My 17 y/o self (living in small-town Oklahoma) lusted heavily after this car. For a few weeks, I would drive down to the dealership in my parent's car in order to drool over it in person (yeah, I was stupid kid who loved this car). Anyway, one day I managed to convince a salesman, who wasn't much older than me and obviously bored, to take a test drive in one. We got into the car and he told me that he first was going to show me what the car could do before letting me drive it and so, I had to wear the seatbelt (which was unheard of back then). Soon, we were on the highway and he put it through its paces - demonstrating the acceleration and handling, but he got a bit overconfident and then wound up putting it into a spin. By an extreme amount of luck we managed to avoid hitting anything. After he regained control we pulled over to the side of the road to inspect the car, and much to our relief (and astonishment on my part), there wasn't any visible damage on it. To his credit, he let me drive it back to the dealership were I shook his hand and thanked him for not killing us. Just as I get over to my mom's car, the sales manager shows up to try to close the deal - but when he got a look at my 16 y/o self, his demeanor changed from optimism to mild disappointment. I said I had to discuss with my father before I could consider buying it (but the look he had on his face was that he knew I was full of crap)
I am not going to panic about it at this point. But, if it does develop into a pandemic, I am quite certain that the initial response will be more along the lines of "let's just see what happens. Gotta keep the economy going, right?"
The only reason I can't go full tinfoil on this is that it takes a hell of a lot of things working out to fake your death by sailing into a fortuitous freak tornado. How would you even plan and execute that? If he'd just disappeared from the boat in the night or something it would be a different story.
Currently duck-duck-go-ing "hewlett packard weather engineering".
It is now clear that all those Climate Research super computers HP has been involved in have yielded unexpected new capabilities... please subscribe to my newsletter to learn more.
“Shareholder value” reigns supreme in this late-stage capitalistic world. The executive class lives extraordinarily well off the fruits of the enterprise while the rest lives off the scraps.
The paradox of living in this day and age is witnessing astonishing advances in science, while enduring the increasing levels of anti-intellectualism that pervades society like a cancer.
Ok, but please don't post generic tangents to HN. They make the threads less interesting, more tedious, and (possibly as a result) tend to turn them nasty.
I think all the really obvious and influential products of science and technology happened in the 20th century and now we're so comfortable because of those that we take it for granted. Then people find reasons to hate it because they forget how bad things were without it (previous generations). Same goes for political stability.
Another aspect is that a lot of intellectualism is really activism with "intellectuals" trying to impede other people's lives for the sake of some arrogant moral purpose.
> now we're so comfortable because of those that we take it for granted. Then people find reasons to hate it because they forget how bad things were without it (previous generations). Same goes for political stability.
I'm not sure that most people are really all that comfortable. They're a lot more distracted though certainly.
I think there are a lot of different reasons people today have a problem with science and technology. Some are scared of it. Some just don't trust it, which can be entirely fair depending on the degree/situation. Some see that the regulations, oversight, and accountability we expect and depend on to keep us safe aren't working like they used to or like we thought they would.
Mostly I think people see not only what we've gained, but also what we've lost and could/should have again. Reliable and repairable products that weren't designed to exploit and work against the interests of the person who paid for them for just one example. We've had many trade offs, where they've improved things in some areas while making them worse in others. It hasn't always worked out in our favor. It's also frustrating when you see that amazing things are now possible, but we can't have them because of politics, or greed, or fear of change.
Personally, I hope people never stop wanting and expecting better from science and technology. Especially in those cases where what previous generations had was better than what we're expected to accept today or where we've created problems previous generations never had to put up with.
> I think there are a lot of different reasons people today have a problem with science and technology. Some are scared of it. Some just don't trust it, which can be entirely fair depending on the degree/situation. Some see that the regulations, oversight, and accountability we expect and depend on to keep us safe aren't working like they used to or like we thought they would.
We often forget that many people have been genuinely negatively affected by technology or science or know someone who has. Let's not forget that many technological and medical advances have come at a real human cost. People have been poisoned by harmful chemicals either during their occupation or because an entire community has been exposed. Entire communities have been devastated by the opioid epidemic which the medical community is directly responsible for. Not to mention the countless people who have lost their jobs or will lose them soon to automation.
There are people with genuine concerns about the way science and technology are heading and pretending anyone skeptical of modern science is simply uneducated or stupid is extremely counter-productive.
