I’m thinking more of paying people on the margin or of some kind on tax system that compensates for inequality a bit.
Not fully worked out, but consider: suppose there are 100 people in the population, and a bunch of them are ambivalent between tech work and jobs like hairdressing. If tech work paid 10% more than hairdressing, some would do tech work and some would cut hair. If tech work paid 200%, then maybe there would be too many applicants and the employers would reduce wages. (I’ve occasionally contemplated that perhaps one reason that the big Silicon Valley employers pay so much is kind of anticompetitive: they can afford it, so they might as well, because it makes it more expensive to compete with them.)
Or alternatively, imagine if taxes were structured so that owning more than one house were highly discouraged (with appropriate provisions to make owning properties to rent them out make sense, which is something that a lot of legislators get wrong), and if permitting to build houses were not absurdly restrictive, then many different jobs with very different salaries would could still result in having enough income to afford to live in approximately one house. Some might afford two (!), and some might afford one that is much fancier than someone else’s, but if the pressure that makes someone like a hairdresser need to compete against a highly paid tech worker to pay for a similar house went away, the situation could be much improved.
(California, like many places, has strictly too few residential units in the places that people want to live, so just adjusting prices won’t help much.)
I've read a lot of Holmes recently, and while I'm not a man, I do think Doyle portrays Holmes' issues in a way that is relatable.
Holmes core thing though is that he has an almost ADHD-esque craving for novelty and tolerance for risk taking. He also can't stand not actively working on things, and when he's not working is when he's depressed. He doesn't seem to know how to actually feel good, but he knows how to be useful, thus his penchant for productivity boosters like cocaine.
He's a great character, but I wouldn't over pathologize him according to today's understanding of mental health. Doyle was a physician and gave Holmes various traits similar to what he had seen in his patients.
> ...when he's not working is when he's depressed.
The cure for that is known since dawn of time - walking.
Holmes, being an exceptionally observant man, definitely would observe that walks raise the mood, allow for (most often silly) ideas to come and, last but not least, increase observation capabilities, attention to details and speed of thought.
Arthur Conan-Doyle did an extensive walks back then, but his hero was written to not to. This is not right.
As I recall Holmes did in fact do a lot of walking. He vacillated between periods of inactivity(cocaine, violin, shooting V in wall with a revolver) and intense activity (taking up disguises and doing various physical activities including walking all across London and elsewhere.
Just because your logical mind says one thing is good to do and you know you should do it you are not going to always obey your rider, the inertia of the elephant takes over.
So you need a trigger to snap out of it, for Holmes it was a new case.
AFAIR those had a specific purpose (chasing a perp, tracking down evidence, etc.). Most of his thinking he did sitting in a chair and smoking his pipe for hours on end (sometimes the whole night).
He was a physician and had said that his experience treating patients influenced his characters. So, he had more than academic experience, but I'm not sure if it's enough to prove he experienced those things personally.
Can't read the whole article, but am curious about how it will impact unlicensed childcare operations. I imagine that the number of parents using these is much higher than many people realize. Will be interesting to see how many parents end up using the state program.
Until very recently in human history 100% of childcare operations were unlicensed, and this was better in every way than a government bureaucracy run system.
I'm not knocking it. My parents didn't use licensed daycare for preschool for me or my sister. Just dropped us off at some old lady's house and paid her cash for watching us. 99% of arrangements like that work out fine. It may be suboptimal, but usually it's at least fine.
I'm actually wondering if the program will make a big dent though. One issue with formal childcare arrangements is that the hours tend to not be flexible. Parents who have to work til 6 some nights, or who have nontraditional work schedules in general may not be better served by the state's option.
It may be suboptimal, but what isn't? The problem here is assuming that the expensive bureaucratic credential based system is optimal or even better at all. "Everybody knows $SOME_NEIGHBOR and she's great with kids" is just a much better indicator of quality in child care than "$SOME_DAYCARE is licensed by $SOME_BUREAUCRACY."
Also, I'm not even against state support for parents needing childcare, but giving $500 a month to each parent who needs it to find childcare in an informal system will actually be much better than a state run system that spends $2000 per kid.
Until recently, you had personally known everyone, for years, who you might hand your child off to for a few hours.
We have things like licensing because we're handing off our children to perfect strangers, and want some level of assurance that it's not going to be a disaster.
We are only handing them off to complete strangers because the informal system has been driven underground by laws that only allow the state licensed bureaucratic monopoly. If state licensing was optional and people were allowed to run neighborhood businesses I bet you would see something very different.
I dunno -- it's not like you know people in your neighborhood the way humans used to know members of their tribes. And I've known people in the neighborhood who seemed totally normal and safe, and then got arrested for something shocking. We're not spending all day long with even our next-door neighbors, let alone the ones five blocks away.
