A commentor on a different blog (that I can't find ATM) stated that he knew from inside knowledge that Julian has a "dead-man's switch" to be triggered if he's ever arrested, with damaging information on Ecuador.
He also stated that the recent arrest definitely triggered the switch, and we should expect some interesting wikileaks drops in the next week or so.
(Wikileaks takes care to verify it's information, which usually takes a couple of days. For example, it verifies the encryption signatures of E-mails. Also, it scans and removes information that might get someone killed(*)).
Ecuador is in a panic right now, expecting to be fatally hacked. This might be, and the character assassination might be, damage control right before getting pwned.
Take this with a grain of salt, but it's not unreasonable to wait a week and see if Julian cleaned up and with a shave talks reasonable at a press conference, or if Ecuador is exposed for doing some nasty shit.
(*) Note that the "people were killed" thing from the "collateral murder" drop was done by accident by a Guardian reporter, not Wiklileaks. Also, it was just John McCain spouting off crap about something he didn't like.
Oh, and where did these measles infections come from? Third-world immigrants imported by the leftists against the will of these very people who are being targeted now?
We hear all the time how Republicans are the epitome of evil, how the orange man is soooo bad and all.
Think about that for a minute: all this hoopla about vaccinations causing autism and such could have been so much less by eliminating the very *need* to get vaccinated in the US, and enforcing vaccination on immigrants and travelers going outside the country. We could concentrate on eradicating the disease worldwide, since measles is one of the few diseases that meet the criteria of worldwide eradication.
Instead we let anyone walk into the country with no oversight *simply because* it creates problems that can be blamed on the president.
Thank you for posting that. I was wondering where the mislead was, since all the recent expert analysis seemed reasonable and rational.
In case anyone hasn't been following the Tesla saga (most people, I imagine), public sentiment about the company is completely and totally driven by a sense of profit for the customers of the people writing the sentiment. If a fund's customers would profit by the stock tanking, then they try to bring that about by writing misleading predictions of doom and gloom.
Tesla used to be the most shorted stock in history, and still has significant short interest. Roughly $11 b is betting that the stock will tank, and this results in enormous incentive to bring that about.
Last summer it was "Tesla will need another round of financing, we're certain", then Tesla paid its debt obligation in cash from profits.
Last month it was "Musk violated the SEC agreement", by tweeting information that was available in the published documents.
Today it's "interest has dried up". Wait a half a year and see if the trend is correct.
It's completely insane that the value of the company stock is based not on analysis and solid numbers, but on the perception of numbers. The stock doesn't go up or down based on whether they make a profit - it goes up or down based on whether it meets or exceeds *expectations* of profit.
Ugh!
It's literally impossible to get good stock information about Tesla at this point, and this will probably be true going forward for several years.
History lessons for those not around to remember: After the mass pardons by G H Bush of all the Reagan Iran-Contra criminals in '92, Republicans have no grounds to criticize any pardons done by Democrats. And it was Republican Gerald Ford who pardoned his Republican predecessor in '74 even before charges were brought, "a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9,1974." The Republicans have been far more shameless in using the pardon to clear their cronies of crimes committed while in actual government positions. By the way, the Attorney General at the time who advised Bush on the Iran-Contra pardons was our current AG, William Barr, handpicked by Trump to take over the Justice Department now...
Okay then, let's play that game.
Democrats have no grounds to complain when Republicans filibuster a supreme court pick in the final year of a Democrat president (Obama's nomination of Garland) because Democrats started that tradition.
Democrats have no grounds to complain when Republicans refuse to impeach a sitting president, because during Obama's campaign he convinced his party not to impeach George Bush for cause - including "taking the country to war under false pretenses" and various war crimes - because "it would divide the nation". (This despite Democrats holding firm majorities in both houses at the time.)
It's news because, with the proper filtering and monitoring in place, such groups could be detected very easily. Yes, I know, privacy and shit, but let's face it, once on Facebook, privacy is gone in an instant. It's very hard to believe a large group of 385K members can fly under the radar for so long. This can't be explained as incompetence.
And the problem is in the determination of "legal".
The term "legal" (and "illegal") is defined by the state, and in many instances people disagree with the state's assertion (that something is illegal) and ask it for proof. We call such proof "trials", and in many cases the state cannot prove it's assertion, in that instance.
There are also rules and procedures to ensure that people don't get unfairly caught up in the process. For example, being unfairly accused and suffering harm can lead to a lawsuit to recover damages.
Having Facebook monitor illegal activity is bad is because we're asking non-government entities to enforce the law by common-face reading of what the law is, without fear of consequence for getting things wrong. It's also ripe for abuse, and a tool that can be used to unfairly force a viewpoint on the masses.
It's easy to point to specific cases and say "that's obviously illegal", but note that under those rules VCRs were illegal (until taken to court), DeCSS was illegal, and repairing your John Deere tractor is illegal. How much "hate speech" is actually illegal speech? How much of the conservative viewpoint actually advocates violence?
And in these cases, Facebook (or Twitter, or Google, or whoever) can make mistakes and when called on it, say "oh, it was just a mistake, we've corrected it", with no penalties for doing so.
The state declaration of "illegal" has a healthy fear of repercussions from mistakes, but the private entity has none.
One obvious recent example is Kurt Eichenwald, who posted a screenshot of a flyer that he claims was anti-semitic. One of the tabs open in the background was for tentacle porn.
Eichenwald was doing some pretty sketchy things and pissed off a fair number of people. This ensured that the tentacle-porn thing got strewn across the internet far and wide, to the gleeful delight of everyone who hated him.
And it continues. Even if Huawei earnestly means that they won't collaborate with Beijing, when your engineering security is so lax then it seems reasonable to expect that Beijing will find ways to make use of it (just like any other large government would).
It's just another example of corporate balances not finding a decent center for security versus productivity and profit. We all still have a long way to go.
With all this calling out of Huwei, it sounds suspiciously like the US security agencies found a specific back-door planted in the products, want to alert everyone to the issue, but also don't want to make the vulnerability public so they can use it for themselves.
Isn't it more the consequences of once free speech.
If you host a site that encourages people to kill other people, be ready to take to the consequences of this.
I viewed the video, and it's not that bad. It's a live-action game of "doom" using real people.
My point is that the media adjectives and adverbs do not correctly describe the visceral impact of the video. Yes, people are killed. No, it's not "horrifying", "gut wrenching", "sickening", or any of the choice descriptions we see from the MSM outlets. It's about as bad as any active-duty military person has seen in real life, and any military person should be able to watch the video with a critical eye and note details that might be relevant to an investigation or court trial. (A lot of police could, also.)
