> Medicaid provides more comprehensive benefits than private insurance at significantly lower out-of-pocket cost to beneficiaries, but its lower payment rates to health care providers and lower administrative costs make the program very efficient. It costs Medicaid much less than private insurance to cover people of similar health status. For example, adults on Medicaid cost about 22 percent less than if they were covered by private insurance, Urban Institute research shows.
> Over the past 30 years, Medicaid costs per beneficiary have essentially tracked costs in the health care system as a whole, public and private. In fact, costs per beneficiary grew more slowly for Medicaid than for private insurance between 1987 and 2017, and are expected to continue growing more slowly than for private insurance in coming years, according to the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission.
Right, healthcare costs have been growing faster than overall inflation for many years and the industry now constitutes 17.6% of GDP. If it goes much higher it's going to start displacing more essential industries. So obviously costs will eventually be cut somehow. That will probably be some combination of care rationing, provider wage cuts, and prescription drug price fixing. Regardless of whether anyone thinks those measures are good ideas or not, the math is inescapable. My guess is that the crisis will come when large self-insured employers refuse to continue absorbing most of the annual cost increases for employee health plans.
Medicaid is reportedly well run, though? Yes, it is a big number, but it has not been the source of any budget problems. Quite the contrary, it has been a good lever in controlling health care costs.
Apple doesn't want to pay the Jensen Leather Jacket Fee and has $200 billion in cash it is sitting on to make it happen. If anyone can create an Nvidia substitute for AI chips its Apple and their cash hoard combined with their world-class design team and exclusive access to all of TSMC 3nm and next year 2nm production they could possibly want.
Following the loss of Apple, easily its biggest client, Imagination was bought out by a Chinese-based investment group. Apple subsequently released its first in-house designed mobile GPU as part of the A11 Bionic SoC that powered the iPhone X.. The new “multi-year license agreement” gives Apple official access to much wider range of Imagination’s mobile GPU IP as well as its AI technologies. The A11 Bionic also included the first neural processing engine in an iPhone
This is the core issue. Unchecked executive overreach, by politicians of both parties at the federal and state level, will end terribly for the republic.
But no one cares if it serves their political interests.
Possibly a natural consequence of gridlocked legislature or judiciary. If only the executive branch can get anything done, allowing overreach is the only way for government to continue functioning.
That doesn't mean it's good, but suggests directions for solutions.
Whether it's gridlock really is a matter of opinion though. Our three branch system is designed with a very specific goal in mind - balance of power through checks and balances.
If the government can only get something done by ramming it through only one branch, maybe there's a reason. It's possible that the action wouldn't hold up to judicial review or that the legislature of elected representatives don't support it.
We can't keep assuming that gridlock is a symptom rather than a feature. Not necessarily directly related to this specific topic, but sometimes governments just have to slowly to do their jobs well.
The legislature moving slowly is a feature; do you really want laws that can be permanent to be handled with wanton abandon? Especially if the electorate voting the legislature in is presumably divided on issues for debate?
The executive can move quickly and has some special case exceptions to exercise them more broadly, namely justifiable emergencies, but their powers are supposed to be ephemeral at most owing to their speed.
As for the judiciary, it's not their job to legislate in the first place so I'm not sure why you brought them up.
The legislature is supposed to move carefully, but it must still be able to actually legislate. US Congress, for example, is steadily passing fewer and fewer laws every year. If the current trend continues, fifty years from now Congress will enact zero new laws. That isn't being careful, that's paralyzed.
>[the legislature] must still be able to actually legislate
No, it doesn't have to.
Remember, the legislature is voted by the electorate, the voting public at large; the people of the city, county, state or country as applicable. If the legislature ends up so divided that passing laws with a supermajority to overrule executive vetos is impractical if not impossible, that suggests the people are divided and cannot come to a consensus on issues to be debated.
Why should the legislature pass laws when the people can't come to an agreement? That's not democratic. If the people can't agree, neither should their representatives agree and it's the duty of the executive to veto such legislative overreach.
In the real world there are other effects besides local votes. In the US limiting the amount of representatives in the legislature was resulted in 1 legislator for more and more people in civilization. If I represent hundreds of thousands of people how do I get a consensus from those people? The people when polled nationally agree on abortion or gun control poll for action by a decent percentage but congress has not acted.