I think things like the opioid crisis where doctors were getting outright bribes from pharmaceutical companies who knew they were killing people has done a massive amount of harm to the trust people had in medical science. It's been a problem for a long time, even going back to the tobacco industry hiring researchers to lie about the dangers of smoking. Those researchers didn't lose their jobs and become unhireable in their fields. They just went on to work for the oil companies to lie about how climate change isn't real and are now working for companies currently trying to convince the FDA about the safety of food additives.
Between corporations being able to buy whatever research they think will get them a favorable headline, peer reviewed journals accepting any paper if you pay them to publish it (this one being a personal favorite https://www.sciencealert.com/a-neuroscientist-just-tricked-4...), the reproducibility crisis more generally, the total lack of any meaningful consequences when companies are caught outright knowingly poisoning people or selling dangerous drugs, it's really getting harder to explain to people at the fringes like antivaxxers why they should have more faith in the data we have and on the systems put in place to protect them.
If the people aren't held accountable for causing harm and scientists don't do a much better job self-policing I think the situation is only going to get much worse. Even if things do change it will likely take generations to undo the damage already done.
> I'm not sure that most people are really all that comfortable. They're a lot more distracted though certainly.
I think people in wealthy countries like the USA are very physically comfortable, but also quite unhappy- possibly much more unhappy day to day than they were historically when there was a lot more disease and discomfort- and a lot of that is directly a result of excess comfort combined with a life without any real difficulty, challenge, or sense of meaningful purpose. We feel like we want comfort, but it's mostly harmful to us. Humans just aren't built to be "house pets." People need a sense of purpose, of overcoming difficult challenge, and an ability to directly see positive results from their efforts. The challenges need to be both mental, and physical.
What we have now is lots of empty entertainment, stupor inducing comfort, and lots of sedentary careers that feel pointless, where nobody even notices the difference if you work hard or not. More and more people are burned out at work, and socially isolated.
I don't think the answer is to go "backwards" and lose all of our progress in treating disease, making labor easier, etc. but in a cultural and personal change where we find some new meaning and challenges, to grow even more. Personally, I've found this through being a scientist where I can work on hard problems, as well as doing physically demanding and uncomfortable hobbies like weight training, fasting, and cold water swimming.
I've noticed that the more intentional physical discomfort I experience, e.g. from cold, the more content I feel, and the less I crave comfort, or other addictive things like social media and overeating.
People don't _feel_ comfortable but they objectively are much more comfortable that 120 years ago or more. Unfortunately being objectively more comfortable doesn't make you feel more comfortable and ultimately it matters how you feel and want to fix whatever is causing them to feel like shit.
We're physically more comfortable and that's mainly what technologies promised and delivered. Maybe a new wave of technology improving how we feel emotionally will come with just as much enthusiasm as the old physical technology, but so far it seems we're only going backwards. Maybe that emotional technology was invented thousands of years ago in religion and social norms but we never bothered to adapt it to our modern environment so we lost it.
> Another aspect is that a lot of intellectualism is really activism with "intellectuals" trying to impede other people's lives for the sake of some arrogant moral purpose.
In Germany, unlike every other European country (maybe except the Polish, not sure if they're doing the same with Auschwitz?), we have every generation of school children visit a Nazi Konzentrationslager once - precisely to avoid forgetting how bad it was, by showing the actual, undeniable evidence. And on top of that the Nazi dictatorship is usually an entire year's worth of history lessons in schools.
Despite the far-right being on the rise as well as everywhere in Europe, they still have a harder time here, which I think is mostly due to these two education policies.
I do not think it's working. The AfD was the second most voted party for the European parliament, despite their candidate literally defending the SS a few weeks prior.
European elections are usually used to deliver a "Denkzettel" to the currently governing party, it's the same across Europe as these elections are (wrongly) seen as consequenceless.
Federally, the AfD is around 15-18% [1], which is still way too high in my opinion, but they're far from any chance to gain relevant influence on politics. Statewide is a different beast, sadly in Eastern Germany (the equivalent of the "flyover states" in the US) they're almost at the 33% required to block major legislation [2]. I'm honestly not sure how to combat that any more, outside of a (well deserved, given e.g Höcke directly using banned NS slogans) ban on the party.
I'm honestly not sure how to combat that any more, outside of a ban on the party.
