The statistic is very clear. Employment is going down. I don't see why you need context for that. You can make your own context based on your own worldview. No need for anyone to provide that for you on a silver platter.
Let me be clear that I do not agree fully with this article, but I think it contains many great observations about day-to-day realities for many people.
Couldn’t you mount a Hetzner Storage Box via SAMBA (SMB) or FTP to your device and then point Syncthing at that network storage? The box is €3.20 per month for 1TB of storage.
It’s a network attached storage with some FTP/SAMBA etc managed by you via a web interface.
Think VPS with lots of storage, but with file-storage software pre-installed and configured and only ability to change users. I don’t know how else to explain.
What I dislike about these large bureaucracies is that it's not only impersonal to the developers who have to work on it, but also for the customers. Even though software is difficult, I think it's a net positive for society to have 10 to 100 banks with poorer software than a few big banks with great software. I think we often overestimate the benefits of economies of scale. A small bank in a town run by a few locals could handle the town's finances perfectly well without much software if there wouldn't be a whole morass of regulations.
Interesting. I’ve seen a lot about sewn signatures too indeed as well as a technique where you glue a small strip of paper on the side instead of a full cover.
What do you mean by “scrimp”? You would spent hours fiddling with Word? EPUB to PDF is okayish nowadays indeed via Pandoc. But nothing beats Typst. Truly remarkable piece of software.
Yes can confirm this is real. I know both German and Dutch nurses who say that the workload is incredibly high. One older nurse also said the pressure today is much higher than years ago.
I am not surprised. Healthcare costs have been rising faster than inflation for several years. It's a difficult sell to increase budgets, so we have to resort to these "invisible" cost cutting measures to try and stay afloat.
Over here in Canada healthcare spending has been rising faster than general inflation more or less continuously since the 1960s. Seems to be generally true of many wealthy countries. More tech and therapies. And an ageing population. And probably other factors.
Another factor is Baumol's cost disease. While some aspects of healthcare have been automated, much of it still comes down to individual clinicians performing procedures on patients.
That does not explain everything. While you could make a reasonable case that doctors are overpaid in the US, the same budgetary crisis is happening all over Europe where salaries are much lower.
The crisis in France is clearly not on the same level that is in Quebec. It's not the only factor, but a serious one. As a continuation of it we have a heavily caped number of doctors what can be 'minted' every year. Same caps exist in the USA states.
This also happens in Italy, there's a maximum number of people who can get into med school. However, even though some complain of being overworked, some others complain that increasing that maximum number will lead to unemployment. So apparently medical professionals can either be overworked or unemployed, there is no in between..
Perhaps in the US, but nobody is getting paid that in most public European systems. A quick google suggests that the absolute highest pay band for a doctor in the UK is ~£142k (~$190k USD). And there won't be many making that.
This cherrypicks a high billing specialty, doesn't appreciate an overhead of 25-40% for most physicians, and also overestimates the proportion of physician salaries in healthcare budgets (~15%). You could literally pay physicians half and not save that much.
Also is that too high? I know a guy in his early 40s still finishing his 2nd radiology fellowship (4 years undergrad, 4 years med school, 5 years radiology, 1-2 years each fellowship = cost of his 20s/30s) to get a job...
I find HN comments on healthcare compensation when it comes up funny because on the other hand compensation expectations in the tech gold mine here are justified. E.g. I take home less in CDN dollars than an L3 SE at google without benefits. I'm happy with what I do/get but there is a mismatch in rationalizing high compensation, markedly more years of university and training, and from my point providing a societal benefit.
Yeah hospital accounting is weird. I had family in the ER and one of their crappy meals was like $60, for basically just rice and canned vegetables on a tray. A single bandaid cost like $25 or something outrageous like that. This was pre-covid too. I'm sure that same meal is getting close to $100 by now.
It is profits. When someone is sick, or dying, we really need to make a huge profit, before it is too late. Porsches, Lamborghinis, Malibu houses cost money. You can't just sit there and let others do it, instead of you.
Not sure why we would walk into the sea because work doesn't need doing anymore. If you are worried about needing work to put food on the table, I think our best solution is to start with a small UBI that we try to increase as automation increases.
The way I see it, you have three choices, the government, corporations, or billionaires. It's an oversimplification of power in this world today, but those are your choices. Which one of those do you pick to clothe and feed and house you, after the singularity happens?
Another potential alternative is healthy capitalism, where a large number healthcare providers are in competition with each other to provide the best service at the lowest cost. In this model a hospital, for example, would be forbidden to buy another hospital down the road, in the same way a doctor’s office would be forbidden to buy a second doctor’s office, because both cases reduce competition.
