide over anything and everything, and believe the state serves as an important factor in making sure people's basic needs are met etc, but still at the same time maintain that individuals are free to say what they want, enjoy whatever substances they want etc... The authoritarian left of which you speak of is not just opposed by the right, but by a large quantity of us leftists ourselves, as one of the Sargon videos I linked above well puts it, the modern day SJW crowd has become very similar to the authoritarian right.
So no, there is no one 'The Left' anymore than there is one "The Right". The political field is much wider than that and we should all know that at this point. The political compass is a good tarting point to rid yourself of the tubelike vision that all members of left/right think alike or uniformly, I recommend checking it out if you haven't already,
Norway is cowardly. Claiming your term limit is 21 years, then codifying in law that it can be de facto extended indefinitely, would not pass muster under the US Constitution.
I'm not Norwegian so I don't know the details of how it works exactly, but I think such a system is still superior to 'life without the possibility of parole'.
The way we have it set up in here (Finland) is that we have a life sentence (which one can only get for murder, or treason/war crimes/crime against humanity etc), but as per law everyone has the right to apply for parole after 12 years, no matter the crime. The median sentence length IIRC is something like 16 years, and it seems to be working for the most part as only about 15 % of released lifers ever end up back in jail.
No. It is there so that they can visibly be penalized for their crimes, to the benefit of society as a whole. They serve as negative examples.
That as well, but also the point is to try and make sure they do not do those things again. If you're going to say it doesn't make a difference whether the reconvition rate is 15 % or 99 % then I don't really understand how you deem society benefits from high reconviction. It's obviously better the lower the re-conviction rates are, both for the inmate as well as for the socíety, so to argue that rehabilitation is not an important function of the system makes no sense to me.
Perhaps people who are given longer penalties are more prone to commit crimes, thus deserving those longer penalties. In other words: it's the person who causes their own recidivism, and not the length of time they spend in prison on prior convictions.
The numbers you supplied do not account for that.
They do not account for that yes, that's one thing that surely factors into it as well, I should have pointed this out in my post, my bad.
Still point being: prisoners released from the US system have significantly worse outlook than their western counterparts as the felony conviction pretty much makes it impossible to get employment, and in some states even blocks access to housing etc. If you keep people who're already violent/dangerous when they come in in rather inhumane conditions, then you release them with even less of a chance of making a living legally than before they went in, it should not come as a surprise that most of these people turn back to crime. Ex-inmates are societal outcasts, which make them a ripe target for organized crime tor recruit.
The penal system is not enacting it's penalties with an aim to rehabilitate e.g. Jeffrey Dahmer, it's enacting its penalties to stop the next Jeffrey Dahmer from eating his first victim.
This is a giant strawman. The vast majority of criminals are not Jeffrey Dahlmer and are not serving a life sentence. This means that for MOST inmates the prison system is there to rehabilitate them to society.
No-one's arguing that there aren't mentally unstable individuals who cannot be released and so on, but tehabilitation and making sure the inmates, once released, do not commit crimes again is the primary focus of any sane penal system. If you look at actual data and charts on reconviction rates you'll note they go up as the length of the sentence goes up. This means the more time the inmate spends in jail, the higher the chance of them committing a crime again is. The US is not the only country where this happens, but if time spent in jail increases instead of decreases the chances of a re-conviction, it ought to be clear that the system is faulty.
Compare that to something like Norway which has one of the 'softest' prison systems and has no life imprisonment (technically, although with people like Brevik it's unlikely he will ever be let free, as they have to pass an assessment before release or the sentence can be continued, and even if he's ever released he'll probably be released into a mental institution) and has incredibly humane conditions (that is it allows for the inmates to live fairly normal lives within controlled conditions), the re-conviction rates are far lower because it turns out if you treat prisoners as people instead of cattle to be kept in small boxes and the released after several years with limited rights and next to no employment options, they actually for the most part turn out to become productive members of society.
As younger baby boomers join Medicare, the average amount that the program spends per beneficiary will be slightly reduced over the next decade. Overall, however, it appears that public programs control per capita spending somewhat more effectively than private coverage does. That may be just the opposite of what many would presume in a country where the private market is generally expected to outperform the public sector.
Here’s another way to think about it: While Medicare and Medicaid are far from perfect, the purchasing power and policy levers available to large public programs appear to give them an edge over our fragmented private insurance system when it comes to controlling spending.
The problem with trying to have his discussion with you is that you're misinformed about facts, and make claims that are not consistent with reality.
If you look at the numbers spent per patient, both Medicare and Medicaid are cheaper than private alternatives already. So your point is wrong: the costs of the system to the state have increased as people enrolled in these programs have increased, but the cost per member when compared to private insurers is still cheaper.
Point being, if you replaced medicare and medicaid with some type of single public insurance that would still be free/cheap for people of low income, but open for everyone (at a cost for those making above a certain amount if you wish to avoid tax-funding it), it would be cheaper. The point about public insurance -. even if it's not a single payer model - is that as its funded by a public entity and is non-profit, obviously it's going to be cheaper than an insurance ran by a company for profit. If you then further either ran more hospitals with public funds, or alternatively had more control over the pricing of the hospitals, you would further cut the costs.
None of this even requires the elimination of private clinics and insurers. Models such as this are in pretty widespread use in places like Germany,
has it occurred to you that you're incapable of being objective
Yes and I'm very aware that obviously I have certain biases, as do most people, I try my best to control them, albeit not always successfully.
