OnlineCourage

This is a tautological explination which adds absolutely nothing to the discussion. Yes we all understand that A = A.

> Can they get away with it if a large percentage of highly educated and well connected people are very strongly opposed to it and can't do their jobs properly?

Well, Mao certainly could during the cultural revolution.

I would be absolutely shocked if this happens. Less than 1% of China's population speaks English beyond learning for business purposes. Making learning English illegal would be impossible to enforce, you would have to build additional infrastructure on the internet just to specifically block english courses. What you are suggesting is actually more complex.

The US has far more than $3 trillion in assets when you take into account land holdings, as well as the idea that money itself is representative of continued faith in the existance of an issuing institution. There are so many layers of incentives pushing for the continued existence of the US one can't dismiss that by arbitrarily assigning a value of '3', and then declare, "See, 3-21=-18...therefore bitcoin."

There is no such thing as a wise monkey. Take everything you said and remove the possible upside, and that is the truth.

Ok, here is another quote from Xiaobo in 1990 which shows that he did not hold extremist views as you falsely claim:

My tendency to idealize Western civilization arises from my nationalistic desire to use the West in order to reform China. But this has led me to overlook the flaws in Western culture — or, even if I see them, to set them aside intentionally. I have not, therefore, been able to stand apart from Western culture, take a critical view of it and perhaps get a better view of human frailty more generally. I have been obsequious toward Western civilization, exaggerating its merits, and at the same time exaggerating my own merits. I have viewed the West as if it were not only the salvation of China but also the natural and ultimate destination of all humanity.

> Is this proof that I am more intelligent than everyone who believed in this idea?

No.

> The more intelligent and clever will always benefit

Not during the cultural revolution in China.

I'm not quite sure what you're asking and I am not going to ask you to elaborate to appear as though I am being intelligent by asking questions because this conversation is not in real-time, I may not come back here for a few days. No it is not a random coincidence that the diseases you mention came from adjacent regions...it is specifically because those regions are tropical, and have a lot of disease vectors. Read up on, "tropical disease," and how vectors play into disease. Disease comes from random mutations, and when you have a high density of random mutations and things that can carry those new diseases around, you have a higher likelihood of any given species (e.g. humans, for example), contracting a novel disease. While humans originated in the same area as where those diseases are coming from relative to the size of the earth, humans came from a completely geographically distinct and isolated area, e.g. the Rift Valley vs the Congo Basin which is separated by the Mitumba mountain range and has a completely different ecological character. Congo = Jungle. Rift Valley = Savannah. Much more vectors and biological diversity in Congo than Rift Valley.

Edit: For those who are saying, "We are dumb to eat apes." You are actually dumb for not realizing why people would eat apes, because you have a wide range of information gathering resources at your disposal to understand why people would eat apes, but you are not using it, while most of the people who eat apes totally lack information. They are ignorant, while you are actually just dumb.

Actually, it's more like a nice shiney bank which gives a huge interest rate on your deposits, but you go to the bank and the doors are locked, and you can't get in to make a deposit...but you can kind of see opaquely through the window that there are a lot of amazing bankers in there making tons of money, but they won't look at your or acknowledge you, because they are too busy making money on the money they already have.

It doesn't need to seem serious...the Science Minister is following more of a risk mitigation strategy - e.g. the vast population of the public will most likely feel OK about the, "Attenbourough," name, whereas a small fringe will leverage, "Boaty McBoatface," to attack the cause of science and say that it's a waste of money. The small fringe's attack has a risk of loss, whereas the larger science fanbase has no risk of loss, only a risk of not as much gain.

He would have received public criticism either way. However, he's going for the safer strategy, which is to mitigate attack rather than expand upon opportunity. Think about politicians like Sarah Palin who attack scientists for studying fruit flies, and then her tons of followers agreeing with her and lobbying to cut science funding because it, "sounds bad." The same effect could occur in the UK, although on a lesser scale.

My head is fairly asymmetrical, so I wonder if there would be some kind of strange signature which wouldn't allow a standard system to work, or perhaps it would identify me as a monkey or something.

If you read my other comment on this thread, you will understand more about where I'm coming from. Sorry...I didn't want to repeat a huge wall of text.

Your understanding is incorrect, actually. HMOs do charge higher insurance rates for people who are less healthy on the aggregate. You are using the word, "penalize," but it has nothing to do with penalties, it has to do with market offerings, as HMOs offer insurance to employers based upon the risk pools. If we use your word, "penalty," to mean "higher pricing," - then less healthy workforces get penalized with higher rates for being unhealthy, sort of like group punishment. Of course using the word penalty or punishment makes it sound like there is some kind of unfair aggressor involved, like a parent punishing their kid for having cancer. In reality it's a cold, heartless, unfeeling robot assigning values based upon what it predicts will happen. See my other response for more explanation on that.

