bhupy

56 ms·

451.
by bhupy 6y ago
A negative income tax is mathematically equivalent to a UBI as long as we have progressive taxation.
452.
by bhupy 6y ago
> And funnily enough, food is heavily government-subsidized and regulated. It's not really a free market either. Sure, but by this metric, there exists no free market on the planet. If your argument is that the healthcare market sho
453.
by bhupy 6y ago
The vast majority of healthcare expenditure is preventive or planned care, which is largely fungible. MRIs are fungible. Primary care is fungible. Antibiotics are fungible. To the extent that healthcare isn't fungible, it's in ver
454.
by bhupy 6y ago
Different types of healthcare are also fungible. And not all healthcare is cancer! I think the biggest problem with having any discussion around healthcare policy is that we automatically assume that we should treat routine treatments and v
455.
by bhupy 6y ago
> The US is actually the only developed nation without a public healthcare system, That's false on multiple counts. First of all, the US does have a public healthcare system, Medicare and Medicaid. Second of all, there exists other
456.
by bhupy 6y ago
> Healthcare can never be a free market in this sense, because the customer is faced with a choice of "buy service and/or product" or "be dead". What you're referring to here is a high "price elasticity
457.
by bhupy 6y ago
Except...it's not obvious that the root cause of the US's current healthcare disaster is "privatization". I work in the industry, and by far the #1 most jarring misconceptions I see floating around forums like this is co
458.
by bhupy 6y ago
> In their current state, yes. Tough on Crime, War on Drugs, and the prison-industrial complex are unwarranted and destructive. But this presupposes that those things are unambiguously bad. "Tough on Crime"? The American public
459.
by bhupy 6y ago
> but in light of the BLM protests, dealing with local police departments to better surveil their own citizens is unethical. I'm not sure that this is so clear cut. This also one of those things where it's fairly uncontroversia
460.
by bhupy 6y ago
> There is a difference in building a car that people can drive and one that is specifically to be used as a weapon. This sounds like an equally slippery argument: one whose premise is that weapons should never be built, and that there i
461.
by bhupy 6y ago
> Making alcohol should be legal. Specifically selling it to a kid is not legal, because then you are specifically helping them commit a crime. This seems reasonable. > Likewise I don't blame steel mills for producing steel that
462.
by bhupy 6y ago
> If the typical user would use a trust-based institution, then what is the advantage to the end user over the traditional banking model? In theory, it's two-fold: 1) That you have the option to use the same money in that account
463.
by bhupy 6y ago
One could argue that the "intrinsic value" of crypto is that it enables censorship resistant point-to-point data transfer (transactions). As long as some subset of people are using it for that purpose, it has value, even if it&#x2
464.
by bhupy 6y ago
The system has just about as much capacity for transactions as batch-driven ACH clearing houses today. Until very recently, the expectation for ACH was that a transaction would clear after days (sometimes weeks). The end user of that produc
465.
by bhupy 6y ago
That's not the point though, the point is that Bitcoin is not comparable to the entire financial system, rather it's comparable to raw cash. Just like it's pretty infeasible for everyone to always use cash all the time, it wo
466.
by bhupy 6y ago
But that's sort of a straw-man representation of what (most) Bitcoin adherents see as the future of Bitcoin / crypto. I don't think anyone serious expects the raw blockchain to power every single transaction in real time, rat
467.
by bhupy 6y ago
Why isn't this an appropriate venue?
468.
by bhupy 6y ago
Ah yeah, this is very different from rent-control as American left-NIMBY's advocate. There's some more information here: https://www.globalpropertyguide.com/Europe/Switzerland/Landl... One important dist
469.
by bhupy 6y ago
Do you have a citation? Switzerland almost certainly does not have nation-wide rent-control.
470.
by bhupy 6y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Switzerland does not have nationwide rent control?
471.
by bhupy 6y ago
Now you're starting to follow the thread to the root cause: onerous medical licensure and onerous medical university accreditation. In the US, the barrier to become a doctor is higher than it is anywhere else. Nowhere else in the devel
472.
by bhupy 6y ago
Not now, but between 1947 and 1961 there absolutely was. That’s the point: it didn’t happen from the top-down at the Federal level, it happened province-by-province and there was a period of time when it was patchwork. It was fine for the C
473.
by bhupy 6y ago
> There are clear reasons why individual US states haven't been able to provide universal health care. It's not because the idea is unworkable at a national level; it's because you can't do it state-by-state. How do y
474.
by bhupy 6y ago
You're right that it's a useful starting point, but I think that it's even more complicated than "single payer is better". First of all, it isn't obvious that single payer is the best system, because there are
475.
by bhupy 6y ago
Inpatient care refers to any treatment where the patient is required to be admitted to a hospital or health care facility facility. On the other hand, the OECD defines outpatient care as care that "comprises medical and ancillary servi
476.
by bhupy 6y ago
That figure cuts out the middle-men by breaking out administrative costs.
477.
by bhupy 6y ago
> I am interested to understand what makes the "raw" costs so wildly different. There are a number of reasons. One big one is simply that doctors in the US command a much higher salary than their counterparts elsewhere in the w
478.
by bhupy 6y ago
It's not. There's a good breakdown that compares what drives healthcare spending between the US vs Germany (and others). https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/what-drives-health... The vast majority of th
479.
by bhupy 6y ago
Not anymore, all LZW patents expired by 2004 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lempel%E2%80%93Ziv%E2%80%93Wel... ), long before the 2014 Alice decision we're talking about. We don't know if the LZW patent would h
480.
by bhupy 6y ago
The implication of the SCOTUS ruling I'm talking about appears to be that there's no real limiting principle, since effectively every software is just the automation of an abstract business process or mathematical theorem. https:

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