This came up when someone online made a statement of fact about the video that seemed a bit... unlikely, so I went to check for myself(*).
While searching for the video online I noted that CNN was, at that very moment, pushing the hoax that Trump said Nazis were "fine people", which can be quickly dis-verified because Trump's statements are available online.
CNN probably considers Trumps words as racist and, if he weren't the president, could get his comments removed from the internet on that basis. A lot of people could simply report those words as racist speech, and the internet giants would dutifully remove those posts.
And we would have no source of information except the MSM version of what he said.
The only reason this doesn't happen to Trump is because he's a high-profile celebrity, but anyone else can be subject to misinformation, spin, and outright hoax. Like the Covington students being racist, Brett Kavanaugh being a serial rapist, and Trayvon Martin - that adorable teen-aged child - gunned down by a racist white man.
The video should be available for anyone to view online, the manifesto as well, because if it isn't we will have to rely on the judgement of experts in the MSM for content and significance.
And the judgement of experts in the MSM is untrustworthy(**).
(*) Yes, apparently the killer was listening to polka music (or similar) on his way to the mosque.
(**) The MSM is trying to paint the shooter as a right-wing zealot based on the manifesto, but do the actual manifesto words support that conclusion? New Zealand wants to ban the manifesto from the internet.
The current realities are in flux - can you be more specific here?
Is he still "literally Hitler", or has that reality been discarded?
How about "is going to rot in federal jail, along with his family"? Will that reality happen any time soon?
I think the "anti-semite" reality was dealt a death blow by moving the embassy to Jerusalem, but if that didn't kill it the Golan Heights thing surely did.
Or is he still an anti-semite after all that?
The "racism" reality is still going strong, despite having done more for minorities than any other president in living memory (by reforming the sentencing guidelines). Also, illegal immigration disproportionately hurts minorities, and minority unemployment is the lowest it's ever been.
Is he still racist after all that?
Which realities are you referring to, that appear in Trump's head?
For a little more clarity on the subject, this is a physical realization of the "Wigners Friend" experiment. The "state" referred to in the summary is "superposition/collapsed waveform", and not the specific information about the photon such as its spin.
In the experiment, one scientist ("Wigner's friend") observes a photon in a superposition of states, which collapses the state, while a second scientist observes the first scientist. This uses entangled photons, so that observing the first photon collapses the state of the second.
The first scientist observes one photon, thereby collapsing its state to reveal information. Does the second scientist see his photon in a superposition or collapsed state? The first scientist might even tell the 2nd that he has observed the photon, collapsing its state - but not sating what state information was seen.
According to the experiment, the 2nd scientist still sees his photon in a superposition of states even though he knows that the first scientist has observed the photon and that the first scientist knows what the collapsed state is.
Thatâ(TM)s not what happens today. FUD is doing a good job of helping those destructive to society get in power and stay in power. In the meantime a well researched stance is screamed at for being elitist, left wing, supporting already defeated candidates and non-patriotic
Donâ(TM)t underestimate the power of the misinformed populist vote. It has hurt the US, the UK and other countries.
"Oh, if only our citizens had been correctly informed, they would never have voted for Brexit!"
That seems to be the defining rationale for all the dissent in the UK today, and it's complete and total bullocks. It's used as justification by people who didn't get their way to make the transition as painful as possible with the faint hope of reversing the decision.
Firstly, leaving the EU is objectively a better decision than staying, from an economic, cultural, and game-theory point of view. The economic arguments for staying are based on invalid assumptions(*), and in practice staying in the EU is causing more economic hardship than staying.
The arguments against leaving center mostly on the transition, and not the end result. It's always what will happen "in the next 6 months" or "in the following year" and whatnot. No one will admit that the UK could voluntarily implement all the agreements it currently has with the EU - such as unrestricted travel between nations - and there would be little hardship.
But mostly, the argument that "not enough correct information got out" and "people would have chosen differently with better information" is completely false.
Most people simply don't think what people tell them to think any more, and instead they rely on what they can see. So let's examine this: what do the UK people actually see when they look around their country nowadays?
The UK culture has undergone a massive shift these past 30 years, and the people are not happy with the results. Teens are stabbed every week in London, people are being arrested for online criticism, jobs are hard to come by, and different-culture people are everywhere.
That's what drove the vote to Brexit and if you held the referendum again you would find *more* people would vote for it, simply because the changes have become worse in the past 2 years.
I suppose the single most obvious culture shift indication was in the police: in previous decades, bobbies didn't have to carry guns. Nowadays UK police they are armed and armored like US swat teams.
Your opinion and votes matter more than ever. We should not need to resort to demeaning opponents (dead or alive) to try to make our arguments. Taking time to understand what scares a person will likely help make a better argument for trying to win them over.
You are giving the people too little credit. Making them "not scared" by talking or presenting information or reasoning simply won't work. You can only make people "not scared" by making them safer. No amount of argument will change that basic fact.
You give the people of the UK to little credit. They chose, and even if you don't agree with it you should abide by that choice.
(*) For example, the assumption that a bigger pool of workers and jobs makes for a better economy. When the countries are economically equal it works out - a dental hygenist in the UK can get a good job in Germany, and vice versa. When this assumption doesn't holds true the better country gets pulled down - a dental hygienist in Greece can get a good job in the UK, but the reverse isn't true. The result is massive unemployment in the UK while high-paying jobs are filled with non-UK citizens. A large number of assumptions - which turn out to be false - underlie the economic arguments for being in the EU.
There's lots of money. You can even use it as toilet paper.
Fiat money seems to be a problem for socialism and other regimes. With fiat money the government can print as much as it likes, running up inflation and driving the country into ruin. Some historians say this happened to the Romans once they started polluting their coins with base metals, and is probably what caused Germany to start WWII.
Since you brought it up, let's ask the obvious question: if a country's money is *not* fiat based, would this be enough to allow socialism to thrive?
Suppose you created VenCoin on the BitCoin model. BitCoin (and therefore VenCoin) has the ability to add new coins that the miners would find, so the country could implement a fixed rate of inflation(*). Suppose the inflation rate is fixed into the model and can't be changed. (I don't know how this might be implemented, but suppose it were. Perhaps a fixed inflation based on the current year and a fixed estimate for the average GDP growth.)
Would that be enough to allow socialism to thrive?
I ask this because, as a society, it appears there's a growing trend to transition to cashless payments using blockchain technology. Now is the time to point out fundamental problems. I'm aware of the privacy issues (cash is anonymous, BitCoin is not), but these might be overcome with careful implementation.
