Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | jjackson5324's commentslogin

I don’t know about other countries but that’s absolutely the case for the US.

The culprit is the AMA.

> In the 20th century, the AMA has frequently lobbied to restrict the supply of physicians, contributing to a doctor shortage in the United States.[10][11][12] The organization has also lobbied against allowing physician assistants and other health care providers to perform basic forms of health care. The organization has historically lobbied against various of government-run health insurance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Medical_Association


Milton Friedman discusses this in depth in his book Free to Choose (from the 1980s), for anyone who’s interested. Here we are 40 years later, problem still unsolved.


Wow.. amazing


Obviously, they are a big problem, but they're not the only problem. It is received wisdom among doctors that increasing the number of doctors causes medical costs to go up, and it is generally also the position of the state.

The doctors are simply wrong; the state is correct from a pernicious point of view.

Because the state is responsible for buying so much of the total supply of medical care, they generally view things from the perspective of "how much are we spending on the category 'medical care'?", rather than the perspective of how much any given treatment costs.

Increasing the number of doctors lowers the cost of all treatments and is unambiguously good.

However, it does raise the total amount of medical spending, which, in the eyes of the state, is bad.


So you’re saying that increasing the number of doctors will result in more medical services being consumed which means higher costs for the gov?

That’s the view of the government?


Think of it like increasing lanes in a highway. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox]

Or induced demand.

That said, likely individual medical outcomes would be better.

Large scale systems tend to produce… odd behaviors.


Yes.


> At least that's my observation

30 seconds of serious thought would tell you that your observation is wrong.

Again, a news organization can just change their robots.txt to block google from indexing their site.

They don't do that because that would instantly kill all their search traffic... and most likely kill their business.

If CNN changed their robots.txt to stop being indexed by Google, Google would literally lose 0 users.

> I wasn't picking a side as much as earnestly asking how OP concluded that its the news sites wanting something free from Google versus the other way around.

It's been explained to you several times. Instead you're more interested in acting self-righteous (it's honestly pretty cringeworthy).


>30 seconds of serious thought would tell you that your observation is wrong.

Or, maybe I just have a different opinion.

>news organization can just change their robots.txt to block google from indexing their site

You don't seem to have thought beyond this superficial robots.txt "solution". Yes, we all know that option is available. But, as I've self-righteously offered for consideration, Google is one of a few sites that essentially monopolizes traffic generation, so they've positioned themselves to make it untenable for sites to block Google's crawling (and free monetization) of their content.

Cory Doctorow has (another) recent Twitter thread on how tech monopolies have grown virtually unchecked and now abuse the ecosystems in which they operate, increasingly clawing back more value for themselves at the expense of others. IMO this fits the pattern. Look it up. You might find it interesting. Or not.

>They don't do that because that would instantly kill all their search traffic...and most likely kill their business.

And there you've just stated exactly the problem I'm referencing, with apparently zero awareness of how someone could find it problematic. I mean, you just said "they could solve the problem by blocking Google via robots.txt, but that would kill their business".

So, not exactly a solution then, right?

It's baffling that you can say this but still angrily scream that "It's robots.txt! Case closed!"

>It's been explained to you several times. Instead you're more interested in acting self-righteous (it's honestly pretty cringeworthy).

You clearly don't hear yourself. Calm down.

EDIT: out of curiosity, I just took a quick look at your recent comments to others. One of the first to pop up was this:

>What are you even talking about? That's not how SEO works in the slightest....?

Lol am I still reading HN or is this Reddit?

Yeah, no self-righteous cringe there.


What are you even talking about? That's not how SEO works in the slightest....?

Lol am I still reading HN or is this Reddit?

You can see the Core Web Vitals. What modern day news organizations are doing is nowhere close to that.


Google rewards them by ranking them so high. In any case, Google doesnt actually give a shit about any core web anything when they’re raking in the adsense monies. These are simple distractions, they know which side of the bread is buttered.


It's the advertising arm of Google rather than the search part that incrntivises this stuff.


Yeah, this guy clearly doesn't use Reddit


> while real applications have seemingly gotten worse

Can you elaborate on this? I'm not sure I agree.

Modern day applications are doing far, far more than they were 10-15 years ago. Much more traffic, much more data, much more tracking (unfortunately), etc.


Teams is a gigabyte and takes literal minutes to open. Facetime was 14 years ago and did not take literal minutes to open.

(I hate to be the sort of person who exaggerates, so I decided to go through the effort of actually timing Teams for this comment so that I could give it a fair number. I return bearing no such measurement, as today it decided to instantly segfault on open.

    Exception Type:        EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)
    Exception Codes:       KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x0000000000000008
    Exception Codes:       0x0000000000000001, 0x0000000000000008

    Termination Reason:    Namespace SIGNAL, Code 11 Segmentation fault: 11
    Terminating Process:   exc handler [40516]
)


That's more a commentary on the inefficiency of Teams rather than software in general. Slack and discord both open pretty much instantaneously, and rarely show up in the top 10 resource consumers on my laptop.


I guess there's 'software' and there's software. The problem is in the larger human system that makes it mandatory for me to run Teams on my laptop- there's a reason I complained about Teams and not my college friend's raytracer project, even though both programs have similar resource consumption and segfault issues.


Performance of software has gotten significantly worse pretty much everywhere. Older computers can't run the things we run today, which is obvious. "Handing more traffic and data" is purely due to the amount of hardware used.

