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Medicare's admin cost is around 5%, private insurance is around 33% of claim dollars. There are around 27-28% uninsured. The money is already there who pays needs to be moved to the Billionaire and Multimillionaire class to reduce the annual costs for those who work for a living.

> private insurance is around 33% of claim dollars.

The Medical Loss Ratio (MLR) requirement established by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is 20%.

Typically it's closer to 15%.

As these are private companies, some percentage of that is obviously profit.

It doesn't cost that much more to run private insurance than Medicare.

The problem is the incentive of insurance to drive up cost to get a larger fixed cut, and the lack of a public option (which would require private insurance to actually be worth it).


Eating raw Miso a few times a month can move one's biome to get more plant protein digested per gram than even from egg whites. So the issue with protein is somewhat overhyped. The main potential shortfalls in the vegan diet are vitamins B-12, D & K.

Yes but the Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates are below breakeven so cash and insurance rates have to be above provider breakeven. The main cost frictions are administrative costs for billing on both the insurance and provider sides.

That's true to an extent, but some provider organizations manage to survive with patient populations that are almost entirely Medicare / Medicaid. Many provider organizations are just badly managed and haven't taken steps to optimize their finances through automation or participation in value-based care programs.

See the above comment about fraudulent billing for non-existent illnesses that don't need treatment.

I know roulette is random enough but here is a fun book by some physics whizzes who tried to make money off the game.

The Eudaemonic Pie is a non-fiction book about gambling by American author Thomas A. Bass. The book was initially published in April 1985 by Houghton Mifflin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eudaemonic_Pie

The book focuses on a group of University of California, Santa Cruz, physics graduate students (known as the Eudaemons) who in the late 1970s and early 1980s designed and employed miniaturized computers, hidden in specially modified platform soled shoes, to help predict the outcome of casino roulette games. The players knew, presumably from the earlier work of Shannon and Thorp, that by capturing the state of the ball and wheel and taking into account peculiarities of the particular wheels being played they could increase their odds of selecting a winning number to gain a 44 percent advantage over the casinos.


Yes if you hold a camera and capture the speed and position of the ball and wheel you can gain an edge, people have tried it. Good point.

Two or more tickets in the same draw have a lower expected value. Yes it is a very small change to your payout while having an extra chance. In some way you're betting against your self with a second bet in the game relative to the jackpot .

Robins only eat bugs and worms as part of their raising an egg and feeding the chicks. Once the chicks can feed themselves they all switch to fruit and seeds.

That is absolutely not my experience here. My local robins eat bugs and worms all year, however, I do see them eating fruit (wild raspberries) here, when they are in season, and the fruit of some trees. I've never seen a robin eat a seed, only fruit. Robins also have multiple broods each year here. At least two, sometimes three rounds of chicks, so it's only the very end of summer that they aren't raising chicks (or having one following them around).

In many places the summer gets very dry often near end of year, and by then most of the insects are hunted out. That, along with fruit coming into season, may be one reason you're seeing this behaviour? I live beside a river and a wetland, though, so I have insects and worms all the time.

I wonder if we're talking about different robins. European ones aren't the same as North American ones, and I'm in Canada (currently in Quebec, but the same robins are in Ontario/etc too)


American robins come to my bird feeder quite often, but it's really for the peanuts (protein) and berries. The seeds themselves are deshelled, so they do occasionally take a sunflower chip. Shelless seeds have the side effect of attracting birds that don't normally visit feeders.

It's kind of cute: I'll see my resident robin observing the other local birds at the feeder and decide that he/she needs to get in on that too. They're smarter than they appear.

You're are correct though in that I've never need them take a seed that has a shell. I'm not sure their beaks are made to crack them open.

Birds like cardinals, chickadees, titmice and nuthatches do find insects for their young (protein), but primarily eat seeds the rest of the year. I'll still see them come to the feeder when they have babies, but it's for the high protein seeds like sunflower and also peanut pieces.

Funny enough, some birds, such as American goldfinches, don't feed their offspring insects at all to discourage brood parasites like cowbirds. Cowbird nestlings need insect protein to survive and if a cowbird lays eggs in a goldfinch nest, that bird is doomed.

If you really want to watch them up close, look for a feeder with a camera. If you're lucky you'll get some great video of them deciding what to eat and what to feed their young.


Mid Atlantic, I might be wrong about the seeds part. Their diet does shift in the winter as at 40 latitude they only migrate to closer to the shore and eat berries there until the spring.

Low gravity is another at only 0.39 Earth gravity.

I like that the hand crank is going counter-clockwise


Crap, I saw it as clockwise. (Furious reversal of effort…)


Cinnamon has a very classic Windows layout. I am getting very comfortable using MX Linux with KDE, especially that I have been able to move my NVME drive over several laptops now. Starting to get the itch to find a rolling distro to skip reinstalling the OS every two years.


Late 80s or early 90s there was also a DAD type, which often sounded really good.

From that Wiki link-

In practice, DAD was very rare, as many companies (especially the well-known classical music labels) used digital tape recorders (which were not prohibitively more expensive than analog tape recorders) during the editing or mixing stage.


I don't know if I have such a CD --- do you have an example which is noted as sound markedly better than other editions? (I'd especially be interested in a DAD disc which sounds better than an updated DDD disc)


My CDs are in storage, and I never did an A/B comparison with any later remasters.


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