That's why I liked catastrophic health care plans. Insurance works best when it covers rare, expensive events. Otherwise, it interferes with the process. My car insurance doesn't cover oil changes or new tires, but if I get I crash and injure someone, it kicks in. Homeowners insurance doesn't cover a routine roof replacement, but it will if there's storm damage. That's how health insurance should work.
A catastrophic health care plan has low premiums and high deductibles. You also get access to a tax advantaged savings account to save up for future events. So you can take the money you saved on premiums and pay for medical expenses tax free. Or let the money accumulate to cover future medical expenses or even retirement!
"A catastrophic health care plan has low premiums and high deductibles."
Except they don't really exist anymore. You can get really high deductibles, but the premiums are still ridiculous. The plans have to cover many non-catastrophic events now by law.
The other problem is that the cost and frequency of things like auto accidents or home damage is generally much lower than for health events, and generally include much lower caps on how much they will payout.
This was the intent of the insurance agencies, they sold catastrophic plans but didn't really make a ton on them, so they negotiated basically not being able to sell them anymore.
Self-insurance is the final catastrophic plan and the numbers keep looking better every day.
I would like to get a catastrophic plan that doesn't cover things I would categorize as consequences of bad choices. I get that covering these things is less costly for society than just letting things run their course, but it does drive costs onto everyone else's premium.
Catastrophic plans are still quite costly because they aren't really a pure insurance product. Mine is over 2k/month for 3 people on an ACA Bronze plan with HSA.
The challenge with such carve-outs is it incentivises broadly defining the offending lifestyle choice. So the specifics matter, because otherwise, insufficient diet and exercise (or, for the exceptions, overexertion) is a lifestyle choice that can be positively linked to pretty much any issue for any person.
Even if everyone's fit and has a good diet, maternity care is medically important and starting a family in a free country** definitely counts as a lifestyle choice because some choose not to do it.
Human childbirth without any care has quite a high fatality rate*; no childbirth, no next generation to cover the pensions of today's taxpayers.
* I don't know if South Sudan had something weird going on to push their lifetime rate of fatal complications from maternity to 35% in the worst years, but even if they're an outlier there were plenty of other countries trending at around 10% in 1985: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/lifetime-risk-of-maternal...
** Not so in places without women's reproductive rights.
Maybe if car insurance discounted new tires and oil changes on a reasonable interval, people would crash less, and insurance rates wouldn't even have to go up that much.
I agree. I think this is what happens when a persons transitions from a progressive mindset to a conservative one, but has made being "progressive" a central tenant of their identity.
Progressiveness is forward looking and a proponent of rapid change. So it is natural that LLM's are popular amongst that crowd. Also, progressivism should be accepting of and encouraging the evolution of concepts and social constructs.
In reality, many people define "progressiveness" as "when things I like happen, not when things I don't like happen." When they lose control of the direction of society, they end up just as reactionary and dismissive as the people they claim to oppose.
>AI systems exist to reinforce and strengthen existing structures of power and violence. They are the wet dream of capitalists and fascists.
>Craft, expression and skilled labor is what produces value, and that gives us control over ourselves
To me, that sums up the author's biases. You may value skilled labor, but generally people don't. Nor should they. Demand is what produces value. The later half of the piece falls into a diatribe of "Capitalism Bad".
Just seeing that sentence fragment about "structures of power and violence" told me so much about the author.
Its the sort of language that brings with it a whole host of stereotypes, some of which were immediately confirmed with a little more digging (and others would require way too much effort to confirm, but likely could be).
And yes, this whole "capitalism bad" mentality I see in tech does kinda irk me. Why? Because it was capitalism that gave them the tools to be who they are and the opportunities to do what they do.
> And yes, this whole "capitalism bad" mentality I see in tech does kinda irk me. Why? Because it was capitalism that gave them the tools to be who they are and the opportunities to do what they do.
