rwissmann

Getting timely, accurate data from the insurance companies on this intuitively feels hard. What are the guarantees around those APIs? There are so many path-dependent factors, like outstanding claims, readjudication of old claims, or "revenue optimization" games on the backend.

Happy to connect if it would be helpful for you!

How do you handle the interaction with insurance plan information like accrued deductible? Certainly aims to guarantee the patient responsibility, right?

Love to see innovation in this space!

The challenge of not knowing what other services might end up being done seems daunting from a UX perspective. Hopefully you guys can find a solution.

(I was early on the Data team at Oscar Health, so have more than my fair share of experience with thorny health care pricing data.)

You are actually largely in agreement with the author of the article. It just takes a a while to get there (and criticizes those conclusions from a slightly different angle).

You can get to big numbers on global capital markets, for sure. I was wondering whether you a consulting/VC-style estimate given how specific the statements was: "Smart Markets hold the potential to eliminate that loss" of "at least a trillion dollars annually".

How do you think about it? Let's say we expect half the benefit to come from equities.

>> 0.5T / 125 T = 0.004

>> Smart Markets would need to raise portfolio returns by an average of .4% (net of trading costs) annually.

Exciting implementation of a really cool concept.

> Today's market structure costs institutional investors (and by extension households) at least a trillion dollars annually (and Smart Markets hold the potential to eliminate that loss).

How does one get to this estimate? That is ~5% of US GDP. Everything else was easy to follow - this seemed high, at least intuitively.

ORMs are pretty terrible for anything to do with analytics or data science, for example.

Stalin's military lacked in organization, tactics and strategy due to the purges and was surprised by Operation Barbarossa's timeline, but it was well armed and well equipped. Case in point being the Soviet tank forces, which were much more numerous and advanced than German intelligence had suspected.

The population's ability to bear sacrifices and Stalin's willingness - matched by Hitler's - to sacrifice millions of civilians alongside the soldiers were instrumental, but it certainly was the military - rather than civilian resistance - that ultimately broke the German war machine.

Fairly sure that is indeed a typo, in particular given how F+ is introduced a few lines above.

There has been no large scale war between major powers since WWII, let alone between the world's leading superpowers.

If you want to enact change, you have to use whatever means is appropriate.

In a democratic country that is supposed to uphold human rights, public acts such as these can have a strong positive impact.

In an autocratic country such as china, the impact would be zero. Often, limited engagement can have a better impact.

I agree with everything but the last paragraph.

As much as I would like it to be different, we are still at least one or two decades away from an effective European deterrent against Russian aggression. If only because of our inability to coordinate decisive responses and our unwillingness to pool military resources in a European army, rather than split them into national militaries with incredibly amounts of redundancy and ineffectiveness.

A countries sovereignty has exactly zero to do with whether or not the are foreign military bases on their soil...

They likely already record and store all the necessary data (and more) in order to build out people's listener profiles.

Pools of money is not really a relevant metric. They collect all the subscription premiums and pay a portion of them out according to their contractual agreements.

Pay(artist_i) = 0.7 * sum_j [ premium(viever_j) * ratio_ji ]

is not that much harder to do.

I agree that auditing would be more complicated, but usually one does selective audits anyway. I doubt this would be a show stopper.

The confusion on the receivers' side would increase massively though. As someone else has pointed out, there would be a lot less correlation between #plays and payout.

(To be clear, I have no real opinion on whether this would be a better schema.)

Yes, the article really missed this point.

One could also mentioned some sort of tiered payout scheme or a non-linear minimum after a certain amount of plays plus a percentage above that. Likely something that Spotify will experiment with over the years.

Germany had anemic economic growth about 15-20 years ago. After hard political fighting these sort of reforms were enacted.

Competition is global. Greece is not just not competitive with Germany, but also with China, the US, Japan, Australia, ... . That is the real problem.

15-20 years ago Germany was the sick man of Europe. Labour market reforms in line with an industrialization boom in Asia restored the competitiveness of her industrial economy.

The real problem with this argument is that they are too short-sighted. Germany cannot artificially reduce its competitiveness to appease other EU countries, because competition happens on a global stage and so the EU would simply lose out further to North America and Asia.

Your are correct that Germany should spend more on infrastructure.

Thank you for sharing this.

While reading the summary and the paper abstract, I thought this was all way overstated and trivially so. Glad to see someone professionally working in quantum computing thinks so, too.

The paper furthermore appears to rely on specific interpretations of quantum mechanics.

In the Many-Worlds Interpretation, the computing apparatus itself 'grows' exponentially over time.

"therefore there is selection pressure for longer (reproductive) life spans"

this is too simplistic. there is also selection pressure for shorter generational cycles, leading to faster evolution. keeping older generations around would consume extra resources.

The majority of rocket technology was fuelled by and developed because of WWII and the Cold War.

Plus, from a quick glance, it looks like in-sample data with optimisation of parameters around scaling and holding periods.

Fee-less trading on in-sample data. You can get the same return on futures markets with that.

Precisely. As a small, personal investor the last thing you is to make frequent trades thinking that you can beat the market- unless it is your toy money.

Wealthfront and others are making the stock market better for individual investors, retirement savers, and so on. This to the contrary appears like stressing the gambling aspect of it.

I would love to be wrong, but it is hard to see how this will make markets better and not lose people a lot of money. (Provided they don't 'pivot' in the future.)

Instagram was a steal (and Google fucked up).

WhatsApp was pricey, but that was driven by defensive strategy rather then pure financials.

Nice catch. However, Labcorp has almost no revenue and profit growth in an increasingly competitive industry. A valuation at 15.5x LTM profit does not seem unreasonable.

Comparing the valuation of a growing startup with a stagnant incumbent is always going to look strange if you only consider a snapshot of financial numbers.

Until you have reached a very large subset of all available information, more data allows you to make better predictions. Period. That is as true for machine learning as it is of the human brain.

You often want your models to also perform well when you have fewer data points. Those are two separate - if in effect related - design goals.

Actually, in many countries the courts are much more reasonable with regards to interpretation and application of the law. Not just that, but they care about balance between intent of the law, effect and means.

There is no way that say in Germany today the police could get away with trying to induce and photograph a teenage boy's erection for a sexting incident. It is such a fundamental violation of human dignity. I cannot even begin to imagine the press coverage and criminal indictments of the people involved.

The problem regards people who already have Ebola. Of course, if you have just a less severe condition, staying a way form a hospital might during an epidemic might be a reasonable move.

Treating those with Ebola at home is a recipe for catastrophe. Contrary to AIDS, Ebola is highly contagious and often leads to the infection of the whole family and visitors.

So no, fear of healthcare is just about the worst possible mindset for those infected with Ebola and their families.

True. What protects him at the moment are international customs. This is way too small a matter for the UK to risk international backlash by raiding an embassy.

Exactly. And that approach seems to work well in just about every other Western country.

The death of journalists during intense fighting is - while extremely tragic and hopefully rare - not at all comparable to them getting sentenced by courts for simply reporting news. The former is to some degree unavoidable (if they got target specifically then everything changes), while the latter is an explicit act of government against freedom of press and speech.