U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, a sudden reversal

Moot point as the people who actually act on the data understand how to roll their own anyway.

GDP too. That's how you can get more accurate information, and you have actual numbers on the discrepencies.

They rely on the household data more because it doesn't have as much systemic error, even though it does have more sampling error. Asking businesses gives you a more complete picture, but it has much more bias.

Hell, this is why even in accounting, you have double-entry bookkeeping, and even there, the numbers don't always match up.

Or "my bank account doesn't match up with my cashflow statement".

It's not that one is better and you should use that, calculating multiple ways is central to accounting so you can detect errors.

You have to really dig into their website to find their std errors.

healthcare is not for health. Its for sickness. Going to hospital doesnt make you "healthy" . We dont have any medicines to restore health to ppl suffering for diseases majority of healthcare spend goes to.

Maybe those countries dont have sickly population in the first palce like usa where a majority have metabolic diseases.

i softly agree but also think that a body does not need to generate value to pay for the costs in order for the whole process to sustain itself. Monitoring the stars for asteroids heading towards earth provides no market value, for example, but we can still afford to do it. so it's a matter of cost and available expenditure. the market is not net 0, so its possible to generate enough value to have enough to afford healthcare as an expense as a society

what are the costs of fixing a body? The residency pipeline is a bottleneck on labor, but assuming that gets sorted out and AI is capable of guiding any reasonable person through the process, why cant the cost of labor for a doctor drop dramatically?

i would guess limited resources are the biggest blockage, but i dont know how to break down a $20k hospital bill for giving birth into its actual costs. its hard to believe that really needs to be $20k.

I actually think its the opposite. there is so much friction with healthcare and the process of healing is slow enough that costs are inflated because the overall operating cost for the entire facility including rent, ER, having people on standby, who knows what else, all need to be recovered through whatever volume they process and they arent processing as quickly as the resources are able.

healthcare needs do not subscribe to a neat work schedule, and so we have to pay a lot of market prices to have the right availability at all times. but thats not a true cost, it is a result of accounting and underutilization

Or if that random doctor who just walked in is out of network and going to charge $30,000 for my stitches when $3,000 was already egregious.

This isn't possible. Healthcare is a finite resource and having universal, government care not only puts your life into the hands of the government (see the UK for an example where parents are not allowed to take their children out of the hospital) but offers worse outcomes.

When you are young and healthy, it's great. As you age, life-or-death surgeries have long wait times. This can be seen in any country with universal care. My aging relatives in Canada are going through this right now and have been forced to come to the US to get surgery in months rather than waiting years.

MAID has been great for healthcare costs in Canada. Many people that would otherwise have been costing the system money, are now a benefit. The sad realization is that government-run programs need MAID to cut down on costs.

I know lots of expats living in Asia that are now getting older. They have to go elsewhere to get any surgeries done, because of this exact reason.

To make it better, we should only have insurance for surgeries that can't benefit from the free market and are relatively rare. Common surgeries and procedures should have no insurance. The prices would eventually fall to levels that were affordable.

The masses don't want plans like this. They like easy solutions that sound good when you say them and don't take a whole lot of thought besides an elementary school level of thinking.

i.e. young americans are spending more on health care than young americans used to, even if it's also true that there are fewer young americans now, and more old americans.

Americans are spending a lot more on quality-of-life medical interventions, many of which are outside the normal standard of care that would be covered by healthcare systems. It is a booming business in the US and many people seem to have no trouble paying for it.

My main caveat / counter point is that preventative care may actually increase as more and more people jump on the live for ever, dont die, longevity hacking trend.

And I agree that the standards have been rising such as better R-values, car charging, AC, cat5 etc.

I haven’t even met a conservative who has ever had any sort of problem with Canada

Well we all have our opinions on how our money is spent. I for one think we need a lot more missiles and a lot more folks working instead of living off of taxpayer dollars (labor participation rate is the lowest ever), broadly speaking. But we don't really have to have an either-or scenario here and it's unfortunate that politics has gotten this bad in America.

> Perhaps there was more overlap 10 years ago, but... that "both sides are just as bad" doesn't seem to ring true.

Well, I'm not suggesting both sides are bad (though they are in their own ways - we should eject all communists and fascists from this country and planet).

I'm suggesting that Democrats agree with Donald Trump's economic policy even if some are politicking otherwise. If you look back to Trump's first term he began instituting tariff-like policies and other economic agenda items around restoring manufacturing capacity. Biden continued those policies, and then Trump has taken them a step further. Democrats today are campaigning on high inflation, but recall that inflation was also very high in 2022 and so forth, gas prices were even higher than during our support for Ukraine (I strongly support Ukraine), and so forth.

But if/when Democrats are elected it is unlikely they will roll back the Trump tariff scheme though perhaps negotiate more favorable deals with less bickering with our European friends and partners, and will maintain tariffs and other economic measures against countries such as China and perhaps others like Mexico and Canada.

They may not have gone with that specific approach, but the direction was the same. Instead of tariffs the Biden Administration's BBB bill gave money to corporations instead. Two directionally aligned approaches there.

The rest of the comments (immigration policy or Iran) are irrelevant to this specific topic IMO

Chart: https://xcancel.com/ernietedeschi/status/1951721848393105573

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

It doesn't mention the right to make a buck, though it's probably implicit.

So is the theory that they don't say it because they actually believe it, they say it because they want YOU to believe it? Or is it that they believe it just because they wish it were true?