Christ, reading Americans declare that the issue with American healthcare is "too much government" always completely floors me. The system did not work well before the ACA, the system does not work now. The only countries in the world with strong, consistent and equitable healthcare systems have government health systems.
Here in the UK our NHS is a goddamn mess, it's cracking and creaking and bureaucratic, but every American expat i have ever known who now lives in the UK has horror stories about how much worse it is over there. In our monthly social classes (PSHCE) we watched documentaries of poor Americans unable to afford healthcare, and it horrified us all.
You can't run healthcare as a profit seeking enterprise, it just doesn't work, the financial incentives of healthcare providers just fundamentally do not align with their customers. Government run institutions can often fall into a state of bureaucratic atrophy but if this and countless other stories make clear - that's an issue with institutions in general, whether they be government run or not.
This problem will not improve until you get over your ideological commitment to trying to solve every problem with markets. Healthcare must be socialised, anything less is barbarism.
Health insurance is the problem and always has been the problem. Having the government mandate insurance is far worse than a public health system. Currently we have the worst of all of the options (and if an insurance company has bought all of the smaller providers in your area, it’s even worse)!
Healthcare hasn’t been a “market” in decades. It’s completely captured by monopolies which have captured regulation to prevent any alternatives. I do know that the mashup of government mandates for for-profit entities is about as corrupt a system as could be conceived.
> we watched documentaries of poor Americans unable to afford healthcare, and it horrified us all.
A system so good shouldn't need such propaganda to justify it's existence.
> you get over your ideological commitment
The ideological commitment that are the underpinnings of our system of government and the core of our very constitution? Why don't you just "get over" your ideological commitment to entertaining that absurd royal family?
By what metric are you evaluating corruption here, other than selected news anecdotes that support your ideological intuition.
We watched videos of the horrors of the American healthcare system for the same reason as we watched videos and were otherwise taught about oppressive regimes, international poverty, bigotry and racism both local and international - to learn about global issues, to gain a wider perspective on the world, to be knowledgeable about the many ways in which a society can fail it's most vulnerable. Such as, for instance, letting your poor die and suffer from preventable, curable illnesses.
Oh, and I have no such ideological commitment to the monarchy, I and most people I know would choose to abolish it in a heartbeat. It is here, as it is everywhere, the conservative right clinging onto traditions, ideologies and policies that have long since proven unproductive, disfunctional or outright harmful.
The monarchy may well underpin much of how British law and government works, and that is something we should work to change - just as you in the US should work to change those parts of your founding constitution written almost 300 years ago that no are no longer to the benefit of yourselves and your country.
Not having cars doesn't mean not having motorized transport, it just means restructuring our priorities around much more efficient forms of mass transportation, ranging from increased walkability and cycling infrastructure on a local scale, to buses, trams and trains on a larger scale, with specialised vehicles like ambulances and cargo-taxis for those rare cases where you really do need a whole motorized vehicle to yourself.
So what does society look like where you can still have ambulances and taxis but not a car for yourself?
Don't you still need roads for those? So just normal civilians can't have them?
And I won't hold my breath for local politicians to improve public transportation.
I'd love better public transportation, in addition to cars.
-- I hit some sort of post limit, replying to below --
Civilians are still allowed to have and drive their own cars, even in Europe.
I'm all for better designed cities in America though, but it's not a car problem, and especially not a universal issue (towns are perfect).
Instead of hating on cars I think a more useful approach would be to contact your local politicians that are in charge of zoning and public transportation.
As a programmer with likely less experience than most of these commenters, the main question that always feels under addressed in these kinds of posts is that of code deduplication.
Most specifically, often when encountering a situation in which I have two slightly different classes/types that need to be polymorphic with each other, all the standard non-inheritance based approaches seem to require a lot of outright identical code implementing a shared interface, a bunch of boilerplate composition proxy methods that just point to methods in a composed class, or weird and obscure language features that never really feel like the "intended" approach.
Typescript especially seems to demand really awkward and obtuse implementations of basic mixins or abstract classes and the like, I always feel like I'm missing the more "intended" approach whenever I try to share code between similar classes.
Often discussions around this are awash with talk of traits and delegates and other cool features that seem to only exist in a handful of languages, and never the ones I happen to be required to use at that given moment.