Having standards in training, operation, and oversight of childcare seems just as important as safety standards in the food supply. Even though everybody cooks at home, you're not allowed to run a restaurant without certifications and inspections either. And thank goodness.
I'm sorry, America hasn't been Mayberry since the 1950s, and it never will be again. Most of us live in towns with more than just a post office, so this Norman Rockwell-esque fantasy of just dropping your kid off with the nice housewife next door is not just dead, it's starting to smell really bad.
Even with the terrible state of education in most nations, that is a patently untrue sentence at least in the fact that poor people can have access to education at all.
I didn't say anything about school. This article is about childcare for children below school age. But basic education is also actually quite cheap and easy to provide. Abraham Lincoln was educated in a one room school house. We have made it expensive by turning it into a bureaucratic nightmare with administrators, school boards, lawyers, and PTAs, when all you really need is a few good teachers who are given the authority to set and enforce high standards.
"until very recently" includes pre-industrial times to my understanding when education did not exist in an organized fashion for the poor.
[edit] And in what world is Abraham Lincoln considered "the poor" for his times? I am sure you can come up with some less fortunate people during the same times which didn't really get the experience of that one room schoolhouse.
The world is quite a lot bigger than Illinois though.
And it seems I need to spell it out for you, right there in the US during the same times, children of black people in the south didn't get access to education[1]. Serfdom was a thing in Europe until the early 1900, serfs children didn't get access to proper education[2]. I'm giving you a link to Russian education, but the whole of Eastern Europe was at a similar level. I don't know what kind of rose tinted cool aid you guys have been drinking.
Reminds me a lot of AirConsole, which I once had a subscription to.
But ultimately it all comes down to the game quality and how buggy it is. If people can't submit their answer or reconnect, that wears down support. But people tolerate jackbox's absolutely terrible system because the games are great.
My Father-in-law resisted smart phones for much longer than most, but he's had an android phone for a couple years now and it's really cool how much he's adapted it to his own personal use style. Nobody showed him the "usual" way to do things so he made his own system of sorts.
He almost never uses search or menus for anything. Instead he has a bunch of home screens that he customized with quick links. Like he has one for each of his children with a one shortcut to text them, one to call, one to send a Facebook message, one link to their Facebook profile, and a note with special dates (birthdays, anniversaries) for each so he can remember to call them then. He's got another home page he has for stuff related to the Marines, websites and meme pages, etc.
He's very meticulous with getting everything exactly how he wants it, and is so proud to show it off. Sometimes he still needs help (last time I was there he asked me to help him set "Battle Hymn of the Republic" as his ring tone), but I'm honestly really impressed with how well he's adapted.
Meanwhile another older family member handed me their phone to fix, and it's completely unusable from malware that's highjacking everything they try to click, then they try to install something else to fix it themselves and somehow add even more malware. Took me like half an hour to track everything down and disable it so it was usable again, couldn't convince him to factory reset it. We had a nice long chat about installing things after that. I can't imagine he used anything other than the playstore, but man, it was wild.
I think it's normal for the parents to resent the NHS for this, but from what I've read about about patient experiences, many US doctors believe "chronic lyme" is not a real diagnosis, and that TDOT blood test she took is not standard of care, so private insurers, wouldn't cover it either. So in the US, a patient would likely end up paying up to their deductible for all those tests that ruled out other things, and then still pay out of pocket for a specialist. I'm open to hearing otherwise, but just because the NHS experience was bad, doesn't give me confidence that the average US experience isn't also bad.
> The article makes several points about how the US medical establishment, including the US government, is doing better in this regard than NHS.
It claims that "US government agencies are taking tick-borne disease much more seriously", and that may be their words, but I challenge you to point to actions which support them. It also doesn't mention that Trump administration actions have decreased and destabilized overall federal support environments (NIH/CDC) that fund tick-related disease research.
I have a friend who's gone through a similar years-long journey with his daughter. In Silicon Valley, at least, the medical establishment spent years trying to gaslight the family about their daughter's symptoms.
I agree, much of what we knew about the USG position on health care research has recently been called into question, and so it may already be that the author's contention is untrue.
But on the flip side, the problem they describe with the NHS -- namely, that no means no, is less likely to happen in the US. And I think suggesting that there is just one 'medical establishment' in Silicon Valley is painting with far too broad a brush.
Our problem is probably more with particular insurance companies (UHC is so egregious, it is hard to be surprised that so many people were not horrified when their CEO was gunned down in broad daylight). But at least you can easily pick a new provider.
It sounds more fair to pay people according to how much and how hard they work, but economically it tends not to work out.
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