The US system isn't nearly as bad as people make it out to be.
Oh I know, and I wasn't saying that it's bad. It's quite good, even top class in many ways, my gripe is just that from my perspective as someone who knows something about the cost-structure of health care the system is just inefficient at producing health. Simply put, it works great for those that have access to it, but it does so at a greater cost than any other system per capita, which in turn makes achieving functional universal coverage difficult, This is largely why the US is distinct from all other western nations. But again this doesn't make the system bad per se, just cost-heavy.
Yeah, it's great that you're involved and that you're really happy about your system (I notice there are some huge tonal differences between your first post and your replies - and it's okay - we're all nationalistic but eager to accuse others of it and refuse to see it in ourselves) but that actually means you're probably not really going to give an objective and accurate portrayal of your system. Note, really, the differences between your first comment and then the tone of your replies when called out by it by a fellow citizen.
Well my replies are my attempt in trying to be more objective. The first post was meant to highlight the problems with the out of hand costs in the US, not as an in-depth analysis of the issues with the system here. Obviously our system is not perfect either, but by all standard measures it achieves results very much comparable to the results in the american model, not better (for the most part), but pretty much on par in most metrics. So I stand behind the point in the original message. I understand it may come across as overly nationalistic but that wasn't exactly my point, as I'm not suggesting the US directly copies its system from here or anywhere else for that matter. I'm just trying to say that I firmly believe based on the figures I've seen from here and from other countries, that you can get the american system to perform better and achieve better coverage without increasing spending. The problem is this requires meddling with the business of insurance companies and private hospitals, which for political reasons is obviously much more of a difficult thing to pull off in the US than in many other places.
It's okay... In all my travels I've learned one important thing. We're pretty much all just humans underneath.
Yup, 100 % agreed. I do apologize if the tone came off as arrogant, that wasn't intended.
Just curious... do you realize the awesome R & D is because of the profit motivation?
Yes, but I wasn't talking about eliminating profit motives from manufacturers of medical tech. We still buy and use american medical tech here, and the companies manufacturing those make profit on them.
The point is, if you install something like a pacer on someone of course the pacer has a margin on it and is sold for profit. In the US however, on top of this the hospital then adds its own margin and finally after the insurance companies pay the bills they take their own margin on top of that. Eliminating the latter 2 will not effect the capabilities of R&D companies and tech companies to make business.
This is almost a socialist country in the brink of total collapse from the heavy public sector and uncompetitive companies constantly being sold to foreigners.
Erm... the policies of the last three cabinets have been far from socialistic. They've sold of core infrastructure as you mentioned to foreign capital investment firms (not a socialist policy), they've cut the corporate tax rate by quite a huge chunk in the false hope that that would have created more jobs, (which it didn't) and now they're cutting from the poor and the elderly. These same methods have now been tried in various forms for several election-cycles, and we haven't seen a turn for the better because the government cutting its spending and giving corporations tax-breaks does not automatically turn into (export) jobs. Make matters worse they're now cuting education, further making it less likely that we get the types of innovations they themselves say that we need to get the economy flowing properly again. These policy-decisions are not helpful in the long term, and they're certainly not socialistic policies.
Point being: our economy has issues yes, structural issues, but those issues are not because of 'socialism'. Sweden has highly similar tax structure (in fact, their corporate tax rate is higher than ours) and social policies yet their economy is doing much much better. The problem is the current government is only trying to reduce spending for the most part, which will not solve/help unemployment, or for that matter help our companies to export more. The problem is not costs of production (on which we're about at the same level as Germany), or the unemployed being too lazy, yet these two have been the ones the government has been yelling about the most, even though they're not central issues.
There are actual issues which could be addressed, such as making hiring less of a risk for starting companies etc, better support for people starting export businesses, etc... but it's false to say that the current situation is because we're a socialist country: we lost Nokia and nearly a fourth of all our exports with it, and still haven't fully recovered from that and the latest recession.
Also, as has already been pointed out, we're nowhere near any collapsing point.
Then soon after that you will die from the same undiagnosed blood clot you found or you were wise enough for it to be diagnosed by the private sector.
There are problems in the current system here as well, but this is not representative of them for several reasons. If you have acute symptoms you do not go to a health centre, you go directly to an ER. Something like a blood clot which causes clear and immediate symptoms like possible slurring of speech, impeded movement ie. these are things for which you call an ambulance and treatment is started usually within hours, and recovery rates are quite good. Misdiagnoses do happen, but it's not as if people - young or old - are dying en mass from conditions that health centers failed to diagnose.
The system is not problem free, but it's not dysfunctional: people do get treated and most often successfully so. I agree with you that the role of health centers in the current system is problematic, and it is being reconsidered currently. but it's not as bad as you make it seem when you look at actual data on performance and how people get help.
It spends more per capita than Finland, but only manages to cover 1/3 of the population. Scaling that up to the whole population wouldn't reduce medical spending, it would massively increase it.
Of course the spending is massive, because currently the cost of procedures is massively inflated. My whole point is that in the current american model the pricing of standard procedures is way high precisely because the hospitals are in it to make profit and they have fairly free reign to set the prices as the money comes from either the insurance companies or the government. Of course they're going to ask for as much as they can, which leads to situations in which simple procedures like getting some stiches and an x-ray can rack up a bill of over a thousand, or pills that cost a cent or 2 being sold with several dollars.