I will attempt to answer your question directly, rather than going off on a tangent or creating some nuanced, "deeper insights," response - since by my reading of the responses so far, I see people writing very emotionally toward what they perceive are the ills embedded in the system. Everyone already knows that healthcare is screwed up in the US, right?

Take the case of an employer with 50,000+ employees. Why 50,000+? Because as of mid-2015 this is the only set of employers where the economics have shown that wellness programs create an ROI. Below that, accountants have not been able to demonstrate a clear economic investment across the board, it is much more on a case-by-case basis. So if you are below 50,000 employees, the answer to your question would be, "In general, there is nothing in it economically for employers, other than they feel good, their HR department is being hornswoggled by salespeople, or they have done some clear, good accounting with a record of wellness programs going back years which have demonstrated some positive correlation between better health and some indicator for the bottom line of their business."

If you are talking about the 50,000+ employee category, then in general there are economic benefits which can be proven in the world of accounting.

Health insurance companies (or more appropriately termed, Health Management Organizations, HMOs) quote out a given employer's rates based upon the risk pool made up of all of the employees. There is little to no leak of information between the HMO and an employer, because the information used is classified as Personal Health Information (PHI), which has very strict standards for how it is stored, the loss or misappropriation of which is a felony that can result in prison time. The employer does not see this PHI - that information is shared between healthcare providers (hospitals and clinics) and the HMOs. So when an employer goes to an HMO to get a quote, the HMO takes all of the PHI they have on the individuals within that employer's organization, and creates a quote based upon how they see that risk pool.

If an employer with a large number of employees, let's say Nationwide Red Dot Retail Store, Inc. (NRDS Inc), partakes in a given wellness program, they will receive a discount on that underwriting based upon the types of wellness programs they provide for their employees. These discount offerings are determined by data scientists and project managers who work at the HMO, and are geared toward maximizing profit for the HMO. For example, those data scientists may find that by offering people $20 to all employees to participate in a health survey, the number of smokers within that pool of employees goes down by 0.5%, which means that the cost to cover them goes down by 1%, which means they would offer some discount less than 1% to NRDS Inc. However, the accountants and data scientists at NRDS Inc., are no dummies, so they may take a look and see that their employee turnover rate is X%, so that particular offering doesn't make sense of them economically, because by next quarter they will have a whole new set of smokers they will have to pay money to, as a part of the wellness program, only to have them leave 3-4 months later.

Wellness programs are meant to use psychology to trick, not force, people into changing their health habits. People do not react well to being forced into things. Americans particularly, do not react well to being forced into things. You may read some other responses to this question giving you an impression that people are being penalized for their decisions and choices.

Here's a straw-man argument for you: let's say there was a country called, "Amazing Programmerlandia Island," and you could hire the most incredible, genius, friendly programmers who know tons of languages to help you with your startup there for $10/hour. There's just one problem. About 50% of them love to do Crocodil, and it is illegal to check whether they are addicts before you hire them, and illegal to fire them just because they do Crocodil, and you have to pay for rehabs. Would you take any opportunity you could to, "hack," the system and try to lower the number of potential Crocodil addicts in your employee pool with some back-door system? Of course you would, this is Amazing Programmerlandia we're talking about here, tons of money to be made for just a tiny investment!

This spurious example basically demonstrates the mindset of HR departments when they buy into wellness programs. The economics change based upon the size of the company, and the numbers a company may have - it is not an, "across the board thing."

To find out more about the ROI of Wellness Programs, I recommend you Google individual companies names, and reports on the ROI from that particular company, from that company's point of view, not from the HMO's point of view, or from an independent paper (from a place like RAND) or from the Government. I could see the Federal Government funding studies which support wellness programs regardless of their true ROI, and asking the HMOs what they think is like askign the fox to guard the chicken coop.

There is no real tax benefits that I am aware of for engaging in wellness programs, the potential returns are only based upon lowered underwriting costs - although if I am wrong on that, please correct me.

Blatantly false numbers in this article calls into question anything that the journalist said. Really sad, terrible fact-checking in this one. The population of SZ in 1979 was 30,000 not 300,000...that's an order of magnitude difference...you're talking about a tiny fishing village with no infrastructure becoming a world bastion of manufacturing. It's not hundreds of factories besides Foxconn, it's THOUSANDS. Did the author even go to Shenzhen? Back in the, "good old days," of 2007 when China was really cheap, wages were $7 per hour...you could rip on Shenzhen and compare wages to western countries...now it's up to over $20/day in a lot of places from what I have seen...scarily close to American minimum wage. If you want that $7/day wage you've got to go to inland China. I really don't think this author did his research, the article reads like it was rushed through and it seems like they just read a bunch of outdated articles on the topic and regurgitated them under the vice brand.