TL;DR: US healthcare is tremendously inefficient at providing services, compared to every other country; extracts an outsized value from Americans, their employers, and their government, compared to every other country; and delivers a higher level of service to a few by denying service to those in the most need. Single payer healthcare would solve all of these problems.

Sure you can. It's true that healthcare services are currently more expensive in the states than in Canada, but if the political will exists to create a single payer healthcare system in the US, it is likely that the political will would also exist to more heavily regulate the cost of healthcare services. So it seems entirely feasible that if the US adopts a single payer system, costs could come down to levels similar to Canada, and the US could be in a position where it could choose either to provide more generous healthcare than Canada does, or choose to spend the surplus on something else.

Sounds like you should pay your doctors more.

This isn't what you argued. You suggested that the US provides more healthcare, and supported that claim by citing Americans' greater per-capita healthcare expenditure. My point was that you can't compare per-capita healthcare expenditures that way; American treatments are more expensive than equivalent Canadian treatments, so per-capita spending says nothing about the relative quality or quantity of healthcare that Americans receive on average.

It sounds like we agree now, though. It is indeed plausible that single payer healthcare would reduce treatment costs in the United States, but the amount, if any, is currently unknown. The exact reason (or combination of reasons) for American healthcare costs is a big debate, and I only briefly touched on it in my last post. It's not possible to predict what effect single payer healthcare would have on treatment costs unless you know the reason. If the most significant reason turns out to be profit/shareholder returns/executive compensation, then single payer would certainly reduce costs. If the most significant reason is government corruption, single payer would probably increase expenditure even more.

Talking to doctors, the bigger problem is actually working conditions. There aren't enough Canadian doctors so the ones we have are overworked to make up for it, which leads to more doctors moving to the United States. It's a vicious cycle that's hard to break. Our solution so far seems to be doing to the Philippines what the US has done to us.

Canadian primary care physicians are paid more in Alberta than in the US on average, on net salary, but they sure aren't paid as well by hour. Certain specialists are also paid cartoonishly large amounts of money in the US though, like neurosurgeons, or underpaid in Canada if it's a specialty that deals more in elective care.

Edit: But yes, I agree, Canada does need to pay doctors more competitively. Unfortunately this isn't really about accepting market realities as it is about the conservative political sabotage I was talking about earlier. Every conservative provincial government plays super hard ball with the colleges on doctor and nurse pay, and ends up driving people out of Canada. If it's not rigid downward salary pressure and bad-faith negotiations, it's hiring freezes. Whether they're doing it on purpose to destroy single payer, or because they are single-mindedly fixated on cost reductions, they are denying Canadian opportunities to experts who have many opportunities overseas. Experts the Canadian taxpayers paid to train. It is a ridiculous situation. (Hopefully it goes without saying that I do not consider stealing doctors from the third world to be a sustainable answer to this problem.)

Just read about this insufferable regressive ****dick:



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Klein#Health_Care

So, basically, your average American politician.

Labor markets often deviate from traditional supply and demand economics.

People really ought to study more economics. Everyone knows the ideology that "free markets are best", well okay, markets with plenty of competition are actually pretty good, yes. But people don't understand that you need backup plans to deal with markets that aren't totally free and competition is limited. The solution for many people is to yell, insist any organized approach to deal with not fully ideal markets is evil communism, and that the market is actually already free.

Like, if there was unlimited access to capital and unlimited enterprise, sure, most markets would be free. However there is limited capital. And in many important markets, i.e., ****ing labor, there is monopsony power. These simple facts are like, uncontroversial, yet the ideology of free markets literally denies their existence.

Also: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/declare-george-soros-terrorist-and-seize-all-his-related-organizations-assets-under-rico-and-ndaa-law

Jesus Christ we're all screwed.

These (((leftists))) are infiltrating our government! We need to put these (((terrorists))) in camps and seize their property!

But I thought spending money was free speech

I guess it’s only sedition when it’s not a racist monster doing it.

Too real lol

It's not free speech this time, because this time it offends me.

better racist than a pedo diddling white children in the basement of a pizza parlor

maga

https://www.krackattacks.com/

So in case y'all aren't aware, WPA2 ded.

Today I got into a debate about the origins of Black Friday.

I’d explained the modern history as I remember it: Circa 2001-2002 some people would share leaked copies of flyers on websites and Internet forums, including Something Awful which is how I was exposed to it. This sounds ridiculous now, but yeah it was a thing back then. Eventually “people” (astroturfers, in retrospect) suggested that the post-Thanksgiving flyers had the best deals and dedicated websites popped up sharing leaked copies of Black Friday flyers specifically. This growing Black Friday sales trend got so “popular” that the MSM picked it up (i.e. PR firms paid to plant the story).

Anyway, that’s the history. 2001/2002 Internet forum posts, then by 2003 it was the busiest shopping day. Before that it was like 8th busiest, which is about right because Americans only get like 5 statutory holidays lol.

I guess I was convincing enough because I won the debate, but I looked into this afterwards and I can’t find anything about the 2001/2002 origin, the flyer sites, or the original news articles. Every source now says the event dates back to the 60s, and the term dates back even longer... but sales statistics confirm that nobody actually thought it was special until 2003. It’s like the history of Black Friday has been scrubbed to make people think it has been going on forever. Either that or I’ve had a whatchamacallit in my brain thing.

Does anybody else remember what I’m talking about?

Well, after poking around a little bit, the only thing I've managed to find (except for various references to that story that Black Friday started in the 60s -- many of which cite an article from a philly Newspaper from 1961, which must be behind a paywall or something) is this NYTs article from 1960: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9F03E3DA1431EF3ABC4B51DFB767838B679EDE&legacy=true

But I can't actually access it because its behind a paywall too. And from what of the article I can read, I don't think one can infer from it that "Black Friday" described the day after Thanksgiving, as much as that Thanksgiving inaugurates the holiday shopping season (or Christmas shopping season, if you want to be less anachronistic about it). But we wouldn't expect that anyway, if the Philadelphia story is true, anyway.

