5 ms·

> We need to swing back to a more US focused economy. > Cheaper medical, education, housing is what other 95% could use. Eds, meds, and beds can't be outsourc

> We need to swing back to a more US focused economy. > Cheaper medical, education, housing is what other 95% could use. Eds, meds, and beds can't be outsourced, which is why they're increasingly too expensive for workers. Fix the first problem above and the second will follow.

Melting_Harps 5y ago
> Eds, meds, and beds can't be outsourced, which is why they're increasingly too expensive for workers. Fix the first problem above and the second will follow. Education has been forcefully disrupted, by the institutions themselves no less: Zoom School proved what most of us knew all along, most institutions are just costly degree mills with little to no emphasis on truly educated their students. I personally attend a CompSci program from a university in the UK and it's quite flexible and affordable when compared to US standards. Meds can and should be outsourced where ever possible: US,,Switzerland, Germany and France are the gold standard for reasons I don't time have to explain here, but there is no reason we couldn't just acquire their drugs and medical devices at wholesale prices from the aforementioned nations if the US pharma complex refuses to play ball and compete on price. Thousands of nurses are on strike right now as we speak in Stanford, and many more are expected to quit the Industry entirely in the next coming years nation wide after being abused by the system during COVID. This could be the perfect time to re-negotiate the terms imposed by the AMA and the Industry as a whole, ideally opening the roles to more practitioners and thus lowering the costs. Housing, is sadly the last (investment) refuge of the dying middle class' networth in the US: I highly doubt that will be disrupted until 3-d printing of homes becomes common place, continuing the remote-first work place will definitely help in that, but right now the transition is that high paid tech workers can move and gentrify previously affordable areas. I under stand that it's partly creative destruction, and to be honest as a digital nomad with no real need to stay in the US, I'm staying the hell out until these things are resolved--which I'm sure they will in time. I see no real need to be in the US if my quality of life and standard of living is only going to continue to be impaired to prop up the decaying business models of archaic monoliths who have systematically reduced the standards of living for so many.
- throwawaygh 5y ago
  > Zoom School proved what most of us knew all along I'm not sure how things are in the UK, but the sentiment in the US is that Zoom schooling was an unmitigated disaster. I was bullish on remote education prior to COVID, but interacting with the output of remote learning (at work and in volunteer work) has completely changed my mind. COVID was nowhere near a perfect experiment, but what evidence we can glean overwhelming contributes to evidence to the "remote learning sucks for at least a majority of students of all ages" side of this debate.
  - Melting_Harps 5y ago
    > I was bullish on remote education prior to COVID, but interacting with the output of remote learning (at work and in volunteer work) has completely changed my mind. COVID was nowhere near a perfect experiment, but what evidence we can glean overwhelming contributes to evidence to the "remote learning sucks for at least a majority of students of all ages" side of this debate. I feel it's still rather early to say that, we're still on at the optimization level but it's clear things definitely need to be improved (I still haven't received my final scores despite knowing I have 1st honors for my first year with a plugin that has a SQL lookup), but with that said I also got to sit in Master level lectures in AI and ML at Stanford with Dr. Andrew Ng while I was attending my intro courses and for not much money I could have gotten credit for it, too. I think this appeals most to autodidacts as we get to choose what and how I want to learn, which as a self-taught programmer helps a lot to stay motivated. I'm on a Performance based admission enrollment: previous fintech founder, with professional experience in a mega-corp after being head-hunted for said fintech startup. It could also be because I was so deeply disillusioned with my first BSc in Biology that I see this as a more suitable outcome for a working professional; I had launched my 2nd business my Junior year of HS and it was starting to get quite a bit of traction in the middle of my Freshman year. University was always my plan B and I treated as such, but since I was paying for it I valued flexibility over actual substance--my discipline and focus as a cellular and molecular biologist was widely used in research but despite going to a good research university in the middle of the Capital of biotech (San Diego) it was woefully underwhelming. I still speak with my one of my Biochem professors and things haven't progressed much from back then, either. In my experience after having worked at a megacorp in tech that came from an open-source project (Bitcoin, or Blockchain) I just don't think the on-campus model has done much to earn my trust either. People with MSc and PhDs were showing some incredibly sophomoric mistakes with even basic things like annotations that I thought were understood when you started to make learn to make commits on github. I could make a prototype with limited supervision, despite being forced to do it in Soliditiy which remains a horribly buggy lang, where as they couldn't do much without lots of hand-holding from someone that was forced to learn how to code from free tutorials, youtube videos, hanging out #IRC and tons of hours on Stack overflow. I self admit I'm not even very good as a developer either, I just knew what I didn't know and knew where to look and how to ask the right questions: which is something I took away from a lecture in a PhD level Virology class I sat in by accident my senior year in University.
scrubs 4y ago
You're right - cannot be outsourced. Then it'll fall to US labor which is more expensive. Now, on the other hand, if I was running Congress or the Executive branch I'd do a Consumer reports on steroids for "eds, meds, and beds" (a nice rhyme BTW - borrowing it) which would, * publish medical costs (now mandated to be available I believe) and ranking them * publish costs of 4 year education by basic degree category vs. expected income and ranked so student loans are NOT forgiven while students are helped and advised to not spend stupid amounts of money on dumb degrees with no ROI. * While theoretically government student loans help the borrower not the school, there may be a perverse incentive for some schools to raise tuition and board if they think students can afford with loans * And good lord, would it kill us for the Fed to negotiate prices down on pills? Not it would not! I'm annoyed that private companies threaten the public with higher prices and/or less innovation. I say, let's see where it goes! * Maybe the federal government should make generics. I mean if the private sector doesn't play nice, take competition to them. The larger point is that in meds the consumer has fundamentally less control than say a customer purchasing a service. In a typical setting the consumer knows more about the price and price spectrum going into the sale, and the servicer needs the client to pay. So they both gotta get along. In meds the billing prices are less clear and the paperwork for billing goes between the servicer and insurance company. I do not like that. I want the medical provider to know I have the money, and if I don't know or like what's going on, prompt payment is a question.

