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Comment by burrows | Hacker News Reader

> It's pretty clear what 'free' means here, the person getting the treatment is not billed for the treatment.

Actually I think that’s a pretty good example of what confuses me about this usage of “free”. Usually when I call something “free” I am making a claim about who pays for the thing, but as you pointed out, in this case it has something to do with who is billed by the service provider.

> In that way, a society organizes that no one has the existential threat (financially or medically) of prohibitively high cost.

IMO, no current Earth society comes close to that criteria. For example, if someone has a currently untreatable disease, then isn’t that just saying the cost of treatment is prohibitively high? ie, the cost of hiring scientists, renting lab space, running trials, etc.

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> in this case it has something to do with who is billed by the service provider.

What else could it even be? You started your gotcha with the truism that it's not free, so, yeah, nothing is free, and the whole discussion is meaningless. You're arguing in bad faith, but that just makes your argument meaningless.

> no current Earth society comes close to that criteria. For example, if someone has a currently untreatable disease

Your counterargument is that there exist diseases that cannot be treated anywhere?

Let me give you an example of something treatable: Endemic (flea-borne_) typhus. In Europe, the given example is "British POWs in Germany at the end of World War I when they described conditions in Germany." [1] In the US, instead Typhus shows up in the reports of the LA Medical Association as a regular occurence (among homeless, mostly). [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemic_typhus [2] https://www.ladocs.org/news-events/news/lac-dph-health-alert...

I agree with much of what you said, but I don’t think they’re arguing in bad faith at all.

I only see two options, bad faith or childishly naive, so I suggested the more flattering option. In either case it's tiring to argue this 'gotcha' strawman - no one here on HN believes that things just materialize.

But I do think it's bad faith, because I doubt burrows picks the same kind of pointless argument about semantics when someone offers him a free sample at Costco, or a free beer, or is confused when reading the Washington Post online, even though it says 'Post' right there in the name, and that the printed New York Times doesn't really tell you the time, and that Fox News is not about foxes at all (even though it absolutely should be).

Yes, but there is a long history of thinking about the various definitions for "free". This alone warrants the discussion. Surely they see what you mean, but it does sound like you both default to different definitions of the word. I agree with you, but I maintain that you are being much to certain about the naivety of the objection.

Because we're on HN:

There's 'free' as in beer ...

And there's 'free' as in 'freedom'.

All that is true, but burrows conveniently switches back and forth between definitions just to keep a 'controversy' alive. Hence bad faith.

[edit] Also, I cannot really see how anyone, not even burrows, would confuse 'free' treatment with 'free as in speech'.

> What else could it even be?

As I said, my usage is closer to calling a thing “free” if I consume it without paying for it, and importantly it doesn’t matter who receives the bill.

If my wife buys a new couch for our home with a credit card that is nominally her’s, but for which I make the payments, I would not call the couch free despite the credit card bill being in her name.

> You started your gotcha with the truism that it's not free, so, yeah, nothing is free, and the whole discussion is meaningless. You're arguing in bad faith, but that just makes your argument meaningless.

I just asked a question about the meaning of “free” in this context.

> Your counterargument is that there exist diseases that cannot be treated anywhere?

My counterexample to the claim, “There are current Earth societies where no one is unable to get treatment because of insufficient funds”, is anyone in these candidate societies with a currently untreatable disease.

I don’t understand your point about typhus.

> As I said, my usage is closer to calling a thing “free” if I consume it without paying for it, and importantly it doesn’t matter who receives the bill.

Well then that's exactly, word for word, what OP did. How are you confused if you use it the exact same way?

But I think OP does pay for it, as she suggests here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30788837

First OP says, “X is free for me.”, then she says, “My taxes pay for X.” It looks to me that says she both does and does not pay for it, that’s why I’m confused.

In what kind of world did you expect that "X is free for me" would imply that nobody is getting paid for anything regarding an IVF treatment? It clearly means that, _other than paying taxes like everyone else in the free world_ I do not have to pay for it.

This is at the same level as finding a free penny on the street and going "No, but hang on, _someone_ paid to mint this penny so I am extremely confused as to why you would say this penny is free?!"

I hope the other posts in this subthread have made things explicit enough for you, and perhaps you can use this discussion as a heuristic for parsing these kinds of statements in the future.

> It clearly means that, _other than paying taxes like everyone else in the free world_ I do not have to pay for it.

So, other than paying for it, I don’t have to pay for it?

Again, I find this sort of comment confusing.

> This is at the same level as finding a free penny on the street and going "No, but hang on, _someone_ paid to mint this penny so I am extremely confused as to why you would say this penny is free?!"

I think it’s closer to calling the food in the refrigerator at my house “free”. Or calling repairs at the auto shop “free” when the insurance company (who I pay) pays the shop.