glenra

In most other contexts, rich people being able to spend money for some good or service would simply induce more supply ultimately making the product cheaper and better for the masses as well. The rich get to be "early adopters" buying a product when it's expensive and not very good; the poor as "late adopters" get to buy a product that is cheaper and works better once the bugs have been worked out. So...why exactly are resources and talent considered "finite" when it comes to health care and shouldn't we maybe look at FIXING that rather than take it for granted?

Consider, say, food distribution: McDonalds has traditionally made far more money as a private business catering to the tastes of the poor and middle-class than any fancy restaurant ever made catering to the rich. Do fancy restaurants like Per Se "suck up all the resources" needed to cook and serve food? Does the existence of fancy restaurants hurt McDonald's by making it harder to find burger-flippers? And does McDonalds in turn "suck up all the resources" thereby making it harder for people in some other context to find and acquire food? If not, what makes healthcare so different?

Microsoft has been doing various flavors of mobile OS development since LONG before iOS or Android. The first release of Windows CE was back in 1996, roughly contemporary with PalmOS and Apple's NewtonOS.

To be fair to anyone so motivated: the word "public" wasn't necessary to the comment. Loud, substantial private funding for such an endeavor would presumably solve the problem just as well.

(They also might be thinking that "regulations around reporting" pose a substantial free speech issue.)

Oxygen masks definitely aren't unimpeachable good. Passenger oxygen mask systems are virtually never needed but have caused multiple fires that destroyed planes and killed people. They are an expensive complication without which plane travel would be better - the plane would be cheaper to build, there'd be more room and weight available for passengers or luggage, and we'd all save time on safety briefings from not having to hear instructions on how to do a thing that you certainly won't need to do.

The pilots need oxygen masks as a backup while they quickly descend to a safer altitude. Unless you're flying over the Himalayas and can't drop that low, the passengers should be fine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_oxygen_system#Incide...

> I was under the impression that masks don't protect you that much, they protect other people from you?

That claim has been made but is questionable. The masks were designed to reduce exposure to the wearer, not so much from the wearer.

It's a matter of physics: When you inhale the suction generated automatically pulls the mask tighter on your face such that the air you breathe in essentially all has to pass through the mask but when you exhale, not so much.

In designing a mask there is a choice between a finer mesh or a looser one. If you pick a very loose mesh - say, cotton gauze - then air is easy to push through when you exhale but so are virus particles. On the other hand if you pick a very tight mesh - say, N95 or better - then air is much harder to push through but exhaling forces the mask slightly away from the face such that moist potentially virus-laden breath puffs out the sides and top. This is why your glasses fog up when wearing an N95 - moist air is escaping out the top of the mask completely unfiltered. (You can find youtube videos demonstrating this process with cigarette smoke). Double- or triple-masking doesn't help either - that makes it even harder for air to pass directly through the masks so even more air pushes out the side and top instead.

If your N95 is VERY well fitted and the strap VERY tight - tight enough to make your ears hurt - you'll get less escape, but wearing a mask that way is sufficiently uncomfortable that almost nobody does it.

In short, an N95 does plausibly filter nearly all the air you breathe IN, but if you want to filter the air you're breathing OUT, you really should be wearing a cleanroom suit.

I have some on the ground experience with Chinese manufacturing and what I saw was fine - it was relatively low-paying transitional work people do for a few years when they're young - like working at McDonalds used to be here - before they move onto a better job. The conditions aren't great by our standards but it's a much better working environment (and better paying one) than the alternatives available in the region.

US concerns have largely been overblown outrage clickbait. At the peak of the hysteria Mike Daisey did an interview on NPR's This American Life based on a one-man show ("The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs") in which he claimed to have personal knowledge of how bad the conditions are at Apple factories. I saw his show and it seemed clear to me Mike Daisey was lying; it eventually did turn out he had invented and/or exaggerated most of the details and NPR had to retract the episode:

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/03/16/148761812...

Regarding Foxconn suicides: It's hard for us to wrap our heads around the sheer scale of Foxconn - the fact that one company in one area had more workers than the entire population of Wyoming throws off our intuitions! Even at its peak the suicide rate at Foxconn appears to have been lower than the suicide rate for China in general, much lower than the suicide rate for Chinese college students (the closest age group we have data on) and even less than the suicide rate for American college students. So there was nothing unusual in having that number of suicides given how many people lived and worked there. Did they put up fencing around one building? Yes, but we do that here too whenever one building or bridge or cliff becomes an attractive area for suicides. For instance, San Francisco right now is spending over 200 million dollars on an improved suicide barrier for the Golden Gate Bridge:

https://www.marinij.com/2020/08/26/golden-gate-bridge-suicid...

