644 karma · joined July 16, 2019
The prior post was specifically talking about the US. (I assure you, arrogant dismissive doctors are also a thing in the US)
In the US, there are a number of things that artificially increase the barriers to becoming a doctor.
1) You typically need a four year college degree to apply to medical school
2) Medical schools are accredited by the AMA, which is controlled by doctors. The AMA makes it very difficult to start a new MD-granting medical school.
3) Medical school in the US is very competitive to get in. They are likely turning away a lot of people who could complete the degree.
4) Since 1997, the federal government has a fixed number of Medicare (Medicare is a federal health insurance program for people over 65) supported residency positions. That number was basically flat for 25 years. We lost about 20% per capita of doctors being trained with support from this program. The caveat to this is that the total number of residents per capita has increased over time, particularly the past 15 years or so. My understanding is that they are less likely to be fully funded, so they spend more money getting trained, and then have higher students loans (on average graduating with debt above 200k going back to the late 2000s) that they need to pay off, so they charge more.
And you can add to this that it can be very difficult to be a doctor in another country and come to the US to practice here.
https://chatgpt.com/share/69781bb5-cf90-800c-8549-c845259c33...
Good human written docs > AI written docs > no docs > bad human written docs
And just in general reducing the restrictions on building in places with high rent to income ratios.
MMORPGs have had monthly subscription fees for a long time.
For a lot of games if they charged by the hour would probably see less revenue...people buy tons of games and then barely ever play them.
> Sumner is somehow unfamiliar with the concept of a landlord or vacant property investment.
I'm sure he is not unfamiliar with either...
Not sure what landlords have to do with anything since washing machines are often included as part of a rental (or the apartment doesn't have a washing machine, but what does that have to do with landlords?).
And vacant property investment is a small fraction of total property ownership in the US. It's more common that people have a vacation home and rent it out part of the year.
>> progressive consumption taxes
> When someone proposes one, let me know.
They have been proposed...many times. In fact, the US's system has elements of a progressive consumption tax already since people can put retirement savings in IRAs/401ks. What would make it a more complete progressive consumption tax would be to either raise the limits on contributions to these retirement accounts (and remove income limits), and also introduce accounts like these that are meant as more universal savings vehicles. This is preferred (in my view at least) to just cutting dividend and capital gains rates to 0% since that would benefit existing rich people.
Does anyone have a sense of why CUDA is more important for training than inference?