Also the legislature does more then pass new laws they vote on military appointments, sign treaties, determine judges, create budgets and more.
While true that seems like an unlikely situation because human culture and knowledge are not static. At the very least, repealing old archaic laws that don’t serve us or are harmful would be a good idea and it’s self-evident those still exist on the books.
Culture and knowledge don't require laws though, right?
I'd argue that a law based on culture or current knowledge is a bad law precisely because both knowledge and culture are always evolving. Laws that don't come with an expiration date should be timeless, at which point they couldn't be based on today's culture or knowledge.
Not sure what world you’re living in. Even rape and murder, for example, is defined and prosecuted different today than it has been in the past. Surely that suggests that even things you might think to define as “timeless” aren’t quite so timeless. That’s ignoring the fact that there’s all sorts of regulations that are regulated by law. There’s also all sorts of laws that govern how government itself operates and it would be naive to imagine that what works for a country of a few million at the founding would work for a country of tens and then hundreds of millions. And then there’s things like EPA and healthcare which are governed by laws and very much should be updated as we learn new things and find new ways of doing things or technology makes a different way of doing things make more sense.
I argue that it has already ended poorly for the republic since the republic effectively no longer actually exists and what does exist is a fraudulent and inherently illegitimate government based on its own words and actions.
The Constitution that created the federal republic is essentially an agreement, a form of contract. It has been violated to every degree and in every imaginable way possible that the only thing holding any of this together is that people still have not realize that they still trust in a lie.
I get indications that there is possibly a kind of realization starting to work its way through the country, where people are starting to realize just that … that they’ve been had, defrauded, conned, lied to, deceived, stolen from, plundered, and abused.
We shall see how deep the cracks go once an economic event stresses the foundation. I’m agnostic on which way it will go or if the crack will cause the foundation to crack catastrophically. I could make arguments either way.
You’re absolutely right we shouldn’t celebrate that a maniac hasn’t engulfed Europe in war since 1945. This is an incredible feat for anyone with an elementary understanding of history.
We’re at the longest period of time that a unified Germany hasn’t started a war.
Obviously there are still authoritarians seeking control and starting wars, but they tend not to exist where free markets do. Apologies if that’s inconvenient for your politics.
That's a strawman caricature of the argument. States that are driven by free market allocation rather than central planning (because there's no _pure_ model of either/or) are much less likely to initiate major wars of conquest, such as the ongoing Ukraine war or a hypothetical invasion of Taiwan.
That's just empirical fact at this point. There are counterexamples, but the propensity goes strongly in one direction.
Also, "current genocide in Palestine" is a provocative / activist assertion, not a correct consensus use of terminology. It would at least open to debate, for example, that the situation started with a "genocide in Israel". Clarity won't be achievable for a while on that one -- but you can certainly signal that you've pre-judged the situation or can't be objective about it, with phrasing like yours.
> - but you can certainly signal that you've pre-judged the situation
I'm happy to listen to arguments that occupied Palestine was, at the same time as it was being occupied, also genociding the Israelis, however the case for Israelis genociding the Palestinians today is well argued: https://ccrjustice.org/sites/default/files/attach/2023/10/Is... . This is separate from justification attempts. I believe there is no justification for genocide, others may disagree, however it would be very strange for someone to argue that Israel is not attempting to destroy, in whole or in part, Palestinians. That being the definition of genocide. I have looked at these arguments, listened to opposition to these arguments, and determined that Israel is indeed committing a genocide. I'm not sure how that's different from other things I've determined or why it specifically should be considered "pre-judging."