There is indeed a range of factory work. Some is unpleasant but most of it is quite pleasant. In particular electronics assembly tends to be on the more-pleasant end of the scale because electronics assembly is sensitive work. Our traditional idea of "sweatshops" - hot, dirty, sweaty, poorly-ventilated, poorly-lit work - was associated with a particular era of garment manufacturing. Electronics assembly is absolutely nothing like that and the reason isn't for the benefit of the workers, it's for the benefit of the product. Electronics assembly is done in rooms that are clean and well-lit and well-ventilated and temperature-controlled because if they weren't, the product wouldn't work. Circuit boards hate dust and moisture; companies get the best yield rate in terms of working product at the end of the line when the workers are comfortable and clean and there's no dust and they can see clearly what they are doing and they have the right tools available for the job.

So far as I could tell, the workers on the line were happy and comfortable.

Caveat: My personal up-close experience is limited to a couple medium-sized firms in Guangdong: IDT (Integrated Display Technology) and GSL (Group Sense Limited). IDT is the Chinese company that assembled LCD-containing products for Sharper Image under the house brand "Oregon Scientific" in the late 1990s-early 2000s. I worked with these companies as the QA representative of Pocket Science aka Pocket.com while they were building PocketMail products. In that capacity I talked to the assemblers and their managers and sometimes worked beside them on the assembly line.

PocketMail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PocketMail

GSL: http://www.gsl.com.hk/eng/e_about.asp

IDT: http://www.idthk.com/

Nearly all of your links are broken. I think you copy-pasted the text of links that had been truncated with a "...", where the part prior to "..." is not sufficient to constitute a valid web address. For instance, the link for Carvallo et al 2010 should be this, which resolves: https://medicalpressopenaccess.com/upload/1605709669_1007.pd...

..rather than this, which doesn't:

https://medicalpressopenaccess.com/up

...or perhaps the addition of one more competitor makes this area become known as "the ice cream district", pulling in ice-cream-seeking customers from surrounding areas and attracting complementary businesses, with the new competition and higher profile making all three shops more successful and better-known than they otherwise would be.

> I've never heard of green tea ice cream before.

Green tea ice cream is quite popular, you should try it! It used to be something you found mostly in Japanese restaurants but nowadays you can find it in grocery stores as well. Mr. Green Tea was one of the first big US suppliers, they've been prominent since the 1990s:

https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/28/dining/temptation-for-pur...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Green_Tea_Ice_Cream_Compan...

You could register the gun and make it fully legal to use under the NFA in which case yes, you could possess shells and even fire them. There's paperwork, but it's possible and some people do it. Um, here:

https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/operational-tank-for-sale-a...

(Making, say, a 50 caliber gun legal under the NFA is indeed somewhat more onerous than owning a shotgun. And a gun rights advocate certainly could care about trying to make it less so but they're not required to care about it because - as I said above - a tank doesn't count as "arms".)

> I'm saying if you punt on tanks, you aren't actually an absolutist about the right to bear arms.

Black's Law Dictionary defines the word arms as "anything that a man wears for his defense, or takes in his hands as a weapon."

The word "arms" in the right to keep and bear arms explicitly meant weapons that could be carried by a single infantryman. It was never about (and still isn't about) tanks, or cannon, or warships, or nukes. So no, you don't have to be committed to allowing tanks to be fully keen on the right to keep and bear arms.

(if you still doubt this, focus on the word "bear". You can't "bear" a tank, if anything a tank bears you.)

( https://www.buckeyefirearms.org/iii-what-arms-meant-circa-17... )

That said, it actually happens to be totally legal for private citizens to own a tank in most countries, including the US. They're expensive, get terrible gas mileage, probably not street-legal to drive on the freeway, unlikely to fit in your garage and the neighbors are bound to complain if you fire the main gun...but you totally could own one (and drive it around your own private property) if so inclined.

> if not for the FDA to come down on operations like Theranos, then who?

Theranos was committing fraud - selling investors a product that didn't exist. You don't need the FDA for fraud to be illegal, ordinary civil and financial law covers this.

If Theranos weren't defrauding investors and actually had a product that worked, it'd be up to the market to determine if that product were worth paying for. Since different customers have different risk profiles there's no one-size-fits-all best balance between safety, efficacy and cost - let people buy different products that choose different tradeoffs.

