This is discussed in the article:
"Some scientists have suggested that grass-finished beef, if managed properly, can be a more sustainable option: As the cattle graze, they stimulate grass to grow deep roots and pull more carbon into the soil, helping to offset the cows’ climate impact. But, on the flip side, grass-finished cattle also take longer to reach slaughter weight, which means they spend more time burping up methane into the atmosphere. Because of this, some studies have suggested that grass-fed beef can actually be worse for the climate over all, though the debate about this continues to rage.
For now, it’s hard to say with confidence that grass-fed beef is consistently more climate-friendly than conventional beef."
For people that like to eat healthy, how do you feel about eating something as processed as the "beyond burger?" I get that it's nice to have another option but to me it's hard for me to stomach the ingredients especially with canola being the third ingredient.
Processed is not a bad word when it comes to health. What matters are the ingredients. I'm not aware of any consensus on canola being anything but healthy, but am interested in learning more as canola oil is what I use for cooking.
That being said, like any meat or meat-substitute, I wouldn't consider it a "health food".
I agree with you that the ingredients matter, but I also think as a blanket statement avoiding processed foods is smart.
I think this is a pretty good synopsis of why canola and PUFA's (polyunsaturated fatty acids)are bad. I actually think it's possible that we should be vilifying them on the same level as sugar. https://www.alexfergus.com/blog/pufa-s-the-worst-thing-for-y...
The problem with all oil is that it’s very calorie dense and nutrient poor. A tablespoon of olive oil has 120 calories! And since it’s so calorie dense it doesn’t make us feel full.
I've been vegan for a while now and while I think it's a great thing that these products are available I don't think I'll be eating them much myself. I much prefer a lentil curry to a burger but it's nice to have some options when I'm out with friends.
Do I understand this correctly that if I consume a lot of Omega 6 (I love olive oil and nuts and consume large quantities of both) I might actually harm myself? Do I make Alzheimer disease more likely by Omega 6 rich diet?
I'm not totally familiar with the placebo process. Are there anyways you could throw off the process like having the placebo doctors be really mean and the drug doctors be really nice?
Is everything completely randomized in terms of people that are taking the drugs? IE if there was a magic formula for determining that an individual is more likely to respond positively to placebos could they pick those people?
Double blinding is supposed to prevent this. Nobody who sees the patient should know which patients are taking the placebo (person A puts either placebos or treatments in bottle X, person B gives patient X the bottle).
Yes, it seems that other people are more susceptible to placebo than others.
It is likely there are portions of the population, who have a better response to a placebo than to the actual drug - but! - the reverse is also a likely scenario. I.e. there are people who don't respond to a placebo and show a strong therapeutic response to an actual drug.
Hence, if one is capable, one should always have an active attitude to ones treatment - what works for someone else, may not work for you, and vice versa.
I hope someone can dig out the reference to this... I read this from a reputable source, but damn if I can remember from where anymore.
If you're ever board and you want to watch something on placebos I highly recommend watching this lecture by Dr. Irving Kirsch. Placebos are pretty nuts and probably really undervalued. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISptt3CRAqc&t=15s
It is interesting to me that the three areas main areas in America that have become exponentially more expensive are healthcare, construction, and education. It's curious that they have the most government control.
They are also the three things that are socialized to a much higher degree in other developed countries, where they are not becoming exponentially more expensive.
I remember hearing from someone in the field that health care in Europe is indeed becoming exponentially more expensive. the exponent is smaller than the US, and the cost isn't borne by individuals, but they're still going to have a problem. (I don't have a source for this though.)
There's the aging population and that there are costs associated with improvements in modern medicine. If we save someone from the first expensive-to-treat thing that in the past would have killed them but the second (or third) thing does get them, they have two-to-three times the end of life medical costs. We're able to keep people alive longer, but it is costly.
At least in Australia, this is going to go one of two ways - either a user pays system or workers will have to contribute dramatically more tax (it's currently a flat 1%) to the healthcare system to look after people who are no longer working but costing the system a lot. I favour the latter, but the "fuck you, got mine" mentality is insidious and increasingly pervasive.
