2,800 karma · joined August 1, 2010
What if we required licenses to create a website? After all, some unscrupulous individuals create websites that sell drugs and other illicit things!
What happens when the state intelligence apparatus has the ability to perfectly surveil the population? Look no further than what the Stasi accomplished - it becomes trivially easy to discredit political opposition, journalists, business leaders, or any other person or group standing in the way of the powerful.
People split hairs about this kind of oversight, or that kind of oversight, but when the powerful are overseeing their own surveillance apparatus - using secret courts, secret warrants, and all manner of other methods for hiding the true scope of the surveillance - I do not believe it can be contained.
Shifting to a higher consumption tax would put the onus on businesses that sell things, not the average person.
It would also greatly reduce the need for governments to surveil citizens to make sure they're not evading taxes.
Classic bureaucratization, really... when the buyer and the seller of something (e.g. a university degree) are disconnected by way of, say, a flood of cheap student loans, the incentive structure for the bureaucracy is to increase its own budget, staff, and therefore power.
It's no wonder that administration has exploded along with tuitions.
Lack of tenured positions really has very little to do with it.
Not coming to the aid of a man who had just been stabbed is "progress"? How would you have felt in his shoes?
Binance, FTX, etc. are the former, and I'd say Coinbase is the latter... there's a big difference between wilful non-compliance, and disagreements between regulators and counsel at firms like Coinbase about interpretation of law.
The fact that all of these regulatory actions are happening at once suggests that regulators either may not appreciate the difference or may not care, which is unfortunate.
Which is quite silly because crypto is still small peanuts compared to the bank failures that happened recently.
Not excusing their failure to properly account for duration risk, but regulators didn't see this coming either - what they were doing was considered to be not only wholly acceptable, but downright "safe".
Aesthetic judgments aside, seems like a winning strategy for housing affordability?
Andrej Karpathy addressed this point in his recent Lex Fridman interview - more sensors aren't necessarily better, and for each sensor you introduce a whole host of supply chain issues and physical constraints. By sticking to one sensor type that contains all of the information theoretically necessary to make decisions they've simplified the problem.
They bet pretty big on this approach... including by making their own silicon. I don't know how anyone could really believe that they're not earnestly pursuing eventual "Full Self-Driving" capability, even though they may still be far from that goal.
What they've achieved thus far is really impressive. That took a LOT of work.
The reality is that Twitter as a business (and, imho, as a product) was sorely in need of a course correction. Layoffs, if they need to be done, should be done crisply and thoroughly so that remaining employees don't feel like the other shoe is about to drop.
You rip off the bandaid, it sucks, then you refocus on the work ahead.
This is one of the top hospital systems in the world, and they serve patients from all socioeconomic backgrounds. You may want to think about what information they have that you don't when it comes to delivering world-class healthcare.
The best hospital systems in the world, like Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic, are generally non-profits operating in a mixed system where they take private insurance, out-of-pocket payments, and medicare/medicaid. They have to remain competitive otherwise they won't attract customers from out-of-state or out-of-country. If you basically force patients on the public system to only use certain government-run hospitals, you're dooming them to an inferior experience than what you could get by perhaps enhancing access to public pay for some services.
Outcomes aren't uniformly better, by the way. Canada routinely ranks near the bottom of the OECD and like one notch above America, but in America you can get the best healthcare in the world (Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, etc.)
Canada has no equivalent - the small Cleveland Clinic presence in Canada hasn't bothered trying to open a hospital because it would basically be impossible, unlike in the UK where private hospitals still exist.
The healthcare professionals in Canada are very well-trained, but there are too few of them and they're smothered in useless bureaucracy.
It's a bad system and since that article was published public sentiment has been worsening: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/first-reading-canadian-...
Most people who have glowing things to say about it have had minimal interactions with the system. The overall data shows predictable results when government intervention completely skews market incentives: the patient experience blows, administration is bloated to hell, it lacks capacity, and it bleeds healthcare professionals across the border where pay and working conditions are generally better.
The fact that anyone defends the system as it's currently designed is honestly baffling to me. If you took another essential industry - food - and applied similar incentives (any food paid for by government can't be purchased privately, government sets the rates, etc.) most people would correctly predict it would be disastrous.
Would it be federal, or state-wide? How would it be funded? Would it be public "option", or would private pay be banned like in Canada? How would compensation rates be updated, and how often? Ask any hospital administrator what they think of Medicare/Medicaid rates, and they'll probably answer that they're set too low and that they lose money on Medicare/Medicaid patients.
The details on "universal healthcare" can range from heavily-regulated private insurance - Germany for example - to outright bans on private pay for items insured by the government (Canada). A lot of Americans seem to want some sort of federal system that provides insurance for everything, which seems like the best way to get the most expensive, least capable system imaginable. Imagine having yet another insanely expensive, totally underfunded entitlement program that politicians can continuously pad with new promises every 2-4 years when they need to get re-elected.
The Canadian experience (source: Canadian currently living in the US) is one you do not want to replicate, so be wary - Canadians have little confidence in their system at this point, even though it's quite expensive relative to European peers - and we have shockingly low numbers of imaging machines, hospital beds, urgent care clinics, etc. per capita, all well having administrative bloat that makes university administration look positively lean by comparison.
People love to fret about this politician or that politician, but the reality is that Canada got the incentives totally wrong because they sounded nice. No out-of-pocket expenses? No evil private medicine? No profit from healthcare!
As it turns out, central planning fails in healthcare just like it fails everywhere else. So "ensuring everyone has access to reasonably good healthcare" is an excellent goal, but "giving any level of government a monopoly on healthcare insurance" will be the death knell of the generally excellent healthcare Americans have access to if you have insurance.
...it's a rate, it would be bananas/hr.
Hey, uh, there's this thing called Google - most people start there when they're making a big-ticket purchase like a car. Or you could pay for Consumer Reports to get expert-level analysis. Or you can just ask people on the relevant subreddit.
Consumers have access to more information to inform buying decisions than at any point in history. So unless General Motors is the only car manufacturer in the world, people can weigh the pros and cons and make their own decisions. More intervention from government is totally unnecessary and likely even harmful in the form of generally higher prices.
As far as I can tell there are a vanishingly small number of problems where "new laws" are the optimal answer. Increased regulatory oversight generally leads to ossified markets with higher costs. Many of the most reviled monopolies throughout American history got there in no small measure because of government protection in the form of "regulation".
In this case, there are multiple car manufacturers available to Americans from around the world - if this makes GM vehicles more expensive or causes a consumer backlash that damages sales, GM will change their behaviour. That seems like a more responsive mechanism than piling on new regulation to dictate which types of fees are okay and which aren't.
Yes, because that's how the American constitution works. If you think something else should have similar protections - or if you don't like the second amendment and think it should be repealed - lobby for a new amendment.
Until then, it's the highest law in the land and is on equal footing with any constitutional protection, regardless of your personal policy preferences.