tomkarlo

Have you ever actually tried to "shop around" for a serious, non-elective procedure like chemo or surgery? It's very difficult to get quotes, you can't easily compare providers (there's no obviously corpus of "ratings" from other prior customers) and you're often limited to the 1-3 providers who are close enough to your home. That's not exactly a recipe for an effective market.

Re your medicare proposal, are you suggesting that people who are diagnosed with cancer should get a cash check for the estimated value of the treatment? The incentive for fraud and graft in that kind of system would be incredible - lots of diagnoses are relatively subjective, and you'd be rewarding people for reporting every possible ailment they might be eligible for. If you're saying just give them their dollar average benefits, that pretty much defeats the whole purpose of having a risk pool.

I have a high-deductible plan, and have had one for ~7 years now. It doesn't really change my decision process that much, honestly. Especially when I'm considering a procedure that my doctor has told me I need, but I don't know / understand the technical details of... I will try to go in-network, but I don't really have the capability to go shop around and assess which providers will give me a better outcome per dollar spent. I especially don't usually have the necessary skill set to assess if some cheaper option that's not my doc's first choice would really be a good choice.

With healthcare, it's not just about "what's the cheapest option", it's also "who will deliver the best service"... given the relatively limited ability to optimize the first, I generally will focus on the second, and I think that's what most folks do - they go with providers they trust.

It all comes back to my original point: healthcare, particularly non-elective healthcare, is not well-suited to a free market solution.

It's definitely a problem that pricing is opaque and disconnected, but have you considered that maybe healthcare isn't a good candidate for a market solution? Even without this problem, customers have relatively little ability to choose providers or price shop, and they often don't really understand what they're being asked to buy.

By extension, it seems like the key difference between "elective" and "non-elective" care is that one of them is elective... it's going to be a very different market when a consumer can choose to buy something or not buy it at all, vs. when they have to buy something and may not even understand what or why they're buying it. It's not necessarily that consumers are shopping prices more or being stronger negotiators, it's partially just that demand naturally falls if prices start to rise too much.

Having an simple / easy-to-remember password on your Twitter account is a bad idea if you're a state governor. Or really, anyone.

The right answer here is, use a complex password (that you likely won't remember), and/or 2FA, and use a password safe that's available on your mobile device.

Depends how you define "cost productive". Cheaper on a cash basis, but that ignores the (not insignificant) externalities of doing that, such as landfill remediation down the road, and increased cost of transporting other trash to more distant landfill sites.

It's easy to say recycling should "pay for itself" but if you're going to do that, you need to consider the entire economic picture, not just how much value is generated from the recovered goods. There's also landfill savings, protection of the environment, reduced usage of energy (both in disposal and generation of new materials), etc. Given all of those, it can be entirely rational for a government to subsidize recycling heavily, because the overall impact is still "cost effective."

You can get custom sized flannels too, I'm wearing one right now. Just have to look around or pay more but it's worth it if you're a fringe size. (I'm tall.) I get mine from Trumaker.

Even if they made an entirely rational calculation of the risk and the expected costs, they likely wouldn't have anticipated an increase in highway speed limits. Whatever failure rate you assume would likely be tied to whatever typical highway driving speed you expected, and a 10 mph increase might really mess that up. Also, the real world is not like the lab - tires may wear faster in real-life use than in tests.

Goodyear was selling them directly to RV manufacturers as the OEM tire for popular models. It's hard to believe they either didn't know they were going to be used on RVs, or did but were upfront about the risks.

In the bond market (especially cat bonds, which insure against long tail risks like earthquakes), they have a phrase for this: "YBGIBG". It means, "you'll be gone, I'll be gone."

You can't base recycling decisions only on what's "cost effective" while not considering revising the fees people pay to dispose of household. Generating trash isn't supposed to be inherently costless, and it really shouldn't be.

Even glass has become questionable in terms of recycling economics[0] based on current fees, partially because Americans generally fail to clean the containers properly.

"It's cheaper to dump it in a landfill" is frankly, a lame approach that ignores the environmental costs and short-sightedness of creating more landfills. Do you want to live on a landfill, or next to one? They're basically a toxic waste dump.

The obvious answer is to do what other countries do: charge a lot for disposal of non-recycleable/non-compostable garbage, charge much less for recycling properly (and that includes cleaning and sorting), and use the fees from the garbage to subsidize the cost of recycling. This results in 1) less waste in landfills 2) more recycling 3) less pollution and 4) less use of non-renewable resources.

[0] http://www.waste360.com/glass/focusing-economics-glass-recyc...

The problem is you don't pay for someone to separate your recyclables. If we were all charged for the garbage we generate, and also for how expensive it was to process, then it'd be fine. But in most cases, consumers in the US don't pay truly variable rates for the garbage they generate. (Even in the generally progressive San Francisco, you're charged a monthly fee based simply on how many trash cans you have - so pretty much everyone pays the same, and there's little incentive to generate less trash.) https://www.recology.com/recology-san-francisco/rates/

However, in our current scheme (at least in the US), when you don't sort your garbage, the cost of that is mostly just distributed across everyone else - both in terms of the cost to process the garbage, as well as the environmental costs of things like improperly disposed of batteries that end up in landfills.

There's efforts to automate the processing of mixed-stream recycling, but they're not widely available yet.

It's entirely possible that we'll see single stream recycling end here in the US soon, because the places we used to send it for processing (like China) no longer want to do it for us due to the environment problems. At that point, we'll either have to start doing a better job separating it ourselves, charge more for garbage and single-stream so we can pay for processing, or fill up our landfills even faster.