I'm glad that my family never gave a **** about holiday shopping. It's gross, man.

Surely they (by which I suppose I mean the networking hardware companies like Linksys, Buffalo, etc.) can patch that vulnerability within WPA2, or do you literally mean that whole protocol is now risky until the end of times? Maybe that's addressed on that page but I just skimmed through it.

Nah there will be a fix, it's not actually ded but it's pretty serious.

http://www.newsweek.com/russia-foreign-agent-mcdonalds-kfc-fast-food-unhealthy-label-722403

At least Russia can be funny at times, when they're being ****ty.

First: what.

Second: what the ****?

Third: what's the joke?

Fourth: what?

well we're scrapping the bottom of the barrel now...

Where'd `ya find this guy Reid?

Why is that in this thread?

This thread has had so much derailment that I see it largely as an all-purpose thread.

Browsing some old posts on /r/thebluepill



As Kroko said. But yeah, I guess it's not really fitting.

https://mises.org/system/tdf/qjae9_2_1.pdf?file=1&type=document

Lookie, I stumbled upon a new type of Cantor crank: someone using Cantor's diagonalization argument to "prove" socialism can't work. I mean, it's mises.org, so it's like shooting fish in a barrel. But the author is a real economist* and he gets paid to do this, so like, yeah.

can we go back to "capitalism sucks"?

i'm down for a discussion of viXra articles

NEW TOPIC: Can you guess which one is Zloc?
A:

B:

C:

D:

Actually, yeah, I was just to talk a bit about something like that.

A standard retort I hear from the right constantly, is that if employees don't like their labor conditions, they should go start their own company or find another job. This, like many economic zingers, is a pretty flippant (and ignorant) dismissal of a real problem in labor markets: monopsony power. There isn't perfect competition in the labor market. There are large frictions to seeking a new job or starting a company. And this is possible to observe: Silicon Valley wage collusion would not be possible in a world where there weren't limited purchasers for high-skill tech labor. And yet, we didn't see every employee leaving to create their own startup. The benefits of starting your own company and setting your own wage do not seem to outweigh the costs of being unemployed for most people.

And this effect does matter in low-skill labor too. It costs money to move, it costs money and effort to search for work*. These frictions just exist, otherwise, a pay cut under traditional assumptions would imply many people would instantly quit. But, most don't, at most you'll see an increase in the rate of quittings, but again, frictions keep the average worker around long enough for the marginal costs to decrease for employers. And, simply, most people don't have the ability to set wages, employers do. In fact, it's predicted that two mechanisms are effective at reducing the inefficiencies produced by employers abusing monopsony power in the markets: unions and minimum wage increases, which artificially boost wages to account for such frictions.

The validity of monopsony power in labor markets has been disputed, honest work by good economists has suggested there isn't such an effect in some markets. However, the traditional model of labor markets presumed by macro econ is not working, because it's been believed that the real reason for inefficiencies in the labor market are search costs, but that model has failed to predict hiring practices since the recession.

*desite the internet increasing the ability of potential employers and employees to interact, the jobs market hasn't become more efficient at reducing unemployment. Some economists suggest that's due to macro effects keeping employment down. Thoughts?

can we please not?

These appear to be the same picture.

http://vixra.org/pdf/1701.0397v1.pdf

Check it out, floating point arithmetic is inaccurate, therefore Andrew Wiles' proof of FLT is wrong.

To continue: the right's view of the matter is that, somehow, anyone can just start a company and have it compete successfully. This does happen, but like all things that happen, the question is one of proportion and to what effect. American startups are less common, and we are seeing an increase in the numbers of mergers and acquisitions. Besides M&A having the obvious effect of increasing the potential for monopsony in a given labor market, the bigger the size of any one corporation, the bigger their ability to sling weight against any new company trying to acquire capital. Like, if you want to supply aluminum, but the Alcoa 2.0 MegaCorp used their size of the market share to negotiate deals below profitability for you, then, good ****ing luck, because you don't have the negotiating power and the early years of any new business are the tightest on cash flow.

If access to capital was completely open and free, as in, anyone who wanted to start a tree trimming business could acquire the tools necessary at no cost, then sure, telling people to start their own business if they don't like employment for another is a fine retort. But the very principle of capitalism itself is the 100% exact opposite of free and open access to capital, it's about the private control of capital. Hence socialism.

In other words, right-wingers might as well be saying "let them eat cake".

Perhaps my favorite thing about this is the author effectively states "I have discovered a truly marvelous counterexample of this proposition that this paper is too short to contain." It's very meta.

We've come full circle!

I find it interesting how many proofs in math can be done constructively, I think it's sort of a bias in human reasoning that we look to find the "fault" with the negation of a statement rather than the truth of a statement.

For instance: infinitude of primes. You can take a set of n coprime integers, and show (by multiplying them all and adding one, then using the division algorithm) that there's another number coprime to those n, so there are n+1 coprime integers. 2 and 3 are coprime, so inductively there are infinitely many coprime integers to 2 and 3, i.e. infinitely many prime numbers.

Same for Cantor's diagonalization argument: take any list (by list we imply countability) of sequences of bits. The diagonalization argument shows there's a sequence of bits that isn't in the list, therefore the list is incomplete. The impossibility of a surjection implies uncountability of all such sequences.

In fact, generally it seems most proofs people handle can be done constructively. Not that I'm against nonconstructive proofs, I just find this bit of our reasoning interesting.