It just backs out to interest rates commensurate with the risk. Lack of collateral doesn't mean you can't get a loan.
Perhaps the economics wouldn't work, but it sure sounds like nobody tried in this case. What it would boil down to is if the insurance company expected a larger net cost on a traditional drug regimen for the life of the patient, vs servicing a loan at the market rate over N years. Interest rates are still very low so in general debt is seeking out risk.
Insurance companies don't cover total health costs over the life of the patient. They cover the next month of health costs, and a certain percentage of their customers churn afterwards. For insurance companies, providing treatment that lasts a longer amount of time can often be a terrible business decision - if the customer switches insurance providers afterwards, then they're essentially subsidizing the insurance company they switched to.
This more commonly happens with prescription quantities. Medication compliance is far better when people can pick up a three-month supply of medication. Insurance companies want patients to pick up one month supply instead, so that they aren't paying for two months of medication for every patient who switches insurance companies.
Right, so what is necessary is for Gene therapy to have similar financial characteristics to an insurance company as a monthly perscription for a chronic illness. There is no reason this cant be securitized properly, unless a) the lifetime healthcare costs for a person are higher with the therapy than without (unlikely for most chronic illnesses) or b) the interest rate would need to be so high as to make it so. If gene therapy provides a more optimal use of resources and capital than continual therapy for chronic illness than the up-front high price tag nature of it being a problem is an opportunity for someone to come along and make the market more efficient.
Insurance is how the US deals with health care. It isn't how all countries do it. There are other models and there's no reason we couldn't invent new ones if none of the existing ones work.
- By sending dollars to Kenya it's helping reduce inflation for the Kenyan govt. The biggest problem for many developing countries is finding a way to get their hands on the global reserve currency.
- Its allowing private wealth to be created (by women !!), empowering women have very positive cascading effects in a country (fertility rate drops, women have personal freedom to do other things ). Private wealth directly in the pocket of Kenyans is one the most efficient ways the developed world can help the developing world.
Normally giving cash to the govt results in looting of public coffers.
- Teaching useful computer skills to the average kenyan.
I don't follow the "very positive cascading effects" line. How is low fertility rate and women being free to do other things a positive cascading effect? Historically, it makes families more unstable.
Edit: I'm not saying women working is a bad thing. It's good on many fronts. But I feel the ripple effects are not positive.
It's not only developing countries that benefit from increased female participation in the labour force. For Western nations, the increased proportion of women in the labour force was a core component of the rapid increased economic growth between the 1940's and today.
Low fertility is an interesting thing where it comes to development; for most countries it has quite dramatically declined as incomes have increased. The effects are likely bidirectional (increased economic growth -> lower fertility rate; lower fertility rate -> increased per capita income).
The drivers are complex and interrelated: high child mortality rates, low life expectancy, and high poverty are associated with high fertility. It's an unjust comparison to make, however leading theories share common features with K-r reproduction strategies in ecology (with increased survival / longevity, investing in a few highly educated/skilled children becomes feasible). Similarly, increased education / maternal health is highly correlated with economic development and child wellbeing. These are often highly compounding effects over time - a virtuous cycle in which increased economic freedoms, health, education, and opportunities (male and female - often females are relatively impoverished, so there's the potential for bigger immediate benefits) can lead to rapid development with the right institutional conditions.
Lower, not low. Having 5-7 children per family makes it a lot harder to increase your economic position and education levels. It's a good thing when developing countries start lowering their fertility rates towards those seen in developed countries.
It's not bad but why do they feel the need to eat sh? They could have said just that "we pay 4x the going day wage and we want to maximise our profits" instead of that BS: "we don't want to disrupt the labour market so we keep the wages for their own good."
My guess is that the guy they interviewed spends his weekends hanging out with NGO types. How else would you get invited to any parties in Nairobi? And they love this stuff... saying "everybody profits" makes you sound like a cold-hearted evil capitalist.
There have been spontaneous demonstrations among the workers voicing their joy and gratitude at our happy new way of life. /s It seems pretty naive to assume that a handful of individuals being paid a fraction of the going rate for western labor is going to have a meaningful impact on the country's economy or lead to sweeping social changes.
All of Asia was dragged out of poverty - over time - by doing stuff cheaper. China is a world power not from communism or protectionism or by some grand gesture. They took awful jobs for a tiny amount of pay (by western standards) and eeked their way up the GDP ladder.
