I asked ChatGPT of course, and the response roughly corresponded to my expectations so I went no further. Doctors make way more here than elsewhere (British doctors aren’t making 500-750k a year), pharma makes most of its money here, and hospitals charge an arm and a leg - it all checks out, no? Alternatively, if insurance were straight up responsible for doubling health care costs in any easily attributable way, we could easily get rid of it and would have done so by now. The only reason it can continue to exist is that it occupies a no-man’s land of utility.
Insurance companies don't make much money, actually. Hospitals, physicians, and pharma are at the top of the list (60% or so of total spending). Total insurance overhead is perhaps between 10 and 20%.
> But I can't help but feel that it is missing the point.
It’s perfectly fine if _your_ point in playing music is rooted in some flavor of anti-capitalism and your intrinsic joy of your creative process. _His_ point was to write an album during a sabbatical. He succeeded and then some!
What is your a priori estimate for the percentage of news that is consumed as entertainment? As in, it does not result in a change of behavior in the consumer beyond engendering neuroticism. I'd put that number at or above 95%. News is gossip wearing a suit.
Yes, easily head and shoulders above 5.5 and 4.8. The others are like pulling teeth, comparatively (in a domain that never triggers the security fallback at least).
Yes, exactly this. If I didn't care about price at all, I'd exclusively use this model. It functions more like an actual engineer. I'm in the midst of a DB migration, and eg 5.5 continually suggests stuff like "use DB X instead of DB Y for task Z because its 30% faster" which is an impossibility of reality, given we are migrating DBs. Fable jumped in, reduced allocs by literally 46x, found multiple bugs 4.8 and 5.5 created (max file system usage, correctness issues, etc), and continually suggested awesome improvements unprompted. As in, it would finish a task and then suggest we tackle this other existing problem I didn't know about in a very specific manner... this is the first model that feels like its coming for my job.
I will stake the claim, as an engineer never having studied sociology, that in group favoritism is the (only) stable political arrangement by and large… and further, the preservation of any culture necessitates discrimination of some sort.
No one believes or acts like this will be a one time event (on any side of the issue). The history of all new forms of taxation is that eventually it will come for you.
The sovereign wealth fund would be a stakeholder in equities and estates. It would have to exercise voting privileges and be a party to lawsuits. Do you want Trump getting control of the board of eg SpaceX or Meta?
A 6% wealth tax indeed taxes more than the expected rate of return on the base assets. That is indeed equivalent to a higher rate than 100% in terms of an income tax. This math is in favor of PG’s argument.
The expected a priori utility of any social intervention is strictly negative… even if “more thoughtful” does check out in reality for higher ed, $700 billion and 15million man years yearly is rather expensive.
3 10mm bolts failing simultaneously after two decades (on direct it seems) is unexpected! If it were an installation problem, I can’t imagine it would take that long and that they’d all go at the same time. Ditto for corrosion… people take victory whips all the time.