consensus1

I would love to know how universal healthcare works in your head

The perverse incentive of the politician / general / bureaucrat to favor their personal interest over the public interest is identical to the perverse incentive of the CEO to favor his personal interest over the same.

I would argue the government case is actually much worse because at least the CEO has the feedback mechanism of revenue because the company <> customer relationship is entirely voluntary on both sides. The public vote is supposed to restrain the government in the same way, but in practice it seems to be much less effective in restraining politicians than the customer is at restraining companies.

Total profits for US health insurance companies in 2025 were $50 billion. The other $950 billion has got to come from cutting:

1. money to providers

2. overall healthcare consumption

3. bureaucratic redundancy and waste

1 is going to piss off medical providers. 2 is going to piss of the general public. 3 is going to piss off the 20 million healthcare industry workers who are not direct care providers. So pick your poison. This is why it will never pass.

Nobody, including congress, gives a rat's ass about insurance companies and their profits. The truth is that someone has to approve or deny healthcare. Every universal system does it too, but by government policy instead of corporate decision. After the CEO of United Healthcare was gunned down in the streets for doing that thankless job do you think congress is saying to themselves "hey, maybe we should get into that business"?

I don't know. I was just suggesting something that may have an effect. BTW I would be very hesitant to take anything that "opens some magic window where everything suddenly becomes easier to learn" if it existed. Increasing neuroplasticity to that degree is unlikely to be without significant side effects.

I'm pretty sure the context here would require college level courses plus industry training on operational procedures to actually understand in any meaningful sense. Not much different than any other time some safety feature triggers at any other highly complex and hazardous industrial facility. Except that in all those other cases the media ignores it and leaves it to the technical experts who do understand the context to sort it out, and everybody goes on with their lives never knowing about it. But since this particular highly complex and hazardous industrial facility is a nuclear power plant what we will get is journalists who know nothing about the subject screaming about it to millions of other people who know nothing about it who will assume it was a near miss on killing half the population of Florida.

You may even get a reply from Homer Simpson. I hear he's in charge of that sort of thing

The entire point of critical safety features is to turn events into non events.

Psilocybin has this effect. Source: I can't remember where I read it, so low confidence.

One of the easiest and most effective AI regulations would be to simply require all these labs to run all incoming requests through a suite of the most advanced models asking if the request is likely to be a pathogenic agent.

I just can't take this seriously. I grew up with TV being literally 1/3 ads and there was absolutely no way to skip them. People complained idly, but nobody really had a problem with it because we knew that TV isn't free. Nothing on the internet comes close to that level of ad intrusiveness, but I often hear unhinged statements like "They try to inject malware into your thinking, manipulating your worldview and your actions. That's horrible, worse than attacking a machine with malware, damaging persons and societies."

So does ABC, which is why we are all commenting on their article here.

No, it's "We invite popular content creators without regard to their political views."

Yes. This article is just rage bait designed to rile up the type of people that want the government to restrict freedom of speech on social media.

Yes, but that is perfectly ok because we live in a society with not only freedom of speech but also freedom of the press, so it necessarily follows that it is ok to distribute speech that you don't like to a willing audience and also to profit from it. If that isn't ok, then neither is HN or the New York Times.

The constitution guarantees free speech, but not free drug use (though maybe it should). So I don't see any contradiction here. Meta has every right to police speech as it is a private company, but it has no obligation to do so.

Seems like the country was more competently governed before the current university system, though. If its job is to gate keep incompetence out of leadership it is failing spectacularly.

Do we really want the upper echelons of society to be made up of neurotic workaholics? Do we really want universities to be gate keepers here at all?

Microservices is a deployment strategy. Monorepo is a code organization strategy. They are not mutually exclusive.

For parallelizable workloads it scales just fine, and giving exams is perfectly parallelizable. Any good programmer would know that.

Having done both I would say not by much

I remember reading a theory on this that basically it is a symptom of the decline of the news media industry. The positive attitude in the industry lined up with good times for them until around 2000 when their revenue peaked: https://compote.slate.com/images/42207fae-3603-4fe5-b4fe-a65...

For them it really is doom and gloom, and they spread it to the rest of society like a contagion by their writing much like the the banking crisis in 2008 poisoned the entire economy.

I'm not sure if it's true, but it makes a lot of sense to me.

"Freely available" doesn't mean they are free of charge, but that they can be obtained at any time with minimal effort.

Cigarettes and alcohol are freely available to kids

OK, that's fair. I don't deny I broke the rules there. I was just surprised at the unevenness because I assumed you had seen the context.

This is the comment I was replying to:

> I read that left-wing people are consistently found to be much more able to process conflicting ideas than right-wing people are.

Nothing in your guidelines tells me how this comment is ok, but somehow my reply is not.

Yes I'm sure that is genuine belief and not just a manifestation of envy. I can't describe the level of contempt I have for people who go around opining on how much money they think other people should have.

It doesn't rise to the level of critique. Just baseless accusations and conspiracy theories. Success speaks for itself and the mental gymnastics of those that deny it screams "envy" as loudly as if it was written on the accuser's forehead.

They must be seething in envy at the superior returns of the average HN naysayer who has been predicting the imminent collapse of all the "scams" Elon Musk is running for the last several years.

Who has delivered better value for money on government contracts than SpaceX?