DMV residents deserve jobs. The USDA provided valuable high school internships to many of my peers, and we did not go to the most well-funded school. Rural, low-population states already get tons of pork, and contend with much lower cost-of-living and housing prices, to boot.
Ragebait, and I'm starting to realize that your account exists largely for this reason. I wish there were a way to block users on HN.
I hate everything about this, please use your time on this planet to make life better for people instead of worse.
It is better for a million AI crawlers to get through than for even one search index crawler, that might expose the knowledge on your site to someone who needs it, to be denied.
For public knowledge sites this would be the wrong tool entirely. The use case is more like paywalled articles, proprietary product data, or premium content that companies paid to create and don't want scraped into a competitor's training set. obscrd is opt-in per component, not a whole-site lockdown.
Edge case: people who are in the process of changing their body size/shape. Growing children, people losing weight, people gaining weight (they're out there), will all occasionally want to buy for where their body is going to be in the future, not where it is now. How to accommodate them?
I'm sure models predicting how their body changes (based on various parameters and previous scans of the particular person and other people) could be built, allowing to optimize for longest time period of "decent fit" at the cost of "perfect fit now".
>There is a separate issue where for the last 2-3 years, the BLS's later revisions to jobs numbers have been almost entirely downward, instead of evenly distributed like they used to be, indicating some kind of systemic methodological issue, maybe some secular change in how labor markets work post-covid
The Biden administration pulled out all the stops (without resorting to outright corruption, like Trump) to get ahead of the fact that we briefly entered a recession in 2022 (which would not have been as brief if it had been correctly identified as the recession that it was). They changed how they calculated inflation around this time, which coincided with headline staying below 10% even though it had been trending higher and likely was much, much higher for parts of the country. I have no issue with the notion that they also changed the way that they calculated job growth and then, surprise, numbers are good (but then get revised down later when no one cares anymore).
I actually do pay reasonably close attention to how inflation and unemployment are calculated, and read the BLS and Federal Reserve reports beyond just the headlines from mass media outlets, and I can say this confidently: nothing you just said is true, you made up that whole paragraph out of nothing. It reads like a copypasta from RW Twitter reply guys.
...Headline inflation, as opposed to core inflation. Not literal headlines. "Close attention," indeed.
Reading the reports "beyond just the headlines" implies that you're still just taking them at face value, when the problem is that the methodology was likely compromised by a desire not to see bad numbers roll out. Nonsensical susbtitutions in the CPI basket, which just happened to understate the price hikes most Americans saw c. 2022. Suspicious timing of changes in the efficacy of initial jobs reports when compared to later revisions, as you yourself brought up, in part because the Biden admin failed to better fund BLS surveys and better incentivize responses. Stuff like that.
So while I appreciate that you would like to dismiss, out-of-hand, the concerns about the Biden admin's economic reporting, it's not so easy. They're real and this lacto-ovo progressive is not the only one bringing them up.
"Illness is neither an indulgence for which people have to pay, nor an offence for which they should be penalised, but a misfortune the cost of which should be shared by the community.”
That's true to an extent, but the majority of US healthcare spending goes to treating chronic conditions caused more by lifestyle choices than misfortune. There's a fundamental issue in public health policy about individual responsibility and whether to charge people more (or potentially even deny care) over factors at least partially under their control. For example, the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) allows health plans to charge tobacco users higher premiums. Is that fair? Should we also charge higher premiums to alcohol users or those with sedentary lifestyles? There are no clear right or wrong answers here.
That topic should be a non-starter as long as US government policy is to keep shitting in the food bowl. There's way too many communities living under the toxic spill or waste of some unregulated industrial process -- and the country seems perfectly ok with that kind of "lifestyle". I really don't see why we should villify individual lifestyle choices when the entire country is happy with intentionally harmful policy choices.
So, if health insurers want to start charging premiums I suggest they send their bills to Superfund sites first, then to regular toxic cities like Flint, Camden, Hinkley or Picher, then to producers of known-carcinogenic substances (like Chrome-6 or Roundup), and then to advertisers of known-harmful products like alcohol or tobacco. Only when they run out of those targets can we have a discussion on individual lifestyle choices.
OK cute rant but do you have a realistic proposal? I absolutely agree that we should do more to reduce exposure to toxins but there's no legal mechanism for health plans to shift costs that way. Ultimately some of the money spent caring for others with lifestyle-related chronic conditions is going to come out of your pocket through insurance premiums and taxes. This is inevitable. Are you willing to pay more for people who choose to smoke and get lung cancer / emphysema / heart failure / etc? Yes or no?
