3 ms·

But this also means that the average person now has access to heart bypass surgery, which is still (I think) the most powerful "life extension" technology ever

by api 6y ago

But this also means that the average person now has access to heart bypass surgery, which is still (I think) the most powerful "life extension" technology ever developed (statistically speaking). That means the actual reduction in income is less than it appears, as a lot of it is just going to far superior but more costly health care. That being said, US health care costs are higher than many other developed nations for a variety of reasons and this could be improved. What's the other 2/3 then? I am going to take a wild guess: outsourcing / labor arbitrage, the collapse of unions, and automation reducing labor demand. I would prefer hard evidence though to wild but reasonable guesses.

youredoneson 6y ago
Why is this grey. Why? Remove comment downvoting from the website. Just fucking remove it. Nobody will miss it. You can still rank comments by upvote.
- techbio 6y ago
  I haven't clicked it, but my guess is that the first sentence oversimplifies in drawing its conclusion. Remove it and the comment is improved.
PaulHoule 6y ago
"Superior" is not always clear. In the case of heart-bypass the economics have always been ambiguous and are more so now when you put it in competition with angioplasty, statins, aggressive treatment of hypertension and type II diabetes, etc. I remember Issac Asimov writing about his circa-1970 thyroidectomy and circa-1980 heart bypass and being amazed at how few articles he'd have to write to pay for these services. (I found out 30 years later that he got AIDS from that heart bypass operation and that was why he wrote all of those sequels that he said he wasn't going to write.) Note though that the surgeon's job is checklistable (Asimov wouldn't have lasted 10 hours if either surgeon had displayed much creativity or had to wrestle with contractions while working) whereas Asimov's monthly essays involved reading maybe ten scientific papers, resolving contradictions, probably rewriting a few times just to get the organization write, never mind catch all of the errors you'll find in a piece like I am writing now where I have neither the time nor the tools set up to do that work. Although the surgeon seems to be "restoring order" to the body, Asimov's mind was directly engaged in removing entropy -- taking a wide area of scientific information and composing it to create meaning. My wife works (part time) as an aide for an extraordinarily nice dementia patient and is own the other side of the "cost disease" problem from myself, a computer programmer. Even distant relatives of the man she works for might think is he high functioning if they saw him most of the time, but left on his own he might "get stuck". Basically my wife and other aides help him get through his daily checklist. This guy is fun to hang out with, but other people get paid the same to do the "same" thing for a person who might not recognize them, think they are a home invader, and try to strangle them. (e.g. don't wear a necklace if you do this job) Me? Asimov inspired me to study physics and I became a computer programmer and if something is checklistable either my team decides that I'm going to spend my time programming the computer to do it, or it decides that it is going to spend somebody else's time doing the work. So I spend a lot of time seemingly "in a daze" or "going in circles" because I am often in a place where I haven't yet resolved the contradictions in the situation, don't really understand the problem, etc. I do figure it out and then spend some fraction (less than 50%) of my time looking "engaged" in the way that my wife looks "engaged" when she does her work. The work of all four people are hard to compare because of those differences. Unlike the other three, I'm in the one sector of the economy that seems to be improving in productivity, but even that seems to be questionable. The spectre of marxism (not leninism, stalnism, maoism, trotskyism ...) is that behind it all our life lacks a dignity of work that makes all we toil for meaningless. That is, the root cause of the heart problem might be in your "other" heart as opposed to the physical organ -- the emotional stress caused by not being engaged where decisions are made about where we spend our time. We could say that we're getting "half our share" of the produced by our labor, but we might be happier (get more utility) for less currency if we had more choice about what we buy and sell as individuals.

by api 6y ago

youredoneson 6y ago

Why is this grey. Why? Remove comment downvoting from the website. Just fucking remove it. Nobody will miss it. You can still rank comments by upvote.

techbio 6y ago
I haven't clicked it, but my guess is that the first sentence oversimplifies in drawing its conclusion. Remove it and the comment is improved.

PaulHoule 6y ago

"Superior" is not always clear. In the case of heart-bypass the economics have always been ambiguous and are more so now when you put it in competition with angioplasty, statins, aggressive treatment of hypertension and type II diabetes, etc. I remember Issac Asimov writing about his circa-1970 thyroidectomy and circa-1980 heart bypass and being amazed at how few articles he'd have to write to pay for these services. (I found out 30 years later that he got AIDS from that heart bypass operation and that was why he wrote all of those sequels that he said he wasn't going to write.) Note though that the surgeon's job is checklistable (Asimov wouldn't have lasted 10 hours if either surgeon had displayed much creativity or had to wrestle with contractions while working) whereas Asimov's monthly essays involved reading maybe ten scientific papers, resolving contradictions, probably rewriting a few times just to get the organization write, never mind catch all of the errors you'll find in a piece like I am writing now where I have neither the time nor the tools set up to do that work. Although the surgeon seems to be "restoring order" to the body, Asimov's mind was directly engaged in removing entropy -- taking a wide area of scientific information and composing it to create meaning. My wife works (part time) as an aide for an extraordinarily nice dementia patient and is own the other side of the "cost disease" problem from myself, a computer programmer. Even distant relatives of the man she works for might think is he high functioning if they saw him most of the time, but left on his own he might "get stuck". Basically my wife and other aides help him get through his daily checklist. This guy is fun to hang out with, but other people get paid the same to do the "same" thing for a person who might not recognize them, think they are a home invader, and try to strangle them. (e.g. don't wear a necklace if you do this job) Me? Asimov inspired me to study physics and I became a computer programmer and if something is checklistable either my team decides that I'm going to spend my time programming the computer to do it, or it decides that it is going to spend somebody else's time doing the work. So I spend a lot of time seemingly "in a daze" or "going in circles" because I am often in a place where I haven't yet resolved the contradictions in the situation, don't really understand the problem, etc. I do figure it out and then spend some fraction (less than 50%) of my time looking "engaged" in the way that my wife looks "engaged" when she does her work. The work of all four people are hard to compare because of those differences. Unlike the other three, I'm in the one sector of the economy that seems to be improving in productivity, but even that seems to be questionable. The spectre of marxism (not leninism, stalnism, maoism, trotskyism ...) is that behind it all our life lacks a dignity of work that makes all we toil for meaningless. That is, the root cause of the heart problem might be in your "other" heart as opposed to the physical organ -- the emotional stress caused by not being engaged where decisions are made about where we spend our time. We could say that we're getting "half our share" of the produced by our labor, but we might be happier (get more utility) for less currency if we had more choice about what we buy and sell as individuals.