anothercomment

That would be another issue than the "medical care is especially expensive in the US", though.

Are the numbers even known, I mean, how much would proper health insurance cost per person?

But why - I still don't understand what is causing the problem in the US? Even in the non-US systems, somebody has to pay, so how can they afford it, given that all other countries are poorer than the US?

In my view, insurance is completely compatible with capitalism. It is simply a business, based on statistics. So why should the US have a special problem with insurance?

This seems to be more of a problem with insurance - there often is little transparency and doctors simply charge all sorts of things to the insurer that the patient has no idea about.

I think that is one of the main challenges of health insurance.

In my country (Germany) I have actually shied away from switching to private insurance, because they pay doctors more, and doctors are known to do as many tests and procedures as possible (not always a good thing, but in the end it is a gamble - too many examinations/procedures or too few?).

The "public" health insurance is quite regulated as to what gets paid and how much. The downside is that doctors have to waste a lot of time on bureaucracy (every examination has to be entered into the computer to determine the costs), and transparency is still missing (patients typically don't even know how much their treatments cost). And some committee decides what procedures get paid. I don't trust committees. I trust the market (I mean I trust "in" markets, not necessarily any given market as markets can be broken by regulations, lack of transparency, all sorts of things). I have also spent a lot of money on things that weren't covered by public insurance.

One story I heard is that for example in the UK they won't pay for dialysis after a certain age. So public health insurance is not an automatic solution to every problem.

I think it is actually unavoidable that insurance will have to make a cut at some point, because medical procedures can become arbitrarily expensive. Perhaps even now for the right money, people could be kept alive indefinitely.

I would have no problem with a doctor trying to be profitable - just as with other businesses. I guess the classic assumption is that to be profitable, businesses have to provide good service.

But why does it cost more, and how are employers able to provide health insurance anyway?

A bit OT, but this post made me think: how do countries provide good health care? does it always have to be government sponsored, otherwise it would be not affordable? And how does the government pay for it, given that the money has to come from taxpayers?

Because otherwise I don't understand why the market can't provide good health insurance in the US? Isn't that a classic insurance problem, take a group of people and spread out the risk?

What is going on? Is medicine too expensive because of state subsidies, so private insurers can't compete? Or are there regulations preventing private insurers from entering the market?

"Why is the world moving towards a more authoritarian kind of rule all of a sudden, and why is this happening now."

Is it really all of a sudden? Counting communism as authoritarian (as it always ends in dictatorship), strong moves towards authoritarianism have been happening for over 100 years? I guess they have happened since the US proclamation of independence and the French Revolution, and before that the world was already authoritarian because there were churches and kings.

Perhaps US independence and French Revolution were flukes, and people (or at least rulers) craving for authoritarianism is the norm.

Perhaps it is simply the herd nature of humans that is to blame? They either want to be leaders or have a leader to look up to?

The number of Bitcoins that will ever be in existence is fixed, so I guess there can be no inflation in the classical sense.

Value is another question altogether.

Also, they make me sign in with Facebook to claim Stellar (in their latest PR campaign). No.

I just meant to illustrate that money is actually quite complicated, even though we use it daily without giving it much thought.

True, I worry about that, too. And in case of the DAO, that issue hit home big time.

There are efforts under way to create contracts with formal verification, but I remain a bit skeptic. It is difficult to write complex software that way afaik.

On the other hand, a lot of contracts are maybe not very complex. I thought about a bank account recently (receive and send money). That could perhaps be done in 100 lines of code? (I don't know the programming language yet, but their basic token creation example seems to be short, and it is kind of like a bank account). That seems impressive compared to the effort banks probably spend on IT.

OK then, explain to me: what is money?

What about those things that produced the last financial crisis? Reselling bad credits b mixing it with good credit and so on. Maybe it was only accessible to the pros, but then if they got it wrong, and they probably bundled it up with other things that they were then able to sell to the public.

Maybe true, but in a way, classical investments are even more complicated. Some of them are even deliberately complicated to obfuscate their risky nature to naive investors.

Agreed, and it is a reason why I am holding back on Etherium so far. I don't know if they have a proposed solution to that, tbh, but it seems pretty impossible to solve.