It's not hard to see why that mentality exists though. That same capitalism also gave rise to the behemoth, abusive monopolies we have today. It gave rise to the over financialization of the sector and declining product quality because you get richer doing stock buybacks and rent-seeking instead of making a better product.
Early hacker culture was also very much not pro-capitalism. The core principle of "Information should be free" itself is a statement against artificial scarcity and anti-proprietary systems, directly opposed to the capitalist ethos of locking up knowledge for profit. The FOSS we use and love rose directly from this culture, which is fundamentally communal, not capitalist.
I'm not ignorant to this fact that it helped us for quite a long time but it also created climate change. Overpopulation.
We are still stuck on planet earth, have not figured out the reason for live or the origin of the universe.
I would prefer a world were we think about using all the resources earth provides sustainable and how to use them the most efficient way for the max amount of human beings. The rest of it we would use to advance society.
I would like to have Post-Scarcity Scientific Humanism
You would need to demonstrate that some other system would have given us all the things you want while avoiding every problem you cite, while not introducing other comparable or worse problems.
It didn't work out well when the NYC MTA tried fare free rides.
https://www.mta.info/document/147096
Dwell time and customer journey time decreased.
The bus speeds were lower on the fare free routes.
If public transport provides value to people, they should pay for some of it. 30 day unlimited ride pass in only $132.
i will gently point out that new york state and new york city are not the same thing
> Under that metric, the poverty threshold for a couple with two children in a rental household in New York City is now $47,190. The study found that 58 percent of New Yorkers, or more than 4.8 million people, were in families with incomes below 200 percent of the poverty line — about $94,000 for a couple with two children or $44,000 for a single adult. Poverty rates among Black, Latino and Asian residents were about twice as high as the rate for white residents, according to the report.
So you need 2% of your income to generate 100% of your income (assuming you need to get to work).
Sorry I just can't take these arguments in good faith. $100 in the richest city of country of the richest country in the world is basically nothing. If you can't allocate that towards your mobility then IDK what to say to you.
You're not exposed to how many people live. There are people, for example, who must choose to budget between food and medication. Those are also people without other forms of transit.
That's great. It's only around 8 hours of work instead of 16.
Its still a lot of money at $16.50. 12 days a year you labor just for the opportunity to labor. Your point only makes it slightly better and doesn't really take away from my point - it's a lot of money for a good number of folks. You know, the folks that could really benefit.
A 50% discount is probably pretty hard to get - and you are still asking the poorest folks to pay 4 hours of labour for busses.
To get the reduced rate many municipalities will require you to visit an office, somewhere you likely have to take transportation to, during office hours (aka working hours), and provide documentation to prove this.
This isn't really unknown either. There's a very good story anyone can look up about Dr. V in India and what it took for him to actually get the eye care he wanted to provide to the people who needed it.
In the digital world many of us know you want to deeply understand your user and design with them in mind. Same thing here in the meat space.
I dont' know how you reached the "didn't work out well" conclusion, both metrics you mentioned were commensurate with systemwide metrics, meaning fare-free didn't have much of an impact on these routes. Ultimately, ridership increased
Ridership increasing doesn't make it a success. I read that New Yorkers who frequently used the bus system were asked what the city could do to make their experience better. Among those who were polled the top two complaints were that the buses were too crowded and often late. The free bus trial program made these two metrics worse - 30% more riders (aka even more crowded) and longer dwell times (aka more delays). The bus fare being too high was like number five or six on their list of things that riders cared about.
> We’re a quarter of the way through the 21st century, gas taxes have been optional for driving for quite a while now.
States mostly take the equivalent of those taxes out of vehicle registration fees for electric vehicles.
And bicycle usage is nearly a nil cost on the existing public roads, so the costs here would be appropriate to come out of the general sales/property taxes that fun the city/county. If anything you might argue to try to subsidize bicycle ridership more in urban areas, whether with bicycle paths or otherwise, to reduce the number of cars on the roads and reduce congestion for those still on the roads.
