Americans will do everything but not have socialised health care even though they are already leading the world on taxes spent per capita for health care.
They had the buffer! She’s top level medical doctor with top health insurance for her family, shelling out who knows how many thousands of dollars a month for it.
Those payments must have covered them, but they were denied instead.
American health insurance is a total scam.
UPDATE: also a minor proof in the days of wealth accumulation to the top 0.00001%, that (seemingly) wealthy Californian doctors and entrepreneurs are much much closer to bankruptcy than many of us could think.
> What do we do when we know that social media it not healthy for kids.
IMHO it's not healthy for anyone. From kids, to retired pensioners not knowing what to do with their time, to profesionalls doing linkedin "hacking" and "networking" on twitter, etc.
1. Like others said - induced demand. You add one highway lane - more people will jump into cars to use it. You add tram/metro line instead - same people would like to use that instead of sitting in traffic jam, taking away traffic from the highway.
2. Continuing from first point - see linked graph in parent comment. Light rail has an order of magnitude capacity per lane compared to cars. For 20 lane highway you'll need 2 lines of light rail or 1 lane of "heavy rail" (as per graph). Insane difference!
Current situation with prevalent "private travel", i.e. cars in USA (and probably "the west" overall??) IS due to corporate and political interests.
Car manufacturers, "big oil", road construction companies, politicians collecting taxes from cars (fuel sales, road use, cars themselves[0] and car parking), banks leasing money to buy and maintain cars, insurance, landlords owning car parks, etc.
They are very very interested that private car ownership wouldn't go away and are fighting it tooth and nail. You need to own multiple cars per household spend thousands on leasing, hundreds on parking, to just go to work and of course there's fuel.
Though somewhere like London, Paris or Tokyo - why would you want to do daily commute in a car? If you are a billionaire, driven by personal driver in your Bentley or Land Rover - sure, but otherwise metro is cheaper by an order of magnitude and I'd bet often times much faster too. In those places rich and heads of state take trams and metros.
I probably not need to remind you that "richest man" lobbied some failing projects to upsell his car sales, instead of allowing high speed rail to be developed.
[0] this of course depends from country to country and from state to state.
> The trouble with this graph is that it assumes the buses/trains are full. It obviously doesn't apply to a bus with one passenger on it, which takes up even more space than a car.
IMHO it's a bit moot to delve into extremes. Average car occupancy is around 1.5 passengers. I'd bet that such number is far from average for average bus/train/tram/metro. I also probably won't make a mistake stating that "Average car" in USA is either a very big SUV or even bigger "truck" (which probably has a footprint as half of a bus). You also need to park your car somewhere at the destination.
I also thought that there will be reply like yours, though you answered your own problem:
> To fix this the thing you need before mass transit (by several years) is zoning rules that allow higher density construction in a higher percentage of the land area where people live and work.
Of course you don't want to build trams and all in low density (and low population) areas and my comment didn't apply for such case. You must have density as well as mixed use zones. I am not from USA and seemingly prevalent single use zoning[1] is very foreign to me. It all comes down to efficient urbant planning.
Highways are built at (relative) ease, no matter the cost. Data centers are infamously now being built at society expense (electricity and water capacity), sometimes literally in peoples backyards.
At the moment I don't have the receipts, but from anecdotes - it's all just political will.
There's a highway extension? Some properties are taken by eminent domain, some other NIMBYs are told to just suck it up.
Data center? Forget about it - foundations are being laid this moment (sometimes no matter the law)!
High speed rail? We must listen to every NIMBY on the proposed path, hence it will take 200 years to listen to all complaints and align opinions of the people impacted. Millions speant on "research, enviornmental impact and public opinion" - project stalls and is closed after 5 years.
NB: I am not from USA, I think this pattern fits many (especially western) countries. Successful projects (I repeat myself) are always based on political will, when rule/law framework is designed to make such projects easier and much cheaper.
NB2: Also as with anything - when you start building you get experience and expertese - the more you build the cheaper it gets. A lot of places havent built new train/metro/tram line in decades - hence all expertese must be built from scratch (from policies, to government clerks knowing how to deal with such projects, to construction businesses who never built rail in 50 years, etc.).
1. Extensive support of public transport: metro, tram, dedicated bus routes (separate from car traffic), dedicated paths for bicycles.
2. ... maybe whatever is this ...
UPDATE: here's a good graph - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_transport#/media/File:P... , i.e. car traffic is often congested because of inherent low passenger bandwith. If google wants to manage traffic as internet routing - why then stick with outdated low bandwith ethernet cable?
Though I’d say US is speeding with reimplementation of ruzzian style oligarchy (already happening with open corruption between government and broligarchs) with flavor of Chinese capitalism (this article).
I am neither from Germany nor USA, thus can only assume it's similar to what I experienced elsewhere in EU.
Notary's job in real estate deals is (briefly) to check that property is good for sale (has all necessary documents, up to date drawings, liabilities (mortgages, upstanding payments for services), there's no court orders upon the property, etc.) and inform seller, buyer (and creditor if there's a mortgage), what documents to bring and who pays who by which date. Also sends copies to national registry of real estate.
It does not matter if property is a shack for 10k€ or mansion for 5M€ - you pay a percentage on the value. I'd even argue that more expensive properties are easier to work with, because rich owners have their papers up to date, etc. And notary gets cool 50-100k€ from such property deal just to go through a list of procedural checkboxes and filling in blanks in a standard contract.
I don't know what actual legal liability for notaries exist if there's serious disputes, but I haven't heard any. Biggest real estate scandals are when someone develops somewhere where it's not allowed, but got approval through corruption. Notaries neither help, nor care here, because their responsiblity is only check that papers are good (not that they were acquired through corruption).
I forgot what's the actual percentage in my country, but it's in ballpark as for OP (maybe less - around ~1%, which is still too much). To make it worse: this fee is mandated by law and has a cap. So if you are top 1% property owner - you get reduced rates for notary!
I don't know what real estate angents are responsible for in USA, but notary is not a real estate agent. Where I live you can buy/sell without real estate agent (but many people still do), notary is mandatory (with law mandated fees) though.
> I mean, there's an obvious difference between "distributing copies" (which is what the law was designed to prevent) and "training an LLM".
What's the difference between me/you downloading an mp3 through torrents for personal use (not distributing) while risking criminal punishment in most of the western world and BigCorp downloading petabytes worth of copyrighted works "to train an LLM" and resell it?
Can me/you do the same, when police comes to mine/your door?
"Dear police, don't lock me up - I was just going to train an LLM!"
> Humans have spent millenia harvesting and distilling each other's IP
You maybe somewhat correct, but also copyright lawyers wouldn’t have work if it would be up for grabs to take others IP willy nilly just because “shoulders of giants and all that”.
> Anthropic's IP was created by harvesting and "distilling" other people's IP. Copyrighted materials, and the commons... which they have essentially privatized.
Anthropic and others argue that because LLMs don’t output full copyrighted works word for word - hence their LLMs aren’t infringing on copyright laws.
I think (if this ever comes to that) Chinese lab should use same arguments against Anthropic.
UPDATE: this is slight hyperbole of course, not worth arguing what they actually said. The point is intent and the facts - "The Big LLMs" "distilled" collective knowledge including copyrighted works at unimaginable scale, but it's all kosher and totally not piracy/copyright infringement. Though if you're teenager torrenting an mp3 - you'll get screwed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...
Also, what is HIPPA?