It seems that this would prevent the sorts of "runaway inflation" that is caused by a corrupt government printing too much money.
You'll have to enlighten me. How has the EU been punishing the UK? From where I stand it looks more like a whiny cunt trying to leave the club whilst stilling having access to the equipment and the cheap members bar.
I was referring to the ongoing deals and proposals between the UK and the EU that started right after the UK submitted notification of withdrawal. It hasn't been prominent in the news, and the news has a decidedly "globalist" slant, so I'm not surprised you're not aware of it. You'd have to be interested in and follow the process to see what's really going on.
Things such as the EU demanding a "divorce fee", where the UK pays £92b for the privilege of leaving, or the UK guaranteeing that EU residents would not be forced to leave and then the EU *not* giving the same guarantee for UK citizens living abroad, or the EU proposing that the UK accept unlimited immigrants and still be subject to EU court decisions, and so on and so on.
There's been a continuous stream of "fuck you" proposals from the EU. It's not in any way been an amicable process with the intent to make things as painless as possible.
The end result will almost certainly be a "no deal" Brexit. Everyone agrees that's the worst possible situation, and yet at the same time all the leaders seem to be hell-bent on it.
The results of elections didn't go the way the permanent state/globalists/monied elite wanted, so there fore we have to STOP EVERYTHING. IT"S THE WORST DISASTER EVER.
Listen, these elections are what you get instead of violent revolution. Keep chipping away at the values of the enlightenment and you won't like the result.
And this is apparently a world-wide phenomenon.
The Brexit vote didn't go the way the globalists wanted, and as a result the UK has had two years of obstruction and doom-mongering just to prove that brexit is bad, while clinging to the slim hope that the decision could be reversed. (Oh, if *only* we could have a second referendum - the first one didn't really count, you know?)
The EU has been trying to screw over the UK at every turn, just to scare the other countries into staying. Leaving is an insult to European relations, so the UK has to be punished in every way possible.
The Venezuelan national assembly (their highest governing court, 'sorta analogous to our supreme court) declared Maduro to not be the president, he objected, and has been riding his country to ruin and weathering all sorts of sanctions from other nations.
After Trump was elected there were calls for the electors to be faithless, calls for the supreme court to step in and invalidate the election, calls for the military to step in and prevent Trump from taking office (!) (yes, that was actually a thing), there were riots in many cities, people were crying, looting, swearing "not my president", and all sorts of childish behaviour. Notably, Hillary did *not* step forward and tell her followers to calm down.
It's completely astonishing to me that, even at this late date, remainers in the UK aren't trying to make the transition as painless as possible, or that Maduro still has enough supporters to keep control, or US legislators are still investigating and trying to impeach Trump for nothing.
It's almost as if their core beliefs don't include the welfare of their governed citizens.
I wonder if it needs energy to do this, an amount of energy greater then the energy produced by burning it in the first place?
If so, why not just use that energy instead? Cut out the middle man.
I read through the paper when the article appeared in the firehose.
Yes, this method uses electrochemical decomposition to change CO2 into various forms of carbon. It essentially undoes the action of burning, and for that you have to replace the energy you got out when the carbon was originally burned.
CO2 is very stable and difficult to decompose - typical methods are inefficient. There are metal catalysts such as Cerium that bring the efficiency up nearer to the Faraday limit, but they tend to get oxidized during the process.
The paper talks about dissolving Cerium metal nanoparticles in molten Gallium at largely room temperature and using that as one electrode in electrochemical deposition against CO2 dissolved in dimethylformamide. The by products are carbon "chunks" that float on the surface of the mixture, and the Cerium is not oxidized because the liquid Gallium is an oxygen-free environment.
So to remove CO2 from the atmosphere you would need an awful lot of energy - the equivalent of all the energy we got from burning the CO2 in the first place. Possibly frickin' huge tracts of solar panels in an area that gets a lot of sun and little human use (Sahara desert, Utah salt flats, or similar) could capture CO2 in an automated process.
(For scale: A square of solar panels 20 miles on a side, working automated for about 100 years would be in the ball-park for reducing CO2 levels to pre-industrialized levels. With a lot of unknowns in the estimate.)
An unrelated question: Can anyone point me to a reference that tells how soluble Nitrogen is in dimethylformamide? I wanted to compare this to the solubility of CO2, and couldn't find that info anywhere.
Please post if you either a) have that information, or b) have a link that has it.
Automatically believing something that the left-wing AND right-wing biased outlets report on is still unwise, as it just means that outlets that lack critical reporting and are willing to publish regardless of truth merely have to agree to prioritize profits.[...]
How about if, say, The Atlantic, BBC, Al Jazeera, and Christian Science Monitor all agree on something?
That's a very good point.
It would seem that Scott's idea is testable. Perhaps instead of using the top 4 networks, the idea should be studied over the course of a few months using all the major networks, and see if a combination - *any* combination - works as a fake news filter.
It shouldn't be too hard to find, in retrospect, blatant mistakes like the Covington students, and then see which outlets got it right.
I am all in favor of suppressing disinformation, but who should decide an information is truth or not?
We all remember Irak's Weapons of Mass Destruction
In modern times, we get the following:
a) Buzzfeed reports that Trump directed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress, which Mueller's office contradicts the next day. a) Buzzfeed reports on the Covington students, they were lambasted in the media for about a week, then better video evidence was available b) Jussie Smollett gets attacked in NY by two white, MAGA-hat wearing Trump supporters who put a noose around his neck and splash him with some liquid. And later charged with obstruction for making the whole bit up.
I find it particularly entertaining because Microsoft NewsGuard counts "Drudge Report" as fake news. "Drudge Report" is mostly a story aggregator (as Slashdot is for tech news) and doesn't have many news stories on its own, so it can hardly be considered "fake".
...however, when the recent government shutdown ended they managed to get the scoop on *everyone*, so many people read in the news that the government shutdown had ended, and Microsoft readers were told that it was fake news!!!
Scott Adams made an interesting suggestion for a fake news filter: if it's on all 4 major networks (Breitbart(*), Fox, CNN, MSNBC) then it's probably not fake. This is an interesting take, because the left-leaning outlets tend to wait for the full story when it's potentially bad for them, and the right-leaning outlets do the same when it's bad for their side. Waiting until both sides agree that the information is available and solid would prevent problems of "instant speculation gets the story wrong" like the Covington students or Jussie Smollett.
