new_time's comments

This is like asking "is a relationship code for abuse?"

A relationship done poorly can be abusive. Similarly, public private partnerships done poorly can lead to enrichment of politically connected cronies. But that is not the only way.

Precisely right.

That's why printing cash (whether in the form of UBI or any other cash printing social program) is not a sustainable solution for lifting people out of poverty or building a healthy economy. There are always negative long term effects that end up hurting the poor and middle classes even more. Even if there's not inflation of consumer goods, there's inflation of investment grade assets.

However this saves us from inflation, since the money circulates among the wealthy and corporations rather than among the common person.

Many lines of evidence indicate that it is.

We can't wait for markets to sort themselves out while a few executives and their well connected friends control and decide the information we get to see and hear. The stakes are too high to wait for a market solution here.

Why do I need to see a doctor to get a mole or skin lesion checked? Why is it necessary for someone to go through 4 years of undergrad, med school, etc etc just to examine a mole and remove it with a scalpel?

In the 19th and early 20th centuries there was in the US a proliferation of medical schools - many unaffiliated with Universities - with very few entrance requirements, extremely uneven quality of education and little standardization in curriculum. In fact many people became doctors through apprenticeship right up through the turn of the 20th century. Many states had extremely lax or nonexistent licensing requirements. It was quite chaotic and unregulated.

In light of this, Abraham Flexner was commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation to produce a report on the state of medical education and to make recommendations.

The Flexner Report was published in book form in 1910 and set forth a programme of reform for medical education and the broader healthcare system in America. The structure envisioned by Flexner largely remains with us to this day.

The crux of the problem is that in response to a very chaotic system, order was imposed in the form of strict licensing and educational requirements which made sense given the problems of the time but have contributed to new problems in our time. Outdated regulations, standard practices and conventions have artificially restricted supply of qualified medical personnel in America and it's time we address these structural issues.

Targeted reform of the system is the best solution for American healthcare.

While I don't see any examples of on this list, except perhaps for Pula, emerging archaeological evidence indicates that in the Balkans region around 7000 years ago massive towns (cities?) began emerging with up to 40,000 people living in some settlements. The homes were arranged in tight lots next to one another, with evidence for some homes even being 2 story structures.

The inhabitants of these communities were the same Neolithic farmers who crossed from the Near East, over Anatolia into Greece and then up into the rest of Europe around 8000 years ago.

They not only introduced farming to Europe, but also herding and domesticated cows and sheep. There is some linguistic evidence that the word Taurus (representing the bull in the Zodiac) is a remnant of the language these people spoke, which would make sense as they were the ones to introduce the bull to the ancestors of the Proto-Indo-European speakers.

We will never be able to rid ourselves of the virus at this point. The only thing we can do is get healthy people out into society to build up immunity and eventually herd immunity. An additional benefit to this is we will have many people whose plasma we can use for antibody therapies.

The point of lockdown was never to completely eliminate the virus, it was to buy industry, academia and government time to prepare to deal with the virus when we begin reopening.

Ida Tarbell's father was an oilman who was ruined by Rockefeller and Standard Oil while she was a girl, which is important to keep in mind when contextualizing her work. She lived her life in part as a crusade against Standard Oil and Rockefeller. Obviously she was heavily biased, this being instilled in her early on.

For a less biased look at the history of the American oil industry by way of Rockefeller and Standard Oil, I strongly recommend Titan by Ron Chernow - author of Hamilton - which is an excellent account of Rockefeller and Standard Oil, both the good and the bad.

Futures prices are significantly higher than $0. This is less noteworthy than it seems.

https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/future/crude%20oil%20-...

The devil on the shoulder has appeared

The mad rush to shout down the Wuhan Bio Lab escape theory was always so odd to me. It was mentioned as a possibility and then there was a sudden deluge of headlines proclaiming the idea was patently ridiculous, etc.

But if you actually read the articles their reasoning was basically that coronaviruses like Covid-19 already exist in wild bat populations. One even said that the virus wasn't deadly enough to be a bioweapon, which is obviously nonsense and indicates a significant amount of grasping and/or lack of imagination.

The fact is that numerous pathogens have escaped biological research facilities in the past, including from Chinese facilities in the past 15 years.

Maybe Occam's razor tells us that the coronavirus originated from the wild, but maybe Occam's razor is on the side of the escape theory. It's not clear right now. What is clear is that there is a lot of smoke.

Exactly, this seems like an friendly handshake agreement to cooperate with an official name and press release.

OTOH, pacts like the popular vote compact signed by some states in the past few years is almost certainly unconstitutional.

In any sufficiently high dimensional system with resource constraints it's inevitable there will be tradeoffs. Or more simply, no system is perfect.

I love the United States' flexible decentralized model. Different states have sufficient autonomy to tinker and try different approaches, allowing the best ideas to emerge from the collective. It's one reason why the US is such a dynamic place, similar to Europe but with the additional benefit of unified language, culture (broadly), economy, and high level regulations.

It's truly a great system.

Well said. It's a disturbing trend throughout the internet that the Left completely disregards publications that don't follow the accepted narrative. Those individuals and publications that do follow the narrative - very often entities that the public has placed a significant amount of trust in - are all too eager to agree and encourage this sort of delegitimization.

This article from 2014 (it is untainted by coronavirus politics) documents the long history of viral outbreaks from labs throughout the world. This is a known and relatively common phenomena, appearing to occur once every few years.

https://thebulletin.org/2014/03/threatened-pandemics-and-lab...

This is a great example of an author taking a few methodological issues, doing some aggressive nitpicking, redefining some terms on the fly and then grandly extrapolating out to a ridiculous conclusion.

The author tries to say that people with good willpower and self control aren't actually exhibiting self control but have instead developed helpful strategies and techniques for coping with desire.

Well... Ok? It doesn't matter how temptation resistance manifests. Some people are better at it than others, and this makes them more successful.

From the way the text ends, it seems the author is eager to dismiss self agency because then it frees them to blame external forces like poverty or oppression for everyone's misfortune rather than personal failings.