orwin

Yes. Institut Pasteur discovered a lot of the molecules currently used in general medecine, created more new vaccines than any other institute and currently is at the very edge of gene therapy.

Not that is has anything to do with efficiency. If you give 100 to my public healthcare, 94 of that will be used to reimburse health expenses, if you give 100 to US private healthcare, only 86 will be used to reimburse health expenses. That has nothing to do with initial costs.

Insurance is the perfect industry because in no other industry you can calculate efficiency this easily: if I give you 100, how much is used to reimburse other insuree. It turns out for public insurance, often more than 90, even in more corrupt countries, and for private insurance, often anywhere between 70 and 90.

Originally, money is a IOU and basically a tool to trade between communities. The individualization of capital (capitalism basically) made place for private loan and artificial middlemen like i wrote in the previous comment. And yes, you can work without it, but this is the way things works in the west since the 18th century, 17th century in GB.

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To be clear about how banks work: they don't loan money, they create it via accounting. You go to a bank and ask for 20 money at 10% interest, they will write in their asset column "20 money" and in their liability "20 money", give you the newly created 20 money and create a "coupon" of 2 money (sorry that's the french word, i don't know how englo people call that). If needed (like a liquidity crunch), they can sell the coupon worth 2 money at 1 money, or even your loan worth 20 money 18 to another bank, but they will keep the liability in their own books. If the liability become higher than the assets, bankruptcy. Notice that the money you put in the bank isn't touched.

The money you put in bank, they invest in low risk assets like government bonds, through their investment funds. Since those are locked assets, if too many people want their money back at the same time, the bank enter a liquidity crunch, have to sell the locked assets at a discount, and put the losses on their own funds, in the "liability" column.

Wether it's caused by a credit crunch or because loans aren't being repaid, if a bank "liability" column has a higher value than its "assets" column, they enter bankruptcy. The state auctions customer-linked investment off (i think that's more complex and depends on the local laws, in my country you have a transfer provision where the customer and the bonds linked to some of his bank accounts are transfered to a new bank) where those are slowly sold at a higher value than the failing bank would have gotten, slowly reimbursing the customers. It is _very_ rare that bank customers loose any money in the long run (they do suffer opportunity cost though, their assets are locked and don't earn any interests, so in a way, they loose a little). in the 2007-2008 crisis, the issue is that banks split loans weirdly and did a lot of accounting shenaningans tying each international bank to each others.

too many people view male teachers as inherently predatory.

I absolutely hate this. It's the same in every field in contact with kids. When I was a youth camp counsellor, a director told me after stuff happened with other counsellors "at least now, I'm sure you are not a predator" (translation here). I know it was a joke, but the place and the way makes are sometimes seen in the field genuinely hit me hard. I remember the sentence and the director face as she said it better than the other counsellors and the overall situation.

People you tend to for months or years dying on you gets old really fast though. In my family, the 5 doctors are still working (or kept working until retirement), of the 8 PT, only one isn't working as a PT, but of the 4 nurses only one is still working (she's getting a psych speciality), the other all went another way. Granted, we're not in the US where the nurses are paid more, but the reason to stop wasn't the pay but the moral toll.

I borrow you 10 money i use to buy my chair-making tools. I make the chair, sell it 20 money, then pay you 12 money back for the service rendered. Basically money is supposed to be a tool that help us creating capital by exchanging goods.

Yeah, happened a few months ago to my friend (who is leaving in August)(that's why I sort of knew the prices and living conditions). She waited a bit more of a month. It isn't often an issue from my understanding, but it is extremely frustrating for the person and the people around her. If you react poorly to anxiousness medication or antidepressants, you will be kept in a hospital before being admitted, and I believe in a higher category. Still a very frustrating situation.

That why i usually keep to the insurance example, i agree that comparing municipality power to private companies owning a monopoly is unfair.

Administrative costs for insurance are very easy to verify, and the facts stay consistent across countries. If i cherry picked something, it is the admin overhead for US insurers. US health care insurers are particulary effective with their average of 14% admin overhead, SwissLife, that used to be my private insurer, had a year with 30%, which make the comparison quite unfair).

For psychological care it isn't that bad. Probably because people will first get on anxiousness/depression pills, and convince themselve they are ok.

I also understand the hesitancy to pay for two months at a “retreat-like inpatient psychiatric facility.”

In publicly funded system, it’s likely facilities like this would not exist or would be strictly private pay.