If you have an eye for humor, the current MSM is right risible. Some 80% of the population (84%, by a recent poll) now doesn't trust the mainstream media for just about anything spectacular.
By going after conservative outlets as "fake news", the public now labels the MSM as untrustworthy.
That's hilarious!
(*) Yes, Breitbart. Get over it. Breitbart has more readers than the next two networks (Fox and MSNBC) *combined*. CNN is in 4th place.
In the U.S. one of our two major political parties represents a minority of voters but thanks to our voting system has had a stranglehold on policy and that party is dedicated to doing everything possible to maximize donor profit.
California has 55 electoral votes, 7 of which are due to illegals(*). The US census counts people, not citizens, in an area to determine how many electoral votes a state gets.
California gets a significant extra amount of influence in elections due to the electoral college - are you willing to give that up?
Also, the EC is what keeps California and NY from ganging up on all the other states. In effect, it prevents the US from having a civil war, and breaking up into smaller national entities.
Are you willing to give *that* up? Just because your candidate lost the popular vote?
And finally, House representatives are also allocated by the census count. California gets 7 more reps due to its illegal population.
All of which means California gets to dominate affairs in the US house of representatives and presidential elections out of proportion to their electorate.
Their mindless followers vote them in being mesmerized by keywords like "job creation" and chimeras like "the liberals are coming to get your guns." They will churn up FUD with their industry-funded studies.
a) A lot of jobs *were* created. Chrysler just opened an idled plant, creating 6500 more. Look around - the economy is doing great!
b) The house just passed a law making private sale of guns illegal. Also, NY just passed a gun confiscation law, which is ripe for abuse.
(*) About 2.3 million illegals, at 700,000 per house rep/electoral vote. The electoral formula is non-linear, and estimates of illegals are sketchy, but it's about right.
(Incidentally, this is why the Dems are so much against the wall. They don't care about any of the issues - cost, crime, jobs, and so on - that's not their problem to fix. That's why Pelosi kept the government shutdown past $6 billion to avoid spending $5 billion on a wall "that would do nothing". It would have been more cost effective to build the wall even if it did do "nothing".)
If anyone's interested, Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) is running a Climate change debate on his blog, where he invites believers and skeptics to post their best arguments with evidence, and he (as an intelligent person with no background) sorts through the bullshit for us.
One outcome of that debate is that claims of sea levels rising are bullshit. That's a concrete point, one where "the debate is settled" can now be applied. Sea levels have not risen to any appreciable degree, and that point cannot be made to show that climate change is real.
(They may rise in the future, but that is not the same as using *current* sea level changes as an argument for climate change.)
I look forward to Scott examining - one by one - all scientific claims of the climate change debate. Perhaps eventually we will arrive at a position everyone can agree on.
No, moviegoers don't hate women. Comic books especially have always led entertainment when it comes to diversity, and comic book fans have never had a problem with that.
To amplify the point, no one had a problem with Ripley gunning down Aliens - it was an awesome movie and perhaps one of the best SF movies of all time.
No one has a problem with Black Widow tricking Loki into revealing his plans, or largely holding her own against the Winter Soldier. I saw both of those and was impressed at how female characters in Marvel movies are *not* useless. Including Maria Hill gunning down the attacker on the helicarrier bridge. (Also of note: no one cares that Nick Fury is played by a black man, it's extremely well done.)
There's an interesting article(*) on Breitbart that sums up the current situation: a) Hollywood engages in hatred towards half the country, and b) this wouldn't be a problem if the movies were any good. As it turns out they're not any good, and this is just us hating you back.
From the article:
Yes, we’ve been insulted, and we’re sick of it. But I can overlook a lot of insults if you give me something worthy of praise. Maria Callas insulted a lot of people, but we still wanted to hear her sing. Can we say the same about the films nominated for Best Picture?
A specific instance cited in the article is Spike Lee's "BlackkKlansman" (nominated best picture this round) compared to "Giant" (1957). Spike Lee's movie casts whites as evil while doling out liberal doses of shame and humiliation, while at the end of "Giant" the audience is visibly rooting for Rock Hudson fighting with a racist diner owner.
Same message, good (versus bad) delivery.
Maybe this is why movie attendance is low, and oscars attendance is really low: the movies are crap, we're sick of the insults, and we don't like being brow-beaten with your social justice message.
(*) Yes, it's from Breitbart, get over it. It's an insightful article that largely describes the problem, and attacking the source is not the same as discussing the content.
That is basically the ancient Chinese model. Everyone living in the same lock with the doctor payed a monthly fee. Got he sick, he stopped paying and visited the doctor. As soon as he was cured, he payed again.
I'm not sure this would work under game theory, because people would have an incentive to get out of paying by claiming to be sick when they're not, or get out of paying by going to the doctor for trivial reasons.
For the system to work, there can't be any monetary incentive to "game" the system. The system has to be viewed from all angles, and cheating and other abuses have to be eliminated from the point of view of incentive.
No, it's actually about high time somebody asked this question.
I've recently been thinking about this a little in terms of game theory: Insurance companies see medical care as an expense and premiums as income. Patients see medical care as a benefit and insurance premiums as an expense. This has led to a system with a whole lot of problems, but the fundamental flaw is that the two sides have fundamentally conflicting goals.
How can we rework this into a better system?
The first thing we need to do is define the goal of the system, and "longer average lifespan" seems like the right goal. We can also add a quality of life rider by saying that anyone can check out if their life becomes unbearable, with lots of safeguards against coercion and suicidal depression and such. (I imagine a process similar to sex-change operations - the patient has to really want it over an extended time, and have psychiatrist buy-in.)
With "longer average lifespan" as the goal, now how do we pay the doctors?
One answer might be to assign to the *doctor* (primary care physician) a monthly fee per patient, regardless of that patient needing medical service. If patients could switch to a new doctor at any time and for any reason, doctors would then have incentive to a) provide the best medical care, b) compete with each other for quality of service, and c) keep their patients healthy, happy, and long-lived.
This seems to work at the "primary care physician" level, but it isn't a good fit for specialist and above, hospital care and ER. The PCP should feel free to refer a patient to a specialist without incurring a drop in salary, and an ER doc should have incentive to save a patient's life without regard to payment.
Also, medical research should be included, so that there's incentive to cure diseases instead of masking symptoms.
Anyone good at game theory like to add to this model?
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a link for you.
A commentor on a different blog (that I can't find ATM) stated that he knew from inside knowledge that Julian has a "dead-man's switch" to be triggered if he's ever arrested, with damaging information on Ecuador.
He also stated that the recent arrest definitely triggered the switch, and we should expect some interesting wikileaks drops in the next week or so.