I at no point said that you must scale the current system up, it's not doable that way. I said you could establish a better functioning universal system if you controlled the pricing better and/or eliminated the insurance companies from base level medical care and treated it - like most of the rest of the industrialized world - as a public expense altogether.
I remember reading/hearing about similar studies years back in a philosophy course. To me this isn't exactly surprising. I mean put simply, if I tell someone to "name an animal" they cannot control which animals pop into their head. Their mind/subconscious goes through their memory quickly and picks up certain animals, with the more common ones probably coming up first. Say the person thinks of dogs, cats and horses first. He/she now then has to choose which to say out loud. Whether or not that choice is 'free' is something these kinds of studies look in to, but I don't find it shocking that unconscious factors (which animal he likes most, or which he thinks I like most, thinks is most expected/unexpected as an answer, etc...) probably end up affecting the final choice quite much as well.
So even under the best possible scenario for free will, it's only free in the sense of 'we're free to make choices based on the alternatives we happen to think of', but we do not get to choose what we happen to think about most often. No matter what way you look at it 'classical' free will has been dead for a long time, as for that to be true human beings would have to be free from the influences of our surroundings (both environment and other people) and we already know that's not true. Look at cold reading: people can be guided by suggestions even when these suggestions are not framed as such, but are merely words/phrases/gestures which are meant to bring about certain responses and behaviors in an individual. A skilled cold reader will have his audience believing that he in fact was reading the person's mind, when in fact what he's doing is reading small hints and tips from expressions and mannerisms which are for the most part involuntary.
I work for the single payer health care system of Finland on the administrative side (IT & stats related) and partly because of that, health care has always been one of my favorite subjects to discuss. However something I've noticed when talking with Americans about it is a certain type of illusion/fallacy that many seem to be under, which is that because you pay so much for it, it must be the best system out there.
Just yesterday I had a lengthy conversation on fb about the problems with a purely insurance based model, and even though I tried linking a couple of studies as to the amount of deaths caused by lack of access due to costs, I was labeled a liar because apparently 'everyone in the US now has the opportunity to get health insurance" (a direct quote from him) despite the fact that it's known that there are people who do not meet the criteria under the ACA to qualify for the cheaper/low income insurances whilist also not being able to afford a private one AND that there are also still issues with insurances not covering certain operations. Don't get me wrong, the ACA was a small step in a better direction but the gutting of the public option for all sort of killed the best potential about it. Yet my counterpart in said discussion was adamantly of the opinion that anyone who dies in the US for not getting treatment dies purely because he/she didn't bother to get insurance and hence the system is not to blame.
You've plenty of things where you lead the world, and the medical R & D and high level expertise in the US is unparalleled. However I do wish that more Americans would realize how much you're paying for simple base level health care. I've seen hospital invoices from the states where simple over the counter ibuprofen pills are billed at several dollars a piece. That's a a margin of several thousand percentages. The fact that this is allowed is unfathomable to me. Even if one is of the opinion that a life-saving basic service should be allowed to remain a profit-driven business, having no controls on pricing combined with the insurance lobby has created a gigantic price bubble. This is why the US spends combined (private and tax spending) the most money on the planet per capita on health care, and still the results are far from the top. (Source (wiki))
The profit motive needs to be either removed or curtailed heavily, so that more of the money that's spent can actually be used to improve the level of care and oversight, instead of just increasing the profits of the insurance giants and private hospitals.
We get comparable treatment results and universal coverage (at about 3500 dollars a year per capita) than the US does when it comes to life expectancy, cancer survival rates (in fact, with certain types of cancers we're ahead of the US even) and so on. You spend more than DOUBLE that (8700 dollars according to OECD when totaling private and public spending, though interestingly, the CDC puts this figure even higher at 9500) and the massive increase in spending doesn't get you the kind of results that such an investment should.
You could and should easily be able to arrange for the hands down best universal health care system without spending a dime more than you already are. Don't spend more, spend smarter.
Just my 2 cents, feel free to mod me down for being a socialist scum now.
But it is. Finnish socialism is bureaucracy and endless regulations in addition to heavy taxation.
Bureaucracy has to do with it in part yes, taxation not so much
Sweden, that you just used as an example of an economy that's doing much better than ours, has higher corporate tax rate and about equal income tax and and VAT.
Why are most unemployed Finns just resting on their heels and not moving to Helsinki or any other city with jobs? Why should they, they receive 1000-2000 euros each month for doing nothing.
This quote is plainly false. Sure, in the beginning of unemployment you can get that if you're a union member you get 60 % of what you got paid for 1,5 years, and that's soon to drop to a year.
The people who are unemployed on the long term do not receive such amounts. I have a friend who recently graduated from a university and is currently unemployed and living alone, receiving the maximum amount of all the possible benefits and that totals to 1050 euros a month. And this is before paying for rent etc. After rent, utilities and other necessities that leaves you with around 300 a month to live by. If you've ever had to sustain yourself with such income at our prices you should understand that most people aren't glamouring to be unemployed to live on 300 a month.
We have over 270 000 unemployed individuals yet less than 20 000 open job positions. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to deduce that the main problem with our unemployment is not people just liking the "massive" luxury of living on a couple hundred euros so much a month that they'd rather not work.
You're right that there are issues, many of them made worse by the unions, but my point is this: sweden is a social democracy with heavy social security and taxation just like us, yet they're doing a lot better at the moment. Therefore it's illogical to point the finger at 'socialism' when the problems are clearly in the implementation of it, and not the concept in its entirety.
