Infant mortality rates are not a fair metric for comparison because the point of viability is significantly earlier in the US that in most other countries in the world. When adjusted, US infant mortality rates are some of the best in the world. The US is also one of the best in terms of experimental treatments, emergency room care, cutting edge surgery techniques and specialty care for diseases such as cancer. The downside is that care is generally more costly in the US, but there is a reason why the wealthy individuals in many other countries come to the US when they need heart surgery etc. The challenge of reform will by to preserve the really innovative and successful aspects of the US health care system, while expanding coverage affordably.
Infant mortality rates are not a fair metric for comparison because the point of viability is significantly earlier in the US that in most other countries in the world.
People may not know what this means so I'll spell it out for you: a baby born three months premature to a drug-addled mother is very unlikely to survive. In the U.S., that baby will be treated and damn the cost. In most other countries, that baby will be scored as a miscarriage (i.e. not the hospital's fault) if it dies. It receives care accordingly.
You know the saying "We only improve what we measure?" Many countries do not measure the healthcare of severely premature infants.
This is a good thing to keep in mind the next time you hear about "rationing", because this difference is the rationing that dare not speak its name. After all, if they're not acknowledged to be human quite yet, then if you withhold care to them it isn't rationing.
While that's a very interesting point, and I haven't heard it before so I'll look it up, my main point remains. Because of socialized health care, other countries can focus on prevention, which is much cheaper and effective then dumping money and effort at the point of crisis.
A quick anecdote: my friend and I here were laughing because in both cases our pregnant wives went to the doctor about a small concern and were put in the hospital for a week for testing. But I thought about it later, and that wouldn't happen in America. You're churned out as fast as possible. The great side effect, and I think you'll see this on infant mortality rates as well, despite what you've said, is that if health care is free, people use it earlier than the crisis point. And that's cheaper and better for everyone.
Or rather, it saves money for the individual who has something worthy of being prevented. For that person, it's much easier to find something and/or prevent it early rather than wait until it gets serious. This is why prevention seems like such a common sense thing.
For society at large, however, testing and servicing all of the other people -- the people who never will get the thing you're trying to prevent -- ends up spending more than the treating person who got it later.
It's one of those things that sounds good when you say it, but the statistics don't back it up.
That's a horribly spurious statement. What statistics? What the hell kind of statistics can you have that would back up something like that? 1) It depends on how you do the prevention, and how you handle the event itself. 2) A lot of people would probably die without preventative measures, making it very cheap indeed. 3) What is the point of medicine if we afraid it's going to cost more? Medicine is about preventing.
But it's not more expensive. Most European countries spend much less on health care, but much more on prevention. It's very effective, and at the end of the day, it's really what medicine is about.
...After all the consequences are accounted for, very few services of any kind save more money than the cost incurred. Childhood vaccines are among the rare examples that actually are cost-saving...
Of course, there's more to universal health care than just saving money. Once you politicize it, it's more about doing and saying things to keep those votes coming in.
I think you're contradicting yourself when you argue that economics is not a science and yet also argue that central tenets of modern econ have been "proven wrong." By what means are you claiming they have been "proven" wrong if not scientifically?
I think he was using "techno" as an umbrella term for electronic music. Lets be honest -- techno, trance, electro, progressive etc. it's all ultimately pretty much the same thing.
> Lets be honest -- techno, trance, electro, progressive etc. it's all ultimately pretty much the same thing.
Electro sounds nothing like trance, even if you know little about electronic music. Compare Kraftwerk with Tiesto or ATB for example to see what I mean. You may need to listen to trance for a while to be able to distinguish between, say, Goa and Psychedelic, but saying that all genres of electronic music are ultimately the same thing comes across as ignorant. (I understand that any electronic music sounds like noise to some people, but it's a genre as rich and diverse as any other.)
I disagree completely. Those styles you mention are all completely different. You can still split these down further and still be able to tell the difference.
e.g. tech-house, progressive-trance, progressive-house, hard-house etc etc.
If GM's value speculative then Telsa's valuation is completely pulled out of thin air. Just a few months ago Tesla was actually losing money on every car they sold. Now they're asking for government money to stay afloat and promising a 50k sedan for the masses. Let me get this straight... at the moment, they cant build a miata sized roadster with a sparse interior on an existing platform for less than 90k, but in 2 years they're going to have a profitable full-sized sedan to go up against cars like the Lexus GS, BMW 5 and Mercedes E selling for half that?
I love Tesla, but if I had to place my bets, I'd think it more likely that you'll be able to buy a Corvette in 10 years than a Tesla roadster.
A value "pulled out of thin air" is still better than "almost certainly zero via bankruptcy". And even if Corvettes rather than Teslas are still on sale 10 years from now, that might not mean any value flows to current GM stockholders.