I'm curious about this thought experiment when people are discussing the pros and cons of user pays:
> Imagine that in 2019 someone invents a perfect artificial heart, which has zero risks or complications, reliably giving 5 or 10 extra years of life to typical elderly patients with heart issues. The downside is that it has to be made out of a giant diamond and so it costs $100 million. How do we decide who gets one?
The point is that somewhere down the line, as our opportunities to spend money on medicine grow and grow (which by itself is a good thing!), we have to come up with some way to draw the "user pays" line. It might be that people with a "fuck you got mine" attitude want to draw the line a lot lower than everyone else, but that's not the same thing as believing that the line exists at all.
It's an okay thought experiment but I don't think it's especially valuable when the reality is closer to "we take an additional 1-2% of your taxable income in return for people being confident that they can go to the hospital if they need to". Which is where we're at, not $100M hearts.
Of course there are issues with it. Government inefficiency, people taking up GP time when they don't need to, over-prescription pushed by drug reps as the government pays for it etc. But comparatively I think it's a small cost to pay for avoiding poor people dying because they can't afford to go to the hospital.
I think we're likely to cap out on a quality of life front before it becomes genuinely affordable. Bodies still break down over time, even if we're able to prolong lives a little through modern medicine.
Could you explain to me how the government control of those things had lead to price increases? Specifically? I hear this a lot but have never heard an explaination and I am genuinely curious of the reasoning
"The Economy" is a (surprisingly effective!) system for allocating resources. It short-circuits a human instinct that social status and fairness should be the guide, and replaces that with "a persons economic contribution" instead.
Now, it turns out that the difference in productivity between people is so great (think the old 10x-100x programmer) that allocating resources according to contribution creates so much surplus stuff that everybody wins, even the unproductive. And, as a side benefit, everyone has an incentive to be productive.
The flip side is that Government is made up of ordinary people who often ask "what about fairness and status?", and likes to interfere to reallocate from productive people to unproductive people. In mild cases you get a healthy level of support for the disadvantaged, in extreme cases you get Venezuela. But in all cases, since the productive people are given less, they create less and there is less available to distribute. In theory this triggers the laws of supply-and-demand, reduces supply and prices increase.
The flip side is if the productive people consume their wealth instead of producing with it then we probably could tax them without any ill effects, but I think that is rarer than most people think.
This seems like an odd way of rationalizing the extreme concentration of wealth to the top along with growing poverty and lack of opportunity to climb the economic ladder.
Defining people in baskets like 'productive' and 'unproductive' is a fairly cold and callous way of looking at the plight of many Americans ranging from the poor to the elderly.
edit: Also to add onto my point: We've seen in America that people over time have grown more productive, yet wages have stagnated. If your theory was correct that productive Americans are allocated more resources, then presumably we should've seen the economy adjust accordingly.
Well, I actually believe that the constant money printing (eg, expressed in the US M2 Monetary Stock) has badly messed up the ability of the economy to recognise who is and isn't productive. The system is in real trouble and not working as I'd like it to.
But the question wasn't what America is doing wrong, the question was why government intervention always leads to price increases.
The market's notion of "value" is whacked. Feeding a starving poor person is not "valuable." Finding an excuse to decline insurance coverage to someone with cancer is extremely "valuable."
When the market says that one person is 1000x more productive than another, I'd take that with a 1000 kilo grain of salt unless I know the particular market sector to be sane by some other measure.
Ignoring that your average first-grade teacher is an employee of the State rather than of any kind of private entity ...
... it's a question of ephemeral facts. In a given area, companies who employ software developers, able to retain personnel who perform to those companies' subjective satisfaction, by paying them $X; and analogously for private schools in the same area it is $Y for first-grade teachers. How does $X compare with $Y, today, yesterday, and in all the millions of possible tomorrows?
In other words: the beauty of the free market is that we don't have to answer those questions normatively/prescriptively in any one central place.
You can't brush away the misvaluation of teachers by blaming the state. Education is a public good. It's something with huge social value, but that value isn't and can't be captured by the educator. That's inherent in the activity. Capitalism only values something insofar as it can be directly exploited for personal profit.
> that value isn't and can't be captured by the educator.
Oh, but it is. Quality of education is clearly valued by parents. And depending on which school-district you live in, your property tax rate varies, and the quality of the local public schools correlates rather strongly.