Perhaps by getting rid of these haughty, and one simply has to say: typisch-Wessi notions of the new Länder as being "flyover territory". Which is part of what drives people to vote for AfD in the first place. As if the former West Germany doesn't have its own stereotypically maligned areas as well.
Excuse me, are you saying that teaching kids about past horrors including onsite visits to places where those horrors took place, with pictures and film and everything is "brainwashing"?
He’s making the point that poor governance delivering poor outcomes will eventually by replaced by its ideological opposition, no matter how distasteful.
No, he isn't saying that. The context was "children are taught why Nazis are bad but now people are voting for Nazis" and his response was to say people were brainwashed to defend going against their interests.
He may not be saying this to imply that the Nazis would have been acting in the interests of the voters but that's what the notion that teaching children Nazis are bad is brainwashing (to allow the government parties to go against the interests of their voters) strongly suggests. Couple this with a comment history of being vocal against "economic refugees" and a German political context of the AfD heavily using migrant scares in their rhetoric and it's entirely legitimate to challenge this statement.
It's also worth mentioning that AfD politicians have not only defended the SS but also loudly complained about Holocaust remembrance and downplayed the extent and significance of the Holocaust.
Your reply completely ignores that he deliberately used the word "brainwashing" which the comment you replied to called out. Intentionally or not, your reply demonstrates a motte-and-bailey (the bailey being that teaching about the Third Reich is brainwashing, the motte being the content of your reply).
Technically, I think teaching in general is basically brainwashing/propaganda. The primary difference is that what we're teaching us socially/culturally acceptable, if not actively _wanted_. Much like the thing about paranoia only being related to what you're thinking/feeling, regardless if you're correct.
I wonder, how it is usually spinned? I'm asking as Russian and I see direct evidence of how people who grew up in the constant narrative "fascism is awful, that war was important, our grandparents are heroes" also, it seems, consumed it in easy/stupid form of "fascism is something that those weird germans do, they attacked us, and we won, so we can't be fascists ever".
I'm pretty sure there are places in Europe where the AfD equivalent doesn't get 15%.
Trip to a holocaust museum is nice and all, but it probably fails at making people understand the problem. They'll kind of nod that yeah, Nazis were bad but then happily go and blame others for their bad decisions and vote for populists with easy solutions.
Somehow half of Germany thinks Russia is OK, because they "saved Europe", hammer and sickle symbols are still not treated the same as swastikas and, of course, the main outcome of the kind of education you mention is that Germany is basically freeloading wrt defense and very unwilling to do the only reasonable thing, i.e. help prevent another genocide as it unfolds in Europe.
Hopefully something has changed in the last 2 years, but the preceding decade, spending over 100 million euros daily on Russian natural gas is hard to undo. And that's with pre-war historical minimum prices. Since you all didn't get the memo that you need to stop buying Russian stuff until NS2 got blown up, the flow of money for natural gas from Germany to Russia in 2022 and 2023 is likely several times the pre-war annual number.
And then you have people saying shit like "we have spent enough on Ukraine" or "Ukrainian refugees are coming because of our social safety net", not even from AfD politicians (I think some CDU idiot, lol). Yeah sure, but you gave 100x the money to Russia, who of course spent it on weapons because they don't give two fucks about their own people.
Being sorry about things from the last century, while failing completely to judge the situation in the present doesn't really help. Not to mention Poland still didn't get the war reparations for WW2 last I checked. They probably don't want to shake the boat too much and just hope Germany will at least stop being useless.
Do you really think there is no intellectual work to be done on moral subjects? That morality is entirely in the realm of folk intuition? If you thought very hard about some moral question and came to another conclusion than most of society, what would you do about it?
Would you have called intellectual abolitionists people trying to impede other people's lives for some arrogant moral purpose?
Like, I get it, nobody likes a woke-scold, but it is still weird to complain about the idea that an intellectual who comes to a moral understanding might want to act on that new understanding/change the world/convince others.
I don't really know the state of moral understanding, but I do know people, even intellectuals, can't separate their personal ideologies from their work, so they're not really capable of objectively figuring this stuff out.
I'm sure we can at least make some judgements about whether a set of morals is better or worse than another, but all the obvious cases are already solved and people strongly disagree on the ambiguous ones where they really have no idea.