(Wikileaks takes care to verify it's information, which usually takes a couple of days. For example, it verifies the encryption signatures of E-mails. Also, it scans and removes information that might get someone killed(*)).
Ecuador is in a panic right now, expecting to be fatally hacked. This might be, and the character assassination might be, damage control right before getting pwned.
Take this with a grain of salt, but it's not unreasonable to wait a week and see if Julian cleaned up and with a shave talks reasonable at a press conference, or if Ecuador is exposed for doing some nasty shit.
(*) Note that the "people were killed" thing from the "collateral murder" drop was done by accident by a Guardian reporter, not Wiklileaks. Also, it was just John McCain spouting off crap about something he didn't like.
Oh, and where did these measles infections come from? Third-world immigrants imported by the leftists against the will of these very people who are being targeted now?
We hear all the time how Republicans are the epitome of evil, how the orange man is soooo bad and all.
We *almost* had eradicated measles.
Think about that for a minute: all this hoopla about vaccinations causing autism and such could have been so much less by eliminating the very *need* to get vaccinated in the US, and enforcing vaccination on immigrants and travelers going outside the country. We could concentrate on eradicating the disease worldwide, since measles is one of the few diseases that meet the criteria of worldwide eradication.
Instead we let anyone walk into the country with no oversight *simply because* it creates problems that can be blamed on the president.
Which party is the truly evil one?
Thank you for posting that. I was wondering where the mislead was, since all the recent expert analysis seemed reasonable and rational.
In case anyone hasn't been following the Tesla saga (most people, I imagine), public sentiment about the company is completely and totally driven by a sense of profit for the customers of the people writing the sentiment. If a fund's customers would profit by the stock tanking, then they try to bring that about by writing misleading predictions of doom and gloom.
The Tesla target price is all over the map - from from a low of 180 to a high of 500.
Tesla used to be the most shorted stock in history, and still has significant short interest. Roughly $11 b is betting that the stock will tank, and this results in enormous incentive to bring that about.
Last summer it was "Tesla will need another round of financing, we're certain", then Tesla paid its debt obligation in cash from profits.
Last month it was "Musk violated the SEC agreement", by tweeting information that was available in the published documents.
Today it's "interest has dried up". Wait a half a year and see if the trend is correct.
It's completely insane that the value of the company stock is based not on analysis and solid numbers, but on the perception of numbers. The stock doesn't go up or down based on whether they make a profit - it goes up or down based on whether it meets or exceeds *expectations* of profit.
Ugh!
It's literally impossible to get good stock information about Tesla at this point, and this will probably be true going forward for several years.
History lessons for those not around to remember:
After the mass pardons by G H Bush of all the Reagan Iran-Contra criminals in '92, Republicans have no grounds to criticize any pardons done by Democrats.
And it was Republican Gerald Ford who pardoned his Republican predecessor in '74 even before charges were brought, "a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9,1974."
The Republicans have been far more shameless in using the pardon to clear their cronies of crimes committed while in actual government positions.
By the way, the Attorney General at the time who advised Bush on the Iran-Contra pardons was our current AG, William Barr, handpicked by Trump to take over the Justice Department now...
Okay then, let's play that game.
Democrats have no grounds to complain when Republicans filibuster a supreme court pick in the final year of a Democrat president (Obama's nomination of Garland) because Democrats started that tradition.
Democrats have no grounds to complain when Republicans refuse to impeach a sitting president, because during Obama's campaign he convinced his party not to impeach George Bush for cause - including "taking the country to war under false pretenses" and various war crimes - because "it would divide the nation". (This despite Democrats holding firm majorities in both houses at the time.)
It's news because, with the proper filtering and monitoring in place, such groups could be detected very easily. Yes, I know, privacy and shit, but let's face it, once on Facebook, privacy is gone in an instant.
It's very hard to believe a large group of 385K members can fly under the radar for so long. This can't be explained as incompetence.
And the problem is in the determination of "legal".
The term "legal" (and "illegal") is defined by the state, and in many instances people disagree with the state's assertion (that something is illegal) and ask it for proof. We call such proof "trials", and in many cases the state cannot prove it's assertion, in that instance.
There are also rules and procedures to ensure that people don't get unfairly caught up in the process. For example, being unfairly accused and suffering harm can lead to a lawsuit to recover damages.
Having Facebook monitor illegal activity is bad is because we're asking non-government entities to enforce the law by common-face reading of what the law is, without fear of consequence for getting things wrong. It's also ripe for abuse, and a tool that can be used to unfairly force a viewpoint on the masses.
It's easy to point to specific cases and say "that's obviously illegal", but note that under those rules VCRs were illegal (until taken to court), DeCSS was illegal, and repairing your John Deere tractor is illegal. How much "hate speech" is actually illegal speech? How much of the conservative viewpoint actually advocates violence?
And in these cases, Facebook (or Twitter, or Google, or whoever) can make mistakes and when called on it, say "oh, it was just a mistake, we've corrected it", with no penalties for doing so.
The state declaration of "illegal" has a healthy fear of repercussions from mistakes, but the private entity has none.
One obvious recent example is Kurt Eichenwald, who posted a screenshot of a flyer that he claims was anti-semitic. One of the tabs open in the background was for tentacle porn.
Eichenwald was doing some pretty sketchy things and pissed off a fair number of people. This ensured that the tentacle-porn thing got strewn across the internet far and wide, to the gleeful delight of everyone who hated him.
And it continues. Even if Huawei earnestly means that they won't collaborate with Beijing, when your engineering security is so lax then it seems reasonable to expect that Beijing will find ways to make use of it (just like any other large government would).
It's just another example of corporate balances not finding a decent center for security versus productivity and profit. We all still have a long way to go.
With all this calling out of Huwei, it sounds suspiciously like the US security agencies found a specific back-door planted in the products, want to alert everyone to the issue, but also don't want to make the vulnerability public so they can use it for themselves.
Isn't it more the consequences of once free speech.
If you host a site that encourages people to kill other people, be ready to take to the consequences of this.
I viewed the video, and it's not that bad. It's a live-action game of "doom" using real people.
My point is that the media adjectives and adverbs do not correctly describe the visceral impact of the video. Yes, people are killed. No, it's not "horrifying", "gut wrenching", "sickening", or any of the choice descriptions we see from the MSM outlets. It's about as bad as any active-duty military person has seen in real life, and any military person should be able to watch the video with a critical eye and note details that might be relevant to an investigation or court trial. (A lot of police could, also.)
