rohanshah

this is at best an incomplete assessment and at worst ahistorical

others [1] would argue that it was american auto manufacturers' anti-union zealotry (and the decisions they made in the production process to combat the unions) that lead them to shoot themselves in their own foot.

[1] Schwartz, Michael, and Joshua Murray. Wrecked: How the American Automobile Industry Destroyed Its Capacity to Compete. Russell Sage Foundation, 2019.

"Marxism has therefore given up trying to provide an explanation for the 20th century history... The reason for this failure lies in the fact that Marxism never made a meaningful distinction between standard Marxist schemes regarding the succession of socio-economic formations (what I call the Western Path of Development, WPD) and the evolution of poorer and colonized countries. Classical Marxism never asked seriously whether the WPD is applicable in their case."

In fact this was/is an active area of research, namely Post Colonial Theory and Subaltern Studies, which has been heavily criticized and reified with a more classic Marxist analysis since. Post Colonial Theory and the Specter of Capital [1] is perhaps the most accessible such critique.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcolonial_Theory_and_the_Sp...

It's worth noting that a recent analysis of S.1804, the Medicare for All Act, "could reduce total health care spending in the U.S. by nearly 10 percent" [1]. Even conservative analysis [2] has the program project to save in the trillions over a decade.

All while providing comprehensive, universal healthcare, free at the point-of-service.

Also, Medicare For All would theoretically be able to command substantially lower drug prices by nearly monopolizing demand.

Notably, given the study's analysis focus on OECD countries, the United States is (said to be [3]) the only of the top 25 wealthiest countries and one of two total member countries to not provide universal healthcare coverage.

[1] https://www.peri.umass.edu/publication/item/1127-economic-an... [2] https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/blahous-costs-medicare... [3] https://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2015/sep/01/d...

From my understanding of Bernie's "Medicare For All" bill (S. 1804) [1] payment to providers would be fixed at the, well, Medicare rate. Medicare rates are about 40% lower than private insurance (about 56% of national healthcare spending is private), but it's also higher than Medicaid and obviously higher than what the uninsured pay. All-in-all, from the figures I've seen [2], this specific single-payer plan would lead to about a 10.6% [3] overall reduction in payment to providers (some of which will be ameliorated by a reduction in costs that maintain complicated insurance administration work at hospitals) but I imagine providers will generally take some percent hit to payments which would in turn affect physician salaries (albeit not drastically)

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/180... [2] https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/blahous-costs-medicare... [3] https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2018/08/15/provider-pay...

Interestingly enough the house single-payer bill H.R. 676 [1] (and supposedly the Senate bill S. 1804, although I couldn't find any specific language on it) has provisions for "retraining, job placement and employment transition" to account for any "jobs eliminated due to reduced clerical and administrative work".

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/676

The article didn't really go into detail on how LO3 uses the blockchain as part of their technology, so this may be unrelated, but this podcast [1] better articulates some insight into on how the blockchain could be used to affect the energy sector, specifically the grid.

[1] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/beyond-bitcoin-...

There's two main reasons I can see: performance is impacted by the implementation language and because officially supported SDKs/client libraries are usually written, and get updates, in the implementation's language first e.g. Elasticsearch and Java.

This is a great series. I also highly recommend Benjamin Pierce's book "Basic Category Theory for Computer Scientists" if you are interested in this

http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/basic-category-theory-computer...

I just attended a talk but Sumit Gulwani where he demo'd FlashFill, FlashExtract and walked through their underlying architecture. His talk had much cooler demos than any I could find online but from what I can tell it seems like they provide a superset of transformy's functionality (not to detract from it, this is very cool, and I'd be curious to see how related the underlying theories are). Apparently current work by that team at Microsoft is focused on abstracting out functionality into a system called FlashMeta so that it can be applied to a bunch of domain specific problems. Overall very exciting work, from both parties.