One big moral concept is individual freedom vs long term survival of the system of social order they belong to. You can't have individual freedom without a society to protect it but you can't sustain that society without restricting people's freedoms (eg. military conscription). It's popular today in the west to value the individual over the future of their society, but a lot of history and the rest of the world is the opposite. People from these two camps seem to be blind to the weaknesses of these underlying assumptions, so they end up with moral ideas that seem totally immoral to each other.
I don't understand how anyone could separate their personal ideology from their work unless they happened to mostly align already. I might disagree with a person's ideology, but I can only agree with a person who believes their ideology ought to inform everything about their life, including their work. What other use is an ideology if it doesn't compel you to change the world or, at the very least, yourself, despite resistance from the world?
In the US you also have situations where all that science means that effective treatments exist but they are entirely out of your reach because of insane healthcare costs.
I can't imagine having to watch a loved one slowly die knowing that you are surrounded by doctors who could save them if you only had the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars they demand or if you'd been living in basically any other developed nation on Earth.
I’m certain that the US is in no way unique in that. Countries with universal public healthcare care systems do cost-benefit analysis all the time and access to the newest effective treatment options outside of the richest/most developed countries (or even in them) is far from guaranteed. e.g good luck buying latest cancer drugs from the US on an East European salary after your local healthcare system bureaucrats have rejected them because they are too expensive and/or are taking a year or two to decide of they are worth buying.
> or if you'd been living in basically any other developed nation on Earth.
That’s just beyond absurd, unless you think that only Switzerland and a handful of other rich countries are “developed”. Yes getting some minimum/acceptable level of care when you’re not rich might generally be easier. Getting access to latest or even experimental drugs (most of which are developed in the US)? Not so much..
This is partially true but for many things the price is different. In the US drugs are priced assuming that there are some number of rich people who can afford them. This often results in higher margin pricing which is more profitable even if the volume is lower and puts them out of reach of many. In countries with public health care, setting the price that high will typically result in near-zero sales, so the price gets set closet to the cost-benefit point to make profit in lower margins but higher volumes.
It doesn't always work like this. Some drugs are just too expensive to manufacture and the minimum profitable price is too high for the benefit in public health care. But often the bargaining and purchasing power of a public health care system can achieve lower prices for drugs and other tools.
That's because we subsidize the world by investing in a massive portion of the science and tech for producing medicines. Then when those costs are recouped via sales to our consumers the whole world laughs at us while ironically many of them would be up shits creek without the advancements they get to piggy back off of.
Healthcare and medicine needs overhauling but it's maddening watching these downstream foreign benefactors damn the golden goose they'd be fucked without.
I don't think it's necessarily true that we need to keep letting Americans needlessly die due to unaffordable healthcare in order to maintain our nation's lead in innovation. We should be able to continue to invest in medical science without continuing to fall behind other developed nations in actual health outcomes for patients. There are certainly many opportunities to drastically reduce the costs of healthcare without impacting the budgets for research.
Does the US actually fall behind other nations in health outcomes? The US has two big factors working against them: much more widespread obesity (and the level of morbid obesity) and the insurance bureaucracy. These two factors should negatively impact health statistics without the treatments being worse.
> Does the US actually fall behind other nations in health outcomes?
For the world's richest people you couldn't do better than to be a patient in America. For most Americans though, the US healthcare system is failing them. America does worse compared to other nations in some very basic measures like having a lower average life expectancy, a higher infant morality rate, more obesity and congestive heart failure and more hospital/pharmacy screw ups. A child or teenager in the US is less likely to live to adulthood compared to those in other developed countries. It's not any better when it comes to mental health either. The US is one of the worst nations when it comes to mental health outcomes and suicide and drug related deaths are higher in the US. Over thirty percent of the US population has been forced to put off getting the care they need due to the cost and preventative care is usually the first thing that people cut back on leading to bigger problems that could have been avoided entirely.
If you adjust by factors like obesity, state and drug use US is quite close or more or less on the same level as Western European countries.
Even if you don’t do that there is a higher variance in life expectancy between different US states than inside the EU. e.g. California is about on par with the Netherlands, Germany, Britain while Mississippi and West Virginia are slightly below Bulgaria (of course mainly because of drugs..). IMHO that kinds of makes generalized comparisons semi-meaningless.
"Yeah, but just unimportant people from flyover states. We have to divide our analysis of the United States: Over here in California - you now were the people we care about live - life is just as good as in these other fancy European countries we don't look down upon."
