1,450 karma · joined March 28, 2018
I would say that the ACA is on the free market-ish side of the design space: individuals purchasing (subsidized) insurance from private companies.
The "Bismarck model"[0] describes a family of healthcare models where people pay into a central healthcare fund, and that fund then pays medical providers -- which can be private businesses.
(If Americans are thinking, "huh, that sounds like Obamacare / the ACA marketplace!" then you're right.)
It's funny that he (accurately) quotes the Cato Institute as being opposed to employer-provided health insurance... and then implies that the sole alternative is the NHS. Um, I'm pretty sure that's not what the libertarian Cato Institute was suggesting!
If I were Xi, I wouldn't do that; I would just blockade them. You can get the same capitulation (hopefully) without firing a shot.
The way I saw this proposed, back in the 2000s: "proof-carrying code."[0]
The idea is: the compiler compiles the program, and simultaneously generates a proof that the program doesn't violate X, Y, or Z safety rules.
Later, the end-user downloads the program and the proof together, and the local execution environment (the browser, the OS itself, etc) verifies that proof.
The idea being: constructing proofs is hard and sometimes involves manual steps. But verifying a proof is easy and automatic. So do the slow, manual thing once, and the fast thing each time the program is downloaded.
I hope that physical media sticks around. DVDs and Blu-rays often include something that digital releases don't: director's commentaries, "making of" featurettes, and other extras.
For me, it adds a whole new layer of fun to movies I already like.
I agree -- this is big news, but the thread only has 21 comments?!
When the Trump admin kinda-sorta banned Fable a week ago, it seemed like it might be a one-off event: handicapping Anthropic because the administration has a grudge against them.
But today's news makes it seem like we're moving into a whole different world of AI regulation: each US model will have to be approved for release by regulators! And not only that, but the administration will whitelist who gets to use it "customer by customer." (Altman's words.)
Have you listened to the song he links? It's very convincing. If you were just casually listening to it in the grocery store, you wouldn't notice it was made by AI.
This reminds me of Dafny: https://dafny.org/
Actually, that's an interesting question: how good are LLMs at writing Dafny?
At some point the state has to say, "our requirements are making it insanely expensive. We need to consider a different route, or a lower speed."
Interestingly, an experienced player proposed "Tibet rules," which are rules specifically for newbies that cut out a lot of the advanced mechanics: https://riichi.wiki/index.php?title=Tibet_rules&mobileaction...
Just to state the obvious: 2020 was the year of COVID, which played hell with peoples' social lives.
And I think it's been pretty well-proven that happiness is largely driven by the strength and quality of our social relationships. Anything that cuts us off from our friends, or prevents us from forming new friendships, is going to be visible in the happiness data.
Judging by the stats, we haven't dug ourselves out of the post-COVID hole yet.
Hot take: I have never played an expansion that I liked more than the base game.
It's a rare thing: a real-time board game. No turns!
* Skull: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/92415/skull
* Cockroach Poker: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/11971/cockroach-poker
The reason why is: everybody there has board game ADD! I've been coming for 2 years, but we never play the same game twice; someone always brings the Hot New Game of the moment.
But I find that the first playthough is the least-fun one. That's the one where you're trying to remember what the grey cubes do, and whether they're worth victory points or not. And the game takes twice as long as it says on the box, because everyone needs to reason out their strategy from scratch.
I wish that I could convince my group to pick some set of N games to focus on!
Yes, this is an important piece of the puzzle. The "medical loss ratio" for large insurers (the kind we all know and love) is set to 85%. So they can keep up to 15% of their revenue as profit.
As you said, if total spending goes up, they get 15% of a larger number.
Doctors and other providers bill for each individual thing they do. But that means that their incentive is to do as much as possible, so they can quickly rack up billable codes.
It's like if developers billed their employer per line of code they wrote: the incentive is for churn, when it should be for slowing down and thinking about quality.
Most Medicare recipients do get supplementary private insurance though? It's called "Medigap."
Medicare pays for 80% of patients' costs, but even the remaining 20% is a lot. (You get a $100,000 procedure -- you're on the hook for $20,000.) That's why people get Medigap coverage.
Doesn't this already partly exist? My (US) employer offers an HDHP (high-deductible health plan) that comes with an HSA.
(It's not quite what you described, because you have to use the insurer that the company picked. I think you're describing something more like the Singaporean system with Medisave.)
In the COBOL modernization space, I want to highlight Mechanical Orchard[0]. Their analysis tools can trace the execution of individual jobs, and decompose a complex data flow graph into a series of nodes with inputs and outputs.
Once they have that, each individual node can be translated into a modern language, with every individual (input => output) serving as a sort of black-box test. That way, they can gradually rewrite a complex system, while ensuring that the semantics stay the same at each step.
(Sorry, I'm not sure if I'm using the correct COBOL/mainframe terminology, but you know what I mean.)