You can look at the LASIK clinics for an example of a medical industry which is mostly unaffected by insurance, since it is generally considered an elective procedure. The price is mostly quoted up front, and you can shop around for a better price, or go for a more reputable doctor. From what I can tell, price is also much lower than most procedures covered by insurance. Of course, if you can't afford LASIK, then you simply don't get it done, so there is a much smaller coercive price driver.
Actually, on second thought, there's no way to compare this with an urgent procedure. If you need a procedure right away, the clinic could charge an exorbitant price, akin to private firefighters watching your house burn down. The insurance company reduces the coercive force because they and the clinic agree to a price structure beforehand, when there is no urgency.
And what justification do you have for dividing the CEO compensation by the number of insured people, rather than dividing the CEO compensation by the number of CEOs? Sure, you can make any big number small by dividing it by a big number.
How big a factor is the wages of doctors and nurses in the bottom line? The cost of drugs and supplies is much higher in US, driven up by collusion between pharmaceuticals, insurance companies, and government. You also have leeches like Martin Shkreli pumping up the cost.
It's true: poor Americans don't normally starve. But they do frequently die of exposure or lack of medical care. The indigent mostly get care from emergency rooms, and don't have treatment for more chronic issues.
Transaction costs and mining costs can't be separated because they are the same thing. The work of miners is used to verify transactions. The cost is not fixed at all. The cost basically scales with the combined computation speed of all the miners since the total transaction rate is fixed (at a fairly low value). Granted, the creators of bitcoin couldn't be expected to foresee it's popularity, but limited transaction rate is fundamentally broken.
Optimistically, the number of miners will go down once it becomes not worth it to mine anymore, and the difficulty will scale down to a point where the transaction costs are somewhat reasonable. The system may fall into some equilibrium where the transaction cost is high enough that few people want to make transactions (settling to the limit of ~1700 transactions/10 minutes) and the number of miners will fall into an equilibrium such that it's worth it to mine at the new difficulty.
Pessimistically, the whole system will crash and burn. I think this is much more likely. Maybe another crytocurrency will take its place or maybe not.
Considering all the sanctions the West has put in place against anyone going nuclear, it's not surprising that more poor countries do not go this route.
First 20 hours standard taxation standard tax. Everything over 100%tax. Now how many are willing to work more? This is exttemely simplified.
Overly easy to game, no matter how convoluted you make the laws. The thing about overtime pay is that at least one party has an incentive to make sure the law is followed, so while it is gamed, at least there is a check on it.
I have no problem with a messenging app for young kids, but if they claim to protect against nudity/violence/exploitation they are opening themselves to lawsuits when those things occur. It's too bad, since the system is probably better than nothing. But this is land of lawsuits.
Having used supercomputers for some physics simulations, I have some understanding of the general workflow. There is no need for GUI nonsense on a supercomputer. You have thousands of users using the supercomputer remotely. You ssh in to submit jobs into a queue. You process input files and do some file manipulation. You write scripts to copy and edit input and output files to organize your test cases. You copy what you need to your local workstation so you can visualize the results. This is exactly what POSIX is for.
I suppose POSIX for Windows exists, but it is far behind Linux. What's the point in running Windows if you are going to use POSIX?
Generally, you want to compile your codes for each supercomputer you run on, so a full make environment and portable API is kind of important.
Look at all this trouble that researchers went through to "crack" the phone. $150 in materials, silicone, 3D printing, makeup, printouts. Oh, and they have to borrow your face to make the measurements. Apple should be chuckling.
MS Office is a good product. Much better than OpenOffice. But Microsoft's constant struggle to reinvent Office to sell a new product will eventually bust them.
I can sort of see them going back to Windows 7, since that's an OS suitable for real work, but Windows 10? It's hard to see how to get work done with all those annoying tiles moving around and vying for your attention and the flat white UI with thin borders which cause eye strain. I suppose IT can produce an OS image without all that crap, but will they get any support from Microsoft?
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Perhaps the issue is lack of competition. Would US have ever gone to the moon if there were no USSR?
Plants also require sun.
Perhaps if we led, the world would follow. But we stopped leading a while ago.
Economists tell us that the correct thing to do is to tax the externalities instead of subsidizing. Of course, we never do that.
You can look at the LASIK clinics for an example of a medical industry which is mostly unaffected by insurance, since it is generally considered an elective procedure. The price is mostly quoted up front, and you can shop around for a better price, or go for a more reputable doctor. From what I can tell, price is also much lower than most procedures covered by insurance. Of course, if you can't afford LASIK, then you simply don't get it done, so there is a much smaller coercive price driver.