> States that are driven by free market allocation rather than central planning (because there's no _pure_ model of either/or) are much less likely to initiate major wars of conquest,
This doesn't make sense to me considering one of the largest drivers for global war and conflict has been the "free market" USA. When should we consider America having been a "free market" state? Is the 1800s too early? Do we count all the wars against native americans as one war of conquest, or each individual one as its own war? First Seminole, Black Hawk, Winnebago, etc. Then there's Mexican-American, the Opium wars (also participated in by Free Market Great Britain and France), the war against the Mormons, etc. Maybe America wasn't free market until the 20th century? Well, in that case, the Indian wars were still ongoing as late as the 1910s, there was the USA occupation of Veracruz, Haiti, Dominican Republic. There was American involvement in the Korean and Vietnam war though I can accept that those weren't necessarily "wars of conquest," though the USA framed it as a war of Free Market Capitalism vs Communism, in which case, the goal was to conquest communism. The USA also attempted to invade Cuba, did invade Grenada, bombed Libya, invaded Panama, then there's the Gulf war... which brings us to the 21st century. We have the 20 year war in Afghanistan, which was begun on a false premise of finding weapons of mass destruction, similar to the Iraq War, same time period.
Let's now go down the list of conquests and invasions by non-free market states.
Obviously, Nazi Germany, not having a free market, tops the list. Luckily it was defeated relatively quickly from a historical standpoint, so, very small time period to analyse, though I think you and I both agree that they wouldn't have stopped until total world domination.
We can look at the Soviets, and again, smaller time period, so we can be fair and compare their 20th century behavior to the Americans in the 20th century. They invaded Afghanistan (poor country can't catch a break from the commies or the capitalists!), was at least as involved in the Korean and the Vietnam war as the USA was, pressured the Polish border, the Finish border, and the Japanese border, which I would agree is a war of aggression. Invasion of Czechoslovakia, definitely a war of aggression. Further wars escape me - the Soviets never invaded Cuba nor American territory, so I think that's +1 war for America (ostensibly the Soviets were merely providing the means for Cubans to defend themselves from an apparently aggressive neighboring nation!). Am I missing any Soviet wars? Then the collapse into Russia, which, if we count them as the same country, I'm not sure - the notable difference between Russia and the Soviet Union was that Russia was seeking a more free market, globalist economy. Yes, it's certainly not as free market as the USA, but neither country are true free market economies, right? In any case, certainly late 20th century Russia had aggressive actions such as in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Chechnya (ostensibly started by their own struggle for independence but Russia's refusal to acknowledge that could perhaps be compared to Native American struggles to maintain independence). Invasion of Georgia, and of course invasion of Ukraine. You really think Russia is a centrally planned economy? I don't think corruption counts as central planning.
Then, the PRC, free market or no? In the beginning absolutely not, and this coincided with their most aggressive period, but as they split into a more free market economy, their wars of aggression cooled, unlike America's. Cold War meddling like the USA and Soviets, and then attacks on Taiwan (sort of a continuation of their own civil war, but not necessary and therefore imo aggression). Border disputes with India, invasion of Cambodia / Vietnam, invasion of Tibet, genocide against Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, and that's about it. Imperialist threats against Taiwan on a weekly basis into the 21st century, economic imperialist activity in Africa, global cultural imperialist and han supremacist activity, not much more than that.
By my eye, I'm not seeing evidence that a State economy being free market or centrally planned has any bearing on its aggression. We have centrally planned countries that tried to take over the whole world (nazi germany), aggressively tried to spread communism (soviet union, PRC), and push on borders (soviet union, PRC), and we have market economies that wiped out indigenous people, aggressively spread capitalism / resisted spread of communism, invaded countries outright, overthrew local governments, and so on.
> That's just empirical fact at this point. There are counterexamples, but the propensity goes strongly in one direction.
>it would be very strange for someone to argue that Israel is not attempting to destroy, in whole or in part, Palestinians
This line alone proves all my points on the topic. That you find it _unfathomable_ that Israel has goals other than the destruction of Palestine shows how one-sided your view on the subject is. There's nothing I can write in this forum that will change such a deeply warped perception, but I'll state for the record: no serious international observer believes that claim.
Ironically, that claim is usually made much more convincingly in the other direction -- that various regional factions have sought the utter destruction of Israel -- but even that is considered an extreme view (of the present) by most experts.
>I have looked at these arguments, listened to opposition to these arguments, and determined that Israel is indeed committing a genocide.
Good for you, but there is a lot more information than you alone have processed, and much more information about the current conflict is not available and will not be for some time. So by declaring your personal "determination", you are really just declaring an amateurish opinion via malapropism.