This came up when someone online made a statement of fact about the video that seemed a bit... unlikely, so I went to check for myself(*).
While searching for the video online I noted that CNN was, at that very moment, pushing the hoax that Trump said Nazis were "fine people", which can be quickly dis-verified because Trump's statements are available online.
CNN probably considers Trumps words as racist and, if he weren't the president, could get his comments removed from the internet on that basis. A lot of people could simply report those words as racist speech, and the internet giants would dutifully remove those posts.
And we would have no source of information except the MSM version of what he said.
The only reason this doesn't happen to Trump is because he's a high-profile celebrity, but anyone else can be subject to misinformation, spin, and outright hoax. Like the Covington students being racist, Brett Kavanaugh being a serial rapist, and Trayvon Martin - that adorable teen-aged child - gunned down by a racist white man.
The video should be available for anyone to view online, the manifesto as well, because if it isn't we will have to rely on the judgement of experts in the MSM for content and significance.
And the judgement of experts in the MSM is untrustworthy(**).
(*) Yes, apparently the killer was listening to polka music (or similar) on his way to the mosque.
(**) The MSM is trying to paint the shooter as a right-wing zealot based on the manifesto, but do the actual manifesto words support that conclusion? New Zealand wants to ban the manifesto from the internet.
More than one reality In Donald Trump's head.
The current realities are in flux - can you be more specific here?
Is he still "literally Hitler", or has that reality been discarded?
How about "is going to rot in federal jail, along with his family"? Will that reality happen any time soon?
I think the "anti-semite" reality was dealt a death blow by moving the embassy to Jerusalem, but if that didn't kill it the Golan Heights thing surely did.
Or is he still an anti-semite after all that?
The "racism" reality is still going strong, despite having done more for minorities than any other president in living memory (by reforming the sentencing guidelines). Also, illegal immigration disproportionately hurts minorities, and minority unemployment is the lowest it's ever been.
Is he still racist after all that?
Which realities are you referring to, that appear in Trump's head?
We're all dying to know what you think!
For a little more clarity on the subject, this is a physical realization of the "Wigners Friend" experiment. The "state" referred to in the summary is "superposition/collapsed waveform", and not the specific information about the photon such as its spin.
In the experiment, one scientist ("Wigner's friend") observes a photon in a superposition of states, which collapses the state, while a second scientist observes the first scientist. This uses entangled photons, so that observing the first photon collapses the state of the second.
The first scientist observes one photon, thereby collapsing its state to reveal information. Does the second scientist see his photon in a superposition or collapsed state? The first scientist might even tell the 2nd that he has observed the photon, collapsing its state - but not sating what state information was seen.
According to the experiment, the 2nd scientist still sees his photon in a superposition of states even though he knows that the first scientist has observed the photon and that the first scientist knows what the collapsed state is.
Thatâ(TM)s not what happens today. FUD is doing a good job of helping those destructive to society get in power and stay in power. In the meantime a well researched stance is screamed at for being elitist, left wing, supporting already defeated candidates and non-patriotic
Donâ(TM)t underestimate the power of the misinformed populist vote. It has hurt the US, the UK and other countries.
"Oh, if only our citizens had been correctly informed, they would never have voted for Brexit!"
That seems to be the defining rationale for all the dissent in the UK today, and it's complete and total bullocks. It's used as justification by people who didn't get their way to make the transition as painful as possible with the faint hope of reversing the decision.
Firstly, leaving the EU is objectively a better decision than staying, from an economic, cultural, and game-theory point of view. The economic arguments for staying are based on invalid assumptions(*), and in practice staying in the EU is causing more economic hardship than staying.
The arguments against leaving center mostly on the transition, and not the end result. It's always what will happen "in the next 6 months" or "in the following year" and whatnot. No one will admit that the UK could voluntarily implement all the agreements it currently has with the EU - such as unrestricted travel between nations - and there would be little hardship.
But mostly, the argument that "not enough correct information got out" and "people would have chosen differently with better information" is completely false.
Most people simply don't think what people tell them to think any more, and instead they rely on what they can see. So let's examine this: what do the UK people actually see when they look around their country nowadays?
The UK culture has undergone a massive shift these past 30 years, and the people are not happy with the results. Teens are stabbed every week in London, people are being arrested for online criticism, jobs are hard to come by, and different-culture people are everywhere.
That's what drove the vote to Brexit and if you held the referendum again you would find *more* people would vote for it, simply because the changes have become worse in the past 2 years.
I suppose the single most obvious culture shift indication was in the police: in previous decades, bobbies didn't have to carry guns. Nowadays UK police they are armed and armored like US swat teams.
Your opinion and votes matter more than ever. We should not need to resort to demeaning opponents (dead or alive) to try to make our arguments. Taking time to understand what scares a person will likely help make a better argument for trying to win them over.
You are giving the people too little credit. Making them "not scared" by talking or presenting information or reasoning simply won't work. You can only make people "not scared" by making them safer. No amount of argument will change that basic fact.
You give the people of the UK to little credit. They chose, and even if you don't agree with it you should abide by that choice.
(*) For example, the assumption that a bigger pool of workers and jobs makes for a better economy. When the countries are economically equal it works out - a dental hygenist in the UK can get a good job in Germany, and vice versa. When this assumption doesn't holds true the better country gets pulled down - a dental hygienist in Greece can get a good job in the UK, but the reverse isn't true. The result is massive unemployment in the UK while high-paying jobs are filled with non-UK citizens. A large number of assumptions - which turn out to be false - underlie the economic arguments for being in the EU.
There's lots of money. You can even use it as toilet paper.
Fiat money seems to be a problem for socialism and other regimes. With fiat money the government can print as much as it likes, running up inflation and driving the country into ruin. Some historians say this happened to the Romans once they started polluting their coins with base metals, and is probably what caused Germany to start WWII.
Since you brought it up, let's ask the obvious question: if a country's money is *not* fiat based, would this be enough to allow socialism to thrive?
Suppose you created VenCoin on the BitCoin model. BitCoin (and therefore VenCoin) has the ability to add new coins that the miners would find, so the country could implement a fixed rate of inflation(*). Suppose the inflation rate is fixed into the model and can't be changed. (I don't know how this might be implemented, but suppose it were. Perhaps a fixed inflation based on the current year and a fixed estimate for the average GDP growth.)
Would that be enough to allow socialism to thrive?
I ask this because, as a society, it appears there's a growing trend to transition to cashless payments using blockchain technology. Now is the time to point out fundamental problems. I'm aware of the privacy issues (cash is anonymous, BitCoin is not), but these might be overcome with careful implementation.
