fennecfoxen

And yet the theories of the free market, like many physical models, retain significant predictive power!

Well yes, it was functioning as a health care plan featuring actual bona fide insurance, which means you paid for yourself, and you paid an amount commensurate with the risk that your health care needs might prove to be expensive. It was not designed as a wealth transfer to the needy any more than the auto insurance market.

We may need more wealth transfers to the needy so that they can pay for healthcare! You will note, however, that the recent approach to reforms, which tried to turn the vehicle of “insurance” itself into such a wealth transfer, has not exactly solved the problem!! Nor has it achieved its stated goal of making healthcare and health insurance more affordable to the general population, a mission always contradictory to its goal of being a wealth transfer!

Historical and tax reasons. It started back in the era of WWII wage controls. It continued to be an okay way to do group insurance without facing major problems with adverse selection. Being able to pay for it with a pre-tax payrolld eduction is the other big reason it thrived.

Given the mandates on insurance there are some reasons it should continue, but they are not really good reasons.

> Those essentially solved the problems of environments, configuration, as well as backups for me. Most *nix distros have humiliatingly failed at having a single directory for everything an application needs to run, which horribly complicates figuring out where your data actually lives and how you could re-create everything from 0 in case of a failure or migration.

The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard actively militates against a single-directory setup. Instead it is designed so you can keep your static stuff on one read-only location, your interim application runtime stuff on another (/var), your user data on a third (/home)...

It's a high-end standard appropriate for serious computers where these directories can be on different disks, with different filesystems, security protections, performance implications, and backup strategies (no need to back up what you can simply reinstall!). As a small-time user it's only your choice because it's the standard choice.

I guess you can have /opt/xyz?

What is he supposed to write instead? This is not news. There's new studies confirming it, but we've known for decades China is ruled by a totalitarian regime that treats human life as disposable, and we've heard rumors of this for decades, and of much, much worse.

No one with power has done anything about it. No one with power wants to do anything about it. Instead we have world leaders praise China for its boldness in the coronavirus lockdowns, politicians and pundits who fantasize — let me use Thomas Friedman's words here — "What if we could just be China for a day? I mean, just, just, just one day. You know, I mean, where we could actually, you know, authorize the right solutions ..." China has power. They envy it. They want it. They want us to be less free and more like that. It's more common than not. Your political party is not immune. If you're lucky, they're struggling to engage with the idea of China as a Major Geopolitical Risk (and it makes them somewhat uncomfortable to admit even that) or they're trying to be tough on China as a general play for Economic Protectionism, an excuse to serve the self-interest of a narrow slice of their constituency. (America First!!! Let's pay $900k/yr/job to save $100k/yr jobs in the steel industry!!! This is the only road to prosperity!!!)

You chide GP poster for his cynicism, essentially. Why shouldn't we all be cynical? I'm sorry, you're late to the show and probably missed out on the shock factor by a good decade or so, possibly longer.

Florida education law, and this law, and education law in general, all have some real problems.

It's somewhat unfortunate that misinformational memes of this sort travel much faster than reasonable understandings of its problems (this is but one example.) I believe it impairs the resolution of the nation's problems. Yeah, it galvanizes some support, but also hardens the opposition, and impairs the ability to make any sort of incremental progress, leaving achievable reforms stalled for years or even decades.

Moreover, as a matter of principle, I don't really want to be part of a political movement which values spinning a story to its advantage more than it cares about informing the public. Build your movement on something solid.

What information? “This apartment exists at LOCATION and will be available for rent at DATE?” And you think the tenant is entitled to stop the world from knowing that because the tenant is residing at that location before DATE?

Goodness. I should give the First Amendment a hug.

I use a similar process to look at interesting job listings sent to me unsolicited by recruiters. You can anonymize the company but it only takes a few unique phrases to locate the posting with Google.

It is amazing that unions get a legal monopoly in this manner, and it is not surprising that, with such rights, they fail their constituents, preferring to amass money and power for a corrupt leadership.

Imagine a world with two or three unions per employer and you could actually pick which one you were under. They’d actually have incentives to deliver!

But we’ll never have that because it means less lobbying money and smaller campaign contributions to our representatives in government.