Actually, on second thought, there's no way to compare this with an urgent procedure. If you need a procedure right away, the clinic could charge an exorbitant price, akin to private firefighters watching your house burn down. The insurance company reduces the coercive force because they and the clinic agree to a price structure beforehand, when there is no urgency.
And what justification do you have for dividing the CEO compensation by the number of insured people, rather than dividing the CEO compensation by the number of CEOs? Sure, you can make any big number small by dividing it by a big number.
How big a factor is the wages of doctors and nurses in the bottom line? The cost of drugs and supplies is much higher in US, driven up by collusion between pharmaceuticals, insurance companies, and government. You also have leeches like Martin Shkreli pumping up the cost.
It's true: poor Americans don't normally starve. But they do frequently die of exposure or lack of medical care. The indigent mostly get care from emergency rooms, and don't have treatment for more chronic issues.
Of course there's a shortage of energy that we can easily harness, and generating energy creates pollution.
All the energy that went into it is lost.
Trump wasn't exactly the establishment.
It seems like you aren't the first to think of this.
https://curecoin.net/
http://www.gridcoin.us/
http://foldingcoin.net/the-coi...
I haven't bothered to look at any of these in detail, but I'm not sure if they actually use the scientific work as the proof of work, but the idea is out there.
Transaction costs and mining costs can't be separated because they are the same thing. The work of miners is used to verify transactions. The cost is not fixed at all. The cost basically scales with the combined computation speed of all the miners since the total transaction rate is fixed (at a fairly low value). Granted, the creators of bitcoin couldn't be expected to foresee it's popularity, but limited transaction rate is fundamentally broken.
Optimistically, the number of miners will go down once it becomes not worth it to mine anymore, and the difficulty will scale down to a point where the transaction costs are somewhat reasonable. The system may fall into some equilibrium where the transaction cost is high enough that few people want to make transactions (settling to the limit of ~1700 transactions/10 minutes) and the number of miners will fall into an equilibrium such that it's worth it to mine at the new difficulty.
Pessimistically, the whole system will crash and burn. I think this is much more likely. Maybe another crytocurrency will take its place or maybe not.
Considering all the sanctions the West has put in place against anyone going nuclear, it's not surprising that more poor countries do not go this route.
Is it really any better in other continents?
Automation makes labor worth more, not less. The amount of goods produced by one unit of labor is amplified by automation.
First 20 hours standard taxation standard tax. Everything over 100%tax. Now how many are willing to work more?
This is exttemely simplified.
Overly easy to game, no matter how convoluted you make the laws. The thing about overtime pay is that at least one party has an incentive to make sure the law is followed, so while it is gamed, at least there is a check on it.
I have no problem with a messenging app for young kids, but if they claim to protect against nudity/violence/exploitation they are opening themselves to lawsuits when those things occur. It's too bad, since the system is probably better than nothing. But this is land of lawsuits.
It's only passable if you remove the animated tiles.
Having used supercomputers for some physics simulations, I have some understanding of the general workflow. There is no need for GUI nonsense on a supercomputer. You have thousands of users using the supercomputer remotely. You ssh in to submit jobs into a queue. You process input files and do some file manipulation. You write scripts to copy and edit input and output files to organize your test cases. You copy what you need to your local workstation so you can visualize the results. This is exactly what POSIX is for.
I suppose POSIX for Windows exists, but it is far behind Linux. What's the point in running Windows if you are going to use POSIX?
Generally, you want to compile your codes for each supercomputer you run on, so a full make environment and portable API is kind of important.
You are dreaming if you think every scientific simulation can be gamified and distributed to the masses.
Look at all this trouble that researchers went through to "crack" the phone. $150 in materials, silicone, 3D printing, makeup, printouts. Oh, and they have to borrow your face to make the measurements. Apple should be chuckling.
MS Office is a good product. Much better than OpenOffice. But Microsoft's constant struggle to reinvent Office to sell a new product will eventually bust them.
I can sort of see them going back to Windows 7, since that's an OS suitable for real work, but Windows 10?
It's hard to see how to get work done with all those annoying tiles moving around and vying for your attention and the flat white UI with thin borders which cause eye strain. I suppose IT can produce an OS image without all that crap, but will they get any support from Microsoft?
This was exactly my thought. You beat me to the post.