It is a the worst kind of white, privileged attitude that taking a higher paid job won't improve things for the locals.
But lets give this a fair airing. Name a country that had a GDP increase in any other way. I'll wait.
Scandinavia and the entire Soviet Union spring to mind instantly. There's nothing particularly white or privileged about healthy skepticism of any system that hinges on labor arbitrage to accomplish it's goals. Go meditate on the econ definition of the word "exploitation" until enlightenment is achieved. Note, if you're planning on trying to muster McCarthyite arguments at this point you're going to have to overcome the fact that the first manmade object and the first person in space were both put there by communists.
Sure, but the argument is specious for all of the same reasons that philanthropy has a track record of exacerbating the social problems it intended to solve.
Its a wise move considering solar might get much cheaper by 2030.
At this point though the main expense is not the panels but the more complex task of logistics, operational, etc.
It could also generate a lot of jobs for Saudi citizens but I do not think the average Saudi would be interested doing the job of installing solar panels.
Solar is a really good bet for the Saudis, they just need to execute it well.
">>Same reason as the US and farm workers, natives don’t want to do it."
$30 an hour and I'd do it. Immigrants do it because the cost of living in their country is like 10 times less than in USA. They sacrifice for x years, almost live off the grid here until they build a house, open a business and stay in their country.
And yet, we are all born in just the right moment. Just by existing, Ramanujan opened eyes as to what people from "backward" (colonial) areas were capable of. While his own life might have been better if he had been born now, his existence helped improve many other lives. Just reading about him as a kid inspired me. And I'm just a white dude from the suburbs.
Does Linus hold a monopoly over operating systems since maybe 80% of servers and mobile phones use Linux ?
Maybe he twirls his mustache every night thinking about how much cash he will make once he aggressively starts charging everybody 100 dollars to upgrade their Linux version, and all he has been doing over the past 20 years is under price until he has absolute vertical domination ?
Linux harms legitimate 'small business' owners who cannot sell their operating system for 10,000 dollar / license to recoup their investment.
--- BIG RED /S ---
Lawyers trying to create laws about macro economics is no different than me telling a doctor how to perform eye surgery, it's what got us into this mess.
So if Amazon has a monopoly, and you think that is bad why not put you money where your mouth is and aggressively fund its competitors ?
Where were you when for 20+ years shareholders of amazon were funding it's growth, taking all the risk, most amazon investors have not seen any actual cash from their investment, if tomorrow amazon makes a bad decision or mistake, then all the unrealized capital gains wealth that is it's stock price would plummet.
You could solve this anti-trust issue really easily you know ? China has alternate e-commerce sites, so does India, instead of the populist message of "Eat Bezos" maybe give some of your salary to actually solve the problem ? I know amazon shareholders did, and they didn't have our hindsight.
Of course I am not going to take their talk seriously unless they actually buy shares in Amazon's competitors, ask the EU how the shakedown of tech companies is helping them, they could seize all of Bezo's, Zuck's, Sergey's wealth (which is in stocks anyway, how much would it be worth after nationalization ?) and still not figure out how to solve the problem.
+ I was suffering from increasing myopia and astigmatism yearly.
+ It turns out my power was all wrong, it was wrong by 2 dipoters !!
+ Why ?
+ It turns out if you spend 12 hours a day in front of a computer, you start suffering from 'pseudo myopia', a temporary state where your ciliary muscles cannot relax, its quite harmless and normally reverses within 1 week of no screen time, but if you go to an optician - unless they correct for it they will give a wrong power !! which acts as a negative feedback to increase your power !! :(
+ The solution is quite simple and that is to check your power under dilation (3 days of blurryness ). I managed to fix all my headache and eye pain once I got the correct power but I am quite pissed about the whole thing.
+ I apply 0.01 atropine before sleeping to force relax my ciliary muscles since I cannot quit coding.
+ Sunlight is key but only when you are young, as you get older and see more opticians, wrong power can do more harm than lack of sunlight.
+ Atropine works even without sunlight, it the best control mechanism we have in 2018 (outside of taking up a non screen job or working outdoor )
That's brilliant! I noticed on vacations (before smartphones) where would spend most of the time looking at the horizon, that after less than a week, my eyesight would be so much clearer.
The doctor normally gives you a different muscle relaxant, you wont be able to read for 3 days.
The reason why more opticians do not do this is because its inconvenient for the patient, I beg to differ since my ability to see things is worth a lot more than 3 days of paycheck.