What you're opposed to is government corruption. Blaming the "free market" is dishonest and, frankly, idiotic.
Well if the market allows for bribery legally then the market is "too free." And where do you think the corruption comes from? It takes 2 sides for bribery to happen: someone to give and someone to take the bribes.
The corporations have had an active role in corrupting the government(s) and breaking the markets. Obviously the market itself is not to blame, it's just a mechanism; but both the private and the public side have changed the rules of business so that it no longer is what most people consider free or fair.
Corruption is at the root of it, but not just corruption in government, but also on the side doing the corrupting; ie. the wealthy elite who've had the desire to be able to bribe politicians.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you slightly miss the overall point of the video. The math is one thing, and surely no-one's claiming it's impossible to build a system that works with enough effort, however the real question is whether or not such a system will be worth the advantage, which, as the video explains, will not be much more than an hour cut from the travel time when you take into consideration that the system will likely have to have close to airport-level security anyway.
The cost calculations they've been showing thus far are vastly understated, they assume no maintenance costs whatsoever, and the costs for the building of the thing are sketchy at best.
Overall the whole project of HyperLoop One as it's been thus far presented is heavy on hype and light on facts and doesn't inspire a great deal of confidence because of that. For example as mentioned in the video, they currently waive the challenges caused by thermal expansion of by saying they can have a moving tube at the endpoint, that is, that they'll just allow the whole thing to expand few hundred meters and just move the station with it, but it should be obvious that you can't have 600 miles of solid steel tubing without any expansion joints and assume that this thing won't buckle at all and cause issues... I'm no engineer but this still seems very sloppy if they want their project to be taken seriously.
Simulating these things is one thing since in simulations you can simply assume a working system (ie. a working 600 miles long vacuum-tube), the video is talking about the difficulties of actually building/maintaining such a system using current technology while keeping the costs sensible.
This is not to say some version of the hyperloop is physically impossible, just that given all the challenges present in actually building and maintaining one, it looks to me at the moment like it's not really worth it.
As this article well put is:
No, the reason you got modded to 0 is because you do not seem to understand that there are actual practical reasons for why fiat money is used: namely that the global economy is of such size, that we don't have anywhere close to enough precious metals to produce coins or representative bills for all trade to be conducted, that way. Like, just as a rough estimate: according to wiki's 2011 numbers there's about 62500 tons of gold currently held as investments and by reserves. At the same time, there's about 1,46 trillion american dollars in circulation
At the current prices of gold, even if ALL of those 62500 tons would be either melted into coins or held in storage to be used as a gold-standard, the value would not cover that of all the dollars in circulation. And that's just the US dollars, the global money reserves combined are about 42 times larger than the amount of US dollars in circulation, so that should give you a ballpark understanding of why we don't use precious metals for currency anymore: there simply aren't enough of them, they're a finite resource and they have other functional uses in industry.
Fractional reserve banking doesn't mean if the bank goes your money goes with it. Countries have deposit insurances to deal with this risk. Even if your bank crashes and burns tomorrow the money you have will not be gone with it, your fund are insured up to 100 000 dollars. Of course, stocks and investments are not covered by this because those are at your own risk, Banks fail all the time, and deposits are backed by deposit insurers all the time. In 2010 alone the US lost about 157 banks, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation paid out about 97 billion to the customers of those banks.
Moreover, Lehman Brothers & al were investment banks not consumer banks, nobody had their deposits lost because these institutions fell. Investors who made risky decisions lost some money, but that's how the market operates
Ah, there it is, I knew the illuminatus gay-jewish-conspiracy side would enter into this sooner or later, since the 'FIAT MONEY HAS NO VALUE OH MY GOD' -card is usually played by people who aren't exactly the sharpest tools in the shed (such as yourself). Wrap the tinfoil tighter, the gays are coming to steal your money and guns with the ancient Chinese invention called paper money! :D
The whole bonus system is counter-productive for performance by its very nature. Think about it: most bonuses are tied to short term performance and goals on a quarterly or yearly basis. So by their very design they encourage the CEO to make whatever changes possible to meet that target, no matter what it does to the company 2 years or 5 years or 10 years down the line, because chances are he/she won't be in charge at that time.
These studies have been done numerous times in different countries with similar results and people and companies should start to wake up to this: if you don't want the guy to come in, fire 30 % of the staff to cut the costs for a temporary boost in profit that then backfires in a year, then don't explicitly make these types of deals that guide them towards such solutions. Change the timescale: pay bonuses retroactively if the company is doing better after 5 years, or in decade. The guy doesn't need to commit himself to work there for that long; if he knows he'll get a sum of money in 5 years if the company is still doing great then, he will be encouraged to make his decisions on that timescale, and not just think about the next 4 months.
People don't just live in the cities because they want to be around other people for work and play, cities are also handy in that all sorts of crucial services are nearby. There's a reason cities developed as trade hubs to begin with: people are lazy and would rather walk a couple hundred meters and take a subway to go fetch their laptop from the shop rather than driving long distances for it. Likewise, being close to emergency services is something that only cities can offer. Here in Finland the average response time of an ambulance in cities is about 8-10 minutes in emergencies, whereas up north in Lapland it can easily be an hour even with a helicopter. Libraries, schools, hospitals, post offices, drug stores, etc, all of these and much more are something you can find in nearly every part of any larger city but you might have to travel a couple hundred miles to out in the countryside.