I would also argue that quality has gone down significantly (unless you talk about enterprise apps, where quality was always abysmal) and the cost of making software has also increased, even if we adjust for developer salary. But those are just personal opinions.


Which is what I like in Apple’s ecosystem. There are still good software there. Things 3, Bear, Paper, Anybox, iA Writer, Reeder, Doppler, Meta (tag editor), Nova, Transmit, Secrets,…


> Modern day applications are doing far, far more than they were 10-15 years ago. Much more traffic, much more data, much more tracking (unfortunately), etc.

Yes but are you sure the 'more' is in the user's interest?

I'd say 90% isn't. Out of which maybe half is less development cost because you can throw layers upon layers of bloat upon the user, and half is spyware.


No but the company isn't trying to develop software that's best for the user. They're trying to develop software that's best for their bottom line.


This isn’t what he meant, but my optimistic reading is that the average quality of software has gone down because so many more people can make it. People who would have gotten close but given up now can publish. It does mean a pile of rubble to sift in the marketplace, but so has any advance in creative tools, and many people are scratching their own itches with software and not bothering others with it, which has no downsides.


That depends entirely on your definition of rich.

PG's definition of rich is probably 100x what yours is.


My point is that the probability of getting that rich is really low. You need to combine hard work with incredible luck. A very few percentage will get 100x richer than a FAANG engineer.

A typical founder, 10 years in, is less rich than he could have been if he had taken a high paid tech job.

But anyway, PG is saying the same thing he's been saying for years. He wants people to launch startups, and he wants them to shoot for the moon with VC money. He has no interest in bootstrapped companies. Because he's a VC, so he's talking in his own interest first and foremost.


I agree with you, but PG’s definition of rich in the article is people worth $10 billion dollars plus.

I don’t think he’s being malicious. I think he genuinely just doesnt see a $5-10m NW as rich.


I understand that the MSM hates Elon Musk but it's sad that they have to spread misinformation about Ketamine Therapy in their lust for clicks.

It's had amazing results for treating depression -> https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/ketamine-for-treatment-r...


I don’t like this notion where every drug intervention, especially around mental health, has to be superficial defended

I can’t help but feel this is a superficial defense of Musk as a proxy for defending the drugs.


Everyone should dislike Elon Musk. He's a horrible person and needlessly rich. The man has sociopathic tendencies. We just have to listen to his ethos to determine that.

With that said, yes Ketamine is effective for depression. But it is not designed for "depression-like symptoms". It is designed for acute depressive mood disorders and suicide ideation which cannot be treated by other means, similar to electroshock therapy or TMS. Ketamine is not a "first line" treatment for depression.

Simply based on his own words from this article, this sounds like abuse of Ketamine.

My question would be if he's getting IV treatments or using compound medication. They are wildly different in their usage, effects, and monitoring.


> Everyone should dislike Elon Musk. He's a horrible person and needlessly rich. The man has sociopathic tendencies. We just have to listen to his ethos to determine that.

Thanks for telling me what to think.

> But it is not designed for "depression-like symptoms". It is designed for acute depressive mood disorders and suicide ideation which cannot be treated by other means, similar to electroshock therapy or TMS.

That's literally not true. Spend a few mins reading a survey paper on it perhaps? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28249076/


You failed to read the abstract of the paper you linked.

> antidepressant effects in patients with mood and anxiety disorders that were previously resistant to treatment.

_Resistant to treatment_ is the key phrase. That means there were already attempts to treat it, i.e. it isn't a first-line treatment.

Have you ever taken Ketamine? Have you ever talked to a professional about it? No psychiatrist will tell you it is a first-line defense.

Ketamine IVs are significant treatment. Not all insurances cover it. Ketamine IVs require a significant time investment (2-3 times per month, 2-3 hours in treatment and you can't drive yourself -- not an issue for Elon, of course). You're a barely walking meat sack after Ketamine.

Ketamine in compound form is for daily at-home use and is debilitating, typically used prior to bedtime. But that isn't how Elon is describing his usage.

The fact that investors said it was "recreational" should be a warning sign. And his combined use with MJ is very concerning; you don't treat depression with a depressant. If he truly is 'depressed' he should have had professional advice to quit MJ.


Sounds expensive, but he should easily have the funds to pay for it.

Under a doctor's care would surely add a lot to the cost, but he can afford it financially.

What might turn out to be unaffordable no matter how much wealth has been accumulated, is the plain ordinary toxicity. Something toxic doesn't have to nearly be fatal or even give blatant negative effects, in many cases unabated use can allow "minor failures to cure conditions" to progress unchecked, eventually turning out to be major failures.

As an example, a well-recognized cultural icon in his time, Michael Jackson could afford all kinds of toxic things and medical treatments where money was no object, and look how he ended up. If he would have had lesser medical supervision it would have been much worse too.

When you do the math, the risk/benefit ratio between a drug treatment using a product possessing an element of toxicity, even at a recognized safe dose, versus a non-toxic alternative of a different sort, these can be in a completely different ball park. One of the choices has a zero in the equation, and it's not easy to come close to that some other way.


This feels like using the internet in 1996 or the iPhone in 2010. Not quite there yet, but you can clearly see that this is going to be massive within a few years.


Yep, the only solution is more disinformation police.

Clearly they saved us during the pandemic!


theverge's coverage of anything not directly related to gadget reviews is always incredibly biased, sensationalist and usually wrong.


"always", "sensationalist", "usually wrong" you sound as biased as them mate.


How would you put this if it was a fact and not "biased"?


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: