Cheap wants, expensive needs. This is our economy now.
"I love my iPhone, but I worry about health insurance." as I've heard it put here on HN.
Ironically, the Soviet system fell from opposite. Expensive wants, cheap needs. Everyone saw the West getting cheaper and cheaper consumer goods and central planning failed to keep up.
Once Perestroika liberalized their economy, they had distribution issues, sure.
But before then, housing, food, clothing all were cheap and available. The food was simple, the apartments small and the clothing dull, but it was all there and for very little cost.
But they liberalized their economy in order to compete on the consumer goods boom in the West. That desire for consumer goods had a big role in destabilizing the system.
And today, the converse desire for cheap staples and necessities in the face of intense asset inflation may be destabilizing our current system.
I suggest talking to some people who actually lived through the pre-perestroika era in the USSR.
Yes, there was generally clothing in stores. Whether there was clothing in your size (no matter what size you were; pretty much all normal sizes tended to be hard to find in practice) was a big gamble on any given day.
When you say "apartments were small"; I just want to make sure we understand that we're talking about things like a family of 4 living in a 16 sq meter room plus shared access to a small kitchen (this is personal experience here).
And note that if we're talking about smaller towns or villages the situation was different yet again: more living space, but running water might be a real problem. Heck, consistent hot water was a problem even in reasonably large cities.
The 80s brought their own set of problems, but it was not all rosy before that, by a long stretch. Saying "it was all there" elides the fact that what was there was quite poor quality, especially compared to what was available even just across the border in Romania, much less Western Europe or the US.
| Professional organizations such as the Endocrine Society recommend against puberty blockers for children who have not reached puberty, and recommend that patients be at least 16 years old before beginning hormone treatments for feminization or masculinization of the body. The last step in transitioning to another gender, gender reassignment surgery, is only available to those 18 and older in the United States.
No claim containing the string "is not recommended by anyone" will hold up, since eventually it's easy enough to find someone (probably a troll) who does recommend X practice.
That seems unnecessarily pedantic, since obviously it should be assumed to mean "not recommended by anyone who matters", but I've upvoted you for providing the source.
I was editing my comment with that exact link when you posted.
Mastectomies are performed for non-gender-related reasons, such as prophylactic mastectomies, so it's arguable whether that falls under the definition of SRS/GRS. For any reason, it is exceedingly, vanishingly rare in children.
It seems like an oddly small number to obsess over, especially considering over 8,000 non-trans teenagers between 13 and 19 receive breast augmentations each year.
From your link:
| the mean (SD) age was 19 (2.5) years for postsurgical participants and 17 (2.5) years for nonsurgical participants
Surgical patients would be the ones who are in the most danger of suicide or self-harm or for whom nonsurgical (hormone) treatment is not an option.
Also,
| Self-reported regret was near 0.
Here is the document that the report refers to as the standard for care for transgender patients:
> I paid little attention to what site that was on, just looked for the content.
Sometimes people lie on the internet.
And quite often, when they lie, they do so by omission or by inaccurately summarizing facts.
In any case, the two points in this thread are in agreement. Top surgery is "typically only available to those 18 or older," as 'john-radio wrote. In atypical cases, it is available to those under 18, and it requires a doctor to a) decide that it's necessary and b) consciously go against WPATH recommendations when doing so. The legal opinion here is that an insurer may not come up with a rule that says that doctors may never decide that it's the right thing to do for a particular patient, because that's a decision a doctor is allowed to make.
The point that you're missing is that when there is a demand, a supply tends to rise.
My child is smart enough to look for a doctor that is known to have evaluated cases on a "case by case basis" to provide the surgery that they want. As for how to find said doctor, if anyone in their online social network finds one, that information will be shared. In fact I would happily take an even money bet that my child would have no problem laying their hands on the name of such a doctor within 24 hours.
| The WPATH standards of care also state, however, that male chest reconstruction surgery for female-to-male
patients “could be carried out earlier” than the age of majority in certain cases, and ultimately should be considered on a case-by-case basis “depending on an adolescent’s specific clinical situation and goals for gender identity expression.”
What do you think that specific clinical situation was in those situations?
There is an awareness of power consumption of data centres.
Why not start marketing code to power consumption metrics?
What about fastest-to-market and above average code base = marketing argument? Or even scientific paper?
I think here is is also important to look at smaller companies and not only FAAG.
| a much smaller house, much less technology, a very cheap car or public transit, vanilla food, only a few suits of clothes, and bare bones health care.
You would have to be highly skilled to do that, the average worker couldn't get anywhere close to that lifestyle on 10-20 hours a week.
Right, but that's why we (ideally) put infrastructure costs under the control of an entity (the government) which doesn't have to operate within a system of profit and market competition.
Automated signatures work decently when the process is smooth. XCode integrates with your Apple ID to sign apps. Letsencrypt works for signing TLS certificates. HDCP works silently even for typical users.
I don't support HDCP or DVD-region-lock but they worked for the copyright owners without inconveniencing the users enough to affect the bottom-line. It's the technical users and hackers among us who have a problem with these.
I'm not looking forward to NFT everywhere for creatives, I'm saying I can see it happen. I don't want to sign every JPEG I edit but if the tools preserve the source signatures, it wouldn't really affect me.
Photoshop has had counterfeit detection system for over a decade. I'm sure Adobe would love to offer Getty + CS Cloud NFT-copyright integration if they can make it work. I'm sure they can come up with a catchy marketing name for it and build an ecosystem to license, edit, and distribute media with detailed tracking of every asset.
| It's bad now, but in the future it might be great?
Not be able to reverse transaction is not a feature, it's a fundamental flaw. There is absolutely no advantage to the consumer or the producer to have all transactions immediately permanent.
The rest of your comment reveals your bias: You don't really care about it working technologically, you just wish you had made money on it.
One aspect I'm fascinated with is the way that consumer goods are continually dropping in price offsets the increase in necessities. We get a supercomputer in our pocket for $40 a month, but rent has ballooned. We can have hundreds of video games for free but we'll never own a home. And so on. We all get wikipedia for free, but a college degree is painfully expensive in a world that doesn't let you apply for jobs on the strengths of self-education.
As someone on here said years ago, "I love my iphone but I worry about health insurance."
What good is cheap frivolities if the necessary building blocks of life are skyrocketing.
My dad's crusty friends refer to that as deflation for things you want, inflation for things you need.
Also official reasoning about housing costs ignores that there are huge variations in that prices people have to pay to house themselves. The focus on average market rates hides the reality on the ground.
"I love my iPhone, but I worry about health insurance." as I've heard it put here on HN.
Ironically, the Soviet system fell from opposite. Expensive wants, cheap needs. Everyone saw the West getting cheaper and cheaper consumer goods and central planning failed to keep up.
Now we get to see what happens.