jzackpete

their whole point is that the law can be abused

I'm talking about the regulatory capture of everything related to health care: medications, credentialing, insurance, etc. Any regulation imposed on the production of a good or provision of a service is a constraint on the supply. Reducing supply increases costs. I fail to see how the imposition of one insurance company (a monopoly) would improve that.

When Medicare was created, medical care accounted for less than 7% of GDP. It's around 20% now[1]. If you extrapolate life expectancy from before Medicare to now, has that massive increase in spending changed the trajectory at all?

You see the same phenomenon in higher education: we subsidize demand through government-backed loans, and costs and administrative overhead skyrockets.

[1] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe...

It's silly that believing more government intervention will solve the problem, given that a big reason healthcare became tied to employment in the first place was wage freezes by the government, from which employer sponsored health insurance was exempt.

We're not going to solve it by constraining the supply of healthcare by regulating every aspect of it, and then subsidizing the demand.

neither, for the same reasons

Yeah it's probably a combination, which might explain why my experience isn't the norm. Ever since I had it done, any poke, foreign objects like sand, etc. is much more painful than before, so the pain from dryness gets amplified. I've used eye drops and gels, but the most effective thing is just avoiding things that mess with electrolyte levels, like alcohol, medications, and certain foods.

you mean artificially colored canola soy extrusions, with an unspecified (i.e. very small) quantity of chemically replicated salmon cells? how about counterfeit biohazard salmon?

I had PRK 15 years ago. I also woke up multiple times last night because my eyes felt like they had a bad sunburn (eyes so dry they stick to your eyelids + REM sleep.)

Some unsolicited advice: wait for widespread adoption, and review data on long term side effects from sources without a conflict of interest before you have a procedure like this. I went from 20/150 to 20/15 for a few years (which was pretty cool) but they're 20/40 now so I wear glasses/contacts when I leave the house anyway. Glasses and/or contacts aren't that bad.

having been a customer for more than a decade, I've noticed an inverse correlation between their org size and the quality of their products

by that logic every business in the country should be nationalized, given the existence of the civil rights act

perfect is the enemy of good, with WhatsApp being neither (at least wrt privacy)

yes, as a citizen of the USA, deporting the non-citizens feels exactly like slavery

how many people do you know who actually believe in the 2nd amendment and don't support trump? do you even live in the US?

that would imply the existence of an objective authority on the meaning of the statement, which is debatable

piracy probably wasn't the reason they won back then, but I think the point was that the change in IP enforcement since then might be the reason they can maintain their lead now

more like kicking out the staff after they convinced everyone that your house is a hotel that they own and operate

unless the US selects people at random to immigrate that chart is irrelevant

because he's the only one that people whine about like a jilted ex girlfriend

are you referring to the act of playing video games or the act of not playing video games

Nope. When I worked in a factory as a teenager, ICE came in and presumably deported all of the illegals, because they didn't show up the next day. A big reason Trump got elected is because they stopped doing that, and "mass deportation now" is effectively enforcement of the same policy as it was back then.

You mean a country that is more white?

Can you name a policy of today's republican party that is further right than the republican party of 20 years ago? From my perspective they've ceded ground on many social issues. They had a porn star speak at the RNC convention this year. Dick Cheney, one of the people responsible for the "War on Terror", endorsed Kamala Harris. The idea that federal politics in the US has shifted right, not left, is baffling to me.

electoral votes and number of representatives are allocated based on census numbers, which have nothing to do with citizenship status /!s

I'm an atheist, so I wouldn't consider myself an expert on their beliefs, but you don't appear to be either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou_shalt_not_kill

If that were a real concern and not a cope for having to submit to pointless security theater, airlines could just charge by weight. The weight of my contact lens solution is negligible

No one born there (and where I'm from as well) is willing to do the hard jobs at the current market rate. Every conversation about a "labor shortage" seems to disingenuously pretend that wages are a fixed part of the equation.

Wages never rise because everyone falls for the propaganda that immigration is a "net positive" (and it is only a net positive for the capital-owning class who sell out their countrymen in favor of lower employment costs.) Do non-western immigrants in Germany contribute more in taxes than they receive in benefits (on average?)

Because immigration (i.e. increasing the labor pool, increasing competition in the labor market, increasing demand for housing) actively harms the average member of the electorate? I fail to see how working _more_ hours is a consequence of fewer workers chasing the same number of jobs (unless you believe the average non-western immigrant comes here, starts a business, and employs at least one native born person.)

I've left 2 companies that have reorganized around SAFe, and I'm currently at the third one now. It's a malignant egregore that I can't escape

skill issue

I'll dismiss it until the risk is quantified, because all I've heard is "might" and "maybe" when it comes to long term effects. Then compare that quantified risk to the precautions required to avoid being infected (i.e. a lot more than what was done, because everyone still got it) and there's your actual rational response.

Pascal's wager. Masking and isolating children has a known cost, your speculative consequences don't