cadlin

Both of those numbers are wrong. It's more like 6% deficit and 8% GDP growth.

If you project the first three quarters of GDP growth, the US should end the year with $27.6 Trillion of GDP. The annualized rate is 8.5% without adjusting for inflation. Inflation adjusted, the annual rate of growth is 3.75% in the first three quarters.

In that case, the $1.7 Trillion deficit is 6.1% of GDP, so actually a half-percent lower than your calculations.

There's a saying in my country. "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread."

If anyone is interested in the thread in question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22640905

I bookmarked it at the time, as I was worried about the hospital system collapsing where I lived like it had in northern Italy.

As a renter and voter, my preferred policy solution is to suspend rental evictions, let the foreclosures go forward as mortgages are a risky asset, then let the market sort it out at auction. That sounds like a more market-oriented solution to me.

The most expensive plan for my family (2 parents and a young child) is $367 a month. Equivalent coverage in the US would be thousands of dollars.

Every single one of the past five presidents?

I don't know the answer to the best time to give antivirals, but the lung inflammation happens for some, but not all patients. A non-trivial amount have relatively normal lungs, low oxygen saturation, and an extremely high heartrate.

The reasons for this are unknown, but it is an active area of research. Some doctors are beginning to call for treating covid patients like they altitude sickness.[1]

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7096066/

Doctors that don't know how to properly operate a vent are currently a problem in the US. Not blaming them, as there doesn't seem to be any real alternative.

Here's an /r/medicine discussion of it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/fr0x3m/how_do_you...

Good systems would obviously be desirable, but this is basic executive competence. A US response to a potential pandemic brewing in China should have been a top White House priority since early January. When there are coordination problems, it's the responsibility of the person at the top to sort it out. They didn't even try and fail to fix the problem, they identified an entirely different concern: the threat to the stock market, which is where the response concentrated.

To a very good approximation, the marginal impact of any hoarders on the scarcity of a product is zero.

This is pure ideology. Do you have any evidence that a single person buying 10,000 masks from every hardware store in an entire state has no marginal impact on the scarcity of a product? Basic math would suggest this is not the case.

That Medium post isn't arguing in good faith either. He criticizes a bunch of graphs on Vox or Mother Jones, but doesn't bother engaging with any actual academic research. The news websites may be imprecise, but their underlying point isn't wrong.[1]

Similarly, if I were to argue that anti-gun control people deliberately argue in good faith, I wouldn't use a random Hacker News commenter as evidence, but would instead point to the fact that John Lott fabricated survey evidence[2].

[1]https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-an... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20130304061928/http:/www.cse.uns...

On the other hand, if you buy a business entirely dependent on human capital, then proceed to instigate a mass resignation, there is no amount of spin that adds up to anything other than boneheaded decision making.

Are you certain of this? It's a common misunderstanding about campus consent policies and it might be true somewhere, but it is far from standard. It might be a part of lower quality consent literature, but that's different from the actual standards determined by school policy.

E.g., The University of California's policy around alcohol and consent is:

The Respondent knew or a reasonable person should have known that the Complainant was unable to consent because the Complainant was incapacitated,in that the Complainant was... unable to understand the fact, nature, or extent of the sexual activity due to the influence of drugs, alcohol, or medication

You think it's literally illegal to fire someone for spitting on their boss?

France pays less for healthcare than the US and gets more. A lot more.

To pick a statistic, their maternal mortality rate is 1/3 of the US.

Because the US is a wealthier country overall it can waste more money and receive worse results. That isn't an argument in favor the US healthcare system.

Also, do you realize that the graph you are citing isn't tracking the cost of US healthcare to a US citizen, it is literally saying Americans spend 5% of their personal income on health insurance. It is not counting the taxes they already pay, the cost to their employers, etc.

Only 60% of murders in the US are solved. The police are not as diligent as you'd think.

https://www.vox.com/2018/9/24/17896034/murder-crime-clearanc...

Perhaps they're decent parents, and you're a lousy judge of parenting?

The document is left to right. Tapping down goes to a cover(?) page.

C section rates above ~20% aren't correlated with better health outcomes. They will probably decline as federal heartbeat detection improves, as a major driver for them right now is losing track of the heartbeat and performing a c section as risk mitigation

Life expectancy is largely driven by infant mortality. Each marginal child that lives to 60 is equal to 12 adults living 5 years longer.

Yes, there's a museum across the plaza from Notre Dame that showcases the subterranean Roman ruins.

http://www.crypte.paris.fr/en/crypt

That article says, "Failure to surrender, ie. not turning up on the date given on your bail sheet (whether to a court or to return to a police station) is a crime."

What's not a crime is breaching the conditions of your bail, e.g. you can't go to political protests if you're released on bail.

U.S. Healthcare is more expensive because every single step along the way costs more.

This blog series[1] by healthcare professionals goes through it all. The primary culprits are: more expensive inpatient care, more expensive outpatient care, more expensive drugs, higher administrative costs, higher insurance costs, higher health investment costs, higher disease prevalence costs, and higher defensive medicine costs.

https://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/what-makes-the-...

The article doesn't argue this is the reason for inequality. It's just a piece of trivia.

Americans are used to thinking that their nation is special. In many ways, it is: the U.S. has by far the most Nobel Prize winners, the largest defense expenditures (almost equal to the next 10 or so countries put together) and the most billionaires (twice as many as China, the closest competitor).

Greg Cochran isn't an expert geneticist. He's a consultant with a PhD in physics who was an anthropology adjunct for ten years.

He doesn't have any training as a geneticist or in biological research.

It's all in his LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregory-cochran-48b51b79/

Black people have worse health outcomes controlling for obesity and poverty.

Blaming genetics for such a wide range of negative outcomes is silly if you're looking for a simple explanation. Consider this[1] paper on cervical cancer. There are nine different genes linked to it. Now do that for every relatively worse health outcome. That's the opposite of simple.

Lifestyle is even more nebulous. It encompasses so much that suggesting it's a kind of verbal jujitsu to suggest it's an adequate use of Occam's Razor. There are hundreds of lifestyle factors and you can weight them however you want to get the result you want.

All of those are about as broad and as simple as racism, which you appear to categorically disregard as a plausible explanation.

[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19347305

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The Turkish writer Elif Batuman has a trio of essays about Turkey in The New Yorker that are excellent. I like all of her writing, but they are especially good.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/12/19/the-sanctuary https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/03/07/the-view-from-... https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/31/the-big-dig

I would just point out that "Gödel, Escher, Bach" is one of the books he read this year. As is Anna Karenina, which took me several months of devoted attention to read.