SerialStateLineXer
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User ID: 1345
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
I'm sure they do seem like a lovely person
I'm not picking on you in particular, but I see this all the time and genuinely wonder why people do this. The person in question is clearly identified as a "girl," and OP consistently refers to her with the appropriate female pronouns. Why the "they/them?"
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
That confidence interval must be a misprint. If the lower bound is not 1.08, but -1.08, it makes perfect sense, since 0.58 is the midpoint between -1.08 and 2.24.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
However I think the issue with insurance is when it becomes mandatory or defacto mandatory, because then you lose proper economic controls on the price via supply and demand.
Failure to consume food is much more quickly and reliably fatal than failure to buy health insurance, and that market works fine. It just isn't true that supply and demand don't apply to necessities. I may have to buy food, but as long as I don't have to buy from you, you're not going to have much luck selling me potatoes for $10/pound.
The bigger problem is just that health care is really expensive. Supply constraints may play an important role here: The US just doesn't have enough doctors. Coverage mandates may be another issue. The government mandates coverage for treatment x, which adds $y to the premium. How many consumers, when fully informed, would a priori actually be willing to pay an extra $y per year for x to be covered?
Lack of price transparency is another issue. Lack of competition among insurers may be an issue, but insurer profit margins are pretty small, so it's likely a minor issue.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
Not even a personal grievance, just terminal Reddit-brain?
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
Selecting an unpopular target?
This is obviously it, isn't it? The media don't want to prevent copycat attacks.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
with simple tips like “wear a suit to a job interview” or “don’t curse in front of your boss.”
Sometimes I forget that the tech industry is weird.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
My point was not that she's doomed, but that if she actually has the quantitative skills and conscientiousness needed to do well in finance classes, she'll probably be fine and not be magically handicapped by having been poor as a child.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
one interesting data point that I've come across is that people who grew up poor tend to lag behind, even after obtaining the degree
It's worth noting here that years of education completed is a piss-poor measure of human capital. It's better than nothing, but there's tremendous variation in IQ, non-cognitive skills, and even knowledge among people who nominally have the same educational attainment. Since IQ and non-cognitive skills are highly heritable, it's not surprising that people whose parents were weak in those areas and consequently had limited earning power do not, on average, accomplish as much with 17 years of formal education as people whose parents were strong in those areas and consequently had high earning power.
The flip side is that if you actually do have those traits, either because you got lucky with meiosis or because your parents were poor for reasons unrelated to lack of talent, your parents having been poor isn't nearly as much of a handicap as that Brookings white paper suggests.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
The fact that breasts lose elasticity with age is proof that there is no God.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
Famously Evelyn Waugh (the male writer) was married to a female Evelyn.
I heard she was wild in bed. A real homonymph.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
My redpill was all the stories about how white the tech industry is.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
The main advantage of a blockchain is that it makes it extremely difficult to rewrite history. It doesn't really do anything to prevent writing lies into a new record, especially when it's about claims that require real-world evidence to verify.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
I don't know that health insurance is particularly unprofitable. Profit margins can be misleading, because they're a percentage of revenue. With health insurance, it's easy to take in huge revenues, because you get thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars per customer every year. It's one of the highest-revenue industries there is. Of course, you also have to spend a ton of money. But due to the high revenues, a health insurer can have large profits with a small profit margin.
Also, profits go to the shareholders. Maybe there is a wage premium for employees.
Not to dispute the broader point, which is that insurers provide an important service. The irrationality of the public puts them in a bad position. The public wants low premiums, low deductibles, and unlimited coverage, and they will always side with providers over insurers. There's no good way to satisfy them.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
How do we distinguish the effects of COVID from the effects of the anti-standards and anti-law-enforcement movement born out of BLM?
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
My feed is also full of asses and boobs, but not that kind.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
There been dragons.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
How many tabs do you have open, that closing 10% merits inclusion in this list?
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
I don't really know who it benefits to keep creating people without the skills necessary to live in modern society and then, when they fail to live in modern society, say "Yeah, they deserve to be tortured for that".
Is he saying we should practice eugenics?
Not that I'm opposed, but...he knows about heredity and the poor track record of educational interventions above and beyond what we're already doing, so what else could he mean by "creating people without the skills necessary to live in modern society?"
I believe it originally referred to the leaders of Scottish clans.
Maybe? But there was only a 1.1-point difference in SNAQ score (range: 4-20), so I don't see how that could lead to such a large adjusted difference, nor does it explain the discrepancy between baseline, end value, and "change from baseline."
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
I meant that more in the sense that anything is legal if you don't get caught. The idea is not that people who think they pass would be encouraged to violate the rule, but that those who actually do pass would in fact get away with it, just as people often get away with violating many other laws and rules.
I'm not even commenting on whether it's a good policy, just pointing out that the idea that we'd need to have a genital-checking guard for enforcement is either stupid or in bad faith (one can never tell with Ocasio-Cortez).
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
Can anyone make sense of table 3 in this study? As I read it, none of the numbers add up. For example, in the "PAL: total no. errors" section, they claim a large difference between placebo and intervention with p < 0.001, but the change from baseline looks about the same in both groups. Also, the change from baseline in both groups is about 8 points, but they report about 5.
I've read a lot of scientific papers before, and I can usually make sense of them, but I have no idea what's going on here. Is this some kind of error, or are they using a convention I don't understand?
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
Due to diminishing marginal utility, quality of life is even more equal than consumption. The difference in utility between a $100,000/month home and a $1,000/month home is not 100 times as great as the difference between a $1,000/month home and living on the street. A meal at a three-star restaurant may cost a hundred times as much as a cheap, nutritionally adequate meal, but the difference between them is less important than the difference between the cheap meal and starving.
Anyway, the monetary value of goods and services are important, because, unlike income, wealth, and subjective quality of life, consumption is rivalrous—it reduces the availability of goods and services for others to consume. The monetary value of the goods and services you consume is a measure of how large a share of total output you consume.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
the study I dissected was on novel evidence suggesting semaglutide decreased incidence of Alzheimer's
Mechanistically, this seems plausible, given the evidence implicating insulin resistance and systemic inflammation in neurodegenerative diseases. Was that all, or did the study incorporate epidemiological evidence?
Not the middle class. The professional and upper classes. The Medicare tax only covers about a third of Medicare expenditures, and because it's uncapped and progressive, it's disproportionally paid by high earners. The main source of revenue for Medicare is general revenue, which is wildly disproportionately funded by high-income households.
Medicare is a really good deal for the average person, who doesn't come close to paying the net present value of future Medicare benefits in Medicare payroll taxes. The American middle class is carried by high-income taxpayers to a much greater extent than the European middle class is.
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