Some people seem to get immense satisfaction and pleasure out of censoring other people online.
It's something I've seen time and time again, in a wide variety of discussions forums, for decades now.
Such people will happily do it for free, and they're willing to dedicate many hours per day to it, too.
I don't understand their motivation(s), but perhaps it simply gives them a sense of power, control, or influence that they otherwise don't have in their lives outside of the Internet.
Praying he doesn't take this the wrong way, but perhaps /u/dang would be so kind as to weigh in? I don't equate what he does on a daily basis to censoring, but I'm certain it constitutes a part of the job (after all, this is the Internet, and I'm sure there's all manner of trash making an appearance on occasion). Furthermore, I would posit that there's a bit of overlap between censorship and moderation -- even excellent moderation -- although I welcome any nuance I'm missing on this topic.
Moreover, while I hope he is compensated well enough, I imagine this was initially, if not any longer, a job that demanded effort disproportionate to the monetary reward. What would keep someone interested in such a job and naturally driven to perform it well?
Coming from a place of curiosity, meaning no offense, and happy to let this comment slip quietly away to a back room to sit alone if that's what it merits.
> Furthermore, I would posit that there's a bit of overlap between censorship and moderation -- even excellent moderation -- although I welcome any nuance I'm missing on this topic.
You aren't missing anything. Many people have oppositional defiance disorder and have never used an unmoderated forum; they are completely unusable because they're full of spam.
> Pricewise, things start favoring PCs if you need more RAM, as Mac upgrades are costly.
That's the position I'm in, along with some other people I've talked to recently, too.
For our situations, the M4 would likely offer more than enough processing power, and the efficiency and physical size are attractive, but a maximum of 32 GB of RAM definitely isn't sufficient.
The M4 Pro's 64 GB of RAM is somewhat better, but the cost of those upgrades are very hard to justify.
I'd also prefer to use the system for at least 5 years, and likely up to 10 years, if not longer. Even if 64 GB is tolerable now, I can easily see it becoming insufficient for my needs before then.
The lack of reasonably-priced internal storage, while easier to work around than the lack of sufficient and reasonably-priced RAM, doesn't help matters, too.
Even if future Studio models, for example, might allow for a more ideal amount of RAM, I have to expect that unjustifiable upgrade costs will likely still be an issue, and then there's the wait on top of that.
I can easily see myself and the others I've talked to settling for PCs, rather than making unjustifiably-expensive Mac purchases.
In same boat, I have the 5950x with 64gb memory running PopOS and there are times I'm hitting swap a lot more than I'd like. 16 or 32gb of memory is just not feasible, and even 2TB of storage would likely cause headaches, I have a 4TB and a 2TB nvme at the moment which will come with me next upgrade.
I'm leaning towards an upgrade next year to the 9950x3d if reviews pan out. Sure, it's going to be a bigger machine with louder components, but the upgrade will likely be half the cost of anything close from Apple since I can take my existing GPU, PSU and storage at the very least along with me.
And "upgrade costs" is highly misleading for most of the components. You are buying a different machine config that you can't change, up or down, later on. I get that most people don't want to bother opening up a PC to swap out components, but the easier they made it, the more people will do it, and Apple is running the other way.
Mine doesn't but yes I could move to a mATX or bigger board to unlock that extending its life. I tend to go for the 'smaller' ITX cases and boards, so currently have a x570-i setup maxing out at 64GB.
For storage at least, you can pop your existing nvme drive into a thunderbolt enclosure and use it on a mac mini. Over TB4, it should run at the drive's full speed (so long as you get a decent enclosure).
It won't help the RAM situation, but storage at least is upgradable like that.
Be careful to check the support for larger ram on the motherboard as well as cpu - I’ve got an am5 setup with 128gb of ram but the it had to be down locked to even post.
Memory usage is not comparable across Linux and Mac. MacOS is much better at avoiding swap, uses memory compression, shared frameworks etc. At the same time it tries to use all the memory available which makes direct system-wide comparisons not accurate. A good rule of thumb is that 8GB on Mac == 16GB on Windows/Linux.
MacOS does seem to “use all the ram” but never falls over itself.
I think the kernel is likely genuinely better in low memory conditions (its hard to be worse than Linux here to be honest) - and thats combined with being aggressive about using as much of the ram as there is available opportunistically. (not fully unloading applications when closing them for example).
“WindowServer” uses 2-3G of ram, and electron apps use lots too; but truthfully my macbook is able to sustain significantly more open programs than my linux laptop, despite my linux laptop actually having more memory. (32G vs 24G for the Mac).
I cant explain it and I am genuinely curious how this is the case, but at least anecdotally, parent is more correct than not.
For what it's worth, the apple silicon machines are much more efficient on RAM than most - a 16gb m1 absolutely mops the floor with the 32gb of ram I have in my thinkpad with an i7. It's not really even close.
