bayesianhorse

considering that the cost of healthcare in the US is increasing rapidly, but also the ratio of insured citizens, no, I wouldn't say a breaking point has been reached.

I'm not against drug patents, I am only stating that they prevent the drug market from being a free market by a considerable margin.

Actually no, in Germany the drug companies can't take any price, because the insurers are negotiating as one party with the drug companies. But yes, drug prices in Germany are relatively high. Why would private companies leave money on the table unless forced by regulation? They have to squeeze every profit they can out of the health care system.

The situation in Germany is way better than in the US, where these negotiations are a lot more favorable to the companies, because they can "negotiate" with individual insurance companies and even patients. But especially in the latter case, there's not a lot of "negotiation"...

That's simply not true. Yes, development costs are high, but not that high.

The real reason the drugs are priced so high is that people/insurers pay it. I wouldn't even call it a free market, since the patent protection is involved. Essentially it is extortion. Eventually we might get a situation where drug companies raise costs for patented drugs, not only cancer ones, slowly to the breaking point where even less people can afford insurance anymore. Why wouldn't they? The insurers are very disinclined to refuse life saving treatments to their patients.

With biologicals the cost of actually producing the drugs can be high. The only way to bring that down is to drive forward the necessary technology.

I regularly don't leave my home 12 hours or more at a time... Should I be worried? ;-)

I'd say its not just "mistreatment" of animals, because even the stuff you do to beloved animals would be demeaning to a human being. Especially the part about controlling virtually every part of their lives. For pets, that is ok or even better than most alternatives. For Humans? Hell on earth.

The biggest problem with paying welfare to immigrants is that it has to be paid upfront, long before there is a profit or cost reduction compared to not paying it.

The problems with not paying are manifold: They are an underclass, without most rights and very poor. A proper healthcare system can't refuse them treatments, for all sorts of reasons, and poverty and lack of rights just increase health care costs. Then there is the lost potential: Those people do have children, often naturalized, or not, living in the country, but not getting the care, food and education they need, which also means they don't fulfill their potential benefits to society.

I think refusing children basic welfare is about the stupidest thing a society can do. Both for financial and for humanistic reasons. It is completely irrelevant whose children they are.

I'd say that simple understandings of economic theories fail to acknowledge limited physical resources. But most "theories" I know don't even talk about limited physical resources.

Economic growth is about "value", not necessarily "consumption of physical resources".

Rule changes are not even enough. European borders are impossible to secure against "illegal" or "unwanted" migration of individuals. They always have been. Even the GDR wasn't able to stop its people entirely from leaving for the west. And nobody wants to use their methods.

Of course, "illegal" immigrants can't apply for UBI. They would form a permanent underclass, who work for minimal wages, don't have any representation, no social security, and no social mobility.

One reason why I am currently not so much in favor of UBI is immigration. I have three uncommon beliefs about immigration:

First, I don't believe the idea of human rights allows a state to tell people where they are allowed or forbidden to live.

Secondly, I don't believe immigration controls are ultimately feasible. In the US this is obvious in the big population of illegal immigrants, other countries are also discovering that they can't really stop people from entering and that hunting down and deporting hundreds of thousands of people is harder than it looks.

Thirdly, I don't believe a society can save money by withholding social welfare to someone who lives among them. The cost in health care, crime, and lost potential may very well outpace the savings.

I also believe a UBI would force countries to try and tighten their immigration controls. The problem is not so much that the immigrants wouldn't ultimately benefit that society, but the upfront payments and increased financial risks are just scary as hell.

Philosophers and Economists have battled on that question for centuries now...

I guess immigration laws are not in place because of that "fictional concept", but rather because those inside the country are so afraid that immigrants would take away from whatever they believe to be entitled to.

I also believe there will come a time, when all industrialized nations will open their borders, at least for honest immigrants. Preferably all those nations at the same time. Already, enforcement of immigration regulation is impossible in many countries. And the extent to which that regulation seems to be working might as well stem from the fact that most people, no matter how poor or desperate actually don't want to leave their home country.

Most immigration laws are "stupid" in a lot of ways. It's even stupider when you think about the fact, that specialized and highly skilled jobs are actually harder to work in for immigrants.

Yes, theoretically, the U.S. immigration law (and many other countries', too) favors highly skilled jobs. In practice however, it is far easier for low skilled workers to just overstay a visa. In 2012, the U.S. paid $18 billion to try and enforce immigration laws. Still, there are anywhere between 7 and 30 million illegal immigrants in the country, despite all the effort.

Billions for law enforcement, not a penny for social services...

You don't have to agree to it, because it doesn't matter. You don't have a choice so you are in slavery.

In modern states, you don't have a lot of choices either. But at least, even though you are "forced" into a society, you eventually get the right to participate politically.

That is a strawman argument if ever I saw one. Nobody outside of "the society" is forced to pay taxes, even if membership is not completely voluntary. So yes, the majority should be able to force their will on the minority, within reason.

For me, a scripting language is used to extend a larger more inflexible software project. Like scripting in Office Suites, Blender or similar.