No, it would be a mixed economy, where private individuals and businesses provide most of the goods and services, and the government plays a significant role in regulating the market.
Monopolized markets are almost always evidence of regulatory failure.
"Healthy capitalism" isn’t an option distinct from government intervention. Healthy capitalism it is government-regulated capitalism. Any system where competition is protected depends on active, ongoing government enforcement of the rules. Without that, markets naturally tend toward monopoly or oligopoly.
Advocating for "healthy capitalism," is advocating for a system where government sets boundaries and steps in to preserve competition. That places it firmly within the spectrum of government-regulated options, not outside or apart from them.
It's tempting to imagine ideal or the worst versions of each option and then claim, "what I want is none of these." Instead, we should look at whether our preferred scenario is actually possible within the real-world range of choices. In this case, "healthy capitalism" is only possible when government is both the referee and the enforcer, so it's a version of the government option, not a separate path.
Government. 100%. It has issues certainly as every organization created by humans does, but corporations already run almost everything and that's why most everything is on fire. And billionaires are just the dumbasses in charge of the aforementioned corporations.
I don't know, I'm merely stating what comes down to an economic law. I'm not an expert on healthcare.
However, as it happens I just spent the last weekend accompanying my wife as she was in a hospital. There was actually quite a bit that happened, especially once or l out of the ER and admitted, that I would have felt totally fine if a robot had done it. Half of what the nurses did were things like bringing puke bags, picking up a full puke bags, bringing water, paging the doctor again who wouldn't show up for another 4 hours, explaining how to order food.
It's the baby boom. If level of care stays the same then at some point one third of the labour force is projected to have to work in healthcare, it's not possible.
To anyone here open minded enough to give it a shot, I encourage you to read The Real Anthony Fauci, or at least the first chapter. To people who feel resistance: what is the worst that can happen? If you after reading disagree then your brain will soon forget about it anyway so nothing is lost.
You seem to have the causality backwards. Prior to the 1960s, the healthcare system couldn't really do much. Most of the drugs, devices, and procedures were relatively cheap. After that the capabilities increased tremendously as did costs, and then government had to get involved to control costs and ensure patient access. (Although many of those government interventions ultimately had the opposite effect.)
Why did Lasik machines decrease in cost, while increasing in efficacy?
Drugs were far cheaper before the 1962 FDA Amendments, after that was a massive increase in costs. See "Regulation of Pharmaceutical Innovation" by Sam Peltzman.
Before 1962, drugs were already regulated to be safe. 1962 brought about the requirement for effective, which enormously increased drug prices. It's all in the book I referenced.
The reference says what happens with the greatly increased cost to develop a new drug, is the number of new drugs developed dropped dramatically. But the percentage that turned out to be effective stayed the same.
So, yes, we are worse off because of that, because we wind up with far fewer effective drugs.
A proper solution is for the patient, a legal consenting adult, to sign a piece of paper that says he understands that the FDA has not verified the drug to be effective.
I don’t get the whole MechaHitler outcry, LLMs have been doing weird things for years now. Sometimes randomly this, sometimes randomly that. Even Google and Microsoft had many cases were AI gave weird responses
Grok has seemed unusually prone to bizarre behavior, even if you don't count the times that its system prompt was modified (like the infamous "please talk about white genocide" incident in May). Part of the problem seems to be that it's being trained on recent Twitter posts, resulting in a weird sort of feedback loop when users discuss Grok's behavior.
Difference being the CEOs of Google and Microsoft didn't do a Nazi salute before their bots started extolling the virtues of Hitler's ideology. Every damn time.
> BBC Channel 4 had a documentary in which a psychologist described 16-year-old boys with erectile dysfunction coming into his counselling room.
I think that must be another medical condition or the boy lied, but we’ve all been 16 here and seriously those problems are extremely unlikely. If there is one problem that 16 year old boys have it is a too active sex drive.
I have zero reason to believe pornography is the culprit.
Erectile dysfunction is a physiological issue. It's almost always an issue of blood flow. This young man could have heart failure or some other condition limiting his blood flow to that of an old man.
Not to mention testosterone levels have been declining for what, 70 years? Why are just intuitively, and pre-emptively, blaming random stuff on pornograhpy? You can't do that. You have to show the causation. The world is complicated.
"Now pornography starts at 10 using classmate’s cellphone."
I went to Australian schools. For comparison I'm old enough to remember when a brand of bubble gum came with cards that had photographs of famous female film stars on them. Whenever we boys got duplicate photos we'd swap them with one another (it was pot luck, until we unwrapped the gum we couldn't see the photo).