> Throwing a remote driver into a dangerous situation with no context sounds like a terrible solution to me.

We might be thinking of different situations. I'm mostly imagining a car or truck that does great on the freeway but poorly on surface streets or poorly on particular KINDS of surface streets or even particular KINDS of weather...and we KNOW this and can recognize those situations. The remote driver typically jumps in BEFORE the part that is actually dangerous.

This isn't a new problem - consider a big ship that delegates harbor navigation decisions to a harbormaster and/or tugboat, or a big plane that delegates final runway approach decisions or parking at the gate decisions to a control tower and/or local guy driving a tow vehicle or waving directional flags. You could slice the world up into "regions we can reliably navigate without help" versus "regions where we still need a little help", with the latter group shrinking over time as technology advances and maps get better and edge cases are better handled.

The initial product offering might be for long-haul truckers - the truck drives itself for hours on separated freeways and then throws to a handler when it needs to navigate unfamiliar local surface streets for a delivery. But once you've GOT that sort of infrastructure - basically a map with geofenced areas where remote drivers step in - it's a logical next step to make the help areas dynamic and mark slowdowns or detours due to an accident or a landslide or a cow on the road for similar handling.

95% of that job would not be stressful. I'd be more worried about it being boring...but then, so is normal in-person driving.

> Anything less than 100% FULL automation is MORE dangerous than manual driving, because the "driver" will almost certainly lack any situational awareness.

With enough reliable bandwidth a decent workaround is to have the system fall back to human control by someone other than the local driver. I'm imagining a Car Traffic Control Center where your onboard robot driver sees a situation it doesn't understand and throws control to a remote driver wearing a VR rig with your car's video feeds as input. The remote human driver assesses the situation, steers you carefully past the weird obstacle/issue then returns control to your robot.

A system where robots drive automatically, say, 95% of the time while human remote drivers handle special cases 5% of the time still seems like a big improvement over the status quo - there's a market for that.

Did you mean to imply we are consuming crude oil "orders of magnitude faster than [reserves are] produced"? Because that isn't true - the amount of oil "known reserves" is how much we've bothered to find and figure out to tap thus far, but whenever it seems like we might be running out we just go find and figure out how to produce more such that total known reserves are approximately stable-to-mildly-increasing.

Here's a plot of known oil reserves since 1980: https://www.indexmundi.com/energy/?product=oil&graph=reserve...

Does a similar plot exist for helium? My impression is that helium reserves are low because the world hasn't been trying very hard to increase the amount we capture as a proportion of the amount we could capture.

> If you're a "right" leaning person you probably want a smaller government that spends less and we never get that. For every reduction in law hundreds are added.

Actually, under Trump government finally did get smaller. Maybe not cheaper just yet but we absolutely DO have fewer laws today - a LOT fewer. Trump promised to repeal two laws for every new one and he basically did do that.

One way to measure the amount of regulation is by counting the number of pages in the Federal Register. In 2016 that metric hit an all-time high of over 95,000. Under Trump, it dropped to and has remained below 70,000.

https://cei.org/blog/trump-regulations-federal-register-page...

https://cei.org/blog/trumps-2018-deregulatory-effort-3367-ru...

Quote:

"Under Trump, there has also been a substantial reduction in the number of rules and regulations published within all those Federal Register pages.

The Federal Register closed out 2018 with 3,367 final rules in all. The only lower count was 3,281 under Trump a year ago, which was the lowest count since records began being kept in the mid-1970s."

Nope! In recent decades the violent crime rate has dropped in the US faster than the population has increased so the total number of crimes is actually fewer today than it was in 1990, even as a raw non-population-adjusted number.

My own theory is that as bad events get rarer they cross some threshold that makes them become more newsworthy when they do happen, so that we hear about them more, and salience bias - the fact that examples quickly come to mind - make us think it's happening more. This applies as much to hurricanes and mass shootings and "hate crimes" and violent crime in general as it did to shark attacks in the mythic "summer of the shark". Once the media has an existing narrative they can hang a story on (eg "it's just like Columbine!") they find it easy to report more stories like that, until eventually we all get sick of that topic and move on to something else.

I wonder if this article was inspired by a Blink Health press release? The article positions them as the obvious one to switch to if you still want automatic ordering/delivery and don't want to bother with in-person coupons or a doctor's visit: According to the article:

> "Blink Health, a drug-discount startup that pitches low prices on generic drugs, recently added a men’s health telemedicine offering that undercuts Hims and Roman, charging $6.95 for 10 sildenafil pills and $8.95 for a month’s supply of finasteride."

