sigvirt

There is similar premise in James Rickards 2014 book The Death of Money. He describes trade dynamics and international organizations, including the Bank for International Settlements and their unit/basket of reserve currencies called Special Drawing Rights. Several years ago China was on about having the Yuan declared a reserve currency so it would be included as one of the currencies which comprise an SDR unit.

Anne Applebaum's book Gulag describes similar psychology and social dynamics. It's an epic work of scholorship that examines the surrounding society as well as the camps and the prisoners. A wide range of inmate experience shows through because of varying lethality of camps and some longer resulting timelines, in contrast for example to Kiernan and Cambodia where the end was often more prompt.

Being potentially wiped out by a healthcare incident is not simply a matter of the looming bill. Your recommendation (i.e. to carry on by ignoring the bill) assumes the illness causes little disruption and the cure is complete. Many illnesses or injuries take much time to recover. Sometimes proper medical care cannot be obtained. Sometimes doctors don't want to take on a case, or even care to be honest. Others might withold a cure to generate recurring therapy revenue. Especially in the US, medical fraud and waste is monumental and the social safety net is insubstantial. These things will disintegrate a life more surely than a bill. Employers and creditors become impatient. Opportunistic predators circle about. If people are in debt, and without savings, then life circumstance unravels quickly at any non-trivial interruption.

Also include the simple motivation of greed. A lot of war and genocide is simply about profiteering. Some perpetrators do so knowingly. Other miscreants feel need to invent some excuse, such as dehumanization, and repaint their predation in righteousness.

Ben Ferencz says much the same.

[1a] - http://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-the-last-nuremberg-prosecut...

[1b] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14437511

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Ferencz

The Silicon Graphics crew did like their case mods. Adding to the list: a demo team had a deskside O2K with a top air-intake and side exhaust pipes like a dragster engine.

Near Y2K, as development slowed, several of the hands-on QA teams were found to be astonishingly good at Quake. Later, as labs high and low were decommissioned, a couple of sysadmins consolidated equipment and absolutely dominated the SETI at Home rankings for many months, and likely the PG&E [1] rankings as well.

[1] Pacific Gas and Electric, a California utility company

Also around 1993, Onyx with RE II was used by Nameco and a company called Magic Edge to build actuated flight sim pods [1]. Coincidentally also in 1993, NASA published a guide [2] to their Vertical Motion Simulator [3]. At the time, the VMS used several SGI IRIS machines as auxiliary display processors, but custom machines for primary.

[1] http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=832 - Nameco Magic Edge Simulator Ha rdware at System-16, The Arcade Museum

[2] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/199400... - Vert ical Motion Simulator Familiarization Guide (pdf) (1993)

[3] https://www.aviationsystemsdivision.arc.nasa.gov/facilities/... - NASA Vertical Motion Simulator

One day, the din of the machinery paled and withered under a thunderous earth-shaking draconian roar - whiplashing my head out of the rack toward the windows - an F/A-18 tilted sideways at the edge of ground effect ripping a minimum radius turn back to from whence it came ... without ever leaving the airfield. Sigh. There is no simulator for That.

Propublica [1][2] has done some investigation into the amount of waste, beginning with a 2012 report by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. The unnecessary costs amount to roughly 5% of US GDP. For comparison: the defense budget is about 4.5% of GDP, and Social Security Disability Insurance outlays are about 5% of GDP. NASA's budget is about 0.1% of GDP.

A number of other commenters have castigated politicians on suspicion of being in the pocket of insurance companies or health care companies. Sure such things may happen occasionally. More certainly, politicians and bureaucrates are regularly attentive to the budget and financing of the government.

If medical care was cost efficient, it would 1) reduce GDP and the appearance of economic growth, and 2) wreck the back office math concerning whether the federal government can afford the deficit and the interest on the national debt. Elimination of mass incarceration and criminalization would cause a similar dilema. US economic growth has been 2-3 percent in recent years. If that were negated by substantial reduction of waste-masquerading-as-productivity, then the federal budget could not be financed without massive cuts or dramatic manipulation of interest and inflation rates.

There are others who potentially benefit from denial of treatment or claims beside the insurance company. Beside the doctors, medical institutions, and insurance companies are another set of actors: the benefits management and payment processing companies, who often profit per transaction. Some of the calculus in this camp can be seen in [3]. This part of the system (and others) can benefit when a patient is denied or discouraged from or uninformed of curative treatment and manipulated into some ongoing palliatve therapy - despite the possibility of greater overall long-term cost. The cash-flow gets distributed differently than curative treatment, and there are more smaller on-going transactions enabling a higher percentage of skim.

[1] Sep 2012 - https://www.propublica.org/article/a-costly-equation-medical...

[2] Nov. 2017 - https://www.propublica.org/article/a-hospital-charged-to-pie...?

[3] Nov. 2017 - https://www.bnymellon.com/us/en/what-we-do/business-insights...

This group (near Stanford with other locations) has some effective methods to help clients reduce pain or discomfort and improve physical ability.

The Balance Center - http://www.balancecenter.com/overview.htm

I am not afilliated, but have known several people to go through their program with life changing results.

As I understand it:

They have traveled around the world studying populations of people which have a low incident of back pain and old-age disability [1]. They observed those groups to have posture and movement habits that are subtly different from populations having a high incident of such problems. Their effective training program improves clients comfort and ability by teaching them the habits observed in the low-pain low-disability groups.

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[1] area's similar to a Blue Zone - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone - but apparently chosen for prevelence of comfort and ability instead of simply highest age.

Yes. Well put and necessarily said, 62991. Hopefully, one has the peace-time luxury of a leisurly acclimation toward the deeper end of the pool; too many in the world sadly don't. Absolutely, awareness and preemption are paramount. btw - instead of "healthier options", I perhaps should have said "healthier instinctive responses". All that aside, any day arriving home alive and intact is a good day.

Training is your friend. Learn to be on both sides of the fist and stick and gun - what is and is not possible. For some illustration of outcomes, see youtube for "28 foot rule" or "21 foot rule". Learn to see the setup and the ambush, though there are fewer who teach this. One of the best introductory defense programs I've seen, for when push came to shove, was Bay Area Model Mugging (although for women only). There can be a time to step-up/speak-up and defend yourself and friends, a time to hand over the goods, and a time to run like hell. Training goes a long way to replace panic with healtier options. And call the police right away; it might save the next local victim half an hour later.

To feed everyone's inquiry/discussion of diet, nutrition, and western disease (though not fasting per se): two particular researchers/authors had much mindshare and influence in Bay Area circles a decade ago. They've not been mentioned on HN in several years, so this will bring forward and tie in the references and discussions for newcomers.

The China Study - by T. Colin Campbell : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Study : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._Colin_Campbell

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto - by Michael Pollan : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Defense_of_Food : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Pollan

The China Study is notably a retrospective of primary research on diet, nutrition, and disease spanning nearly a century. There are many breadcrumbs for further reading. Campbell was a top-tier government/academic researcher for several decades. The summary conclusion is that western diseases (e.g. diabetes, cancer, heart ...) are strongly correlated with increased ratio of animal product consumption, especially in presence of environmental toxins - a binary poison cocktail one might say. Genetics are a factor, he says, but not so pervasively as the other two.

Michael Pollan is iconically known for the phrase, "Eat Food, Mostly Plants, Not Too Much". A prolific author and journalist, he is on about many of the same things Campbell is: cautioning about a) over-reliance on reductive analysis of food nutrient components, and about b) over-indulgence in foodstuffs that passed through some industrial process on way from earth to earthling.

Edit: formatting