Men's button down shirts are generally sized in 3 dimensions - collar, sleeve and fit (slim / normal)... which is more axes than most clothing items. If you're only seeing a handful of sizes, find a different brand.

What if they can't make a profit?

It's a particularly American approach to recycling to assume that the onus on sorting / separating should not fall on the individual generating the trash. Other countries don't take this approach - instead, they place a high premium on disposal costs of unsorted trash, and require that anything you try to recycle be carefully sorted.

If you choose a broad enough definition of betting, everything is gambling. But to be more specific, the post I replied to stated that everyone who invests in stocks is betting that their price will go up, which isn't true. There's good stock investments where you know the price of the stock is going to go down to zero, because you have high enough certainty that it will pay out dividends of sufficient value to justify the purchase price. (This would be typical of a "late stage" or "liquidation stage" enterprise.)

Gambling and investing both involve risk, but they're not the same thing, and there's important differences. In particular, in most gambling, the sum of returns to participants is less than the amount wagered by all parties, whereas in equity investment it's generally / historically the opposite. Additionally, whereas gambling is generally fairly time-bounded, investing isn't, and in fact often rewards longer holds via dividend and coupon yields in addition to the potential difference between purchase and sale.

More to point: most studies show that you do best in investing simply by having money invested for long periods, and being diversified to mitigate secular risk. That wouldn't work in gambling.

At the end of the day, on even these stocks, the value is still predicated upon either those assets being sold and the value being distributed, or those incomes turning into a dividend or liquidation value. A business that reinvests its income into its own business does to because it believes that the return on that investment in the future exceeds the rate of return demanded by its equity investors. Otherwise, doing that would reduce the value of the stock.

It's impossible to assess, of course, but the true value of any equity is the net present value of the future cash it will generate for its holders. Full stop. Equity holders don't care about value in the business that won't translate into dollars coming out of the stock at some point in time.

The problem with giving advance notice is the impact would just be felt at the time of the notice (bc smart traders will just determine the adjustment immediately.) I think the suggestion above to make the change immediate, but re-calc the historicals so the % change is still right, is probably not bad.

Not necessarily, and not in the long term.

You can buy stocks with no expectation they will increase in value (or even maintain value) if the dividend yield is high enough. And stocks have value because of this - the assumption in any stock, even one currently without a dividend, is that eventually it will pay out some form of a dividend to its holders.

You may buy a stock hoping it will will rise in value, but that rise is predicated on the eventual delivery of cash via dividends or some other mechanism of distribution. Contrast that with say, Gold, where in fact it costs money to hold and there's no expectation it will ever generate any kind of dividend.

There's lots of evidence it's overvalued (e.g. price vs. utility), and some evidence as well that it's undervalued (most the argument for future value as more people use it). It's not a matter of lack of evidence, it's an issue of which evidence you choose to give more credence.

"Single dollars" is still a nosebleed-high fee for a simple electronic value transfer. Consider that pricing on something like an ach transfer is quoted in fractions of a percent (so like 75 cents for $100 USD sent - and caps out entirely at some low value like $5 per transaction regardless of the payment size.

That's true of a lot of large cities in that age group - as you start families, you tend to start to value cheap housing (for more space) and good schools more than you do when you're single. I remember a stat that said if you move to a city after you're 30, you have a >50% chance of staying there long term, and that's why cities will target that age group when trying to get people to move. I'm guessing that means for people 20-30 the % that stay in a city is less than that, so it would be normal to see most folks you know eventually move out of town in that age bracket in a major city.

SF has a lot of turnover, but the few studies I've seen say it's not particularly high by US standards. Nashville, for one, is higher. (Notably this study is by MSA so it wouldn't consider someone moving from SF to say, Burlingame a departure.) https://www.abodo.com/blog/so-long-to-the-city/

Not generally, because there's no promise of any future utility or increase in demand, at least by the manufacturer. People buy them because they hope they'll appreciate in value, but that just makes them the subject of speculation, not a security.

If you're shorting, you get the $ up front and have to supply the security when you "cover". Not having to "cover" the short would actually be better.

Because there's fundamental value behind most traditional securities, even if it's well below the current market price. If you hold a bond, it will (usually) pay interest and principal. Equities carry the value of the cash holding of the company, plus the potential for future dividends. These cash flows act as an anchor on the value of those securities (in both directions, up and down.)

Sorry, no. Nobody thinks of you as a millionaire if you have 700K in assets. Just not what it means. Need that third comma...

The concept of "alpha" leaders, especially as derived from wolf pack behavior, has been largely debunked. It was based on faulty research.

Sorry. The link was to support the first sentence (and my main point) which is to refute the parent post's statement that "they are not attracting talent and or companies' which create the demand". Brisbane is planning to do exactly that in this case.

It's not as if human drivers do, either. The closest we've come is Waze, which would a trivial data set for an autonomous car to both utilize and supplement.

Bloomberg is targeting this at their reader base (general investors), who may or may not be up to speed on the latest ICO discussion, or aware of any of these issues. News reports targeted at the broader market are always going to seem obvious/repetitive if you're already active in a sector.

Vet practice management software (Saas) is a pretty competitive field already. If you think about it, if someone has built a platform for traditional MD / GP practices, it's fairly trivial to turn around and also offer it to vets. The bigger challenge is probably getting them to switch off their legacy paper systems.