In France, 80% is paid by the public healthcare if a psychiatrist greenlit you, which still make you liable for ~30€ per day in a room you share with another patient (and if you want a private room it's ~90€/day out of pocket) (maybe the prices around Paris are a bit higher though, i'm a country boy)

[edit] more accurate numbers, i had to check and correct them. Also, 30€ per day also covers medication if needed and a spa session

I'm pretty sure it isn't assumed. My main example has been the same since COVID, as insurance is probably the business you can compare 1-1 the most.

Public health insurance in my country, in the last 20 years used 6-9% (depending on the year) of the taxes send to them as administrative overhead, meaning that for each 100 euro that you paid for health insurance, 91-95 are used to pay doctors, hospitals and medication. The average administrative overhead for private insurance is around 14%, which makes private health insurance 50 to 100% less efficient, and means that for each dollar you pay them, only 86 are used to pay health services.

I have other examples, but it isn't fair: municipal water VS private water service are almost always less expensive and better tested in my country. Municipality trash collection Vs private trash collection, same. Public junkyard Vs private junkyard, same. But in my area, when privatised those services tends to be ran by the local mafia (Marseille, Nice), which add a lot of overhead, and they were privatised because the local government was corrupt in the first place, which means they were probably inefficient (compared to the services still publicly owned) first, then sold.

I need to find it but i have read a few years ago a sociological paper about how criminal organization consolidating and increasing in strength will lead to harder drugs being pushed, more human trafficking and an increase in unauthorized immigrant crime participation. It was about French crime families and how their presence increased in the northern part of the country (mainly Paris) in the late 2000, early 2010s. Basically the best way to reduce violence is to go for the organization and their leaders, and the people profitering.

My favorite "smart" watch at the moment is the casio G-shock (because i do not need any health monitor device). Battery life: at least 2 years, count your footstep (butyou don't have to care), have sunrise and sunset, tides, notifications when activated (the app is a bit shitty and it like some configuration though), can stay in the water for a long time (down to 50m deep).

To me, smartwatches have two useful feature: notifications and health monitoring. I don't need the second feature, so any "smart"watch with the first one is enough.

Casio needs to improve their app though. it shouldn't be that mid in 2026.

From an external point of view, one side is at least trying. Ranked choice voting, "no corporate money in politics" and other initiative like this, to add more democracy, suddenly come out on my news feed and each time i say to myself "it won't work right now, but at least it seems those are steps in the correct direction". Supporting the people who run on those platform is infinitely better than a destructive nihilism.

It was always explained that way to me though. the "Our house is burning, and we are looking away" speech was like 20 years ago and it was pretty clear then than average increase in temps mostly mean higher maximums and minimums.

Nowadays, people who never did anything to consume less (and made fun of people who stopped taking the plane) can't hide behind the "we didn't know" because everybody knew, so they hide behind the "it was not predicted to be as bad" and other "the scientists explained that poorly", but we know what's up, even when they lie to themselves.

India is a lot like Russia in that its people and standards of living are very different from place to place. China, despite a larger size and similar population is more culturally uniform than India, especially once you go in more remote areas.

(this is not a diss on India, i think that make the country much more interesting)

To get standard blood exams (cortisol, insulin, triglycerids, HDL/LDL) reimbursed in France/Spain/Germany/Romania you only need a doctor note (and not even that if you test for STD).

Of course if you need specialized blood tests that need spectrometry or dna analysis or any expensive analysis you need a specialist appointment and that takes longer, but bureaucracy is the only way to make sure no one abuse the system. In worst case scenario, if the doctor thinks you should have priority, you will get it. And sometimes they are wrong. But it's a choice made to reduce overall cost, to avoid abuse.

RT2012 is the reason my uncle installed a reversible heatpump to replace the cheap electric radiator in the house he renovated, so i'm not sure it's really forbidden. But yes, RT2012 make building new houses more expensive, and you don't want to add a AC unit to that. Especially since most areas expressly forbid visible heatpump from the streets, so you have the added cost of having to hide them (In France, we basically have a big HoA in each city, it's called PLU and the mayor get to choose the color scheme and maximum height of your house, the maximum height of your trees and if you get to have AC or not).

My union is pushing for this, >28 WBGT and people can get out of work.

I dislike sentences like 'you still have to wait months for an exam or years for surgery'. Depends on the exam or surgery.

- Blood test: wait time (after your 12 hour fast) is likely 15-30minutes in most of Europe (even eastern Europe. I should know, I do one every 3 month).

- pet-scan/x-ray: at most a few hours if your area is truly underserved, in my experience, less than an hour (but I needed it 4 times, so it might be small sample size).