People who can't do basic math and skip prevention are responsible for their own shit outcome.
People in Portugal, where healthcare is "free", i.e. the government pays for it, frequently wait for years before being able to see a specialist due to long waitlists. The obvious outcome is that only poor people use the system and if you can you use private healthcare.
People in Czechia with single payer healthcare system with e.g. average wage of 2000 USD pay from 100 euros a month for health insurance (unemployed) to e.g. 500 euros (with 4000 USD salary) or more if you make more. You get the same shitty service (something like 20 years behid the US), you just pay a lot more if you make anything resembling a US salary.
There's no such thing as free healthcare. Can you make a single payer healthcare system that works better? Sure, it's just hard and even if everything is ideal you get maybe 50% discount. The main way to make healthcare cheaper is to drop coverage for diseases that are expensive to treat.
- 90% of Americans have health insurance - I would say it works for more than half (most) of Americans. Granted, not all health insurance is created equally.
- The obesity and congestive heart failure issues is a function of poor dietary choices most Americans make (choosing fast/process food over cooking/making healthy foods), and not a function of healthcare access
Clearly having health insurance isn't enough to make healthcare affordable or prevent patient outcomes from being worse for Americans than patients in other nations.
> The obesity and congestive heart failure issues is a function of poor dietary choices
I also suspect that obesity and congestive heart failure issues are heavily influenced by diet, although I think that "choices" might be misleading here and that being unable to afford basic and preventative healthcare likely does have a major impact in healthcare outcomes even when the problems come from obesity and heart failure.
It's certainly not as if people in other nations don't also enjoy ultra-processed foods or are any less fond of sugar, fat, and salt. They just often have better access to healthier foods, and more stringent regulations concerning what companies are and aren't allowed to put in foods, what they are allowed to advertise, and how they are sold.
There is a huge difference between the number of people in the US who have little to no access to healthy foods when compared to those in other developed nations. Sometimes it's physical access (food deserts) and sometimes it's a matter of costs, but I don't think there's anything inherent to Americans that forces them to make bad choices. I'm guessing that instead Americans tend to have less choice and fewer opportunities for healthy foods in the first place, while having unhealthy ultra-processed foods that would be banned in other countries readily available, easily affordable, and heavily advertised to them.
I call bs on the second part. It's not unhealthy food that makes you gain weight, it's how much food you have.
On top of that, the healthiest foods are among the cheapest foods you can buy. Milk, oatmeal, potatoes, rice, macaroni, chicken are all cheap compared to most foods you can get. This stuff is available almost everywhere.
>but I don't think there's anything inherent to Americans that forces them to make bad choices.
It's partly cultural. But this isn't a uniquely American problem. It's just worse in the US. 72% of Americans are obese or overweight.
On top of that there was a recent study that found that BMR has decreased in the last ~30 years. Among men it was even up to 7%. That's a big enough difference to take someone from barely overweight to obese over a lifetime. But this is only a single study so far.
> On top of that, the healthiest foods are among the cheapest foods you can buy.
The usual argument here calls out "bulk beans and rice" instead of potatoes and chicken, but in both cases you aren't going to find that in a gas station or convince store which for many Americans (some 40+ million) is the only place they can get groceries. If they're getting chicken it's not going to be whole and uncooked. It'll be sold in a plastic bag leaching PFAS into the food and be coated in high fructose corn syrup (most packaged lunch meats have sugar or HFCS added). Those kinds of places tend to have very little fresh fruit and veg as well.
If you're looking at cost per calorie unhealthy food will often win out as less costly, not just in terms of money but also time and effort. Someone who works two jobs and spends hours sitting on or walking to/from the bus isn't always going to have the energy or time to roast a chicken. It's easy to see why they'd choose what's fastest, highly satisfying, requires less preparation and clean up, and is inexpensive.
Not that I'm suggesting that the 72% of Americans who are obese/overweight have those kinds of problems... just that you'll find more Americans who are in that position than you'll find somewhere like the UK.
I found the study on the decrease in BMR. That's pretty wild and if true, I wouldn't be surprised if it was a factor in the obesity problem.
>If you're looking at cost per calorie unhealthy food will often win out as less costly
What you should be looking for is cost per gram of protein. That's the only macro nutrient you need large amounts of. Calories per gram of protein are important too - oatmeal and dried pasta are the cheapest protein/$, but their protein/kcal is too low.