Oh, life is far too short for a Harley. Buy a Ducati or something. ;)

No seriously though the other reason 35-year-olds buy a motorcycle or convertible or similar pleasure vehicle is that they actually can afford it, unlike new grads just out of school? (I differentiate the pleasure vehicle from the utility vehicle; if you buy a little 125cc motorcycle as a car-alternative for zooming around town that's quite different than the speed machines, or the massive touring motorcycles that get SUV-grade gas mileage.)

Anyway, this is one of the positive parts of middle age — maybe you're not actually rich, but you're usually much better off then you were in your twenties, might have a good start on a home or a retirement, and can afford a few personal luxuries, or children.

Well, we have information on what it looks like when governments seize someone’s land and destroy their house and their life and sometimes their livelihood in the name of Progress (and/or lining the pockets of someone involved with the project). Turns out it’s not actually a pretty picture, even in nations like the US which elevate property rights (see eg Kelo vs New London).

“Society” can be quite cruel and inhumane to individuals, who need strong rights to protect themselves — including property rights.

> BRT is still reliant on using roads that cars are on

no no no no NO. The whole point of it being Bus Rapid Transit (as opposed to just a series of buses) is that it ISN'T just using the same roads that cars are on.

> Rail transportation in particular.

ahem bus rapid transit

Trading songs on the blockchain sounds like a reasonable idea until you realize any MP3 player that would enforce ownership needs DRM now, which it must either enforce by downloading the blockchain periodically, or periodically talking to some untrustworthy music-industry server that purports to interpret the blockchain but could shut down instead.

You’ll surely have to work on establishing the current system as dystopian.

Carus. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/carus#Adjective

Dear. Beloved. Costly. Expensive. Valued.

If you like that, wait until you realize that when they pray for you, they share their prayer intentions at the church groups — often the first step in organizing some collective action.

> Building drones that can lift containers from cargoships requires electricity/energy storage densities that are so far beyond anything realistic.

Nuclear drones!!1one! Problem SOLVED. Gee I'm smart. ;)

RIP Microsoft Comic Chat. The true loss to humanity!

On Reddit? Or more generally?

Idk, perhaps something like “that girl at UPenn shouldn’t be allowed to swim competitively”

Insta flame war follows. (Hopefully we won’t have a demonstration here. Don’t let me down, HN.)

Why does the submitter hate The Little Mermaid (1989)? Original article title is "What’s a fire, and why does it – what’s the word – burn?".

This is the GPU the parent is talking about https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/a100/

Given the way state pensions and Social Security are run in fact, the idea of an effective centralized pension scheme can’t be taken for granted.

Centralized lets you move money as you said, but it leaves a major risk that the whole system is left in a bad state by the central manager. Particularly when they can gain stature by overpromising and leaving office before it’s time to deliver. Doubly so when they look at the investment opportunities as an opportunity to exert political control over the economy at large, like CALPERS currently strives to do.

The approach he described is consistent with non-malicious failure to turn a new API into something robust, reliable, external, and well documented. If you’ve got a hot new way to move bytes the long term stability of the API is a real concern. You break things if you change it.

Much (but not all) of US economic activity occurs at publicly traded US corporations. Even tax revenues are reasonably well correlated to their success. A major exception is real estate, but if you own a home, then you are implicitly basing part of your retirement on that ownership already.

So what else would you base a retirement based upon? Empty promises from politicians whose have no incentive to deliver on them because their term ends long before these promises are fulfilled? We have that in the public sector already, that's why there's dozens of pension crises looming, from Sacramento to Boston and half the states in between. We also have that to a limited extent with Social Security, which is likewise heading for a major shortfall. And nobody really actually likes Social Security — I mean, they may be in favor of it existing, but everyone who can afford it has a private pension with a lot of holdings in the stock market, to supplement Social Security, and cover its shortcomings, and no one would trade that for more Social Security, because it would mean they end up with a lot less in the end.

Many retirement funds are in a tax shelter either way, though.

It might also have something to do with that Santa Barbara incident in 2014 that killed 3, and the Toronto van attack in 2018 that killed 11 (and injured 15).

> Local governments do subsidize movie production with all sorts of funding and grants.

In yet another example of why government intervention in markets is mostly to make them worse: the politicians in charge can’t help but build and spend the citizens’ money on flashy vanity projects. Public expenses, private profits. They’ll talk it up like it’s some big “civic” investment in Prestige with all sorts of abstract benefits, rather than just being a handout to the rich — and if you challenge them, well, they will correctly tell you that everybody does it!!!