There's very little tobacco advertising anymore so we're not going to squeeze many dollars out there.
Desk jobs like programming are nearly as bad as smoking based on some of the research I’ve seen. We could just make smokers and programmers pay higher taxes. I guess smokers already do; learned recently that cigarettes are like $10 a pack, a few thousand per year for the average smoker. Not sure how best to tax programmers though.
Realistic in this administration? No. They will keep taking and taking from the working class and pitting them against one another. There's no solution there when the government is actively looking to sabatoge the system.
Arguing over tobacco premiums is pennies on the dollar. Pretty much every other civilized country has figured something out with regards to universal healthcare. I'm sure there's dozens of solutions out there to choose from. The only real steps to take right now is to have Americans stop licking the boot and actually push for something that helps them.
Why do you immediately call charging the worst polluters for the bad health effects of their pollution "unrealistic"? Having a sufficient answer to that question seems like a good basis to start your proposal from.
Socialized healthcare means that the State has a direct financial incentive to reduce or ban consumption of poisonous goods, and crackdown on pollution.
That's a meaningless statement. You can find many examples of "working" national healthcare systems (for various definitions of working) and they're all different in how they allocate costs to consumers.
For one example there are some positive aspects to the Japanese system in that they achieve good outcomes (on average) at lower costs. But that's partly due to the "Metabo Law" aka "fat tax" which voters in other countries might see as punitive or discriminatory. I'm not necessarily arguing for any particular approach to lifestyle-related health conditions but any choice involves trade-offs.
In practice everyone has vastly different preferences, expectations, and desires different levels of care then.
For example Some people want to see a specific doctor they know in a private session to discuss life and family stresses. Others only go to urgent clinics if they need an immediate medication.
What percentage of the market actually pays it this way? IIRC, somewhere north of a third of Americans are already on a form of single payer healthcare. Most of the remainder are getting it through their job, subsidized to varying degrees. The fraction of the population that actually pays the full premiums out of their own pocket is pretty limited, AFAIK.
I think it's also worth considering that taxpayer funded US government spending on health care is about the same as in a typical single-payer European country. Then many tax payers still have to pay for private health care on top, to actually get health care for themselves.
Yeah, doctors get paid way more in the US. There's a number of changes beyond the payment method that we'd have to make if we wanted to have costs on par with a typical European country.
> What percentage of the market actually pays it this way?
The only way this can make sense mathematically is if you're including children, seniors, and/or the ill—populations who are unable to work. What is your reference?
Pew Research says just under 7% of the population uses the exchanges to buy insurance. Overall, about 36% of the population is on public healthcare, according to Census.gov. KFF says that about 80% of the working population, plus or minus, gets insurance through their employer, with an average of $570/month out-of-pocket for premiums.
These numbers are incommensurate in a way that may not be obvious.
7% of the population doesn't tell you what population fraction is covered by such policies.
36% coverage is even harder—every child in the US is eligible for Medicaid, and such children may not always need it, or may move states after using Medicaid, in a way that makes them doubly counted.
80% of the working population is also less clear; is that 80% of policy-holders get their own policy through their own job? Or 80% of working-age people have a policy through some workplace, even if they are not working?
Interest on debt; shoring up the financial vehicles and insurance through which they diffused the catastrophic losses of their bad bets from the past few decades; stockpiled for the inevitable economic collapse and the feeding frenzy that will follow; land.
I just want everyone to understand that part of why everything is so expensive today is because our elite funneled the surpluses from the electronic revolution into boondoggles that not only didn't make back what they cost, but that demand even more labor, to this day, to cover maintenance and interest.
>Yeah, screw DEI!
lmao I'm talking about wars; sprawl; advertising and consumerism; wasteful or gatekept luxuries; feet-dragging on any number of technologies and policies that could have mitigated the damage, just to please incumbents.
We temporarily made life spectacularly better for like 5-10% of the population, and doomed everyone to either generations of toil, or a hard reset in the form of a "burn it all down" revolution.
I expected it. I also expect it to get revised even lower, and the gains from the last couple months to disappear.
I really wish people would realize that prolonging this farce is not in their best interests. The energy potential of the inevitable blowback just keeps building.
Tbf Spore's acclaim comes with the caveat that it completely failed to live up to years of pre-release hype. Much of the goodwill it's garnered since, which is reflected in review scores, only came after the storm of controversy over Spore not being "the ultimate simulator which would mark the 'end of history' for gaming" died down.
And you wouldn't really have any idea this was the case if you weren't there when it happened.
reply