rdmcfee
rdmcfee on Hacker News
A single payer system is a step in the right direction, however, there are deeper issues with the American healthcare system.
The unit cost of healthcare is so much higher than in other developed countries.
In British Columbia, physicians bill at total of around $31 CAD ($23 USD) for a standard office visit. They pay all their overhead out of this fee. Typically doctors keep 65% of their billings and the offices take 35% for overhead. From what I can tell, a similar visit in Washington State will run between $60 and $200 USD when billed to insurance.
Why is this the case? What are the factors in the American system that prevent reasonable pricing?
http://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/health/practitioner-pro/med...
The title is misleading. The tax is apparently 1% of property value. $10,000 would be the tax on a $1M home.
There are two core issues with nutrition science.
The first issue is that it's extremely difficult to run a long term controlled study on nutrition. Adherence to diet interventions is difficult to measure and it drops off over time. As a result most nutrition studies are epidemiological cohort studies which are not particularly good at determining causality.
The second issue is a question of funding. Diet and exercise interventions are not something that are typically monetized be the pharmaceutical industry. As such there is little private sector funding going into nutrition studies. Couple that with the fact that they're extremely expensive and you have a serious deficit in studies.
There is already some process available to measure this as Canada has tax deductions available specific to your "primary residence". CRA definitely has a way of auditing this. Sharing that information with a provincial level organization may not be possible, though.
But you pay interest on your leverage. So if your asset isn't appreciating faster than inflation + your interest rate then I don't think you're actually realizing any gains.
Except your mortgage interest may also be 3% so you may realize nothing on your investment.
Your interest costs will be proportional to your leverage so you need the asset to outperform your interest rate to realize anything.
We Vancouverites are spoiled. I just finished an 18 month stint in the Bay Area. One of the biggest inconveniences was the driving time (especially with traffic) to get to the mountains.
In Seattle now and it's a great compromise. Similar wages to the Bay Area but similar geography and outdoor access as Vancouver. And even with the exchange rate housing is cheaper than Vancouver.
One thing that stood out to me is that immigration from Canada nearly stopped altogether in the mid 1890s. I wonder if the klondike gold rush was a factor here. I know it spurred a mass migration to the North.
As a collateral effect, even Vancouver's population skyrocketed growing from around 13,700 in 1891 to over 100,000 in 1911.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Vancouver#Popu...
The more time I spend in this industry the more I realize how many software engineers leave salary on the table.
It's great to see a tool like this which both encourage software engineers to negotiate their salary, and help them strengthen their bargaining position.
Sure, the correlation is statistically significant. Without a control to infer causality the results become much less interesting.
To infer causality in an epidemiological study such as this you need very large cohorts with very specific results.
Even with huge cohorts you still have relatively indefensible results. The 7 country study is a good example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Countries_Study
It's an interesting hypothesis but unfortunately a cohort study with no randomized control and n=236 isn't really meaningful. There's no control at all here and the sample size is tiny.
I believe that some startup founders/execs have optimized for valuation at the expense of costly liquidation preferences for late stage investors.
Maybe it's more a lack of access to modern scientific knowledge than 'craziness'.
I'm a big fan of personal experimentation but it's important to always be skeptical of your own n=1 conclusions.
In this particular case, coinciding the interventions of your diet change and exercise regiment make it very difficult to know the respective contribution of each to your results.
Interesting anecdotes nonetheless.
I hope this will continue to be supported as I'll be including it in my projects going forwards.
Great marketing for a competing product. Has anyone tried ketosoy? I suppose the obvious first question is: How does it taste?
Does it not seem possible that many of the factors leading to this gender grouping are influenced by biological age? For example, research shows that our brains are hugely influenceable until our mid to late 20's. At that point major pathways have been established which influence our thinking for the rest of our lives.
What if we counter aging such that people never leave their peak physical condition? (25 years old?)
Will they still group by the generation in which they were born?
This kind of innovation is cool, but it's a zero sum game. The bitcoin markets are already driven by competing bots. Their profits will be reduced as other bots iterate on their algorithms.
I think this is a complex issue. I suspect that like with cars, many of these folks would have the option to buy a used item which is equally as functional for something like 20% of the price of a new item. Again, like cars, household items depreciate extremely rapidly.
There's clearly some blame to go around. Better public education on financial decision making would help. The companies providing this type of financing could alter their business model or screening processes.
Also, it seems that many lower income individuals strive to own new items because it portrays financial success even if it results in the opposite.
Electric vehicle owners use more electricity, in addition to the electricity they use for charging.
Perhaps electric vehicle owners are in a higher income bracket and have larger houses.
With the accelerating change in the earth's magnetic field it would be fantastic to drop a few of these bad boys and see what's actually going on down there.
Sun Burn = Radiation Burn
Only this year did BC announce they would remove legislation which outlawed having happy hour specials.
In addition to having similar liquor license quotas, British Columbians pay a markup of 123% for wine and 170% for spirits. Our provincial liquor board generates $1.2B per year from a population of only 4.5 million people. There are different dynamics here as we have public health insurance. Liquor and tobacco sin taxes are a form of pre-payment on future healthcare expenses of heavy consumers.
Yeah it's interesting how ancient cultures seemed to have (by trial and error I suppose) incorporated specific behaviors into their culture which, in hindsight, solve a particular problem that can be scientifically identified.
An example I love is the Canadian Inuit who traditionally ate no vegetables for 10+ months of the year without developing scurvy. The tradition of eating raw whale blubber and fish (including the broth) preserved the vitamin C and minerals from the mea, while eating cooked meat without broth drastically reduces mineral and vitamin intake.
Probably easier to just take an insulin sensitivity test or get your Hb A1C tested.
I don't know that the biological benefits of fasting are associated directly with cultural fasting patterns in our ancestry.
I suspect they're more linked with our ancestral hunter-gatherer traits. It seems logical that early humans would go periods of time without eating while hunting, then consume a large amount of protein and fat in a short period of time.
Religious and cultural fasting, however, would likely have not occurred until the development of language which is estimated at 20k-50k years ago. That's not a particularly long time on an evolutionary scale.