While I don't have personal experience with this situation ... I can easily imagine that a good private school's elevator pitch would be something to the effect of "you and we are both located in $D1, which has cheap property taxes and questionable public schools; by living here you will pay less property tax over your adult life than you would by living in $D2; however, not only can our school make your kids smarter than $D2's acclaimed public-schools can, but we can do that without costing you more tuition than that lifetime-difference in property taxes."
> Capitalism only values something insofar as it can be directly exploited for personal profit.
Personal profit is precisely the best way to motivate humans to do anything that is valuable to society.
If someone is doing something of value without profiting personally, the next question about that activity is "what info am I missing about how they profit?".
The point is that a sufficiently large part of the value of education is a non-excludable public good - i.e. it has huge collective benefits for society as a whole - that if you privatised the education system it would be extremely injurious to everyone. Of course, education also gives people, if you want to use that language, a certain amount of 'human capital' which tends towards a higher earning potential. But it is because so much of the value of education is a public good that it's misvalued, and necessarily so under capitalism.
Also: "If someone is doing something of value without profiting personally, the next question about that activity is "what info am I missing about how they profit?".
As someone else mentioned, this is frighteningly sociopathic. But it's also ideologically blinkered. It's an elementary fact of anthropology that human societies for most of history have lived on a communal basis without property. People act from personal profit because of the structure and cultural sediment of capitalism, not because humans are inherently selfish.
>If someone is doing something of value without profiting personally, the next question about that activity is "what info am I missing about how they profit?".
That is a sociopathic statement that ignores all of human morality, denies any human feeling of empathy or acts of kindness, and pretends culture does not exist. It is certainly the logic of modern capitalism though.
If you saw a child about to fall into a well, and nobody else was around, would you help her? Of course you would. When you are eating thanksgiving with your family, does the strongest member of the family steal the turkey and then charge everyone for pieces of it? What you are saying is patently ridiculous.
I read it more softly than that. Of course we get 'paid back' for making the Thanksgiving turkey - by goodwill. I'm paid for moral acts by a reinforced self-image and satisfaction. There are lots of forms of payment.
Right, but those feelings are the result of the culture you were raised in and the normal feelings of compassion you have as a member of a highly social species of animal. The whole reason society works at all is because I teach my kids to share, and not to hurt each other. If everyone starts believing that they should only do things out of pure self interest, then I'd say you're looking at a society that's about to degenerate into warfare, slavery, and violence.
This is a sadistic logic. People dying because they can't afford healthcare. "Everybody wins". Living precariously from wageslip to wageslip. "Everybody wins". Internalising the toxic logic that one's worth is directly proportional to one's market value. "Everybody wins". Etcetera.
Several things:
1. If this were so it's strange how so many widely different forms of economic organisation, across the past and present - from post-war fordism in France to the state-owned enterprises in China today - have achieved remarkable levels of growth, stability and innovation. Economies are incredibly historically, sociologically and culturally varied and complex things. They cannot be reduced to a universal and parsimonious law.
2. What is of market value is not what is of social value. Even the most gooey-eyed neoclassical economist admits that a huge number of inefficiencies and distortions separate the two. Many thinkers - Rousseau, Marx, even Rawls - took them to be very far apart. A system in which the majority of people hate their job, have no bargaining power, have no say in their workplace, and are told by society that they aren't worth anything and to be grateful for the Promethean achievements of the rich, is not maximising social value. It's socially and culturally crippling.
3. You are naturalising a contingent and defeasible fact: that people need gratuitously large paychecks to have sufficient incentive to work. It's proven that above £28,000, increased income has no effect on quality of life. People want more money than that because capitalism, like any social system, functionally reproduces itself ideologically; and humans can be extraordinarily sensitive as to their social status and how others perceive them.
> This is a sadistic logic. People dying because they can't afford healthcare.
At some point everyone dies, and we know somewhere we run up against physical limits of what we can achieve. You'll need o be more specific about what your issue is here.
> Living precariously from wageslip to wageslip.
I've met people on $150,000 who manage to live paycheck to paycheck because they spend all their money in one go. You are probably referring to a real problem, but again maybe be more specific about what the actual problem is.
> Internalising the toxic logic that one's worth is directly proportional to one's market value.
It is impossible for everyone to simultaneously be 10x more productive than average, so I would _strongly_ advise anyone who thinks like this to pick a more achievable standard for measuring their self worth. But the choice of economic system does not determine anyone's mindset.