Except...I just went through their order form for finasteride and noticed that in addition to the charge for the pills there is also a 9.95/month "subscription fee", making the full price (after a first-month discount) "$18.90 per month with auto-refill."

Which is still a BIT cheaper than the other services, but not THAT much cheaper.

The framing of this article is weird. Keeps.com charges $25/month for finasteride; if we look that up on GoodRx it is ONE THIRD the regular retail price at CVS or Target or Rite-Aid or Walgreens. True, it's more than the secret with-special-coupon price nobody knows about, but since most people do pay the original overinflated retail price, those who patronize these services are saving money. They're perhaps not saving the most money they possibly could if they checked the GoodRx rankings every month, printed out those special coupons and stood in line...but that sounds like a lot of work.

An American getting struck by lightning might be on the order of a one-in-a-million annual risk, but it's still a really bad thing if it happens TO YOU, so it's sensible we minimize our risk by choosing not to go out on golf courses during thunderstorms or choosing to install lightning rods on church towers. (The low mathematical risk already prices in the fact that we take such measures - the risk level would be much higher if we didn't!)

Getting falsely accused of sexual impropriety may be a low risk (whatever the base rate might be), but it's still really bad if it happens TO YOU so it's sensible that we minimize our personal risk with relatively low-cost policies such as the Pence Rule. (Once again, the low risk already prices in the fact that some take some such measures - the risk would be much higher if they didn't.)

Terrorist attack basically doesn't ever happen (statistically speaking) while our attempts to prevent it via mechanisms like the TSA are absurdly costly to the point of sheer idiocy, but cheaper simpler policies like "don't swim where there have been recent shark sightings", "don't carry metal golf clubs around in a thunderstorm" and "don't put yourself at undue risk of false gossip or malicious attack" seem basically sensible and proportionate to the risk being addressed.

Somebody with poor eyesight and slow reaction speed is an unsafe driver but doesn't need any particular help loading/unloading from a car. A driver who can help unload is a fine thing, but having somebody drive just so they can help unload seems like a ridiculous waste of resources. A car is ready whenever you need it; a car-and-driver might not be. And yes, you could schedule a car-and-driver to be available at a particular time...but you could similarly schedule somebody to be available to load/unload at the destination.

My guess is that a lot of the 17 are just adding color or confirming individual parts that don't add up to the whole. For instance, they must have had at least one source who told them about the factory with chinese-speaking workers that orders chinese pastries instead of donuts and has separate meetings/announcements for people who don't speak English. Those details help sell the article - and help create an impression that innocuous immigrant workers who enjoy delicious bright yellow pastries are some kind of nefarious 5th column - but do absolutely nothing to establish the central claim. If they had 3 sources on the donuts-and-meetings thing and include those in the 17 that only leaves 14 for the important stuff, and so on. Dial in far enough and I bet there's only one or two dubious sources for the big picture, while everyone else is in their own little information silos not knowing anything but their own part.

The entire article reads like a blog post. It obviously wasn't written by a news writer or edited by a news editor - there are grammar issues and tonal issues and sourcing issues.

Does the BBC now have something like the Fortune "Contributor's Network" - a group of random bloggers who get to write under their domain as if they were BBC writers, weakening the brand but bringing in more click revenue? That'd be my guess as to what's happening here.

Regarding just the first sentence example:

> In this case, there are 86 lead authors from 39 countries, of which 39% are female.

The sentence structure suggests it's the countries rather than the authors who are female. The clause is misplaced and "of which" applies to things not people ("of whom" would have been better). Basically the writer wanted to cram in a bit of extra information, couldn't figure out where or how to do so gracefully and grammatically, yet stuck it in anyway.

> I'm on the lookout for more right-leaning podcasts that balance this out a bit...Other ideas?

If you want news, politics and culture from a perspective that is libertarianish and/or right-wing-ish, try:

* The Fifth Column - An editor of Reason Magazine + friends discuss news once a week

* Penn's Sunday School - Libertarian/atheist/skeptic magician Penn Jillette + comedian friends discuss news

* Coffee with Scott Adams - Will amusingly discuss from a "persuasion" frame why whatever Trump just did/said is, like, totally awesome and you just didn't get it :-)

* The Ben Shapiro Show - A very-Jewish conservative anti-abortion pro-Israel take on the news

* Honey Badger Radio - Outrage from a female-led Mens Rights Activist / anti-feminist perspective.

