BugBrother

I believe that in any given month there are lots of really shocked blog authors moaning: "Why did HN vote up those notes to myself instead of when I wrote about something I know?!"

1/2 :-)

You are arguing against something I didn't write.

First, I explicitly mentioned that I'm not familiar with Norway, but it is similar to Sweden/Finland, where I have lived.

Second, I argue that lots of cases, but hardly a majority, fall between chairs in Sweden/Finland. Diagnosis (access to doctors etc) is bad in Sweden, according to international benchmarking.

No one knows how large these problems are since this is not researched, which is typical for Sweden with the big Ol' Boys networks where media, politicians and big corporations have understandings.

>>However, do you have any study comparing health care systems that supports your claim that a single-payer system can never work?

You are reacting by reflexes on internal US discussions here. See my other comments.

I am arguing something else: Centrally planned systems, like the Swedish/Finnish health care, are inefficient with lots of problems. This is not controversial. And have nothing to do with all possible "single payer systems".

See my other comments for a link to the Economist, re British health care.

>>Your response is just another example of the defeatist attitude that most Americans have when it comes to comparisons with Scandinavian countries

I am from Sweden, please check so personal attacks are relevant first!

I try to make this point: The Scandinavian systems do have big problems too, which isn't that publicized. I wouldn't recommend anyone to carbon copy it. Look at e.g. the German implementation instead, larger population and (from the outside) it seems to work less bad than in Sweden.

See my other comments. (And yes, the US health care is uniquely fubar:ed.)

Re scaling:

Nothing I've ever seen says that organising big groups of people in complex endeavours (companies, societies etc) scale [sub]linearily! (Consider network effects of people. And all the differing areas/cultures. And organized crime/gangs in USA.)

But sure, I am certainly no specialist. References welcome?

Assume best case, that the problem size increase linearly with population. The US has 30 times more population (and probably a similar amount more complexity) than Sweden.

Would you say in a job interview that you think a problem 30 times larger is just 30 times as hard to solve...? (That is a different class of problem.)

Every country has different levels of organization. (And I am Swedish.)

I wrote that the Scandinavian health care systems destroy many lives because it fails to diagnose health problems (again, I don't really know about Norway. It do seem less bureaucratic. Or Britain.).

I also wrote about how people can get real health checkups. (This might drastically improve the life of 0.5% - ?% of the population, no one has examined this afaik.)

A philosophical/political discussion as answer to that -- arguing why it is morally right to have a system that doesn't work (here, even destroy people's lives) -- is very Scandinavian. And very "Animal farm".

Edit: About Britain's NHS and Eastern Europe. tl;dr: NHS sucks, Eastern Europe health care cures people. I.e. same as in Sweden. http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21579018-health-clinic...

USA has 300 million people, the problems to organize a society does not increase linearly with the population size. I doubt the Scandinavian solutions work even in Scandinavia, long term! It is typically Swedish to judge that different places by your own irrelevant standards.

First, the US health care system is uniquely dysfunctional. But there are lots of mosquitos in Scandinavia.

For instance, the health care is a centralised system. Those never work. Doctors don't have time/incentive to diagnose problems unless they are obvious (or you're related to a politician -- yes, like in Soviet). Many Swedes (how many? No one knows) drag easily cured problems around for years and decades.

From my own and friends' experiences -- simple knee problems that stopped favorite exercise, lack of iron/vitamines that gave depressions, hard to recognize allergies that resulted in tiredness, thyroid problems etc.

I am here to tell you Scandinavians that it doesn't have to be like that!

If you go into a health care place in Romania, you are a valued customer they want to make happy. They will screw you over by giving you extra tests, not telling you something (anything) to get you out the door (because they only have minutes with any given client)!

You can't get that for money in Sweden. If you have health care problems, go to East Europe or something for the next vacation. (A recent article on BBC discussed that Polish doctors were working in Britain, because Polish immigrants were spoiled with the health care and the British system seemed similar to Sweden).

Please remember this when you're too chronically tired to make enough fuss so the doctors will try to find your problem to get rid of you.