Several things 1)
Seems reasonable.
Several things 2)
> A system in which the majority of people hate their job, have no bargaining power, have no say in their workplace, and are told by society that they aren't worth anything
I mean realistically this is a value judgment so there is nothing to disagree on, but there are a lot of aspects here that are very negative. Clearly these workers are worth something, being humans, and nobody is seriously going to tell them otherwise. A lot of people are happy in their job, and realistically what is the actual problem with modern jobs? That workers have to turn up on time? That they have to be nice to people even if they don't feel like it? There are some horror stories that come out of retail, but they are caused by bad behavior of customers, not by the economic system.
I've seen a lot of people with lousy jobs who really struggle through life, but often the actual problem is something that is strictly in their personal life. I'm not sympathetic to the idea that somehow because workers don't understand the importance of what they do that they are therefore wasting time.
Several things 3)
> It's proven that above £28,000, increased income has no effect on quality of life
I'm not really familiar with the income and expense situation in the UK so I'll not try to talk about it. I would suggest that once you get beyond lifestyle expenses there are a lot of things that the wealthy do with their money that have nothing to do with their short term quality of life (like investment, or supporting family members or close friends).
Some examples other than what people have already mentioned:
Prescription drugs. The FDA has a "no existing alternative first" policy - they work on approving drugs for conditions where no current treatment works before they even start considering competitors to existing drugs. This sounds quite logical, but the effect of it is that every new drug is granted a monopoly for a long period of time before any competitor can even legally sell their alternative, so the drug company can literally charge whatever they want.
Building codes. In my grandparents' day, it was still possible to construct your own house: you bought a plot of land, hired a concrete mixer to come pour the foundation, bought a lot of 2x4s, and spent a bunch of time hammering & sawing. Now, you have to conform to all of the local building codes (which in the Bay Area, I've heard, is an 800-page tome), and you need to get approval for every feature of the design from the city building inspector, who has the power to completely block your construction if you get on his shit list. As a result, the only people who can build housing are ones who have good relationships with the city and the know-how to adhere closely to all the building codes.
Zoning. Even if you have that know-how and relationships, there are some things you just can't do with housing. Own a 1/4 acre with a single family home and want to convert it to a 4-plex? Too bad, it's not zoned for that.
And you can see the economic impact of all of these by looking at situations where they're absent. Consider generic drugs: once a generic has been approved, the price of a drug can fall by 90% or more. Or compare housing in the Houston metro area, where you can get a 3BR2BA for under $200K, to the Bay Area, where the same house will set you back $2M.
"In my grandparents' day, it was still possible to construct your own house: you bought a plot of land, hired a concrete mixer to come pour the foundation, bought a lot of 2x4s, and spent a bunch of time hammering & sawing."
It still is. And here in rural Alabama, I have the electrical wiring to show for it.
> Prescription drugs. The FDA has a "no existing alternative first" policy - they work on approving drugs for conditions where no current treatment works before they even start considering competitors to existing drugs. This sounds quite logical, but the effect of it is that every new drug is granted a monopoly for a long period of time before any competitor can even legally sell their alternative, so the drug company can literally charge whatever they want.
You think that's government control? Most countries have the government negotiating prices on behalf of it's citizens in a very "take it or leave it" manner. Pharmacists also have to offer a generic if it's available, regardless of what the doctor prescribes.
Those much stronger government controls produce better (cheaper and universal) outcomes.
Pharmaceuticals is a tricky example, because the marginal cost of producing them is extremely low. Having the government control negotiate the price of, say, automobiles, might have weirder results.
> Pharmacists also have to offer a generic if it's available, regardless of what the doctor prescribes.
I believe in the US it's actually illegal for a pharmacist to recommend a generic, if the doc didn't check the right box. Maybe just decriminalizing it would have a nice impact :p
that's backwards. pharmacists are required by health plans or by law in some states to dispense generics (not "offer," dispense, i.e. if I bring in a script written for AMBIEN 10mg, I'm getting zolpidem 10mg without asking) unless the doctor insists on a name brand.
the first generic EpiPens were just approved a month ago, I don't know if they're widely available yet. if for now some plan formularies only have name-brand injectors on them, some people with insurance could potentially pay less for the brand than the generic until that changes. otherwise, the same substitution allowances and requirements should apply.