Melting_Harps 5y ago

> Eds, meds, and beds can't be outsourced, which is why they're increasingly too expensive for workers. Fix the first problem above and the second will follow. Education has been forcefully disrupted, by the institutions themselves no less: Zoom School proved what most of us knew all along, most institutions are just costly degree mills with little to no emphasis on truly educated their students. I personally attend a CompSci program from a university in the UK and it's quite flexible and affordable when compared to US standards. Meds can and should be outsourced where ever possible: US,,Switzerland, Germany and France are the gold standard for reasons I don't time have to explain here, but there is no reason we couldn't just acquire their drugs and medical devices at wholesale prices from the aforementioned nations if the US pharma complex refuses to play ball and compete on price. Thousands of nurses are on strike right now as we speak in Stanford, and many more are expected to quit the Industry entirely in the next coming years nation wide after being abused by the system during COVID. This could be the perfect time to re-negotiate the terms imposed by the AMA and the Industry as a whole, ideally opening the roles to more practitioners and thus lowering the costs. Housing, is sadly the last (investment) refuge of the dying middle class' networth in the US: I highly doubt that will be disrupted until 3-d printing of homes becomes common place, continuing the remote-first work place will definitely help in that, but right now the transition is that high paid tech workers can move and gentrify previously affordable areas. I under stand that it's partly creative destruction, and to be honest as a digital nomad with no real need to stay in the US, I'm staying the hell out until these things are resolved--which I'm sure they will in time. I see no real need to be in the US if my quality of life and standard of living is only going to continue to be impaired to prop up the decaying business models of archaic monoliths who have systematically reduced the standards of living for so many.