>What are you looking at that I'm not?
The frame of reference (as the other poster indicated) is post-WW2. That's when the current international order was established and also when globalization kicked into high gear. Since then, world trade integrated free market economies simply haven't started wars of conquest designed to change the ownership of territory.
Yes, there are wars of intervention, regime change, etc. which have almost exclusively been precipitated against regimes that are deeply hostile to and out of sync with the international order. I'm not saying those are all just, or harmless. But the scale of destruction caused by WW1&2-style total war / wars of conquest is incomparable to the expeditionary wars described above.
Bound the claim correctly and it's very simply true: free market states in the current order don't start the most devastating and costly kinds of conflict, whereas authoritarian states still do, to devastating effect.
Both kinds of states do other types of bad things, but that's a non-responsive non-sequitur to this particular point about the advantages of market steering vs. centralized steering.
I didn't say Israel doesn't have goals other than genocide. I said they're doing a genocide.
> no serious international observer believes that claim
Well, some would call this "appeal to authority fallacy," but, I'm not sure, would you call these people "unserious international observers?"
* Damien Short, professor of human rights at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, and co-director of the Human Rights Consortium. He and Haifa Rashed, also at the University of London, analyse a genocide of Palestinians by Israel: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13642987.2012.73...
* John Docker, professor in the Humanities and Research Centre at Australian National University, has written extensively on Israel genocide against Palestine https://www.euppublishing.com/author/Docker%2C+John
* The national governments of South Africa, Algeria, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, the PRC, Colombia, Comoros, Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Malaysia, Maldives, Namibia, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Slovenia, Syria, Turkey, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe have accused Israel of committing genocide. Are nations not "serious international observers" if they're not big / American enough?
I barely scratched the surface. You can find some very highly qualified people, very serious people, arguing that what's happening in Palestine isn't a genocide, of course, but I think it's quite unfair to accuse me of being unserious or "having a deeply warped perception." I gave the no-genocide camp respect, I read the papers, I read the accusations of antisemitism, fake news, etc, and found them lacking, and I believe I am on the right side of history. You seem to be accusing me of being some kind of mindless holy warrior.
> that various regional factions have sought the utter destruction of Israel
I'm not arguing this one way or the other. I simply said before I don't believe there's any justification of genocide, and genocide is what Israel is doing do the Palestinians.
> much more information about the current conflict is not available and will not be for some time
Luckily, you don't need to wait for the complete eradication of a people to call it a genocide, you can do so while it's happening, and you observe the "destruction in part" of a people. This is actually a part of the legal definition of genocide, that it can be credibly applied during the events happening, you can see more in the original paper I linked on the subject.
> change the ownership of territory
If we're talking about the "new international order," isn't it a little naive to claim that wars that don't result in a 1800s British Colony output with a new national flag, aren't "wars of conquest?" From your perspective, were the communists aiming to lift the same national flag over a new communist government, doing wars of conquest? I would think you'd argue yes. I would argue the same for American intervention to establish puppet governments.
So far as I'm aware, WWI had very little to do with free market vs planned economy nations. And while Nazi germany was certainly a planned economy, it, quite famously, lost to another planned economy, allied with a market economy. Since then, what planned economy nations have started "the most devastating and costly kinds of conflict?" I'm gonna be honest, I simply don't accept that Russia is a planned economy lol. As I said, it's not as free market as the USA, but it's not communist, nor is the PRC. I don't see Venezuela or Cuba or Vietnam kicking off any wars recently either, so I just don't understand where your framing is coming from.
I never put words in your mouth or arbitrarily assigned more authority to one person or another in this thread. You did.
I provided sound, legal, cited arguments for the case that Palestinians are being genocided by Israel. You waved your hands and suggested that somehow, they're actually the ones doing the genociding, but you did literally nothing to back your argument other than try to piggy back on mine with nothing more than what looks to me to be the equivalent of an "I'm rubber, you're glue."
You called nations "unserious and wrong" because you apparently have an ideological disagreement with them. No consideration for their position, no desire to find out why many entire countries are calling what's happening a genocide, just: they're wrong. No reason for why, no counter argument, nothing. I would have expected you to at least try to take a geopolitical analysis along the lines of certain nations, like the PRC, may bandwagon just out of a desire to reduce American hegemony, but you didn't even do that, because you apparently have no respect for people you disagree with.