I'm not saying Ray's wrong overall: it's true that living out of cities has become more viable with technology, but it's a bit shortsighted to assume that the only reason people are concentrated into cities are social reasons and entirely ignore the benefits provided by the kind of service infrastructure that cities offer and sparsely populated areas do not.
I understand perfectly well how investment works, I was merely referring to the fact that the guy in question does not have to personally do much work at all for his wealth to increase.
My argument was not that investments are useless for the economy, just that accumulated wealth generated by investing and passed down is taxed in a way that makes little sense if you want to try and keep the gap between the rich and the poor sensible.
So I glanced through the article and it seems to me that they're making a few bad assumptions about UBI to arrive to their conclusion. One is that they're saying it's bad because it's not tied to working like most existing social programs and there's little experience from social systems that are not tied to work. However the very reason the western world will need UBI or something like it in the close future is that across the board the western countries are facing a situation were automation is making many, many jobs obsolote and the rate at which these technologies create new jobs do not match that. It is pretty much agreed by economists at this point that a 100 % or close to a 100 % employment is an impossibility when you start seeing jobs such as driving and data-entry etc. disappear in the coming decades.
Secondly about the cost: they're saying that the cost of 219 billion would be too much, but really, it's not if you actually started making sure the companies and super-rich paid what they're supposed to. Look at the corporate tax revenue for example, in 2014 you got around 320 billion dollars out of it. However, we know that the effective tax-rates of corporations are far below the nominal 35 %, at 27,1 % because many corporations pay nothing or close to nothing in taxes.
Just by making sure corporations actually paid the required 35 % instead of the 27,1, you'd get an extra 95,5 billion. And we're not even talking about raising the taxes, this is the amount you're currently missing by allowing corporations dodge taxes. and that alone would fund nearly half of the program.
Then if you look at the state of the estate tax:
So you're essentially taxing 1 % of the 1,2 trillion dollars that gets passed down from generation to generation every year. This is insane. The whole point of the estate tax is to try and prevent income inequality from exploding since wealth once accumulated can create more wealth for its holder without the holder having to do any work for it. As an example say someone who is 35 inherits say 6 million today. Let's suppose he's not some financial genius but simply puts it to some safe index fund to sit and generate profit, let's assume 5 % PA, and let's also assume the guy in question pays his taxes, which for long therm investments at that size would be 20 % if I've read the US tax code correctly (and do correct me if I'm wrong), and after that spends half the profit he makes on living, buying things etc... so the total profit he'd be making every year after taxes and living expenses is 5 % * 0,8 * 0,5 = 2 %.
The average life expectancy in the US is about 79 years, so let's assume a period of 44 years from 35 to death. At 2 % a year, this comes down to 11,72 million dollars that's left in the fund, and this figure obviously does not include all the assets and mansions the guy has bought with the yearly ever increasing half of his profits I've assumed above, so in reality the wealth to be inherited is even greater than 11,72 million, that's just the cash.
This is the reason the estate/inheritance taxes are important when you have as much super-concentrated wealth as you do
Correct, just a couple years so far so I'm a padawan, hence my question.
Thanks for the answer, makes more sense now!
Completely agreed. I don't get why anyone would do it the way they did to begin with?
I mean, it's not being actually used for anything during testing other than testing, so why can't they just create the number of test transactions they need, and then wipe the history after testing is done and it moves to production? That's what we're doing here (working on building an ERP for hospital/patient logistics): the test-environment is a sandbox in which we just create any types of orders we need, and prior to launch all of these mockup orders will be nuked,
Hell, the usual answer tends to be laziness, but even that can't be the case here, as they had to spent more effort doing it the way they did rather than in a way which would be sensible.
Also known as 'making a profit for its stockholders' which is the primary purpose of any for-profit corporation.
There are different types of companies and different types of investors for sure, and many don't seem to mind holding stock that pays no dividends but saying that paying dividends is the same as 'running out of ideas' is just frankly silly; it's entirely possible to come up with new ideas and start developing them and still have enough money to pay dividends. Tesla is obviously a company with rather heavy R & D and manufacturing costs so it's understandable that at this stage of their existence they're not doing it.
But the point the shareholders ARE the company. so if they want the corporation to pay them a share of its profits then that's what the company will do and it doesn't automatically equate to 'we're out of ideas'; any new idea carries a risk, so it's a decision between 'pay out X now' or 'Invest Y in this idea at a risk to possibly pay out more later, or lose the money'.
Agreed.
However, at the same time this rhetoric itself is at the core of the Russian propaganda: essentially the message is 'since the US does it, we can too"
As a Finn I've engaged in a lot of discussions with both Russians and my fellow countrymen about the situation in Russia ever since Crimea, and this comes up quite frequently from the pro-Russian side. If you try to talk about the annexation of Crimea and how it's worrysome they throw 'Iraq'-card in your face. Nevermind that we had nothing to do with Iraq, and that despite the fuck-up and unjustified nature of the war in Iraq and for all their incompetence, the US still did not add Iraq as a new state.
