This model does not resemble a free economy at all. Not only it doesn't consider the wealth-creation aspect of a free economy, but it assumes people "wagers" their wealth. No society does this and is a terrible model of how an economy works. Most people earn their wages, if they have some money left they may save that, but long term saving is not comparable with a bet on a coin flip, if you think it is, then you should not save at all because you will go broke with probability one. Again, that is not what happens in our societies.
Jumping to the conclusion that "taxing the rich" could solve anything is completely wrong. You would just make things more expensive and add extra incentives to take jobs abroad. It doesn't matter that the model is too simplistic, the problem is that this model is too far from reality.
I feel this discussion always misses an important point. The value of something has nothing to do with its costs or profits. The value of things (labor included) is subjective and is normally related to its scarcity. In the period analyzed the workforce basically doubled because the inclusion of woman to the workforce, therefore it had a huge pressure to keep it low.
If the productivity of less-skilled workers has not kept pace with average productivity, this was by design. It was not the fault of these workers; it was the fault of those who designed policies that had the effect of devaluing their skills.
my point is that the value of the work is not directly related with its productivity but with its availability, which doubled during the last few decades.
Does this means that Emacs will now be usable on remote desktops such as x2go? It tends to close by itself and, if I remember correctly, it was related to some redrawing issue that, I hope, could be solved by this.
Could this endeavour be detrimental to the environment?
(Please read my whole reasoning before calling me a Climate Change Denier or something like that)
I understand that humans are changing the Earth's environment, but with this we need to acknowledge that other organisms are doing it too. In particular plants have been taking CO2 from the atmosphere for ages and continue to do so. If you look at CO2 concentrations for long periods of time, you'll find that the levels of today are not very different from what has happened cyclically for hundreds of thousands of years.
The difference may be on the fact that now we are adding an extra influx of CO2 to the atmosphere, but in doing so we may be balancing greater concentrations of water vapour, which is a much more efficient greenhouse gas.
If doubling the concentration of CO2 increases the temperature of the atmosphere, in say one degree, to gain another degree you'll need to double the concentration of CO2 again, so the effect of concentration of CO2 on temperature is logarithmic. Water vapour is much more efficient and by decreasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere we may increase the amount of water.
This is because of how photosynthesis (and agriculture) works. A plant breathes air in through small pores on their leaves called stomata. Doing so allows water to evaporate through those same pores. If the concentration of CO2 in the air is low, the plant will need to evaporate more water to absorb the same amount of CO2. On the other hand, if the plant doesn't have enough water to evaporate, it will close its stomata and the result will be lower growth and poor yield, simply because of the lack of carbon. Since nowadays many agricultural plots are using water from aquifers and other underground sources, we are actually putting into the environment much more water than would have been without agriculture. If we decrease the amount of CO2 we may push even further the plant's need for water and produce more water vapour, pushing even further the warming, since water is much more effective than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.
We may be fighting against the wrong enemy. And in doing so punishing unfairly the poorest of the world, who rely on fossil fuel for energy and those who will be the most affected when crop yields start falling and the water available becomes insufficient.
I haven't been able to find a global warming model that incorporates this effect, but if someone made it this far into this comment and knows of any model that does, I'll be very grateful to hear from it. If someone related to this project reads this, please discuss it. It may be a mute point because some reason that I don't know, but it may very well be an important one.
But here you are not talking about coal. The alternative is not a more polluting fuel, is another person that is also very unhappy his opportunity was taken away because he had the wrong gender. We all agree that situation sucks, so we don't make a net possitive by making more people misserable AND being less productive.
Where I live doctors are only allowed to give prescriptions for the generic chemical compound and are forbidden to give prescriptions for specific brands. They may suggest the use of a particular brand if they know of a benefit over others but the one who decides is the patient.
