freemcflurry
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User ID: 106
freemcflurry
8hr ago
Administrative waste is bad but isn't the core problem here. The problem is that the government restricts the supply of people allowed to practice medicine through regulations and then provides subsidies to purchase healthcare so that people buy more of it than they otherwise would. New players are legally barred from entering the market to raise the supply so the subsidies go straight into the pockets of the providers. It's like when the government provides section 8 housing vouchers but at the same time makes it illegal to build new housing via zoning restrictions or environmental regulations. You can't subsidize your way out of a cartel.
And the fact is that we're just not getting a good return on investment. We spend more on healthcare than anywhere else in the world but life expectancy is declining. Paying a trillion dollars a year so people with alzheimer's can linger in the nursing home for another year is just a bad way to spend money.
freemcflurry
9hr ago
What does the government spend funding residency slots though? Medicare has a budget of $800 billion for example and google tells me that $16 billion of it goes to funding residencies, so 2% of their budget. You could make massive cuts to medicare without touching that. A lot of programs are like that where they use the miniscule fraction that's actually useful to justify the fact that the rest of it is bloat.
freemcflurry
10hr ago
Defense is less than 20% of the budget if you lump in veterans benefits. If you take out social security you still have 60% left to play with.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/
Personally I would slash Medicare and Medicaid to start, it's just subsidizing a good that has a restricted supply because of over regulation. It's a political non starter though as are pretty much all spending cuts.
freemcflurry
6d ago
In that case you'd want to compare Ukrainian wounded to Russian wounded as well. It makes no sense to compare killed + wounded to just killed. I don't know what exactly the Ukrainian number is referring to since the source was a video in Ukrainian but I assume that 13k "lost" means killed.
freemcflurry
7d ago
89k casualties does not mean anywhere close to 89k KIA though.
freemcflurry
12d ago
They wrote that in a really weird way:
He sustained a concussion and puncture wounds from the shrapnel. He also sustained burns and he was killed.
Reading through a random selection I think all of the falls and electrocutions were preventable by wearing a harness and lockout tagout respectively. When you do dangerous stuff at your job all day it stops feeling dangerous and you do careless stuff like not tying off and falling out of a cherry picker. In my experience the problem usually isn't the procedures, it's that you do training when you get hired and then maaybe once a year after that but if it's not drilled into people on a regular basis then the procedures won't get followed. Nobody likes to be the hall monitor bugging people to wear their safety glasses.
I was surprised by how many murders there were. I would never want to work at a gas station in a bad area after reading that.
freemcflurry
13d ago
Most dangerous outdoor sports are overwhelmingly white with a few Asians. Look at mountain climbing or back country skiing or sky diving. Maybe it's not as dangerous as drunk street racing but it takes a hell of a lot more skill and physical fitness.
freemcflurry
14d ago
The fact that the jury (who watched hours and hours of questioning of everyone involved) convicted Frank makes me think it's pretty likely that he's guilty. I don't see how it could be "beyond any doubt" though, there just isn't any solid evidence either way.
freemcflurry
14d ago
If you don't have a kid in public school I just don't think wokeness affects you all that much day to day. It's annoying when they paint rainbows on everything but not enough to make me quit my job and move to the woods. Crime has gotten drastically worse but that's recent and still not quite at the level where I'd leave the city entirely instead of just avoiding large parts of it.
Also I get the impression that a lot of the online-right are ex-blue tribe so that might be where they were born and grew up. Before they were all banned I saw so many reddit posts on right wing subs that started with "I voted for Obama but-".
freemcflurry
14d ago
In what way?
freemcflurry
19d ago
I was in a hotel in Australia a few years back and turned on the local news because I thought it would be a nice change to avoid US politics. They talked about Trump for ten straight minutes until I turned it off.
freemcflurry
20d ago
Biggest shark I've ever seen while diving was a couple of white tip reef sharks in Hawaii. One was taking a nap on the ground and another was tucked away in a cave. That's about the level of shark I'm comfortable dealing with. I've only ever been on guided dives with groups so I don't worry too much them, even if they decide to eat someone it probably won't be me.
The one thing I saw diving that gave me goosebumps wasn't a shark though. I was on a wreck dive and was passing a doorway to a cabin on one side. I shined my light in and there was a moray eel just sitting on the ground staring up at me out of the dark. It was one of the coolest and creepiest things I've ever seen.
freemcflurry
21d ago
What is the other more important task they should be working on while the Democrats control the senate and presidency?
freemcflurry
22d ago
CEOs, executives and "the rich" in general get a lot of hate. I think the default position is that people with a lot of money are bad but they get a pass if they're part of the in-group. Kind of like the fact that they support Bill Clinton doesn't mean they're ok with powerful men banging their interns as a general principle.
freemcflurry
23d ago
I'm not following why airlines are like banks. When I think of a bank I think of a company that makes money either by lending money or by investing and providing other financial services. Airlines sell frequent flier miles to credit card companies who use them as an incentive to get customers to sign up which doesn't seem like the same thing. For example if a bank offers a free toaster to anyone who opens a savings account that doesn't make KitchenAid a bank. That seems analogous to how credit card companies use the airline miles they buy. I assume I'm missing something here.
I also don't get how their shareholders are betting on a bailout instead of their financials. For example, American Airlines got a bailout during Covid but their stock is still down to a third of what it was before the pandemic so it's not like the investors made out like bandits.
freemcflurry
23d ago
They don't.
freemcflurry
24d ago
Prince of Egypt was also pretty mainstream wasn't it? Granted 1997 is a long time ago. And there were the Narnia movies, but they flubbed the sequel and stopped making them.
freemcflurry
25d ago
That's hilarious and awesome. Kind of makes me want to buy Fallout 4 so I can try the Donald Trump companion mod.
freemcflurry
29d ago
I'd say most American cities east of the Mississippi have some sort of historic downtown area that's nice and walkable.
freemcflurry
1mo ago
Yes, politically correct brigade pretends they are the same thing, but we don't have to accept their framing.
You don't have to accept their framing in the same way that a sovereign citizen doesn't have to accept the framing of a cop writing him a traffic ticket. If you don't want to go to prison (in many countries) or be fired from your job (in the US) then you do have to accept the common definition.
freemcflurry
1mo ago
Top level comments don't have to be an effort post. I've made quite a few over the years that are just a link, a quote and a couple of paragraphs of my thoughts and the mods don't seem to mind.
freemcflurry
1mo ago
I thought that newborns would start out waking up all the time and then gradually get better until they sleep through the night. I now know the term "sleep regression". We had a few glorious nights when he only woke up once but and then went back up to four times. He's at least napping a little bit better during the day, but usually not more than 30 minutes and sometimes as little as 10 minutes at a time. On the other hand there are a lot more positive moments now. When he was first born it was pretty much eat-sleep-cry-repeat, but now he smiles and coos and stares at your face. He's starting to feel like a real human being. And as I'm typing this I can hear him grumbling in his crib, so it's back to the salt mine.
freemcflurry
1mo ago
I didn't know that, sounds like a classic case of price controls causing an artificial shortage.
freemcflurry
1mo ago
I figured insurance would be different because most people have mortgages so they are contractually obligated to carry insurance. My understanding is that if I let mine lapse my mortgage company would purchase it and send me the bill. Are people just letting their houses go uninsured because it's too expensive?
The entire edifice of credentialing and licensing is built on government regulations that the AMA lobbied for. I can travel to India for a surgery but if an Indian doctor moves here he can't perform the operation without jumping through the AMA's hoops to give one example. I get that these are at the state level but since there are more or less similar requirements in every state I don't see that it matters all that much.
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