Typescript is best when you don't use `class` or `this` at all, but instead return object literals of static closures. In other words, more like this:
function makeCounter(initial = 0) {
let count = initial;
function get() { return count }
function inc() { count += 1 }
function dec() { count -= 1 }
return {get, inc, dec}
}
// works just like a normal object
const ctr1 = makeCounter();
ctr1.inc()
// but this works too. try doing this with a class instance.
const {get, inc} = makeCounter()
inc()
This is the typical style of most VueJS code (though it would replace count with a ref and probably call the function `useCounter`). TypeScript is smart enough that it can infer interfaces and even classes from such literals should you go that way, full support for substitutability checking and all.
It's always possible to 'deconstruct' objects with methods into just dumb structs with functions acting on them. This is the direction Julia takes for instance.
One advantage of this is that it exposes that 'inheriting' a method is really just applying the same base function to all classes that support a particular interface. You can override a method by specialising the function for a subinterface. This interface can just be a marker that says 'this struct has these fields, and semantically is a 'IMyInterface').
Of course object oriented programming languages tend to encourage private and protected properties and such, which force all of this to take place inside the class. At first I though that that was the best way to avoid a mess, but it prevents you from doing this, possibly leading to more code duplication. And after some more experience with python there's something to be said for python's approach of just using name conventions to point out when to be careful.
Safety has 100% been a factor in many of my tool purchases, mistakes happen, especially to amateurs, and most people would rather not lose fingers to a hobby.
This is an inane and deliberately obtuse response to this policy.
There is a vast difference between terms used by marginalised groups to refer to dominant ones, and terms used by dominant groups to refer to marginalised ones.
Whether or not this policy itself is effective or well-considered, the broader mission to identify ways in which historic injustice is ingrained and perpetuated through our language and try to amend it is a noble one.
There are many words throughout history that have been common place but carried so much cultural baggage that they became damaging and were thus abandoned - most terms we now consider slurs were once defended with arguments of similar merits to your own.
The process of improving our language is never going to be an easy one, no doubt many found it challenging to fully excise many of our abandoned terms from their vocabulary, but it's been done before, and will likely be done indefinitely into the future unless we ever reach a point of such equality that our language can no longer cause harm.
Sure there's a difference, but not for the purpose of this discussion. The term 'settler' is basically a slur used to marginalize people who pass as white in North America. So it should receive the same treatment as these other offensive terms.
What you've described is essentially Newspeak. I won't be part of any effort to purge language, and I don't believe that doing so will socially engineer a better society, nor do I believe in such attempts to social engineer. I also don't believe words are harmful unless they're used in a harmful manner, and a majority of the words on Stanford's list not used in such a manner, being just part of every day language.
This is a topic that’s always going to have wildly different numbers. Who cares? It doesn’t change what we all know to be true. Nothing has been undermined whatsoever
This doesn't really make any sense, just because you still need to put in the effort doesn't mean it isn't highly affective at making it much easier for an individual to direct that effort positively.
Well, if the reason Heroin doesn't help depression is because the body quickly adjusts to it and then you end up needing to use it just to maintain your previous baseline. If it didn't cause chemical dependence and retained its initial efficacy long term it would probably be extremely valuable.
Cocaine doesn't really help because it just dramatically increases the intensity and energy of your current state, it doesn't really alter your thinking in a way that could introduce positive thoughts not already present.
If psychedelics had similarly severe downsides then they would likely not be effective at aiding depression in the long run, but fortunately it has relatively few issues with careful use.
Various stimulants can also have a different effect, depending on one's neurotransmitter balance. For example, Adderall is generally speed to someone without a dopamine deficiency. I would imagine even crystal meth would be far less harmful with a dopamine deficiency than without (although there are still the issues with purity and dose size that would make it inadvisable to experiment).
The day we can discover what someone's exact neurotransmitter balance is, I think we'll learn a huge amount about how the brain works via that mechanism. I think if we ever reach that day, we'll also learn that there is no such thing as "neurotypical"
Here in the UK our NHS is a goddamn mess, it's cracking and creaking and bureaucratic, but every American expat i have ever known who now lives in the UK has horror stories about how much worse it is over there. In our monthly social classes (PSHCE) we watched documentaries of poor Americans unable to afford healthcare, and it horrified us all.
You can't run healthcare as a profit seeking enterprise, it just doesn't work, the financial incentives of healthcare providers just fundamentally do not align with their customers. Government run institutions can often fall into a state of bureaucratic atrophy but if this and countless other stories make clear - that's an issue with institutions in general, whether they be government run or not.
This problem will not improve until you get over your ideological commitment to trying to solve every problem with markets. Healthcare must be socialised, anything less is barbarism.