(To balance that last one: if you want outrage from an explicitly PRO-feminist perspective try Feminist Frequency. )

> I think I've seen at least a prototype Waymo car (it was exhibited in the Computer History Museum) that was designed without the steering wheel and pedals for a human to use. That wouldn't work so well given that the car might pull over and be unable/unwilling to drive anymore.

It'd be fine - you just need to have some backup option. A small joystick or two behind some panel, or screen control, or perhaps you control the car with a phone app. It's like having an emergency spare tire - you just need a minimal driving UI that can be used in case of emergencies but users otherwise don't need to see or deal with. It can be inconvenient and speed-limited, since you don't expect to use it much.

Though if there's decent connectivity an obvious intermediate option is remote operation. Some human who is really good at driving might take over for a bit, driving your car from the comfort of their own home or office if you're not comfortable doing so yourself using the backup control pad.

> What's wrong with 10 companies working together to try 10 different things, then eliminate the poorer performing ones, increasing resources on the better ones, until there's 1 winner they've all agreed on?

Isn't that exactly what the market does? The company that is doing a better job makes more money which increases that company's available resources to improve the product and sell more of it, while the companies that are doing a worse job tend to make less money and eventually give up and do something else.

Apple tends to enter a business when they have a clear competitive edge based on features other companies aren't providing. They will putter around refining a new technology for a while in the labs without selling it then eventually find there either is or isn't a clear window for them to sell something great that does something existing products don't do. If the window is there, they jump in with both feet. If not, they go back to the drawing board and putter some more.

Companies working separately will automatically try different things, because separate companies have different strengths and different understandings of the problem space. Absent the kind of cooperation you want there's just about zero chance that Microsoft, Apple and Google would all be doing or attempting "the exact same thing". They're attempting different things, with different odds of success.

Competition is a discovery process; if we knew the right answer ahead of time we might not need it. Having ten companies try ten different strategies is likely to find the right answer - the product that best fits our current set of technical/financial/social constraints - faster than having ten companies get together and hold joint meetings trying to get cooperation on ONE strategy only to discover it doesn't work, so they hold more meetings to convince the group to try ANOTHER strategy, discover it doesn't work either...until decades have passed. Attacking this kind of challenge serially instead of in parallel, by the time they have something that works the problem domain is likely to have entirely changed.

And sure, independent companies competing might all fail - some problems just can't be solved - but the odds of success are better. It's like the difference between having a dozen archers all aim arrows at a target, versus having the dozen archers all try together to cooperatively fire one arrow at the target.

The Scandinavian countries that are doing the best economically today had their best economic growth when they were relatively free market/capitalist. So maybe if you grow enough prior to turning more socialist it can take a long time for socialist impulses to cause society to eat all the seed corn and starve?

That's the "...and then a miracle occurs" theory of economics.

Keep in mind that Uber solved a HUGE REAL PROBLEM that cabs didn't - Uber cheaply serves neighborhoods where it was previously near-impossible to get a cab. Increasing "minimum standards" tends to make it illegal to serve low-income communities. Just as high "minimum standards" on housing price low-income people out of the housing market, high "minimum standards" on transit jobs price low-income people out of the transit market. The market alternative here is illegal "gypsy cabs" which also didn't provide unemployment insurance or a minimum wage income.

It actually is the same as killing Uber. Paying a guaranteed above-minimum-wage plus benefits would kill Uber's business model and either drive the company out of business or force it to act just like the cab companies. Either way, many customers and Uber drivers would be worse off.

Suppose I'm a spare time Uber driver. On the weekends I sit at home, comfortable on my own couch watching TV. Outside of "surge" times I only answer calls that seem REALLY CONVENIENT to take, like people traveling from my own block. When somebody within a few blocks of me wants a ride, I pause the TV, jog out to the car and take the fare, then work for a bit, eventually ending with a fare that takes me close to home again.

That business model is great for customers because the car they need is ALREADY NEARBY so they get a much quicker response. It's great for drivers because they can spend more time at home and have the flexibility to stop whenever or as often as they want, which makes it more compatible with family responsibilities - say, taking the afternoon off to look after a sick kid.

If the firm has to cover unemployment insurance, they cannot afford to let people just work whenever they feel like it and work from any location they want. If the firm has to pay a minimum wage while you've got the app running, they're not going to let you run the app while sitting on the couch all afternoon only taking the few jobs that happen to suit your fancy. You have to work X hours per day to cover the insurance premiums and every hour working has to have a certain number of fares per hour to cover the minimum wage guarantee. That turns it back into a micromanaged standard wage-slave job rather than a flexible opportunity to make a little side money on your own schedule.