I recall an incident in the classroom where we were surreptitiously swapping cards whilst the teacher was writing on the blackboard and had her back to us and she suddenly turned around and caught us.
She walked up one of the aisles towards the back of the class where we were and confiscated every last one of the cards. When she'd finished she turned to us and said in a loud, biting and accusative voice for the whole class to hear "You are all filthy-minded boys and you should be fully ashamed of yourselves".
Of the class only about four or five of us were involved and the school was coed, so half the class was girls (they sat on one side of the classroom we boys on the other).
These cards were only film studio PR photos so whilst the women looked well presented and pretty there was nothing whatsoever sordid or salacious about them.
We were between 12 and 13 years of age at the time. For a boy of that age these film star cards were the sexiest thing we could lay our hands on. There were no adult sex shops or under-the-counter mags wrapped in cellophane so one couldn't see before one bought—they came at least a decade later. Pornography of all sorts was illegal no matter one's age.
I feel you very well. At that age I had access to Beate Uchse (sexshop from West Germany) catalogue. Completely innocent by today’s standard. Current kids have access to all the online sites where one must klick „I am 18 or older - Enter“. There are five parents, who doesn’t care about parental control, for one parent who implements it properly.
Edit: today‘s sick content is not comparable to the one from the past.
You are not describing anything resembling what kids today are exposed to. There is no scarcity. Any phone can access an endless scrolling list of pornographic videos. Kids can spend hours scrolling and watching new-to-them pornography for free.
The first step in solving the problem of those prudes trying to build an inescapable surveillance state because there is way too much porn online, is accepting that they’re right that children are going to suffer because of the porn accessible online.
In the above comment I should have mentioned how risk averse and conservative Australian society is, and it was even more so at the time that incident took place in the classroom—especially so in sexual matters.
It's worth reading this short piece about British conductor Sir Eugene Goossens who in the mid 1950s was conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and after a tour of the UK brought photographic material back to Australia that was deemed pornographic by Australian Customs. He was arrested, he resigned and his life was ruined for something many nowadays wouldn't give a second thought about (although different, the tragedy has shades about it reminiscent of what happened to Oscar Wilde): https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/law/british-conducto...
The Goossens incident was a classic instance of Australian conservatism—conservative values—in action.
It happened some years before my classroom incident but Australian Society's views were essentially still static, not much had changed by then.
That said, things did change and by the mid 1970s Australia had largely caught up with the sexual revolution of the 1960s, nevertheless its society has always retained a high level of conservatism and conservative values about it.
The background behind these new internet regulations is both complex and nuanced. That they've managed to take hold and become law almost without so much as a squeak from the population is partly explained because of that risk averse conservatism but also as there's been no opposition to speak of. By and large, Australians do not complain enough when their politicians enact laws that are authoritarian and unjust. It's rare for Australians to take to the streets on mass and demonstrate. The last time I witnessed that was during the Vietnam demonstrations of the late '60s when a broad cross section of the population took to the streets—and guess what, the laws were changed, politicians actually took note (numbers really matter).
These days demonstrations are largely carried out by minority interests, politicians take little interest and not much happens, and the Establishment still gets its way. The population watches on with little interest and often takes the view that such 'radicals' ought to be off the streets.
The reasons for the population's complacency are too complex to cover here except to make the point again that the conservative nature of Australian society makes it easy for politicians to convince the population that authoritarian law is in Society's best interests. Likewise, politicians are easily convinced by vested interests to that effect for the same reasons.
The large migration of recent decades has brought with it additional complexity, it's changed Australian Society greatly. Migrants have brought both cultural and religious values with them many of which are traditionally conservative (but by nature very different to traditional Australian conservatism). Given migrant numbers, Australia is more conservative now than it was say 30/40 years ago but not to the extent it was in the 1950s.
Moreover, as cultural differences now exist across large sections of the population the Nation no longer speaks with one voice on many issues as it one did (politics back then was fought across a narrow spectrum of interests). These differences not only make governments even more suspicious of their citizenries they also enable power brokers and vested interests to more easily manipulate Government to have it change laws than would have been the situation decades ago when the Nation spoke more with one voice on many issues.
In recent years there have been multiple instances of successive Australian Governments having taken advantage of divided opinion across society to change laws—laws that effectively take power from the Citizenry and cede it to themselves. These privacy-busting authoritarian laws/regulations are now on the statutes simply because there was not enough opposition to them. It's another classic instance of united we stand divided we fall.
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