(I have experience with the Swedish and partly with the Finnish health care systems, e.g. the Norwegian is a bit different but I don't really know enough to have an opinion.)

I am tired of all similar conspiracy theories posted the last week in .se comment fields with very bad Swedish. I am going to answer this.

If Russia was mistreated in Western media, Putin would have been burned in effigy every day for a decade in every city in the west over e.g. this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Chechen_War_crimes_and_t...

"On October 21, 1999, a series of Russian ballistic missile strikes on central Grozny killed at least 137 people, mostly civilians, and injured hundreds. The missiles hit the city's main marketplace, a maternity hospital and a mosque."

And other points listed on that page, which has never really been discussed in western media.

But I guess Wikipedia, HRW et al are in on Obama's homosexual conspiracy? :-)

Yes, but note that there are differences in how you can work in experimental/historical sciences.

Your friend^2 would probably gain by reading more about the scientific method, see wikipedia etc. (But then, so could probably you and me both, too.)

Lucky that... Now only half of Europe was enslaved for generations :-(

I should add -- what I meant was, the filtering of the news is very different but still filtered. E.g. pro-Israel stuff (Pallywood, torture between palestinian groups, antisemitism in the muslim world etc)often just doesn't get printed.

Sometimes you see a story at the BBC/NY Times. After it has grown to a headline item, it is grudgingly made news in Sweden a couple of days later.

I assume this is because the left wing extremists really care about Israel.

I shocked the educated English guy next to me at work, when I gave a reference to "The harrowing of the north".

Not exactly the most obscure part of English history, but still not well known. Control of information isn't new.

The fun part will all the Chomsky thing is that in my native Sweden, you have totally different influences on the news media than USA. E.g. left wing extremists have a large space, political discussion are often done by interviewing political left extremists (Gardell, Hubinette, Guillou, etc).

But you see lots of "manufactured consent", lots of head line news stories at BBC/NY Times just doesn't show up. Etc.

It might be different in different part of public administration.

I spend time in Transylvania, Romania. I love to be here for the food, the people and the nature (there is a certain lack of seas, sadly).

That said, the country is a corrupt piece of sh-t. (I like to say: "The Romanians should shoot more than two politicians next time.")

But the police seems quite good. The rest of the justice systems (courts etc) are said to be a horror story that would need a plutoon of Kafkas to describe.

I was outsourced to Eastern Europe for a project and moved my iTunes account too, because it was a bother to send money to the old VISA card.

I have seldom felt so stupid (+) as I did the next time I looked at the empty iTunes store... :-)

(+) Cough, without alcohol being involved.

I posted this the last time I saw you making ~ the same point https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7316490

(And yeah, 10+ years old Perl code bases might be less than pretty... The environment evolves quickly, for good and bad.)

Hmm... sexy! I'd be happy to be able to buy a couple of Twiddler 3s, as areoevan mentioned, depending on ability to drink coffee without too much fiddling.

But the main problem I see is to follow a page or two of code/text at the same time as the external world. You probably would have to use "Steve Mann style" opaque glasses and projecting camera output on them, with intelligence for when more world interaction is needed.

(Sorry for being late, I was off for a language lesson.)

A killer application for selling to me:

A chording keyboard and ssh (I use Emacs anyway). This needs a good battery and enough screen quality for readable 80+ character without headaches.

Then I could go walking with a backpack filled with coffee and lunch... It might be hard to combine a readable screen with a not too high risk for getting my hit by cars.

(Possibly two chording keyboards if they leave the hands usable when strapped on?)

You are totally correct imho, but miss the point.

Read about the resource curse on Wikipedia. It is too lucrative for the junta in an oil country to steal the elections, get external enemies -- and send the oil money to Schweiz.

Putin needed to get isolated from the West, so he can condemn all criticism as Western conspiracies. :-(

The election was criticised quite harshly. But that is not Russia's problem, anyway... [Or do you think elections in Europe is Russia's problem to "correct"?]

Consider the scary thing here:

To AGAIN start invading and taking pieces (Transnistria, Georgia, etc) of countries in Europe is not just small meaningless realpolitik, as you imply.