This whole conversation you've acted morally and intellectually superior to me and capped with a final condescension, in the meantime your words matched your accusations towards me. You have been unserious, you've been fallacious, you've been wrong, you've been utterly tribalist.
> You said that their goal is genocide, which is the unserious claim.
If, maybe after five years, you ever happen to stumble across this old thread, or remember the "horeshit unserious person" you briefly condescended to, I genuinely, truly would love to hear your thoughts on how you felt mocking those calling out the genocide of Palestinians as it happened, in the future as the whole horror of what's occuring has percolated through the global consciousness. I don't suggest people will ever stop trying to justify it, however I'm very curious what your personal feelings would be if future you reflects on your utterly callous dismissal of genocide. My personal email is caleb@calebjay.com, I've never shared that on this forum, and I'm genuinely interested on hearing from you in the future, I will do so without judgement.
For anybody to take your comment seriously, you'd first have to actually explain how you get to your assumptions. Because most serious people reject your assumption that there's a genocide going on in Palestine right now.
Oh, well, that's pretty easy to explain. Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part. Israel is intentionally destroying Palestinian people in part if not in whole.
> In their public statements and speeches, Israeli officials have used dehumanizing language, describing Palestinians in Gaza as “human animals.” They have also been unequivocal in the goal of maximum harm, stating that the “emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy” using “fire of a magnitude that the enemy has not known.”
One can be reasonably serious as a person without being fully informed of the situation on the ground in the occupied territories (either in the current moment, or in the context of Israel's continuous efforts to dislodge and dehumanize the Palestinians since 1948). Or without being aware of the modern definition of the term "genocide" (per the very first line in the Wikipedia page, and its usage by the ICJ and countless legal and human rights organizations) to include the intentional destruction of target populations "in whole or in part".
Once one understands enough basic regional history to connect the dots, and is aware of the modern definition -- it's perfectly bloody obvious what's happening.
Putin is also a product of the forced liberalization of Rusia. I guess somebody would also argue that since Pinochet was also a general within Allende’s government, he’s also a product of communism.
Anyway, no war in Europe, but it’s kinda curious that the countries that go around with free market capitalism in modern history, are the ones who have invaded the most countries. By just this fact alone, I would consider the modern era of prosperity in the so called “Western countries” through cheap energy as more responsible of peace between them than free market. We will see what happens with more constrained resources. As a world inhabitant, I hope you are right.
They sell at lot Linux in Azure successfully. Forced users into Microsoft Teams (worst piece of software…) and lured users to upload their data in the cloud. Before it were the operating system and applications but now - their data is in the hand of others.
Users? Most ignore their contribution to mass-effects (software scales) and therefore vendor lock-in.
Business customers often think in short terms. The fees for Microsoft are high and the software has drawbacks. A migration (to Linux) pays off in long term and requires personnel and a strategy. And things which require time will pay off only later. When the CEO/CTO isn’t working there anymore.
Linux succeeds. Also on Desktop. Red Hat and Canonical are shipped pre-installed on some ThinkPads and Dell. But you need to need many devices to gain weight.
Valve is doing it right. A device people want (Steamdeck) pre-installed with Linux and an eco-system they want to use (Steam).
There is absolutely no universe in which he is not surrounded by the finest lawyers that money can buy, who are charting every single millimeter of possible movement on every single possible deal.
> Does anyone remember the state of the electric car industry prior to Elon Musk?
Yep. We had the Nissan Leaf and a couple other minor contenders. And then we got the Bolt just before the Model 3 was released, and the Bolt is still by far the better value.
The Model S made EVs sexy for a time, and that's nice, but it's hard to say that it meaningfully accelerated the transition overall. EVs were in the pipeline already, waiting for battery prices to get into the right range, and that's exactly what has happened.
Well Tesla did prove that EVs can road trip reliably and did design the north American standard (which before was named with great hubris but now is actually accurate against all odds).
Feel like something is gonna give in our health care system. This doesn’t seem sustainable.