Specialists will make you wait for sure if it doesn't sound life-threatening for deeper exams, and especially exams that requires surgery, but the only example I have on hand is my mother's boyfriend who got his in less than two weeks, and his cancer removal surgery was planned within 3 months after the tumor biopsy (you need to change your diet at least a month before surgery to prevent complications and improve healing, so the true delay caused by wait time is ~2 month). They also explicitly said that if his cancer was more aggressive they would have given him a month to prepare according to my mom.

But yes, in Europe especially, convenience surgery can take a year (my intern lips and teeth took 17 months) (and you pay a bit out of pocket), when in the US you can be done within days.

The main issue described in all that writing is that studios are risk-averse and won't take any narrative risks. I heavily dislike recent marvel movies, but avengers endgame first movie made a bold choice, and that was the first blockbuster I enjoyed the story of in a long time (I dislike the dedramatization though, so I still think it's a below average movie).

Also, I think narrative is not the main issue with recent blockbusters. Their issues is dedramatization and impersonal stakes, which makes them weaker than movies from 20-30 years ago. I think A24 studio and the Daniels showed you can be goofy and fun while still making the audience care and even cry a bit, so this is probably a skill issue.

I'm in internal tooling for blue and network teams, 70% of my code is generated and I have the same experience as your. The two 'new' hires (1 year into the job, so not so new) however are probably in the same boat as GP, but they just don't see the work we have to put to rewrite their AI-generated issues into something legible and useful, or read their AI-generated PRs filled with duplicated/dead code.

Honestly, the biggest improvement AI have brought me is the complete end of my imposter syndrome. People say comparison is the thief of joy,but in my case, previously invisible devs getting more visibility, suddenly pushing new code every week at the same pace as me but clearly without any understanding any of the underlying issues did wonder to my self esteem. I still consider myself among the worst of my group, but my group evolved from 'all devs I know' to 'the competents', which is very nice.

Pardons are useful in a single specific way. As the laws cannot be changed retroactively (this would be against the principles of democracy), you need something to handle the case where a law was too strict or too dumb and is rescinded. In my country, pardons are mostly issued by judges, and presidential pardons are also reviewed by judges (and always transformed into 'commutation of sentence' instead of full pardon, so that the person is still guilty)

To be fair (and for people who didn't click the link), i think most of the vuln were in libcurl, not in curl itself.

Means of production are created from human labor and natural resources. Money and debt are a good way to allocate those resources in a more or less "fair" way across time, and markets are a good way to allocate both resources, money and debt across places (that what they were created for at first).

But they are not the only way, you can go back to a more autarkical model for the rural population, or to a more directed economy like during WW2, or a mix of both. Also, if i want to be exact, i don't think China is totally capitalist yet anyway, you still have rural villages that does not allocate all resources through the market.

But subsidizing with what? They don't have a magic money tree.

They do though. The advantage of state capitalism is that at anytime you can switch from a fully capitalist economy, where the market is everywhere save the family cell, to a statist economy where the state decides what goes where, to anything in between. If the CCP says 'retirement won't be paid in RMB but in foodstuffs for everyone, and the funds are reappropriated', they kill their debt.

Schools, hospitals, desalination plants, museums and churches, those well know dual use infrastructure. So sad they were unlucky civilians there.

Japanese data shows the opposite, unless you think they weren't a closed country in the 80s. In fact, Japan has been my counterpoint to anybody claiming the housing crisis was caused by immigration.

The US kept hitting civilian targets and blasting about it, so they already did that.

When Arab hit civilian targets, it's terrorism, when the US does, it's freedom. I personally fail to understand the difference, but I'm an europoor

I don't think that's true. The Khomeini clan do rely on IRGC to remain in power somewhat, but it also has strong influence towards the civilian government, and the OPA it ran on the Mullah at the start of the war, getting a non-mullah elected supreme leader at a very cheap price prove they rely on more than their central militia. A lot of the clans who supported the Shah during the original coup also seems to support the regime, which makes the north stable. The western part of the country, despite insurgents/independence groups, seems to have reported their hatred of S.Hussein towards the US (to be fair, the chemical weapons Hussein used to bomb their village were from the US), which means they might choose to fight the US rather than the regime.

Imho the regime was made stronger because of this war. It was really a bad moment to strike. Khomeini had a cancer, and waiting for his death and the succession crisis that would have ensued would have been a better choice. Now the regime is stronger than ever.

Although my real thoughts is that this strength the Khomeini project is temporary, in the sense that the only reason the regime lasted this long before was because the power was shared. If they keep pushing for more control, without sharing, they will end up loosing everything.