Although, to be fair, "classic" contracts also need that someone to enforce them. Maybe Etherium & the likes only replace one aspect of it, not the whole process. If company X publicly announces that they'll adhere to a certain contract in the blockchain, they can be held accountable for it and transactions can be completely transparent.

You can begin to see the beauty of Bitcoin when you want to accept payments. All you need to do is download a wallet, generate an address and put it online. You don't need anybody's permission, as would be the case with PayPal or the likes. The risk of somebody deciding on a whim to freeze your funds is also greatly diminished (again, very different from PayPal and the likes).

"Governance" and "Accountability" seem to be the antithesis to that. No, Bitcoin doesn't need that and doesn't want that.

Yes, it is a bit scary, it is a system that develops on its own, depending on the way it is being used (network effects and so on). I guess economists freak out because they are unsure about the rules, and they can't have that.

But it is also not true that it would be a huge problem if there were forks. Why would it be? People will simply use what works best for them, controlled by market forces (they need other people to use the same fork).

Who decides how Bitcoin develops? Ultimately the users do, by using it or not. Developers and miners merely provide proposals.

And why does a system need 100% agreement on everything? Such a system may well never exist.

Happened to me two or three times in my life so far.

You can pay for sex changes with bitcoin now? Woot!

But even with a Bitcoin split, what would be the problem? You would simply double your coins (kind of).

Also, it would mean that informality would be a privilege of white people.

The assumption seems to be that companies culture is driving women away. Is that even true, as in, are there really hundreds of thousands of female software developers in waiting who would jump at a job at a company with the appropriate culture? It seems very unlikely to me - more likely, the pipeline dries out long before the hiring stage.

That some companies with great effort manage to compete over the few female developers on the market doesn't prove every company could hire lots of female developers if only they changed their culture.

To be honest, personally, even if there were those hundreds of thousands of female developers supposedly driven away by bro culture, I would still maintain that people should have a right to create companies they enjoy working in. If some people want to work in T-Shirts and get drunk every night, it is their right to do so (if they can earn the money to sustain it).

Luckily not all companies are the same, so that people can apply to companies that suit their tastes.

If it weren't so, there wouldn't even be a need for hiring or job seeking to begin with. People could just apply to the next best company and be hired, likewise, companies could hire the next best applicant - because there would be no such issues as cultural fit or whatever. Not very realistic (source: I am not friends with everybody and not everybody is friends with me).

Morals are just mental shortcuts for cases when the rational explanation is over the head of most people.

From the abstract: women in male-dominated fields are not more likely to switch fields compared to their female peers in other fields.

In other words, male dominated subjects don't drive women away (as in, it is not sexism they encounter in a male dominated field that makes them switch in droves).

This just in: "women in male-dominated fields are not more likely to switch fields compared to their female peers in other fields"

From "Do They Stay or Do They Go? The Switching Decisions of Individuals Who Enter Gender Atypical College Majors"

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-016-0583-4

I don't know what the data says, but I think this should be answered with data. If results are better with segregated education, go for it. However, I think it has mostly been abandoned because results weren't actually better. I think I have read about issues with girls only classes, but I don't have the time to google for it now.

Especially with respect to STEM it seems easy to check how many girls from segregated schools go into STEM vs girls from coed schools.

The claim that STEM is biased against women might be one of the biggest detractors for women to go into STEM. So it is very irresponsible to claim there is such a bias, without verification.

My question was, is that what you mean by "STEM is gender biased" - it seems as if on purpose only subjects with male majority are counted as STEM, which would make the whole discussion absurd.

As I said, medicine doesn't count as STEM afaik.

Isn't that just annoying politician speech? If she has an idea how to make education better, she should say so. If not, she has nothing to say. It is a trivial thought that "education could/should be made better".

What do her daughters do now? Would Michelle even have preferred them to do something in STEM? If so, why didn't she push them to do STEM things?

Edit: according to Wikipedia her daughters are 19 and 16 years old - not too late to study a STEM related subjected, are they? Michelle, if you can't make your own daughters go into STEM, what message are you sending to young women of the world?

There is data on gender segregated education. So that question should be easy to decide.