I think it comes down to 'not caring enough' to try to get it under control. All the obfuscation and noise around nutrition ("healthy food") doesn't help either, but it's doable.
>I found the study on the decrease in BMR. That's pretty wild and if true, I wouldn't be surprised if it was a factor in the obesity problem.
It might even be the main part, at least for men. If your normal TDEE is 2136 kcal and you eat at maintenance, but then your BMR drops by 7.7% (165 kcal) then you'll gain weight until your TDEE is at 2136 kcal again. During this you would go from ~80 kg to ~95 kg taking you from 24.7 BMI to 29.3.
An argument against the study is that it could be due to different measuring techniques. On the other hand, we have found that the average temperature of humans is slowly decreasing, so maybe it's true.
It's not all roses. I'm sure that even the wealthy who get healthcare in the US do have to deal with things like over-treatment, a lack of regulations, excessive costs, etc. It doesn't seem to hurt their outcomes enough to offset the fact that they'll have far more options, greater access to the best avilable technology/treatments, and that they'll be treated like absolute royalty.
No. If you get something like cancer, at best you can expect Medicaid to be comparable to basic private health insurance, which can easily leave people with out of pocket costs they can't possibly afford.
Medicaid has a ton of other problems starting with eligibility, but even if you are eligible and you successfully jump through all the hoops to keep it (which are sometimes totally insane: https://youtube.com/watch?v=bVIsnOfNfCo), you still may not be able to get the services you need. Many doctors won't accept it and you can die just waiting for an appointment. Studies have shown there was effectively one psychiatrist for every 8,834 Medicaid beneficiaries and just one cardiologist for every 4,543 Medicaid beneficiaries. These doctors can't possibly see, let alone adequately treat and manage the care of, everyone who needs them.
The closest we get to free healthcare in the US is care in the emergency room which is only required to "stabilize" you. They'll try their best to keep you alive if you're actively dying, but then they push you out the door and send you a massive bill. They won't give you chemo or radiation to keep your cancer from spreading
> That's because we subsidize the world by investing in a massive portion of the science and tech for producing medicines.
Even if we assume that's the case - as in, normal margins would be insufficient to finance the research - that does not account for the medical treatments themselves.
This is such a rotten take. America, saviours of the world. It entirely discounts the contributions that other countries globally make. Countries in the European Union, Australasia, etc.
The US cost of healthcare is about 17% of GDP. In other first world nations it's about 11%. This isn't service delivery or value, it's underlying cost. Per capita healthcare costs over twice of what it does in the UK. Similar for Australia. Both those are socialised and have very active R&D communities.
The average life expectancy in the US is about 78. In other first world nations it's almost unilaterally closer to 84.
The US is ranked 69th globally in terms.of health system performance. The US is also ranked worse than the OECD38 average for death by preventable causes.
The biggest difference between those places I mention and the above is that the US views healthcare as a capitalist endeavour and tries to claim that competition will lower prices. Quite the opposite has occurred, and the system has become perverted. Intellectual property laws applied in this fashion ensure that you cannot have competition for health care since drugs are limited to a single supplier. You also don't get a choice in hospital care or doctors in most cases when you really look at how medical competition works.
In other places, the costs are socialised through taxation. Drugs are purchased through nationalised efforts where suppliers must either come to the table and negotiate prices properly or lose access to entire markets. It's funny how they can still be quite profitable even under this scenario, and yet the prices still be so significantly less by orders of magnitude than US pricing per patient/dose.
American exceptionalism ceases to be felt when you go spend time in other first world nations for any meaningful length of time. You realise it's reassurance of self rather than truth on basically all but defence technology spending.
> The average life expectancy in the US is about 78. In other first world nations it's almost unilaterally closer to 84.
It doesn’t help that (at least when it comes to healthcare) US is a dozen of different countries in a trench coat.
Life expectancy in richer states like California or New York is very close to that in Germany, the Netherlands, Britain etc. (and if adjusted for the massive disparity in drug related deaths they’d probably be closer to Italy, France or even Switzerland) while the poorest states are about on par with Eastern European countries where it’s barely above 75 years or so. So any average figure is semi meaningless.
> That's because we subsidize the world by investing in a massive portion of the science and tech for producing medicines.
