As to the points in the article: Correlation does not equal causation. Now to two major points it conveniently left out.
- First, the overall labor participation rate is at 40 year lows, so there is no labor shortage. In fact, the rate for those 55+ has gone up and is at 50 year highs.
- The biggest danger from an aging population is how to fund our entitlements Medicare & SS.
The reason for a weak recovery and stagnant wages are pretty obvious and completely avoided by this study and article - which I think was purposeful.
The real issue is a legal, not financial one. The ACLU fought a long time ago to make it very hard to commit anyone, very hard to give them treatment while committed, very hard to keep them there, etc.
No matter how much city/states spend, they can't fill up the hospitals and treat patients, which is why most of the hospitals were closed.
If you are interested, there's a very thorough book on the subject that I'd recommend:
This conclusion does cut both ways. It should be acknowledged that treatment at mental institutions then was horrific. Current treatment is not much better.
One of the dumbest statements from a very dumb, condescending post. SF is uber progressive. "Ayn Rand followers" are few and far between and, even then, very much in the closet.
Admittedly the parent post didn't add much to the discussion, but:
> One of the dumbest statements from a very dumb, condescending post.
I'm sorry, but I only got this impression once I got all the way down to your comment after reading the blog post.
> SF is uber progressive.
Is it really? Well, since "progressive" has seen some really weird changes in meaning in the US over time to one I cannot really recognize any more maybe you are right - using the current strange definition. If there is any at all, and the "left/right identifying words" are just thrown around unthinkingly.
Sorry, I can't take this post seriously. Some thoughts without trying to get too political:
- I guess he was disappointed by Obama? Join the club.
- "I moved to Silicon Valley" No you didn't, you moved to San Francisco.
- The Bay Area is one of the most naturally beautiful metropolitan areas in the world. Beijing is one of the most polluted. You can have it.
- "I was confused by the sheer amount of narcissistic Ayn Rand followers." Really? Where are they, I've been here 15 years and have yet to find this mythic horde
All told, I'm getting really sick of the Euro-lectures-Americans schtick.
I have to question the perceptions and judgement from anyone that managed to live in SF and mentions one of the salient characteristics of its citizens is being an "Ayn Rand follower". Did he mistake the Giants logo for something else? Ditto for someone who equates San Francisco as a place where political and religious discussions are to be avoided. Both of these are just bizarre.
For example in France, you can openly express your political opinions at lunch with colleagues. By that, I mean you can totally disagree, yell at each other on touchy subjects and then resume your work as nothing happened in the afternoon. That will be the end of it. A political opinion is just that, an opinion and it is totally fun to argue, disagree bringing new points to the table etc.
Arguing on something else than a purely professional matter at your workplace is the last place you want to be here in San Francisco:
First it doesn't fit the local culture of non-confrontation; You'll have confused Californian eyes staring back at you: "You mean everything is NOT awesome ?!?"
Then, you cannot offend anybody, even slightly. Unfortunately it is really easy to do from a French culture where you make points at extremes as examples, use sarcasms or dark humor. You can be sure they'll be taken at face value on the receiver end and reported to HR instantly.
As a European I got to say most of us have this experience with the US. I don't know southern Europe so well but in much of Northern Europe we talk about religion and politics all the time. You can always count on your American colleagues getting really uncomfortable about that. There as so many cases of people coming from the US and having stories of how they put their foot in their mouth because they did not realize the social conventions in America does not allow politics and religion to be discussed freely.
I find that American very quickly get offended and visible angry if you aren't very careful about how you speak. As a nordic we are used to speaking quite bluntly and that is frequently interpreted as offensive by Americans.
> All told, I'm getting really sick of the Euro-lectures-Americans schtick.
What do you mean? I can't help but thinking that your statement is somewhat not related to Silicon Valley and tech, but rather something political (e.g Europeans disliking Trump) or some military/intelligence incident. Am I wrong? Either way, nationalism is only good to some degree.
For someone raised with American exceptionalism, finding out that the US is a pretty sad place to live can be very hard. There are many great things about the USA, but the lack of societal empathy and general egoism is apparent to most outsiders.
The US is an enormous country. Every state, county, city, town, village, hamlet are different. Every block in New York City alone is an entirely new community with different values or joys or hardship.
Those people who "find out" the US is a "sad place to live" haven't found the right place.
"All told, I'm getting really sick of the Euro-lectures-Americans schtick." Oh, please. If it is something Americans are bad at, it is keeping their opinions to themselves and they are loud about it too. If you lecture the rest of the world about how to run their affairs, you can't complain when somebody in the rest of the world criticize you.
I've been subscribing to American news magazines for decades and if there ever was a mention of any problem in Europe, you'd be sure to hear the normal American lecture to the Europeans about how they need to rid themselves of their addiction to their welfare states. Get more flexible labour markets (read, get rid of worker protection laws). Basically the lecture always sums up to be: stop being yourself and be more like us.
If America insists on lecturing us about economics, maybe it should tolerate a European lecture on social policies.
I have strong opinions on guns and gun control, and they likely differ from yours. But I don't come to HN to debate that topic, whether an article aligns with my opinions or not. Some I'm with you on flagging. Bring me another article about yet-another-javascript-framework!
Hmm... I'm surprised by this. At least in the US AIDS is under much more control, is it not? My fiancee treats AIDS/HIV and has never mentioned "resistance" except when referring to antibiotics. This seems more like a funding issue, though I could be wrong.
All told, this is sad. Aids is the most easily preventable disease. Most of her patients know exactly when they got it.