The most likely discontinuity ahead for GM is a zeroing-out of all current stockholders. For Tesla, there are certain discontinuities -- such as acquisition for technology -- that pay off stockholders even if the nameplate disappears.
His primary example of how Google is big and evil is actually an industry-wide problem, The issue of internet royalties for musicians has been contentions, largely because most internet radio sites aren't making very much money in the first place. Pandora, for instance, has revenues of only about 25 million, 75% of which is going to music labels. An increase in royalty fees would put most companies with a similar business model out of business. Just because Google makes a lot of money on search doesn't mean that they should have to pay above market royalty fees for youtube plays. The real issue is that music just isn't worth all that much to internet consumers at the moment. The days of paying 20 bucks for a CD are over. So, until someone comes up with a better monetization model for online music, I don't see the royalty fees going up.
Prevents? No. I didn't say that. But being poor usually means you don't have access to the same levels of education. Read the comments in this thread. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=520836
No -- you didn't say anything about education level, which is tangential to GPA. What you said is "judging on the basis of GPA alone is class discrimination. Poor people don't stand a fighting chance." In other words, if you're poor, you don't stand a chance of (i.e. are prevented from) being able to achieve a high GPA. My experience says differently.
I've read one of Gladwell's other books, and I think he makes the same mistake you are making. A correlation does not necessarily imply "discrimination" or that the odds can't be overcome. For instance, women have higher GPAs than men, on average. That doesn't mean that using GPA as an indicator of performance discriminates against males. It might mean that males might need to work harder or do something a bit differently in order to get the same GPA.
In the end, my admittedly subjective take is that the biggest factor is individual motivation. We all have our setbacks and obstacles to overcome, but that's just the craps of life. I can verify, however, that it is indeed possible to go from moving out of your house at 16 with no money to graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford (not me, but someone very close to me). Difficult, yes... but it shows that there is almost always a "fighting chance."
Alright. You got me. I shouldn't have made such a strong statement, but I think it's safe to say that you would atleast be put at a pretty big disadvantage. But you're right in that wherever there is a will, there is a way.
I really appreciated your write up as a primer on git. Thanks for writing it. One issue I have with it, though, is that the part focusing on Pushing and Fast Forward Merges is either vague or incorrect and led me down some confusing paths. I'm specifically referring to the part where you claim "one common problem is when you do development on a branch and the branch changes on the remote repository as well... if you pull master from the remote repository, you will get a warning, and if you force the pull to go through, you will lose commit "
First off, a fetch will never result in a fast forward, since it is just modifying remote references, not merging local references. If you fetch in this scenario, it will not cause an error or you to lose your commit. It just updates the remote reference. You can then merge, resolve any conflicts and you're set. Doing a pull is just doing these two steps as one -- i.e. a pull = fetch + merge. After merging, you can push back.
Thanks for pointing this out--this is either a new feature since I wrote the tutorial, or I didn't get it right the first time around. I think it is correct now.
I particularly agree with this point -- "students need to be exposed to the tools to construct large-scale reliable programs..." The individual technical component is only half the story. Real "software engineering" involves developing software which can be understood by others, expanded and scaled, which I have found to be just as hard as nitty-gritty pointer math.
There's also a security reason for attributes to be enclosed in quotes when we're talking about dynamic webpages. Avery's permissive parser might parse the page "correctly," including an additional maliciously injected attribute like onclick=sendcookie(), which wouldn't have been possible otherwise.
Even on my relatively beefy comp, though, the miku animation was enough to get my fan going full blast. Papervision otoh has the potential to build a real, high-quality, 3d game. I don't see JS getting there any time soon, but nevertheless an interesting proof of concept.
I don't see any "hard barriers" but a lot of soft issues that will take time to overcome. As of now, there isn't even a uniform event handling framework in JS. So, first, we'd need a good generic 3d framework. Next, we'd need a significant speedup in performance across the major browsers. If OpenGL is a model, there would probably have to be some graphics-specific optimizations made, which might be difficult to get everyone on board for. Third, I'd either need to buy a new computer or JS would need gpu access, because ATM this site brought my relatively face computer to a grinding halt... and I don't think I'm going to have money for a new comp for at least a year or two :).
You could tell people "download Firefox to use my spiffy 3D site" (or download Chrome or whatever) just like people now tell them "download Flash Viewer 9". Does Papervision in Flash take advantage of 3-D acceleration hardware? In those ways I'm not sure there's so much of a difference between JavaScript in browsers and ActionScript in Flash.
Graphics-specific optimizations are probably going to happen, if by that you mean "fixing Canvas so it isn't painfully slow".