How much of the money that flows into the US healthcare system really goes towards medical R&D, and how much is effectively wasted due to the inefficient bureaucracy and out-of-control litigation?
> How much of the money that flows into the US healthcare system really goes towards medical R&D, and how much is effectively wasted due to the inefficient bureaucracy and out-of-control litigation?
Literally tens of billions are wasted annually on advertising. The cost is pushed to the sick and hurting while doctors are bribed to overprescribe whatever drug people are being trained to "ask their doctor about". I'd worry about that way before I gave a thought to "out-of-control litigation". Especially considering how companies like Purdue Pharma and Philips Respironics can knowingly kill people with their drugs and medical devices, try to hide the fact they were doing it, yet face no meaningful consequences and not one person is put behind bars. If anything, I'd say America should be demanding more justice from the legal system not less.
if US government is paying for research, advancement and what not, why should the end result not be free for citizens? let them spend a trillion dollars on a new drug developed by bayer or whoever, why should the company then charge anything more than say a generic paracetemol?
All research done using any amount of money from the US government should be open and easily accessible to every American (with exceptions for national security), but that doesn't mean we should get the products resulting from it without cost.
If the government funded research that resulted in a more eco-friendly car I wouldn't expect to see one delivered to my driveway or that the car with the fancy new tech (which might be a lot more involved in terms of costs) should be priced the same as the old tech.
Healthcare should just be made accessible and affordable to everyone. It looks like the best way to do that is with publicly funded health systems.
>I wouldn't expect to see one delivered to my driveway or that the car with the fancy new tech (which might be a lot more involved in terms of costs) should be priced the same as the old tech.
we often pay a new user tax, or monopoly tax like the epipen thing. that should not be possible.
Well, if the US decided to not offer medicine on a realistic price point, other nations would do what the US did with Germany's Bayer, back when Anthrax was a concern: Cancel the patent on the only Anthrax medicine available due to "national security".
Don't blame the world for your Pharma executives needing a third private jet for their mistresses.
It's a tragedy of the commons. US lawmakers need to ban pharmaceutical companies from selling their drugs in the US at substantially higher prices than the drugs are sold elsewhere.
I'm not so sure about rising levels of anti-intellectualism overall if you look globally. I looked at some stats over my lifetime and globally from Our World in Data 67m people had post secondary education in 1965 vs about 1.07bn now so up 16x. (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-level-ed...)
Also in the 1970s the Cambodians were searching out their intellectuals and executing them and the Chinese did a slightly less extreme version in the cultural revolution whereas now you get none of that and China is becoming a science superpower.
Admittedly some in the US seem to be pushing antivax and climate denial but it's not like the past events. Also it seems a bit local. I'm a Brit for example and see almost no climate denial here. A bit of antivax maybe.
Some of the anti-vax movement during covid (I presume that's what you have in mind) is anti-intellectualism but some of it is not.
You can hold both opinions that an mRNA vaccine is an incredible new technology that has enormous potential, while a new technology that had never been tested on humans shouldn't be forced on people for whom the benefit was marginal at best (kids, healthy population under 50, people who already had covid).
And you can hold both opinions that health authorities clearly misbehaved or acted in a moronic way (lying about masks, origin of the virus, forcing vaccines on people who had already been infected, telling you you can't go outside, except if it's to protest for BLM, etc) while acknowledging that coming up with a vaccine against a new virus in only weeks is a technological wonder.
It's absurd to be systematically anti-intellectual, but also some healthy skepticism is well warranted.
It's like poker. You can have this lucky draw on the river, but most often you don't. You cannot built your strategy on lucky draws and those people weren't, even when not everything worked out. You and I are still alive, so I think they did a good job.
Right, a lot of the problem with anti-intellectualism is actually the people who define their viewpoint as The Science and try to shut down those who disagree as being "against the science".
its only been a small gap in time where anti-intellectualism was segregated from society. you could always just be in your tiny circles of elite higher education.
only thing thats changed this time is anti-intellectualism is given a microphone.
I think you'll find certain parties on both sides secretly want things to be framed as controversial to drum up the useful idiots to their cause or open their checkbook.
Poor rogue planets - one day orbiting their birth suns with their brethren planets - the next day cast out into the universe due to circumstances beyond their control … cursed to wander the universe alone potentially forever in a freezing dark vacuum …