I saw a lot of different optician / doctors for it, but finally an optician / doctor researcher with a Phd fixed it for me.
I had this done before getting laser eye surgery to ensure my prescription was correct (it was wrong, just like yours) but the effect wore off within 24 hours. It is very inconvenient though, my pupils were fully dilated and I couldn't see anything within 2 feet of me!
Climate is not consistent across the north. Real estate is particularly tricky because it is so reliant on local conditions, which are completely unpredictable at this point. Maybe refugees drive up demand for real estate in the south, maybe invasive beetles destroy all the maple trees, maybe the government drains the great lakes to irrigate Iowa. It's better to make solid (eco-conscious) 10-20 year investments than to try to guess what will be valuable in 50-100 imo
In the 1960s, the idea of deliberately warming Canada's arctic -- in order to make more farmland available for cultivation(!) -- was a serious policy proposal.
Everywhere in the world, at least 5 meters above see level that have maximum temperatures below 40 degrees celsius will be livable, as long as economic output is sufficient to purchase food (if it cannot be grown locally any more).
Yes but which regions will still have maximum temperatures below 40 degrees Celsius at that point, at least on most days of the year?
A 4 degree change worldwide is easily a 10 degree change over continents, and that's just the average!
From what I understand, that can easily mean a 20 or 30 degree change in max temperatures, or does it?
I'm saying Central Europe 60 degrees Celsius on a normal summer day.
Please tell me I'm wrong, but that's the understanding I've gained so far
60 degrees C is almost impossible in non-desert areas (due to evaporation of moisture). The practical limit, today, in tropical areas is about 45 degrees, and at that point, it's getting deadly.
Which also answers the first question. Future temperatures of up to 45 degrees will be survivable. Exactly where that will be, is complicated, but anywhere north of the alps in Europe should be too far north, as should the northerns states in the US.
That does not mean that every place further south will be unlivable, only that it the risk is higher. Spain, Italy, Texas and California could start looking like Sahara, or it could be more similar to Egypt or Thailand, depending on how rainfall patterns change.
In any case, if we look 50 years into the future, who knows what kind of technologies we would be able to leverage to mitigate these problems?
> In any case, if we look 50 years into the future, who knows what kind of technologies we would be able to leverage to mitigate these problems?
Scientists and technologists that have been warning us that no technological solution will be able to address the climate change consequences, and they've been telling us for several decades which makes it weird that people still do not know about this.
Well there is one potential biotech solution which is engineering a fatal panpidemy that would wipe out almost all humans from the surface of earth as was presented in Texas a few years ago but IIRC the conclusion was that for now this seems to be an unreachable goal as no agents combines all required characteristics for such a pandemy to happen.
> Scientists and technologists that have been warning us that no technological solution will be able to address the climate change consequences, and they've been telling us for several decades which makes it weird that people still do not know about this.
Most scientists that I know would not make absolute statements like this. What the WOULD say, is that we should not rely on this happening.
When Thomas Malthus made his predictions 200 years ago, he was right about his core prediction (population increase), but underestimated technological growth.
The truth is that we have almost no clue about what technological revolutions will happen over the next 50-200 years, if any, and how they will impact us.
A global 4° celsius increase would mean at least a 7-8° increase on continental land which means the end of agriculture on land. This kind of defeats your wishful thinking.
This is not some random idea but something out of the GIEC documents and talks.
That is a good point, primarily because it would make staying outdoors dangerous in a number of additional places.
For farming, I'm not sure it's that clear. Many of these studies only consider the negative impacts. Obviously, many places would be left arid. But 7-8 temperature increase, along with increased rainfall (evaporated water has to come down somewhere), will massively increase the farming potential in places like Siberia, inland China and Canada. Increased rainfall can also potentially lead to absurd-sounding things such as rice farms in present-day Sahara.
Finally, as you alluded to, aquatic farming has a huge potential.
We are beyond the point where food production has to be local. As long as there is enough food globally, economically prosperous areas can buy the food they need.
Also, keep in mind that when talking about a 4 degree increase, it is assumed to happen over several centuries. At the present rate of technologial development, it is impossible to say what impact it would have, as food production 200 years in the future is likely to be as different from today as it was 200 years in the past.
Still, I absolutely think that at 4 degrees (at least if it happens within 200 years), the results would be a major catastrophy.
Provided that we haven't been already wiped out (or domesticated) by runaway AI's or nuclear war, of course. (Both of which concern me more over the next 200 years)