EpiPens aren't really medical devices, it's just a drug with a specialized route of administration. it's not any different from an inhaler, a nasal spray bottle, an eyedrop bottle, etc., from a dispensing point of view.
EDIT: it's true that pharmacists aren't always allowed to tell patients when they could save money by buying a generic and paying out of pocket rather than buying a more expensive name brand and paying their share of the full price with insurance. that may be what you heard.
You still can build a house that way, building to code is not hard, it only becomes any sort of problem once you start doing crazy shit like open spans 20 foot wide or vaulted ceilings, and even then, there are simple standards for most of that too, which is why the building codes are so extensive. With a couple months of work or training anybody could build a house to code by themselves without a problem. The only real consideration for not doing it yourself is your speed. Some guy that frames all day every day is going to get that job done multiple times faster from practice and have more than all the tools for anything they will encounter, but if you have the time and can swing a hammer then you can do it.
College administration costs have been expanding rapidly over the previous decades. Part of that could be attributed to federal mandates, e.g. everything to do with investigating/achieving Title IX compliance is the result of government regulation and probably wouldn’t exist in an unrestricted free market.
Accreditation is also related to government and can require colleges spend money on things they might not have 50 years ago.
I suspect the biggest cost driver is federally-backed student loans though. When you’re paying with what seems like free money it’s a lot harder to control costs. If students run out of money and drop out of your school, that’s a bigger driver to keep costs down.
It’s pretty simple. Both regulation and guarantees reduce competition in certain elements. Example: colleges no longer have to compete on pricing because students no longer have to save to go to college. The loans are easy to get and colleges are guaranteed on payment. Due to this, pricing competition because much less of a concern for colleges.
When you subsidize industries they no longer attempt to contain costs. Unintuitively, instead of getting cheaper they get more expensive. There's an interesting video by Peter Schiff on the subject: https://youtu.be/AIcfMMVcYZg
First it’s generally half that 200$ per month. Second, “six of Jefferson County's former commissioners had been found guilty of corruption for accepting the bribes, along with 15 other officials”
But yes, if you look for the absolute worst 0.05% you will find problems.
Seattle's power, sewer, and water bills are all growing much higher than inflation; have been for at least a decade; and are going to continue at this pace for the foreseeable future.
A better view would focus what kind of government control. Are we talking about a government where legislators are entirely and exclusively dependent on the votes of their constituents? Or are we talking about a government that merely presents the facade of a democracy while actually being dominated by corrupt cartels who use its power to extract rents and squash competition?
Because I promise you, "government" behaves very differently in these two situations.
Population studies seem to be pretty useless unless there is a massive effect ie smoking. .05 increased relative risk was the same for the red meat colon cancer paper.
Your cholesterol can balance out over time, might be worth trying for a longer time and seeing if it goes back down. It's also worth trying to reduce your dairy consumption to see if that makes a difference.
I just gave another blood test today, waiting to see how it goes. But stopped my lipitor in the mean time. We both decided to experiment with the doctor and see how it goes... Fully metrics-driven development :)
Insulin is incredibly expensive and is manufactured by some of the companies making these devices. I wonder how much less insulin people use with these devices?
There is no overlap between companies that manufacture insulin and companies that manufacture diabetes-related devices. (Not for any fundamental reason, it just happened to work out that way.)
Also, the amount of insulin used is not significantly different with a closed-loop system vs. not. Although closed-loop systems do increase the benefit of faster-acting insulin relative to slower insulin, and the fastest-acting insulins are more expensive (especially inside the US).
1. For children mac and cheese tastes better (and a lot of adults). It's highly palatable.
2. Rice and beans are cheaper but are small bags of rice and canned beans cheaper than some other highly palatable thing that's easier to make? (It takes a lot more time to make dried beans).
3. Decision fatigue- it's really hard to make healthier decisions when you're poor, overworked, and tired. When you go to the grocery store I'm sure your looking for something that will quickly release some dopamine.
4. America has a pretty sad food culture and while they're might be some amazing asian or Mexican grocery stores with good cheap stuff, a lot of non recent immigrant people have super negative stereotypes about these types of places.
