The Netherlands has a system with both not-for-profit and for-profit insurers, that works reasonably well.
- Transparent, identical rules for minimum coverage and strict rules on minimum and maximum deductible for all insurers and insurees.
- Mandatory coverage for everyone (just like liability insurance is mandatory for cars in the US)
- Insurers do not have the right to refuse any applicants based on pre-existing conditions
- Insurers directly negotiate with hospitals on rates. Emergency care has to be covered regardless of whether hospitals are in network or not.
The Dutch model is a useful counterexample to the argument that you need a single-payer structure to contain costs. Netherlands uses regulated private insurers with community rating and risk equalization, yet achieves per-capita spending well below the US (roughly $7,200 vs. $14,570 in 2023 OECD data). The direct insurer-hospital negotiation you describe is also how Germany's sickness funds operate.
The US equivalent would be all-payer rate setting. Maryland has run a statewide all-payer hospital rate system since 1977 with documented cost containment. Issue #3 of this series focuses on a lighter-weight near-term version: capping commercial hospital payments at 200% of Medicare (already used by Montana Medicaid and thousands of self-insured employers). The Dutch model shows a stronger structural fix is feasible. The question is political path, not technical feasibility.
I would say that gambling with skill component is still gambling. For example, in blackjack you can limit your losses by following a basic strategy, which is a 2x2 matrix with rows containing the value of your hand and columns containing the open dealer card.
If you can obtain an edge through a skill component (card counting in blackjack), some people wouldn't call this gambling anymore, but I would still call it gambling myself. Someone doing this for a living is a professional gambler.
What for me would be a sensible definition is that a bet/gamble has no other goals. Putting money in the bank/investing in a stock reallocates capital, which can be invested by someone. The fact that it is a risk-taking endeavor is merely a side effect. I would say the same goes for selling/buying insurance for your car.
So for me, the difference between betting and putting money in the bank/investing is that the primary goal is something different than the risk-taking activity.
Does this not boil down to the distinction being one's intent? I play poker occasionally, for example, and my primary goal is to win money not to take risk. Does that make it meet your definition of investing rather than gambling?
Well you're not committing the money to purchase an asset that will generate returns, so no, it's not "investing".
It would be more accurate to say you're working, really: spending time and effort to earn money. Though the "work" here, assuming you're a skilled poker player sitting with lesser-skilled marks, is similar to a crypto bro performing a rug pull. You're enabling other participants to gamble in the hope of an uncertain win, while they actually are pretty much guaranteed to lose in a zero-sum game where the house will always earn its keep.
One could say that if everybody else at the table is gambling and you're working, it's still gambling. Lunch is lunch, whether you're the customer, the chef, or the lamb.
In poker the asset I invest in is just very short term - a single hand. I put money in when I expect the asset of that hand to pay off, risking the money a bit like an even shorter term day trade.
I don't think this thread is the best place for the everlasting debate on whether day trading is "investing", but for the purposes of my definition above, day trading, like other kinds of trading like buying commodities for resale, or having a booth at the flea market, would fit my definition of "work" (you purchased something that you expect to generate profit from by putting in your time and effort) rather than investment, since the poker hand is not doing anything by itself to generate value/money/returns for you.
What is needed is an alternative storage that minimizes capex, even if that means operating at lower round trip efficiency. Hydrogen or ultra low capex thermal storage.
If that value is recognized in a beneficial way (such as unlocking loans against it or using it as collateral at a specific recognized amount of value) it should be taxed at the point of value recognition for the amount of benefit recognized.
I think this would work for the summer months. Overnight storage is manageble/cost-effective by load shifting/battery storage/etc. This is now estimated at about $100/MWh ($0.10/Kwh).
Seasonal storage is a completely different story. For my own panels, production in Nov/Dec/Jan is about 20% of that in Apr/May/Jun, and this is typical. That means that you either need 15x solar capacity of what you need on a sunny day, or enough storage to bridge those 3 months, two orders of magnitude storage more than we would need to store electricity overnight.
Or some combination of the two. Obviously sounds expensive but 20 years ago this would have been fiction. I think it’s entirely likely that energy storage and production will continue to fall enough in price to make this realistic.
They are indeed fair. The strongest poker bots are not AI in the way it is commonly defined. From my understanding they calculate the nash-equilibrium for a simplified game and extrapolate that to the full game.
In the Netherlands, there is street charging everywhere. It is indeed a bit more expensive if you do not have a dedicated parking place, but not more complicated. By law, public charging has to be available in 'reasonable walking distance' from any EV owner. 'Reasonable walking distance' is defined by muncipalities, and tends to be higher in rural areas. Therefore it varies between a maximum of 150-500 meters depending on municipality.
Netherlands is a rather rich country even by european standards.
Here where I live people sometimes struggle to park their car in a 2km radius from their home and there are like 4 public street charging outlets in a 4-5km radius. We might eventually get there but it will take a while.
Normally a long payback time is fine, but I would expect that in ~5 years, faster charging will be prevalent and the current chargers will already be obsolete, or at least less popular.
The Netherlands has a system with both not-for-profit and for-profit insurers, that works reasonably well.
- Transparent, identical rules for minimum coverage and strict rules on minimum and maximum deductible for all insurers and insurees. - Mandatory coverage for everyone (just like liability insurance is mandatory for cars in the US) - Insurers do not have the right to refuse any applicants based on pre-existing conditions - Insurers directly negotiate with hospitals on rates. Emergency care has to be covered regardless of whether hospitals are in network or not.