Boston. Was looking into becoming a medic when living there many years ago, and learned that Boston EMS has their own dedicated training and certification, with more limited protocols for EMTs since there are so many world-class hospitals within a few minutes drive from any point in the city. EMS has less to do but load-and-go.
My parents live in the UK which has free healthcare. The situation is dire. The waitlist for chronic pain surgeries are 3-4 years long. Lots of people, including my parents, have resorted to flying out to other cheaper countries to get treatment.
Because politicians have made it their mission to chip away at the NHS over decades. This doesn’t say anything about the efficacy of statutory healthcare.
But it’s quite relevant to the question of whether you can just assume that some country will foot the bill for your health care needs at old age, and therefore you don’t need to worry about health expenses if you retire early. Rising costs of health care systems are a serious problem in most developed countries. “Eh, I’ll just move to Europe in old age” is not really a comprehensive plan to ensure you get good healthcare far in the future.
It does. In every public-healthcare country, this happens. Because incentives are stacked against delivering to the patient and for increasing spendings. It’s the tragedy of the commons.
I wouldn't use the Netherlands as a great example either. The family doctor model is slowly disappearing, replaced by private clinics. It is relatively difficult to get appropriate treatment for anything, and there are long waiting queues even for intake appointments. It has only been getting worse in the past decade.
> Public healthcare isn't a free for all, its regulated, actively managed and budgeted.
Not what I mean. It’s racist. Public jobs are being reassigned in a racist way to help whoever the currently-elected leader wants to favoritize, and, as the NHS ad says: “This is us, now”, clearly demonstrating a no-whites ideal (NHS’s intentions, not mine).
Public health funnels money from people who paid to get coverage, to, on one part, those would be rejected in a normal system (non-insured people) because it’s easier to say yes when it’s diluted; to to, for the second part, people self-selected by the group of currently-employed people, ie in the UK it means that normal people are selected with all criteria but protected classes (the legal term, “protected classes”, I mean) have priority for those jobs.
You may pretend the NHS is not racist, but the NHS actions speak for themselves.
> The waitlist for chronic pain surgeries are 3-4 years long
The NHS has _many_ problems, don't get me wrong. But 3-4 years for "chronic pain surgery" isnt one of them. There are huge wait times, but 3-4 years is not representative. (Hip replacement times are ~4 months, much higher than it used to be)
Would I fly out to turkey to get a knee done? fuck no, half the problem is physio. Can you fly out and do it? you sure can.
This kind of doomerism is going to lead to farage getting his way and replacing universal healthcare for shitty half arsed insurance.
Is chronic pain an outlier here, or representative of wider trends? My uninformed prior is that surgery is not a good approach for chronic pain, and that the NHS is more likely to cover surgeries with a more clear-cut cost/benefit ratio
For things like hip replacements, cancer treatment and other physical ailments the NHS is pretty awesome. Some stuff it fails at I am sure, but as you say that is in part down to the way that it prioritises care based on results.
Private healthcare is still much cheaper in the UK, so you're still better off retiring there. Might not always be the case of course, but I would bet the situation will continue to be better than in the US.
Could a rogue engineer inject whatever code they want into an app update? Possibly yes, but 1) that code will get shipped to every phone at the same time, 2) that code has to do its thing without anyone noticing, which is tricky at scale (this is how malware gets discovered), and 3) there’s an audit trail so that engineer will be exposed to legal risk.
The difference here is that with Eight Sleep, an engineer can remotely access the customer device in real time and poke around the network the bed is connected to, and there may be no audit logs. They can exfiltrate sensitive data with much less effort and less legal risk than with an app update.
Because people rich enough to buy coastal California real estate will be dead or in a nursing home by the time this happens. Or if they’re young, they have enough money that loosing a couple million is a cheap price to pay for living on the beach.
"Coastal real estate" in California is in no way endangered by sea level rise, being characterized by bluffs. Sea level rise imperils people who live along undesirable shores in places like Stockton and Newark and East Palo Alto.
It looks like with California beaches you typically don't have to go as far back to find higher ground than you do with say Florida beaches. From the pictures I've seen a lot of the beachfront houses are built one stilts, often with the back at the level of that higher ground behind the beach.
I don't think they built this was anticipating climate change--it was so if a bad combination of tides and storms pushed water far enough up the beach to reach where the house is it would be under the house instead of in the house. Nevertheless, it looks like a lot of these beachfront houses could take a meter or two of sea level rise and still be above water.
They'd have a lot less beach, so it would probably change the kind of person who wants to live in them, but it is quite possible that they would remain very desirable.
As far as things not actually on the beach goes, playing with the interactive sea level rise map from NOAA linked in kibwen's comment, it looks like there are a few places (such as the Long Beach area) where you get some extensive loss of land a ways in, but for most places on the Pacific coast it is just the beach itself that gets lost. It is more of a mixed bag for places not on the coast but on rivers or bodies of water connect to the coast.
Water is not simply a presence; it has weight, it has impact on everything. If the water level rises, it must have an impact on the coastline itself. Water might never reach the house, but it might make it impossible to maintain nonetheless.
The same reason places like Miami have a red hot market and construction is booming. People either can't fathom sea levels rising to the point of catastrophe, or they think a 50-100 year timeline is long enough to not really be relevant.
Miami Beach is one of the more precarious positions worldwide and the real estate market there is barely reacting to it with high elevations now commanding a slight premium over prior years even in poor areas. It looks like we collectively are only going to react after the fact even if some of us are worried about it individually.
Most condominiums built today using concrete-rebar construction will be torn down in the same timeframe. Concrete rebar has a lifetime of about 100 years, even when properly maintained.
But nobody buying a condo today looks at what the resale value will be in 50 years.
For institutional investors it will react maybe one quarter before it actually happens, and for retail it could continue even with their feet in water with good marketing.
His surprise is still reasonable, because as time goes on our information will get more precise. So, if this is true, you could buy today and then be unable to sell in 10 years as the market moves.