Especially since the motivation is "Protecting Germ... Russian speaking populations"... :-(

What will happen now is that the West will continue to say "Peace in our time" while starting to also rearm.

Are you seeing the obvious parallels here? You need to wait for Putin to get a moustache first? :-(

All this is so damn sad. After such a hard, hard history you really wish the Russians and Ukrainians would get better than such corrupt thieves for leaders.

At least those leaders seems Hellbent on exporting the suffering, so the Russian/Ukrainian populations won't have to be alone... :-(

That analogy would work better if the cheap Androids sold software, too. And were nice to use with those apps.

But maybe ads to people without money will be enough to finance software? I think before that happens, good cheap screens (maybe not IPS) and lowering electronic prices will push the prices for usable xPAd down anyway -- what seems to happen for phones now. Then everything in the xPad market changes (just don't ask me how).

I'm an iPad user in Romania, right now.

The salaries are really low here, most sales seem to be 100-200 Euro cheap Androids.

The Androids are often used for specific applications/niches (e.g. in taxis and by poor students). If buyers had money, they'd at least get Androids with better screens.

I believe the market for paid Android apps here is more or less nil.

(I hope the cheap Androids aren't used for banking etc, considering the lack of security updates.)

In short -- these cheap Androids aren't really competing with iPads. People just can't afford better (or they are used for a specific application 20 minutes a day).

All that said, I still would consider to switch from iOS if I could get better Emacs support with external keyboard than a terminal (which work on iOS now).

I believe dominotw is not talking about what you wrote.

I think he is making an obfuscated argument that since religion was a big force culturally and is interesting from a historical viewpoint, it should get some respect.

The second "esteem" is "aktning", which have a bit different connotation. They got a "no" added in the translation, which inverted the meaning. What is meant, i believe, is that it is better with a real basis for your view of yourself, e.g. that you think you have reached something that needed hard work in some way (the "work" I use here could be just thinking inside your head).

The second quote from the author is, I believe, about getting to where you're able to be expectant and happy to see your true self.

Edit: To me this seems like a literary author trying to obfuscate a simple point: "It is better for your ability to work to be someone that is happy by trying to see who you are, instead of following suspect gurus." That this was made poetic and hard to understand is imho a really fun irony... But perhaps I've known too many literary/idealistic people which were so good with language that they could rationalize anything to themselves.

Edit 2: Tried to make what I believe this means clearer.

The article is about the pseudo scientifical life advice that is popular. There is not much about religion. After a spammy first half a book is discussed which sounded interesting.

Religion is generally just not discussed in Sweden, which is the most non-religious country on the planet. It is considered a bit embarrassing to discuss faith, like your toilet problems or something. (At least Sweden used to be the leader. The statistics might be different after the large immigration wave.)

(This service provided for anyone trying to use translate.google.com :-) )

Uh, no.

That wasn't his own language features, he used Moose in the last example, it is the standard OO environment in Perl. To simplify a little, most new Perl code use Moose.

The author did discuss a bit how Perl is extendable, which is where Moose comes from.

>> [Perl is unmaintainable]

You need coding standards for all languages. Most (afaik) Perl shops use Conway's "Perl Best Practices" with some local changes. Go read "Modern Perl" etc. Are you not aware of those developments? PBP isn't exactly new.

I don't think there are references of these problems while following good practices? Considering all the trolls which show up when Perl is mentioned, I ought to have seen such a link a long time ago...

But sure, we could assume without support (I don't know) that using Perl forces you to read a few more pages of coding standards. That is, as percentage of work time over a long project, not a problem.

>> [Go preaching]

Today, I don't see much practical difference among the usual scripting languages (they tend to port the successful stuff from each others). Also their niches are partly different compared to the niches for Go. So there is no need to preach.

One big advantage with Perl is that I am not often embarrassed by fan boys and/or language war fanatics, as you find in some other environments...

Edit: Readability.

What would you recommend? Note that the guy obviously is introvert (even I can usual ...cough... often find people to hang out with in new places), so administrating people/projects might be out.

No references to the "Long Pig" food store chain in Transmetropolitan?! (Warren Ellis)

Some of the best stuff he ever did, imho.