The healthcare "market" is anything but free. From insurance companies, negotiated prices, all the way down to the AMA limiting the supply of doctors and all the other things they do to keep prices high. It seems the only thing free about it is the freedom to get screwed over.
So in those terms, I'm not sure what sort of diety it is that we're worshipping.
Are you arguing that 'negotiated prices' are not part of a free market? I mean, sure, negotiated prices are a way to hide information, but as far as I can tell, the less regulated a market is, the more "negotiation" is involved in pricing.
Frankly, it's one of the larger reasons why I don't want to be in business for myself. As a consumer? At least outside of healthcare, most of the prices are set, more or less, the way commodities are. There are laws saying that when I get to the cash register, I'm entitled to the lowest marked price in the store. Hell, even with things like cars, which are notorious for ripping off consumers, you are paying at most like 20% more than your neighbor. If you are buying, say, bandwidth, or nearly anything else sold to businesses? It is completely normal for the initial quote to be 200%-400% more than what you end up paying after negotiation.
Now, how much does this have to do with it being a business, and thus having the expectation that you have professionals on hand to do the money-dance, and how much of this is that there's a lot less regulation in the business sphere than in the consumer space? I don't know. I don't think it has as much to do with the cost of the goods involved as you think; I think the biggest contract I signed was around a third of a million bucks for a five year lease; Well under twice what someone doing what I do, only as a worker would pay for rent in my area. Most of my contracts were in 'mid-priced car' range, and still there was a tremendous difference between initial quote, and what I was actually expected to pay.
If you want a market make it transparent not "free". Patients have no chance participating in the US health care market because they have insufficient information.
And it's impossible to get "sufficient information" or negotiate anything when you're being loaded into an ambulance. The whole idea of negotiating healthcare at the personal level is patently absurd.
"...The Minitel business model was a thing of beauty, a well-tended garden that didn’t admit outsiders. In this world, the Internet was the unwashed enemy...
To paraphrase one of my past collaborators, the Minitel did less, but it cost more"
Replace Minitel with iPhone and call me in 10 years.
I don't think this is a fair comparison. From the perspective of most consumers, the iPhone does just as much as its competitors. (This is even true for me, an engineer: I neither need nor want my smartphone to be a generic computing device.)
The iPhone certainly costs more than its competitors (even, perhaps, its technically superior competitors), but it's a mistake to think that this cost isn't purchasing value. An iPhone customer is buying the ease of use and universal compatibility of the iPhone -- and I invite anyone who thinks that this is overvalued to contemplate the phrase "Linux on the desktop." (Thinking about Linux also highlights a basic principle of the technical market that techie types often miss: "power" tends to inversely correlate with ease of use, and the majority of people would much rather have their device work than have their device be receptive to hacking that they'll never even contemplate.)
The purchase of an iPhone is also a very explicit investment in social capital. Sneer all you want at status symbols -- they're an effective form of social currency, and dismissing them is highly irrational.
Here we go again, claiming that the reason Linux is not on the consumer desktop is technical. Nope, it is squarely economical (and quite a bit political). when the OEM contract with Microsoft makes it expensive to do non-Windows PCs, the OEM opts not to.
Ever since KDE 2.x Linux has been just as good as Windows from a technical standpoint (and likely easier to fix once the inevitable error comes up, as there are few to none opaque binaries involved).
Ease of use is a smokescreen, as there is no "tabula rasa" users running around any longer.
I used Linux on the desktop for years. I ultimately switched to Macintosh because I was sick of battling my operating system to fulfill basic consumer needs. To be fair, this was five years ago, and I'm sure that Linux has made usability strides since then. But it's hard for me to believe that the ethos of Linux -- a platform by developers, for developers, that is additionally hindered by the FOSS orthodoxy of certain camps -- has been fundamentally altered in that time.
This - I loved it, but I couldn't afford the random time sinks doing things like making my notebook talk to a projector or give me a keyboard mapping that worked for every key.
Source code is just as opaque as a binary for the overwhelming majority of people. Actually, if you tell someone to consult the source code, they'll probably see it as far more opaque than a binary.
Minitel was a completely separate system. iPhones have a walled garden for apps, but they interoperate just fine with the rest of the world. My iPhone can call or text anybody with a phone number, and it browses the same web as everybody else.
You might have had a point if SMS wasn't a first-class citizen on iOS and you can also easily use Hangouts, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, LINE, WeChat, KakaoTalk and whatever else is out there
My whole point is that the existence of areas which don't interoperate doesn't harm the areas that do. iMessage is proprietary, but SMS isn't, and iPhones support both pretty seamlessly.
Since I cannot prove anything and you'll have to take my word for it, I'll gain more from the ether I hold than bitcoin I hold for same percentage rise. This is because I believe in ethereum's marketing more than bitcoin's. But this is HN & my point was that ethereum's USP is not U.
That's interesting that there may even be a few left. Maybe another trip to Flores one day. I guess they could put some cameras out like they do for tigers.
"the findings add to the argument that all calories are not created equal."
Well pardon my french but no fcking sht. Anyone person/system who strictly counts calories and completely looks over the fact that there are literally millions of other organisms involved in the digestive/energy process gets no love from me. Unfortunately its not as simple as calories in/calories out.
I think the problem here is that of BMI. While it is true that BMI is not always accurate as a measure of fitness, it usually is for people who go around saying that BMI doesn't mean anything. It is only incorrect for people who are extremely muscular, and those people know they're fit enough because they have other measures (like precise measures of body composition) to tell them.
So while it is true that not all calories are created equal, the people who most often seem to go around saying that seem to be the same people who refuse to pay attention to portion size and then bitch about not losing weight because they're only eating healthy foods.
>While it is true that BMI is not always accurate as a measure of fitness
You're right. I've never seen a fit person complain about the inaccuracy of BMI in anything other than a joking manner. It isn't precise, but it's "good enough" for the majority of people. It's a heuristic.
On the other hand, people who are clearly in poor shape love to scream up and down about how inaccurate BMI is at determining fitness levels. Ironic because BMI generally puts non-active people in a positive light. If we switched to body-fat percentage something tells me a lot of these folks would be clamoring to get BMI back since it under-reports people who have low enough mass to be not considered obese, but too high body fat to be healthy (thus are at greater risk for diabetes etc).
You make it sound so obvious but there are many many people who still think in these terms. I recently had a comment in /r/science downvoted into oblivion for saying not all calories are created equal.
It is not that simple, simply because you cannot calculate the amount or rate of absorption. Your intestinal bacteria acts and reacts to changing foodstuffs. For example if your eating a consistent diet of the same foods regularly, your intestinal bacteria will become more efficient at breaking down the food over time. If you suddenly switch foods, it can become less efficient. That could be the case in this study.
Counting calories isn't an exact science (yet), but it is simple and objectively effective for weight loss. Even if not exact, you really only need to be "close enough" with a good margin for error built in.
I get frustrated when people complicate weight loss when explaining methods to people who are interested in losing weight, rather than just boiling it down to the fundamentals (intake less calories/energy than you burn). All the competing fad methods are based around this fundamental with their own spin (and usually tie in a product that the user becomes dependent on to maintain weightless).