Of course this is not very useful when the drug is patented or if there is only one laboratory producing it, but none the less it seems like a sane default. And this is in a private healthcare system, it is surprising that the NHS doesn't have a rule like this when is their taxpayer's money being used.
this is a more complicated situation. First, for biologics, there are rarely equivalent generics (context: https://www.jhsph.edu/news/news-releases/2016/generic-biolog...). Second, this is a case where Genentech (the maker of Avastin and Lucentis) is basically trying to prevent people from prescribing a cheaper drug that can be substituted. Genentech's made the argument that Lucentis is specifically designed for this use, while Avastin has issues (safety and efficacy). Doctors have some latitude to prescribe off-label drugs where there is an indication it's safe and effective. In this case, doctors are basically subdividing avastin packets (which has a risk).
The cheaper alternative that the NHS wants to offer is not actually the same as the more expensive drug that's licensed to treat wet age-related macular degeneration. It's related and there's every reason to believe it's as safe and effective as the licensed drug, but it's still not the same stuff.
The cheaper one is 3.5% and 5% the price of the other two and is recommended by WHO and used widely around the world, including the US. As always the decision as to what will be appropriate will lie with the doctor but at least they have the option now.
I expect that the price of the other two will mysteriously drop quite dramatically now ...
Not a libertarian nor a bitcoin fan, but I have to disagree with OP.
First, he postulates a gedankenexperiment where bitcoin replaces the dollar, but since it tends to appreciate in value, no one actually spends their money, so the economy halts. This train of though obviously neglects the fact that, if it actually replaced the dollar, people would _need_ to use and spend their bitcoins, so its price action would be very different to what we have seen.
Then he goes and mocks the idea of having a trustless currency system but IMO he misunderstands the idea. If you use the currency for exchange you still have to trust other people, for instance if I use bitcoin on Amazon, I'd still need to trust Amazon and possibly some other merchant. The part of trust you are taking away is not between people, but towards the ability of the State to issue money and regulate its value. But then libertarians may come up with some other ways to achieve this that do not involve cryptocurrencies. Furthermore, you don't need to be a libertarian to agree on that principle. One example of this is Chilean Central Bank, which -unlike the FED and by the Chilean constitution- cannot buy the government's debt, so the government can't just keep printing money for political reasons, like many countries in the region have been doing for decades.
So whatever lesson he is trying to teach seems a bit farfetched. Bitcoin may die and not mean a single thing for libertarianism, because IMO it's success depends on technical implementation, not ideological barriers.
>Bitcoin may die and not mean a single thing for libertarianism, because IMO it's success depends on technical implementation, not ideological barriers.
100% agree. The technical details of bitcoin's implementation are taken up (despite being a red herring) by the author as an indictment of libertarian principles themselves, probably the reason he focuses on the oldest and most technologically outdated crypto out of the major ones.
> he part of trust you are taking away is not between people, but towards the ability of the State to issue money and regulate its value.
Not 100% complete. You are also taking away the requirement that the seller trust the buyer. Assuming of course that both the buyer and the seller are willing to wait for the transaction to clear before delivering the product.
You are correct though, that it does not take away the need for the buyer to trust the seller.
Unless and until the asset and entire supply chain you are using is also somehow trustless, which I admit is contrived, but also interesting to think about.
They do say that they adjust for "patient characteristics", although they don't go into much detail. Also it's important to note that physicians that have a large volume of patients don't have a higher mortality rate on their patients. It looks like a real effect, maybe from "staying behind" or maybe simply not being on the "top of their game".
It's difficult to really say for certain what's going on. The adjustments I'm sure are very crude compared to what case assignment decisions are actually based on, for example, so I'm sure they're adjustments wouldn't really account very well for patient illness severity or other subtleties along those lines.
Another possibility is that younger staff are more likely to be questioned about things. "Have you thought about X?" causes them to rethink something and make a revision. If older staff are just assumed to know what they're doing, they might be questioned less.
The fact that differences weren't present among physicians with a large volume also makes me wonder if this is just a fishing expedition that wouldn't replicate. Not to cast aspersions on the authors; just to say that if you slice up any dataset enough you can find something.