From this, it's not a long way to the idea presented by some in the Kremlin that countries simply cannot want to be in NATO for the sake of their own security. Like, if an unallied country at the border of Russia looks at the recent actions of Russia towards other unallied border states (first Georgia in 2008, then later in Ukraine/Crimea) and concludes that it's safer by allying itself with someone other than Russia, then it obviously must because of Washington and the corporate illuminati controlling the popular opinion and seeking to threaten Russia, despite the fact that the risen interest in military co-operation is a direct result of their own actions. This is of course intentional. All authoritarian regimes need enemies, and to Russia it's 'western values' (ie. gays and sexual deviance primarily) from within and NATO from without. To help achieve this they treat the whole of Europe as a unified block ('the west') that's nothing but an extension of the US when it suits them, basically telling us Finns (and Ukrainians) here that we cannot have an opinion of our own, unless we agree with them.
They want to keep and even increase the tension because that's a convenient trick to distract people from the failings of their domestic policies and the rather dismal state of their economy, pretty much fascism 101 stuff. And the fact that in some sense the US is doing the same with the war on terror, war on drugs etc does not make it okay, or justifiable.
This is a perfect example of why a one dimensional left/right -divide is utterly useless. I live in a globally very heavily to the left country (Finland) and adhere to many leftist ideas such as the universal health care and education systems we have here, as well as progressive taxation etc...
However, I do not buy into, nor support, any of the SJW crap about forcing people to feel/think/speak a certain way, and I say this as a part of one of the minorities (disabled since birth) that this crowd so often claims to be defending. There are loads of us. If you look at popular anti-SJW youtube chnalles such as Sargon of Akkad who has over 300 000 subscribers and over 74 000 000 views with numerous videos critizing and debunking this SJW thoughtcrime BS, and you take a look at the channel demographics, you'll note that the vast majority (55 %) of his viewership falls into the same category as the man himself (and me as well): a left-leaning libertarian. Ie. people who do not believe in letting the free markets decide over anything and everything, and believe the state serves as an important factor in making sure people's basic needs are met etc, but still at the same time maintain that individuals are free to say what they want, enjoy whatever substances they want etc... The authoritarian left of which you speak of is not just opposed by the right, but by a large quantity of us leftists ourselves, as one of the Sargon videos I linked above well puts it, the modern day SJW crowd has become very similar to the authoritarian right.
So no, there is no one 'The Left' anymore than there is one "The Right". The political field is much wider than that and we should all know that at this point. The political compass is a good tarting point to rid yourself of the tubelike vision that all members of left/right think alike or uniformly, I recommend checking it out if you haven't already,
I'm not Norwegian so I don't know the details of how it works exactly, but I think such a system is still superior to 'life without the possibility of parole'.
The way we have it set up in here (Finland) is that we have a life sentence (which one can only get for murder, or treason/war crimes/crime against humanity etc), but as per law everyone has the right to apply for parole after 12 years, no matter the crime. The median sentence length IIRC is something like 16 years, and it seems to be working for the most part as only about 15 % of released lifers ever end up back in jail.
That as well, but also the point is to try and make sure they do not do those things again. If you're going to say it doesn't make a difference whether the reconvition rate is 15 % or 99 % then I don't really understand how you deem society benefits from high reconviction. It's obviously better the lower the re-conviction rates are, both for the inmate as well as for the socíety, so to argue that rehabilitation is not an important function of the system makes no sense to me.
They do not account for that yes, that's one thing that surely factors into it as well, I should have pointed this out in my post, my bad.
Still point being: prisoners released from the US system have significantly worse outlook than their western counterparts as the felony conviction pretty much makes it impossible to get employment, and in some states even blocks access to housing etc. If you keep people who're already violent/dangerous when they come in in rather inhumane conditions, then you release them with even less of a chance of making a living legally than before they went in, it should not come as a surprise that most of these people turn back to crime. Ex-inmates are societal outcasts, which make them a ripe target for organized crime tor recruit.
This is a giant strawman. The vast majority of criminals are not Jeffrey Dahlmer and are not serving a life sentence. This means that for MOST inmates the prison system is there to rehabilitate them to society.
No-one's arguing that there aren't mentally unstable individuals who cannot be released and so on, but tehabilitation and making sure the inmates, once released, do not commit crimes again is the primary focus of any sane penal system. If you look at actual data and charts on reconviction rates you'll note they go up as the length of the sentence goes up. This means the more time the inmate spends in jail, the higher the chance of them committing a crime again is. The US is not the only country where this happens, but if time spent in jail increases instead of decreases the chances of a re-conviction, it ought to be clear that the system is faulty.
Compare that to something like Norway which has one of the 'softest' prison systems and has no life imprisonment (technically, although with people like Brevik it's unlikely he will ever be let free, as they have to pass an assessment before release or the sentence can be continued, and even if he's ever released he'll probably be released into a mental institution) and has incredibly humane conditions (that is it allows for the inmates to live fairly normal lives within controlled conditions), the re-conviction rates are far lower because it turns out if you treat prisoners as people instead of cattle to be kept in small boxes and the released after several years with limited rights and next to no employment options, they actually for the most part turn out to become productive members of society.
Yes, yes it is. It's not the only difference between the 2 systems but it's a major one.
This is simply not true. Source
The problem with trying to have his discussion with you is that you're misinformed about facts, and make claims that are not consistent with reality.
If you look at the numbers spent per patient, both Medicare and Medicaid are cheaper than private alternatives already. So your point is wrong: the costs of the system to the state have increased as people enrolled in these programs have increased, but the cost per member when compared to private insurers is still cheaper.