The cost of adding one more car to existing public roads is also essentially zero, as is the cost of adding one more rider to an existing bus route. Until you hit some tipping point and need to add more capacity, then it costs a lot. Bicycles can do that too, if a significant number of them shows up.
In any case, the point is that public transit riders pay fares. Not taxes, not registration fees, but fares. The equivalent for roads would be tolls. And it’s pretty uncommon to see any advocacy for charging tolls for all roads.
EVs pay a gas tax in the form of enormously more expensive registration in almost all states. I pay way more for my EV registration than I would have paid in gas tax.
> Registration is like $100 a year for "unlimited" access to roads. Quite a bit cheaper than a yearly unlimited transit pass.
But that's still "some of it".
> And electric cars don't pay a gas tax.
Electric cars' registration fees are much higher to make up for that, e.g., in New Jersey, you owe an extra $260 per year for an EV (which automatically goes up by $10 every year) vs. a gas car.
Exactly. The essay meandered, and didn't say much of note. It has vague illusions to personal choice and markets being detrimental. But that's it. Too many people feel entitled the control the choices of others. And yet they rarely accept equal control of their choices.
> "But an emphasis on choice as a form of liberation has occasioned serious resentments in different sectors and geographies, where it can seem a direct threat to other, more communal values and needs."
I think this quote sums it up nicely. Personal liberation is not a threat to mutually beneficial communal values. If you need to force people to behave as part of your community, then it should be voluntary. One should be able to choose to pursue any form of freedom or community they'd like. If you want freedom to be "an act of pure imagination" and live a communal lifestyle, you should have the choice.
Right, it performs exactly what perpetuates the problem the author has with the world, in failing to provide or enact any positive vision for how to make things better, and in projecting their own desires onto others as if they're an objective measure of how things ought to be. When I was a kid, I loved walking down the fucking cereal aisle. I personally don't understand why people are so into concerts and music festivals but my girlfriend loves them, and I don't see why they're any worse than the number of open source web libraries or discord channels that people in my demographic take joy in.
The one thing that truly made a difference for my own personal satisfaction was in realizing that inaction and despairing about society because of my own problems were a defense mechanism to justify what might happen if I tried to actually make things better, and either failed or became something I moralized against. Who gives a shit that there's too much cereal? What's actually making people unhappy is not enough of something else, or something missing in their lives that they can't find. Ultimately you either choose to do nothing or to try to make things better, and accept that inaction is itself a choice.
Exactly. The more suppliers are in a market, the more competition there is. Thus lower prices and a better selection. People don't like a monopoly is other areas of life. Healthcare is no different.
That YouTube channel is really great. Their older videos have a lot of lasers but they have expanded into many other subjects. I found them when searching about magnetohydrodynamics on YT. Highly recommended. I generally prefer consuming text but never have an issue sitting through their 30 minute long videos.
Recently they had a video about making very high performance thermal paste and were selling it, but three weeks later it still hasn't shipped and my email a week ago is unanswered. A shame, because their videos are still really great - I wanted to support them financially because the stuff they do is not cheap. But I guess selling a higher quality product for cheaper than the competitors isn't really a great monetization strategy. Meanwhile I had to settle for worse product at a higher price for my high power led project :(
Somehow I knew it was going to be Tech Ingredients based on the confluence of topics. At least now i know he's human haha.
(highly recommend the channel, shows you how to make everything from brilliantly colored smoke bombs to banana brandy to plasma tubes and peltier refrigerators in a fairly precise and clinical manner)
Very pretty but the intro looks like syrup and not chocolate which is what this post is about. I know that your link promises chocolate later but that's no good here 8)
A catastrophic health care plan has low premiums and high deductibles. You also get access to a tax advantaged savings account to save up for future events. So you can take the money you saved on premiums and pay for medical expenses tax free. Or let the money accumulate to cover future medical expenses or even retirement!