throwawaygh 5y ago
> Zoom School proved what most of us knew all along I'm not sure how things are in the UK, but the sentiment in the US is that Zoom schooling was an unmitigated disaster. I was bullish on remote education prior to COVID, but interacting with the output of remote learning (at work and in volunteer work) has completely changed my mind. COVID was nowhere near a perfect experiment, but what evidence we can glean overwhelming contributes to evidence to the "remote learning sucks for at least a majority of students of all ages" side of this debate.
- Melting_Harps 5y ago
  > I was bullish on remote education prior to COVID, but interacting with the output of remote learning (at work and in volunteer work) has completely changed my mind. COVID was nowhere near a perfect experiment, but what evidence we can glean overwhelming contributes to evidence to the "remote learning sucks for at least a majority of students of all ages" side of this debate. I feel it's still rather early to say that, we're still on at the optimization level but it's clear things definitely need to be improved (I still haven't received my final scores despite knowing I have 1st honors for my first year with a plugin that has a SQL lookup), but with that said I also got to sit in Master level lectures in AI and ML at Stanford with Dr. Andrew Ng while I was attending my intro courses and for not much money I could have gotten credit for it, too. I think this appeals most to autodidacts as we get to choose what and how I want to learn, which as a self-taught programmer helps a lot to stay motivated. I'm on a Performance based admission enrollment: previous fintech founder, with professional experience in a mega-corp after being head-hunted for said fintech startup. It could also be because I was so deeply disillusioned with my first BSc in Biology that I see this as a more suitable outcome for a working professional; I had launched my 2nd business my Junior year of HS and it was starting to get quite a bit of traction in the middle of my Freshman year. University was always my plan B and I treated as such, but since I was paying for it I valued flexibility over actual substance--my discipline and focus as a cellular and molecular biologist was widely used in research but despite going to a good research university in the middle of the Capital of biotech (San Diego) it was woefully underwhelming. I still speak with my one of my Biochem professors and things haven't progressed much from back then, either. In my experience after having worked at a megacorp in tech that came from an open-source project (Bitcoin, or Blockchain) I just don't think the on-campus model has done much to earn my trust either. People with MSc and PhDs were showing some incredibly sophomoric mistakes with even basic things like annotations that I thought were understood when you started to make learn to make commits on github. I could make a prototype with limited supervision, despite being forced to do it in Soliditiy which remains a horribly buggy lang, where as they couldn't do much without lots of hand-holding from someone that was forced to learn how to code from free tutorials, youtube videos, hanging out #IRC and tons of hours on Stack overflow. I self admit I'm not even very good as a developer either, I just knew what I didn't know and knew where to look and how to ask the right questions: which is something I took away from a lecture in a PhD level Virology class I sat in by accident my senior year in University.

scrubs 4y ago

You're right - cannot be outsourced. Then it'll fall to US labor which is more expensive. Now, on the other hand, if I was running Congress or the Executive branch I'd do a Consumer reports on steroids for "eds, meds, and beds" (a nice rhyme BTW - borrowing it) which would, * publish medical costs (now mandated to be available I believe) and ranking them * publish costs of 4 year education by basic degree category vs. expected income and ranked so student loans are NOT forgiven while students are helped and advised to not spend stupid amounts of money on dumb degrees with no ROI. * While theoretically government student loans help the borrower not the school, there may be a perverse incentive for some schools to raise tuition and board if they think students can afford with loans * And good lord, would it kill us for the Fed to negotiate prices down on pills? Not it would not! I'm annoyed that private companies threaten the public with higher prices and/or less innovation. I say, let's see where it goes! * Maybe the federal government should make generics. I mean if the private sector doesn't play nice, take competition to them. The larger point is that in meds the consumer has fundamentally less control than say a customer purchasing a service. In a typical setting the consumer knows more about the price and price spectrum going into the sale, and the servicer needs the client to pay. So they both gotta get along. In meds the billing prices are less clear and the paperwork for billing goes between the servicer and insurance company. I do not like that. I want the medical provider to know I have the money, and if I don't know or like what's going on, prompt payment is a question.