Point being, if you replaced medicare and medicaid with some type of single public insurance that would still be free/cheap for people of low income, but open for everyone (at a cost for those making above a certain amount if you wish to avoid tax-funding it), it would be cheaper. The point about public insurance -. even if it's not a single payer model - is that as its funded by a public entity and is non-profit, obviously it's going to be cheaper than an insurance ran by a company for profit. If you then further either ran more hospitals with public funds, or alternatively had more control over the pricing of the hospitals, you would further cut the costs.
None of this even requires the elimination of private clinics and insurers. Models such as this are in pretty widespread use in places like Germany,
Yes and I'm very aware that obviously I have certain biases, as do most people, I try my best to control them, albeit not always successfully.
Oh I know, and I wasn't saying that it's bad. It's quite good, even top class in many ways, my gripe is just that from my perspective as someone who knows something about the cost-structure of health care the system is just inefficient at producing health. Simply put, it works great for those that have access to it, but it does so at a greater cost than any other system per capita, which in turn makes achieving functional universal coverage difficult, This is largely why the US is distinct from all other western nations. But again this doesn't make the system bad per se, just cost-heavy.
Well my replies are my attempt in trying to be more objective. The first post was meant to highlight the problems with the out of hand costs in the US, not as an in-depth analysis of the issues with the system here. Obviously our system is not perfect either, but by all standard measures it achieves results very much comparable to the results in the american model, not better (for the most part), but pretty much on par in most metrics. So I stand behind the point in the original message. I understand it may come across as overly nationalistic but that wasn't exactly my point, as I'm not suggesting the US directly copies its system from here or anywhere else for that matter. I'm just trying to say that I firmly believe based on the figures I've seen from here and from other countries, that you can get the american system to perform better and achieve better coverage without increasing spending. The problem is this requires meddling with the business of insurance companies and private hospitals, which for political reasons is obviously much more of a difficult thing to pull off in the US than in many other places.
Yup, 100 % agreed. I do apologize if the tone came off as arrogant, that wasn't intended.
Yes, but I wasn't talking about eliminating profit motives from manufacturers of medical tech. We still buy and use american medical tech here, and the companies manufacturing those make profit on them.
The point is, if you install something like a pacer on someone of course the pacer has a margin on it and is sold for profit. In the US however, on top of this the hospital then adds its own margin and finally after the insurance companies pay the bills they take their own margin on top of that. Eliminating the latter 2 will not effect the capabilities of R&D companies and tech companies to make business.
Erm... the policies of the last three cabinets have been far from socialistic. They've sold of core infrastructure as you mentioned to foreign capital investment firms (not a socialist policy), they've cut the corporate tax rate by quite a huge chunk in the false hope that that would have created more jobs, (which it didn't) and now they're cutting from the poor and the elderly. These same methods have now been tried in various forms for several election-cycles, and we haven't seen a turn for the better because the government cutting its spending and giving corporations tax-breaks does not automatically turn into (export) jobs. Make matters worse they're now cuting education, further making it less likely that we get the types of innovations they themselves say that we need to get the economy flowing properly again. These policy-decisions are not helpful in the long term, and they're certainly not socialistic policies.
Point being: our economy has issues yes, structural issues, but those issues are not because of 'socialism'. Sweden has highly similar tax structure (in fact, their corporate tax rate is higher than ours) and social policies yet their economy is doing much much better. The problem is the current government is only trying to reduce spending for the most part, which will not solve/help unemployment, or for that matter help our companies to export more. The problem is not costs of production (on which we're about at the same level as Germany), or the unemployed being too lazy, yet these two have been the ones the government has been yelling about the most, even though they're not central issues.
There are actual issues which could be addressed, such as making hiring less of a risk for starting companies etc, better support for people starting export businesses, etc... but it's false to say that the current situation is because we're a socialist country: we lost Nokia and nearly a fourth of all our exports with it, and still haven't fully recovered from that and the latest recession.
Also, as has already been pointed out, we're nowhere near any collapsing point.
There are problems in the current system here as well, but this is not representative of them for several reasons. If you have acute symptoms you do not go to a health centre, you go directly to an ER. Something like a blood clot which causes clear and immediate symptoms like possible slurring of speech, impeded movement ie. these are things for which you call an ambulance and treatment is started usually within hours, and recovery rates are quite good. Misdiagnoses do happen, but it's not as if people - young or old - are dying en mass from conditions that health centers failed to diagnose.
The system is not problem free, but it's not dysfunctional: people do get treated and most often successfully so. I agree with you that the role of health centers in the current system is problematic, and it is being reconsidered currently. but it's not as bad as you make it seem when you look at actual data on performance and how people get help.
Of course the spending is massive, because currently the cost of procedures is massively inflated. My whole point is that in the current american model the pricing of standard procedures is way high precisely because the hospitals are in it to make profit and they have fairly free reign to set the prices as the money comes from either the insurance companies or the government. Of course they're going to ask for as much as they can, which leads to situations in which simple procedures like getting some stiches and an x-ray can rack up a bill of over a thousand, or pills that cost a cent or 2 being sold with several dollars.
I at no point said that you must scale the current system up, it's not doable that way. I said you could establish a better functioning universal system if you controlled the pricing better and/or eliminated the insurance companies from base level medical care and treated it - like most of the rest of the industrialized world - as a public expense altogether.