It seems that this would prevent the sorts of "runaway inflation" that is caused by a corrupt government printing too much money.
Would that be enough?
*sigh*
Since the editor and submitter didn't do it,
here is the BU research alert, which includes an image of the new material, and
here is a link to the published paper, from which you can get a DOI number if you want to read about their work.
The acoustic suppressor looks like thick a 3-d printed bushing.
You'll have to enlighten me. How has the EU been punishing the UK? From where I stand it looks more like a whiny cunt trying to leave the club whilst stilling having access to the equipment and the cheap members bar.
I was referring to the ongoing deals and proposals between the UK and the EU that started right after the UK submitted notification of withdrawal. It hasn't been prominent in the news, and the news has a decidedly "globalist" slant, so I'm not surprised you're not aware of it. You'd have to be interested in and follow the process to see what's really going on.
You can find some of the history here.
Things such as the EU demanding a "divorce fee", where the UK pays £92b for the privilege of leaving, or the UK guaranteeing that EU residents would not be forced to leave and then the EU *not* giving the same guarantee for UK citizens living abroad, or the EU proposing that the UK accept unlimited immigrants and still be subject to EU court decisions, and so on and so on.
There's been a continuous stream of "fuck you" proposals from the EU. It's not in any way been an amicable process with the intent to make things as painless as possible.
The end result will almost certainly be a "no deal" Brexit. Everyone agrees that's the worst possible situation, and yet at the same time all the leaders seem to be hell-bent on it.
The results of elections didn't go the way the permanent state/globalists/monied elite wanted, so there fore we have to STOP EVERYTHING. IT"S THE WORST DISASTER EVER.
Listen, these elections are what you get instead of violent revolution. Keep chipping away at the values of the enlightenment and you won't like the result.
And this is apparently a world-wide phenomenon.
The Brexit vote didn't go the way the globalists wanted, and as a result the UK has had two years of obstruction and doom-mongering just to prove that brexit is bad, while clinging to the slim hope that the decision could be reversed. (Oh, if *only* we could have a second referendum - the first one didn't really count, you know?)
The EU has been trying to screw over the UK at every turn, just to scare the other countries into staying. Leaving is an insult to European relations, so the UK has to be punished in every way possible.
The Venezuelan national assembly (their highest governing court, 'sorta analogous to our supreme court) declared Maduro to not be the president, he objected, and has been riding his country to ruin and weathering all sorts of sanctions from other nations.
After Trump was elected there were calls for the electors to be faithless, calls for the supreme court to step in and invalidate the election, calls for the military to step in and prevent Trump from taking office (!) (yes, that was actually a thing), there were riots in many cities, people were crying, looting, swearing "not my president", and all sorts of childish behaviour. Notably, Hillary did *not* step forward and tell her followers to calm down.
It's completely astonishing to me that, even at this late date, remainers in the UK aren't trying to make the transition as painless as possible, or that Maduro still has enough supporters to keep control, or US legislators are still investigating and trying to impeach Trump for nothing.
It's almost as if their core beliefs don't include the welfare of their governed citizens.
Because next Donald Trump will sign a bill repealing the Law Of Thermodynamics and this will totally work.
But before he can do that, Congress would have to write that legislation.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might be up for it.
I wonder if it needs energy to do this, an amount of energy greater then the energy produced by burning it in the first place?
If so, why not just use that energy instead? Cut out the middle man.
I read through the paper when the article appeared in the firehose.
Yes, this method uses electrochemical decomposition to change CO2 into various forms of carbon. It essentially undoes the action of burning, and for that you have to replace the energy you got out when the carbon was originally burned.
CO2 is very stable and difficult to decompose - typical methods are inefficient. There are metal catalysts such as Cerium that bring the efficiency up nearer to the Faraday limit, but they tend to get oxidized during the process.
The paper talks about dissolving Cerium metal nanoparticles in molten Gallium at largely room temperature and using that as one electrode in electrochemical deposition against CO2 dissolved in dimethylformamide. The by products are carbon "chunks" that float on the surface of the mixture, and the Cerium is not oxidized because the liquid Gallium is an oxygen-free environment.
So to remove CO2 from the atmosphere you would need an awful lot of energy - the equivalent of all the energy we got from burning the CO2 in the first place. Possibly frickin' huge tracts of solar panels in an area that gets a lot of sun and little human use (Sahara desert, Utah salt flats, or similar) could capture CO2 in an automated process.
(For scale: A square of solar panels 20 miles on a side, working automated for about 100 years would be in the ball-park for reducing CO2 levels to pre-industrialized levels. With a lot of unknowns in the estimate.)
An unrelated question: Can anyone point me to a reference that tells how soluble Nitrogen is in dimethylformamide? I wanted to compare this to the solubility of CO2, and couldn't find that info anywhere.
Please post if you either a) have that information, or b) have a link that has it.
Automatically believing something that the left-wing AND right-wing biased outlets report on is still unwise, as it just means that outlets that lack critical reporting and are willing to publish regardless of truth merely have to agree to prioritize profits.[...]
How about if, say, The Atlantic, BBC, Al Jazeera, and Christian Science Monitor all agree on something?
That's a very good point.
It would seem that Scott's idea is testable. Perhaps instead of using the top 4 networks, the idea should be studied over the course of a few months using all the major networks, and see if a combination - *any* combination - works as a fake news filter.
It shouldn't be too hard to find, in retrospect, blatant mistakes like the Covington students, and then see which outlets got it right.
I am all in favor of suppressing disinformation, but who should decide an information is truth or not?
We all remember Irak's Weapons of Mass Destruction
In modern times, we get the following:
a) Buzzfeed reports that Trump directed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress, which Mueller's office contradicts the next day.
a) Buzzfeed reports on the Covington students, they were lambasted in the media for about a week, then better video evidence was available
b) Jussie Smollett gets attacked in NY by two white, MAGA-hat wearing Trump supporters who put a noose around his neck and splash him with some liquid. And later charged with obstruction for making the whole bit up.
I find it particularly entertaining because Microsoft NewsGuard counts "Drudge Report" as fake news. "Drudge Report" is mostly a story aggregator (as Slashdot is for tech news) and doesn't have many news stories on its own, so it can hardly be considered "fake".
Scott Adams made an interesting suggestion for a fake news filter: if it's on all 4 major networks (Breitbart(*), Fox, CNN, MSNBC) then it's probably not fake. This is an interesting take, because the left-leaning outlets tend to wait for the full story when it's potentially bad for them, and the right-leaning outlets do the same when it's bad for their side. Waiting until both sides agree that the information is available and solid would prevent problems of "instant speculation gets the story wrong" like the Covington students or Jussie Smollett.
