gridlockd

Democrats had eight years to fix healthcare, they didn't fix this problem and they created numerous other problems.

This particular problem is due to heavy regulation creating a moat for large pharmaceutical companies to arbitrarily set prices. Republicans generally want to de-regulate, Democrats don't. Republicans generally want the free market to work things out, Democrats generally want the government to work things out.

Each side has been taking turns and as a result, we have had the government prevent the free market from working things out. We want everyone to be able to get healthcare, but we don't (or can't) force anyone to pay for insurance. We effectively incentivize people to not get insurance until they are sick, then we force insurance companies to take them on when they've never paid into the system. Somebody has to pay for all of it, and it ain't the government.

Those compliance costs are in the best interest of large pharmaceutical companies, they lobby for it. If these regulations did not exist, small companies would be destroying the disproportionate profits to be made from generic drugs.

I wouldn't otherwise argue for price controls, but if you give these companies the gift of keeping competition from the bottom out, you need to account for that, because competition is the only thing keeping a lid on prices in a free market.

It's gatekeeping regulation under the guise of "quality control". Drug companies don't want competition from the bottom, they're happy with a regulatory framework that keeps small companies from entering the market.

Insulin itself would be simple and cheap to produce, but getting through the approval process is so expensive, it wouldn't make economical sense to then sell the product near cost. Insulin isn't the mass-market product it once was, because it has fallen out of favor for Type II diabetes and Type I diabetes is relatively rare.

The way other countries get around this is price controls. They just tell the companies what drugs are allowed to cost, so profits are limited not by competition, but by fiat.

This is a dubious explanation, considering that high blood pressure by itself is largely symptom-free.

Consider that if bloodletting had benefits, we would be unlikely to find out about it in our system.

There's nothing to convert, Excel natively supports CSV. It just doesn't read beyond a million lines, it presumably won't warn you about that, and if you save the file again (as CSV), the lines will just be gone.

Compatibility. It's reasonable to predict that some of the participating entities are running software that is at least a decade old.

Like I said, that's the way I heard it, the way it was narrated to me.

The Guardian reported my version:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/oct/05/how-excel-m...

CSV would to me make more sense than an outdated binary format like XLS, but either story is plausible.

The way I heard it, it was an Excel problem: They had a CSV file that had more than 1 million lines, and Excel dropped the lines beyond 1 million.

I can imagine an automated process that appended to the CSV and then Excel saving back to that same file with the lines stripped.

I hope we can all agree that this is not the way Excel or any other software should behave, whether the user is incompetent or not.

> Using an Excel sheet as a database?

You wouldn't (want to) believe how incredibly common that is.

The story I heard was that it was indeed a CSV and that Excel (silently) drops anything beyond 1 million rows.

> People find joy in discovering weird facts.

People also find joy in going "Well, actually..." and so on. This is balance of nature.

> In the remake she sings a song about female empowerment where she tells everyone off, but it turns out to be a dream sequence. Sigh.

Any "empowerment narrative" that has "be a princess" as step one is doomed to failure. Might as well drive the point home that it is all a fantasy.

They must've given you the Potemkin village tour.

The stock market hit all time highs during the pandemic while the economy is in shambles. Why? Because there's a lot of cheap money chasing those assets, and it's going to stay that way for a long while. Therefore, those house prices may still nominally rise or at least stay stable, even while they're losing value.

You have to look at it in terms of opportunity cost. What else could you have bought for that money? If prices rise in SF only because of inflation, prices rise even faster in those places where there's a real increase in demand.

I didn't mention culture at all. I'm not sure how you would define culture in this context and to what degree that is measurable.

Instead, I would point out various socio-economic factors, such as Sweden having a higher rate of ethnic minorities (generally over-represented in COVID-19), Norway's GDP being far higher than the others (thanks to fossil fuel) and Sweden having a far greater population in elderly care institutions, compared to Finland.

A great deal of the deaths in Sweden come from nursing homes, where you had the situation that caregivers would travel from one institution to the next, spreading the virus.

I'm not saying that any of these problems aren't real. Many applications on Windows and some on MacOS disregard theme settings as well. That's not a security issue though, and it's fixable.

> They don't mention sandboxing on their frontpage, at all. This is not a goal.

...and without this "fake sandboxing" strawman, flatkill.org is left without a convincing argument.

The security trade-offs that come with flatpak are the same tradeoffs that desktop operating systems like MacOS and Windows have made since their inception.

Considering that these are successful desktop operating systems, whereas Linux is not, one might conclude that these are the right tradeoffs, all things considered. Sure, it's "a security nightmare", but we've been living through it for decades. The alternatives clearly aren't good enough to bring everyone to move over.

You can already do that with Javascript, it is just less efficient than using the hardware meant to accelerate NNs.

This API does not implicitly give access to the camera or photos. The things that you are concerned about are already possible by doing the NN part server-side, or less efficently in software. If anything, keeping the NN part on the client allows for more privacy, not less.

What "tracking" or "GPU abuse" do you expect this API to bring to the browser, that isn't already enabled by existing APIs?

You have to consider the trajectory. SF is already a dumpster fire, if enough affluent people leave, property prices will tank and you will be paying off a mortgage for a larger sum than what the property is worth.

Meanwhile, all these affluent people have to move somewhere, the properties in these places aren't going to stay cheap forever. So you can get a cheaper mortgage in those places to pay off a property that will rise in value.

Of course, that's all speculation. Prices in the "good places" are already high anyway, if you really want to strike a bargain you have to buy into the places that are still up-and-coming.

Keep in mind that the vaccine has, on average, efficacy of 50%.

Intent isn't necessarily the significant part of a historical artifact, but even then: The way these photos look is part of the state of the world at the time. The way they aged is part of history.

What does it mean for something to be "old"? What does it mean for something to be "well-preserved through time"? All of this is information that may not be significant to you, but it may be significant to a historian and their audience.

It's not even so much about stylistic choice but about the historicity of it. Van Gogh belongs to an era in art history. If you chose to paint in this style today it would have a different meaning, even if it looked the same.

The way these photographs look is as much part of history as what they portray - whether intentional or not. These enhancement processes will remove that part.

The sky did not literally look like that either, when Van Gogh painted it. You are missing the point.

Disregarding that your numbers are slightly inaccurate, these tax rates need to be put in perspective, because you get a whole lot of service, insurance and infrastructure for it - whether you want it or not.

By comparison, in the "socialist" and "high tax" state California, taxes are nominally lower, but what you get for it is essentially a dumpster fire. Plus, you have to pay out of pocket for healthcare and retirement.

It is a problem because that "quality of life" depends on demographics. If there's a huge amount of old people relative to the amount of young people, pension systems turn into a Ponzi scheme. People that are paying into the system now will not be getting their money back, unless the next generation pays even more. Rinse and repeat.

And before you say "we'll just take it from the rich", please do the math on how much money the rich have, versus the cost of pensions. It's sobering.

> I would actually put that as a plus, as a super-soft demographic control policy.

It is not a plus, because in the US there is no need to control births. To the contrary, there are not enough births.

I just picked the first google result, which happens to be metric, so I mixed that up.

Why compare Sweden to Norway and Finland? Because they're "nordic"? They do have quite different economies, different populations, different healthcare systems, etc.

These comparisons can be made arbitrarily to make Sweden look either bad or good.