First, there are a number of different forms of HIV. HIV-1 is what's most prevalent in the US; HIV-2 is mostly restricted to sub-Saharan Africa, but a lot of HIV cases in Africa are HIV-1. (These can be broken down further - for example, there are about seven groupings of HIV-1 - but HIV-1 vs. HIV-2 is the most important distinction). Treatment for HIV-1 and HIV-2 can vary, and a lot less research has been done into the types of HIV that are common in Africa and India.
Secondly, yes, AIDS (as opposed to HIV) is "mostly under control" in the US. There are still cases of AIDS in the US, but they tend to be in populations that are undertreated medically. For people who identify HIV early on, while their CD4s are still manageable, if they stick to a treatment regimen, they're far more likely to die from something else. In fact, people in the US who are HIV+ and under active treatment now live slightly longer lives than their HIV- counterparts.
> Aids is the most easily preventable disease.
AIDS is somewhat preventable (for people who already have HIV), but it requires an active and ongoing treatment regimen, as well as periodic medical care from a clinician. The funding for both of these is an issue, particularly in developing nations.
HIV itself is somewhat preventable, though, which is why pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) has been met with such excitement from HIV prevention efforts[0]. Not only is it over 99.9% effective[1], but it piggybacks off of the exact same drugs that are already used for treatment of HIV. It's much more effective to utilize the same distribution network for both treatment and prevention than it is to try to have separate efforts that exist side-by-side, but do very different work.
[0] The AHF is the lone exception, but they've turned into the anti-vaxxers of HIV/AIDS prevention[2]. I don't consider them to be an HIV prevention group anymore; they've done far more work recently to worsen the HIV/AIDS epidemic than they have to stop it.
[1] There has only been one infection recorded from a patient who was actively taking PrEP, and he was on an off-label treatment (PrEP is not approved for prophylactic purposes in his country), so it's unclear how typical his medication schedule was.
> people in the US who are HIV+ and under active treatment now live slightly longer lives than their HIV- counterparts
This sounded implausible, so I looked for a source. This page says "the average life expectancy of a 20-year-old person in the U.S. or Canada who began [anti-HIV therapy] shortly after he or she became HIV positive should be around 70", which is less than the life expectancy at birth of U.S. men:
They do mention a plausible way for HIV-positive individuals to live longer, though: "compared to HIV-negative people, many HIV-positive people in Canada and similar countries are under a relatively high degree of medical scrutiny—they undergo visits to the clinic for interviews and laboratory tests several times each year. This degree of heightened medical surveillance is likely to detect any complications early on, before they can become serious"
>A study from the US has found that some groups of people with HIV, especially those treated before their CD4 count falls below 350 cells/mm3, now have life expectancies equal to or even higher than the US general population ... the sole contributor to the increased mortality in people who started ART early was AIDS.
It's probably hard to underestimate just how significant that it though. How many medically founded causes of death can be traced to something that, if caught very early, would have been treatable? If every single little "blip" was a concern worth investigating, you'd undergo a lot of testing, but you'd rarely slip through the cracks.
I think chronic kidney disease is one of them and I'm dealing with it. If they did urine test screening of the whole population every few years they could catch it in the early stages and try to keep it stable for much longer. Most of the medicines to do this are affordable generic medicines like ACE inhibitors and prednisone however once the kidney damage gets to a point where it is physically noticeable it is too late to treat or manage and costly dialysis and transplants are the only solution.
To be honest, that's more the norm for organ systems than not. The tests are mostly giant red flags, not subtle warning signs. Hopefully this is an area ripe for disruption with machine learning systems.
> AIDS is somewhat preventable (for people who already have HIV),
I think he means, much more simply, that HIV is preventable by avoiding risky behaviors. Which may well be the case in countries where AIDS/HIV prevalence is small and restricted to specific demographics, but much harder in poor areas where 10% of adults have HIV. It's going to be hard to convince one in five couples in sub-Saharian Africa not to have children.
Well, by preventable, I think I meant something different than you. I meant you could not share needles or you could always use a condom. Sex/needles are what, 99% of transmissions?
And yeah condoms break, but if HIV transfer was limited to the condom breaking that would be a step in the right direction.
And Facebook COO Just endorsed Hillary publicly on FB, the day after WSJ reported that Hillary has taken $48.5 Million from hedgefunds/Wall Street vs $19,000 for Donald Trump.
We know who is on the little people's side in this election.
Incase you're wondering, your comment is kinda tinfoily-hat and it's off-topic from the main discussion of company valuation and tax strategies.
I'd also add the caveat-- are you sure who is buying who here? The next President has some power to make Wall Street's life difficult. I suspect that the donations that Wall Street gives is more of a Clinton-shake-down than it is a bribe from Wall Street.
Additionally, these analyses simply group individual donations in with whatever company the individual works at. Does this mean that the company I work for is schemeing to make /R(?:on|and) Paul/ president? Hell no. It's the individual's money to donate, and just because they have a successful career in the finance industry their political donations come into question. Do you have any idea how insulting you're being to the true Clinton supporters who work in finance?
It just feels very conspiratorial and small-minded. With a dash of wealth envy.
IDK. I could easily be accused of being a shill, but I've never heard a solid argument presented from your camp. It's always "look at this coincidence!! What else could it mean?!?!"
- First, the overall labor participation rate is at 40 year lows, so there is no labor shortage. In fact, the rate for those 55+ has gone up and is at 50 year highs.
- The biggest danger from an aging population is how to fund our entitlements Medicare & SS.
The reason for a weak recovery and stagnant wages are pretty obvious and completely avoided by this study and article - which I think was purposeful.