Python is growing in popularity, and in the majority of cases it is used as the "primary" language now. That's why "scripting" is a misnomer, even if technically CPython is not compiled to machine language.

If you are lurking on hacker news to improve your productivity, I think you're in the wrong place ;-)

Using the term "scripting language" for either Go or Python is a complete misnomer.

Back in the day, languages called as such where so slow, that there was a feeling that they were used "in lieu" of "real" programming languages. They were there to extend "real" software.

Today? Much the opposite. Computing power is almost always cheaper than brain power, and we use C to extend Python rather than the other way around.

For that matter, I think Go is great for networked infrastructure, but bad for interfacing with other languages and still significantly harder to learn than Python, Julia and R.

That is why I caution on the use of Go in projects which have "scientific" bent to them...

That makes some sense, superficially. But you forget that the workers who enter into a contract have a reasonable expectation that the employer is abiding by laws and will pay them minimum wage.

The minimum wage on the other hand is meant to make someone able to feed themselves and maybe even a family. Especially when holding multiple jobs, such unpaid overtime, even just opening/closing a shop can cut into that ability in a serious manner.

You are confusing a contract agreement with fraud and rationalizing the latter with a capitalist/marxist rant. Exploitative wages are not illegal and not wage theft. Not paying wage owed as per the contract, by whatever means of deception and coercion however is fraud or theft. It's as simple as that!

Overtime isn't exactly "off the clock". If it comes to such an insurance claim, it may be hard for the insurance company to prove that the worker is "off the clock".

For that matter, the kind of shenanigans employers pull with on/off time and wage theft mostly happen on the books. Even employees don't necessarily know if and how they are cheated on at any particular point in time.

Society as a whole agrees that taxes are generally a good idea. In today's complicated democratic systems it may be harder and more tedious to prove how exactly, but the reason taxes are levied is that society does not want to change this.

I think you are confusing bad contract terms with actual withholding of wage.

At best, "wage theft" could be considered "wage fraud", with a slightly better connotation (if at all).

We're not really talking about middle-class workers who think their boss is a douche.

Given the high salaries of tech employees and the low unemployment among them, I think that "cheap labor" isn't exactly what I would call the H-1B system.

It is a bit exploitative of the immigrants, by which I meant that the companies use the strict/stupid US immigration system as leverage. But citizens or taxpayers in the US have no reason of complaining. Maybe these H-1Bs are preventing an entirely cut-throat competition for talent, but on overall, those people add to the economy, and in a big way. Anyone who earns like 100K a year creates numerous other jobs and pays a lot of taxes...

Neurofeedback seems to work very well and reliably with ADHD, but it is often not "enough"!

Even though Norway is not part of the EU, it is quite dependent on it for all sorts of reasons. This is an example where the Norwegian government tried to stop that through high import tariffs on butter, and it backfired.

Because of its small population and northern location, it essentially has to import much of its agricultural products from the EU, and thereby accept most of the EU regulations and academic degrees without having the slightest say in the matter.

This is not a problem of "algorithms" but rather of stupid policies. A programming manager at Google would have been fired if he had put such obvious errors in PageRank (or whatever they call it these days).

Algorithms and data can only improve effectiveness of these systems and agencies. However, their use has been combined with drastic funding cuts. These cuts and the resulting malfunctions aren't exactly a fundamental problem with data science.

You seem to have a very low standard regarding "proofs". The article you cited derives broad macro-economic conclusions from storified anecdotes. In the particular case of a "masseuse course" the agency just doesn't see it as a valuable and accredited program. Such courses prefer taking money from participants directly rather than trying to make bureaucracies believe in them.

And yes, then the participants have to pay to attend. They might even have illusions on their employment prospects. If they were to attend an actual physiotherapy course, things may be different. The problem with these types of programs in Germany is that they are mostly privately funded. That is a problem yet to be addressed.

People tend to attribute the "being stuck" in welfare to the welfare system itself. That may happen, I just don't see it as a significant factor. The subsidizing of low-skilled labor is a different problem, and is partly addressed by the recent minimum wage.

The US is an entirely different place. Lower unemployment, but there, even many employed workers have a much harder life and live in poorer conditions than jobless Germans. Full Healthcare, and mostly free education, for starters.

I'm not saying San Francisco should try that. But if they were to try it, they should coordinate their services. I also think the idea behind this housing is that the previously homeless people are encouraged to find new ways of living, and have it easier to stop drinking and get a job. Or start on medication, get treatment for PTSD etc.

Yes, I know about "welfare traps". And I don't believe it. The assumptions behind welfare traps is that people who don't get a job stop trying to look hard enough for one. To make that a significant factor, companies would have to have large amounts of unfulfilled positions, where in turn a significant amount of eligible workers are unemployed. At best, this happens when the wages for a particular job are so low, that they end up costing society rather than saving them money compared to full welfare payment. State subsidized work, effectively.

In Germany, welfare payments are reduced by some amount when poeple refuse to comply. That can be things like refusing an education program or a job offer. These sanctions may not be enough to overcome psychological factors, but it is enough to rule out financial reasons for refusing.