I remember reading/hearing about similar studies years back in a philosophy course. To me this isn't exactly surprising. I mean put simply, if I tell someone to "name an animal" they cannot control which animals pop into their head. Their mind/subconscious goes through their memory quickly and picks up certain animals, with the more common ones probably coming up first. Say the person thinks of dogs, cats and horses first. He/she now then has to choose which to say out loud. Whether or not that choice is 'free' is something these kinds of studies look in to, but I don't find it shocking that unconscious factors (which animal he likes most, or which he thinks I like most, thinks is most expected/unexpected as an answer, etc...) probably end up affecting the final choice quite much as well.
So even under the best possible scenario for free will, it's only free in the sense of 'we're free to make choices based on the alternatives we happen to think of', but we do not get to choose what we happen to think about most often. No matter what way you look at it 'classical' free will has been dead for a long time, as for that to be true human beings would have to be free from the influences of our surroundings (both environment and other people) and we already know that's not true. Look at cold reading: people can be guided by suggestions even when these suggestions are not framed as such, but are merely words/phrases/gestures which are meant to bring about certain responses and behaviors in an individual. A skilled cold reader will have his audience believing that he in fact was reading the person's mind, when in fact what he's doing is reading small hints and tips from expressions and mannerisms which are for the most part involuntary.
I work for the single payer health care system of Finland on the administrative side (IT & stats related) and partly because of that, health care has always been one of my favorite subjects to discuss. However something I've noticed when talking with Americans about it is a certain type of illusion/fallacy that many seem to be under, which is that because you pay so much for it, it must be the best system out there.
Just yesterday I had a lengthy conversation on fb about the problems with a purely insurance based model, and even though I tried linking a couple of studies as to the amount of deaths caused by lack of access due to costs, I was labeled a liar because apparently 'everyone in the US now has the opportunity to get health insurance" (a direct quote from him) despite the fact that it's known that there are people who do not meet the criteria under the ACA to qualify for the cheaper/low income insurances whilist also not being able to afford a private one AND that there are also still issues with insurances not covering certain operations. Don't get me wrong, the ACA was a small step in a better direction but the gutting of the public option for all sort of killed the best potential about it. Yet my counterpart in said discussion was adamantly of the opinion that anyone who dies in the US for not getting treatment dies purely because he/she didn't bother to get insurance and hence the system is not to blame.
You've plenty of things where you lead the world, and the medical R & D and high level expertise in the US is unparalleled. However I do wish that more Americans would realize how much you're paying for simple base level health care. I've seen hospital invoices from the states where simple over the counter ibuprofen pills are billed at several dollars a piece. That's a a margin of several thousand percentages. The fact that this is allowed is unfathomable to me. Even if one is of the opinion that a life-saving basic service should be allowed to remain a profit-driven business, having no controls on pricing combined with the insurance lobby has created a gigantic price bubble. This is why the US spends combined (private and tax spending) the most money on the planet per capita on health care, and still the results are far from the top. (Source (wiki))
The profit motive needs to be either removed or curtailed heavily, so that more of the money that's spent can actually be used to improve the level of care and oversight, instead of just increasing the profits of the insurance giants and private hospitals.
We get comparable treatment results and universal coverage (at about 3500 dollars a year per capita) than the US does when it comes to life expectancy, cancer survival rates (in fact, with certain types of cancers we're ahead of the US even) and so on. You spend more than DOUBLE that (8700 dollars according to OECD when totaling private and public spending, though interestingly, the CDC puts this figure even higher at 9500) and the massive increase in spending doesn't get you the kind of results that such an investment should.
You could and should easily be able to arrange for the hands down best universal health care system without spending a dime more than you already are. Don't spend more, spend smarter.
Just my 2 cents, feel free to mod me down for being a socialist scum now.
Bureaucracy has to do with it in part yes, taxation not so much
Sweden, that you just used as an example of an economy that's doing much better than ours, has higher corporate tax rate and about equal income tax and and VAT.
This quote is plainly false. Sure, in the beginning of unemployment you can get that if you're a union member you get 60 % of what you got paid for 1,5 years, and that's soon to drop to a year.
The people who are unemployed on the long term do not receive such amounts. I have a friend who recently graduated from a university and is currently unemployed and living alone, receiving the maximum amount of all the possible benefits and that totals to 1050 euros a month. And this is before paying for rent etc. After rent, utilities and other necessities that leaves you with around 300 a month to live by. If you've ever had to sustain yourself with such income at our prices you should understand that most people aren't glamouring to be unemployed to live on 300 a month.
We have over 270 000 unemployed individuals yet less than 20 000 open job positions. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to deduce that the main problem with our unemployment is not people just liking the "massive" luxury of living on a couple hundred euros so much a month that they'd rather not work.
You're right that there are issues, many of them made worse by the unions, but my point is this: sweden is a social democracy with heavy social security and taxation just like us, yet they're doing a lot better at the moment. Therefore it's illogical to point the finger at 'socialism' when the problems are clearly in the implementation of it, and not the concept in its entirety.
Well if the market allows for bribery legally then the market is "too free." And where do you think the corruption comes from? It takes 2 sides for bribery to happen: someone to give and someone to take the bribes.
The corporations have had an active role in corrupting the government(s) and breaking the markets. Obviously the market itself is not to blame, it's just a mechanism; but both the private and the public side have changed the rules of business so that it no longer is what most people consider free or fair.
Corruption is at the root of it, but not just corruption in government, but also on the side doing the corrupting; ie. the wealthy elite who've had the desire to be able to bribe politicians.