If you have an eye for humor, the current MSM is right risible. Some 80% of the population (84%, by a recent poll) now doesn't trust the mainstream media for just about anything spectacular.
By going after conservative outlets as "fake news", the public now labels the MSM as untrustworthy.
That's hilarious!
(*) Yes, Breitbart. Get over it. Breitbart has more readers than the next two networks (Fox and MSNBC) *combined*. CNN is in 4th place.
In the U.S. one of our two major political parties represents a minority of voters but thanks to our voting system has had a stranglehold on policy and that party is dedicated to doing everything possible to maximize donor profit.
California has 55 electoral votes, 7 of which are due to illegals(*). The US census counts people, not citizens, in an area to determine how many electoral votes a state gets.
California gets a significant extra amount of influence in elections due to the electoral college - are you willing to give that up?
Also, the EC is what keeps California and NY from ganging up on all the other states. In effect, it prevents the US from having a civil war, and breaking up into smaller national entities.
Are you willing to give *that* up? Just because your candidate lost the popular vote?
And finally, House representatives are also allocated by the census count. California gets 7 more reps due to its illegal population.
All of which means California gets to dominate affairs in the US house of representatives and presidential elections out of proportion to their electorate.
Their mindless followers vote them in being mesmerized by keywords like "job creation" and chimeras like "the liberals are coming to get your guns." They will churn up FUD with their industry-funded studies.
a) A lot of jobs *were* created. Chrysler just opened an idled plant, creating 6500 more. Look around - the economy is doing great!
b) The house just passed a law making private sale of guns illegal. Also, NY just passed a gun confiscation law, which is ripe for abuse.
(*) About 2.3 million illegals, at 700,000 per house rep/electoral vote. The electoral formula is non-linear, and estimates of illegals are sketchy, but it's about right.
(Incidentally, this is why the Dems are so much against the wall. They don't care about any of the issues - cost, crime, jobs, and so on - that's not their problem to fix. That's why Pelosi kept the government shutdown past $6 billion to avoid spending $5 billion on a wall "that would do nothing". It would have been more cost effective to build the wall even if it did do "nothing".)
If anyone's interested, Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) is running a Climate change debate on his blog, where he invites believers and skeptics to post their best arguments with evidence, and he (as an intelligent person with no background) sorts through the bullshit for us.
One outcome of that debate is that claims of sea levels rising are bullshit. That's a concrete point, one where "the debate is settled" can now be applied. Sea levels have not risen to any appreciable degree, and that point cannot be made to show that climate change is real.
(They may rise in the future, but that is not the same as using *current* sea level changes as an argument for climate change.)
I look forward to Scott examining - one by one - all scientific claims of the climate change debate. Perhaps eventually we will arrive at a position everyone can agree on.
No, moviegoers don't hate women. Comic books especially have always led entertainment when it comes to diversity, and comic book fans have never had a problem with that.
To amplify the point, no one had a problem with Ripley gunning down Aliens - it was an awesome movie and perhaps one of the best SF movies of all time.
No one has a problem with Black Widow tricking Loki into revealing his plans, or largely holding her own against the Winter Soldier. I saw both of those and was impressed at how female characters in Marvel movies are *not* useless. Including Maria Hill gunning down the attacker on the helicarrier bridge. (Also of note: no one cares that Nick Fury is played by a black man, it's extremely well done.)
There's an interesting article(*) on Breitbart that sums up the current situation: a) Hollywood engages in hatred towards half the country, and b) this wouldn't be a problem if the movies were any good. As it turns out they're not any good, and this is just us hating you back.
From the article:
Yes, we’ve been insulted, and we’re sick of it. But I can overlook a lot of insults if you give me something worthy of praise. Maria Callas insulted a lot of people, but we still wanted to hear her sing. Can we say the same about the films nominated for Best Picture?
A specific instance cited in the article is Spike Lee's "BlackkKlansman" (nominated best picture this round) compared to "Giant" (1957). Spike Lee's movie casts whites as evil while doling out liberal doses of shame and humiliation, while at the end of "Giant" the audience is visibly rooting for Rock Hudson fighting with a racist diner owner.
Same message, good (versus bad) delivery.
Maybe this is why movie attendance is low, and oscars attendance is really low: the movies are crap, we're sick of the insults, and we don't like being brow-beaten with your social justice message.
(*) Yes, it's from Breitbart, get over it. It's an insightful article that largely describes the problem, and attacking the source is not the same as discussing the content.
That is basically the ancient Chinese model. Everyone living in the same lock with the doctor payed a monthly fee.
Got he sick, he stopped paying and visited the doctor. As soon as he was cured, he payed again.
I'm not sure this would work under game theory, because people would have an incentive to get out of paying by claiming to be sick when they're not, or get out of paying by going to the doctor for trivial reasons.
For the system to work, there can't be any monetary incentive to "game" the system. The system has to be viewed from all angles, and cheating and other abuses have to be eliminated from the point of view of incentive.
No, it's actually about high time somebody asked this question.
I've recently been thinking about this a little in terms of game theory: Insurance companies see medical care as an expense and premiums as income. Patients see medical care as a benefit and insurance premiums as an expense. This has led to a system with a whole lot of problems, but the fundamental flaw is that the two sides have fundamentally conflicting goals.
How can we rework this into a better system?
The first thing we need to do is define the goal of the system, and "longer average lifespan" seems like the right goal. We can also add a quality of life rider by saying that anyone can check out if their life becomes unbearable, with lots of safeguards against coercion and suicidal depression and such. (I imagine a process similar to sex-change operations - the patient has to really want it over an extended time, and have psychiatrist buy-in.)
With "longer average lifespan" as the goal, now how do we pay the doctors?
One answer might be to assign to the *doctor* (primary care physician) a monthly fee per patient, regardless of that patient needing medical service. If patients could switch to a new doctor at any time and for any reason, doctors would then have incentive to a) provide the best medical care, b) compete with each other for quality of service, and c) keep their patients healthy, happy, and long-lived.
This seems to work at the "primary care physician" level, but it isn't a good fit for specialist and above, hospital care and ER. The PCP should feel free to refer a patient to a specialist without incurring a drop in salary, and an ER doc should have incentive to save a patient's life without regard to payment.
Also, medical research should be included, so that there's incentive to cure diseases instead of masking symptoms.
Anyone good at game theory like to add to this model?