Your comment might win you the argument on a random non tech forum but not here.
much more efficient in what? mops the floor by what? which year's i7?
Don't get me wrong, I 100% believe what happened, but if you mean "my macbook is faster than my i7 thinkpad" you should use those exact words, but not bring RAM into this discussion. If you want to make a point about RAM, you need to be clear about what workflow you were measuring, the methodology you were using, and what the exact result is. Otherwise your words have no meaning.
Repeating what I just commented elsewhere, but Mac uses several advanced memory management features: apps can share read-only memory for common frameworks, it will compress memory instead of paging out, better memory allocation, less fragmentation.
Bandwidth for copying things into memory is also vastly faster than what you get on Intel/AMD, for example on the Max chips you get 800GB/s which is the rough equivalent of 16 channels of DDR5-6400, something simply not available in consumer hardware. You can get 8 channels with AMD Epyc, but the motherboard for that alone will cost more than a Mac mini.
Sharing read-only/executable memory and compressed memory are also done on Windows 10+ and modern Linux distributions. No idea what "better memory allocation" and "less fragmentation" are.
800GB/s is a theoretical maximum but you wouldn't be able to use all of it from the CPU or even the GPU.
System design and stability. On MacOS a lot is shared between applications compared to the average Linux app. Dynamic linking has fallen out of favor in Linux recently [1], and the fragmentation in the ecosystem means apps have to deal with different GUI libraries, system lib versions etc, whereas on Mac you can safely target a minimum OS version when using system frameworks. Apps will also rarely use third party replacements as the provides libraries cover everything [2], from audio to image manipulation and ML.
People who need 64GB+ RAM are not running 1000 instances of native Apple apps. They run docker, VMs, they run AI models, compile huge projects, they run demanding graphics applications or IntelliJ on huge projects. Rich system libraries are irrelevant in these cases.
This thread started as question on how MacOS is more efficient, not the usefulness of more RAM. In any case, you might still benefit from the substantial increase in bandwidth and lower system / built-in apps memory usage, plus memory compression, making 16GB on Mac more useful than it seems.
I can run apps with 4 distinct toolkits on Linux and memory usage will barely go past the memory usage of opening one Facebook or Instagram tab in a browser.
Compared to compiling a single semi-large source file with -fsanitize=addresses which can cause one single instance of GCC or Clang to easily go past 5G of memory usage no matter the operating system...
I'm talking about memory bandwidth - maybe your workloads don't take advantage of that but most do and that's why apple designed their new chips to take advantage of it.
Video Editing. Backend and Frontend development utilizing docker containers. Just browsing the web with tons of tabs. Streaming video while doing other stuff in the background. Honestly most things I'd rather do on my M1.
So probably nothing that actually needs more than 16GB of RAM then. And realistically comparing M1 to an i7 several years older than it.
Having more RAM doesn't increase memory bandwidth and having more memory bandwidth doesn't necessarily mean better performance. You aren't even able to make use of all of the bandwidth your M1 is capable of in the real world [1].
Apple Silicon has good perf/watt but the gap probably isn't as big as you're thinking.
When did I say having more RAM increased memory bandwidth? Are you having a separate conversation with yourself right now? I feel like you might have misinterpreted what I originally said and just ran with it.
Not sure what you mean by 'efficient', they are faster for sure (amazing memory bandwidth thanks to on chip memory), but to my knowledge they would be the same for amount of data stored. So that same think pad will likely be faster at tasks that need 24GB for example, highly depend on the use case as always.
Memory requirements for general-purpose desktop usage usually don't come down to a single task with a large working set that needs to fit in RAM in its entirety. It's more often a matter of the aggregate memory usage of many tasks, which means that in practice there's a wide gray area where the OS can make a difference, depending on the effectiveness of its memory compression, swap, signalling memory pressure to applications, suspending background tasks or simply having fewer of them in the first place.
I run Ubuntu on my Thinkpad - I generally notice the biggest difference with video editing, but really multitasking anything is night and day because of the memory bandwidth. I use the same software on both machines for video editing, Davinci Resolve.
Over that time period in Canada, I've also seen a 2 to 3 times increase in the unit price of many other basic grocery items, including dried pasta, rice, bread, canned goods, bags of frozen vegetables (peas, corn), meat, and so on.
The government-reported inflation numbers are well below what I've experienced and what many people in Canada I've talked to have told me they're experiencing.
Assuming you're in a Vancouver, is this true for all the retailers in your area?
In my experience prices are wildly different between grocers for some items.
I shop at whole foods quite a bit for staples. I have grocery receipts from 2019 on the Amazon app so it lets me easily see the difference. Organic canned beans delivered for $.99, now $1.3. Lentils, pasta, etc look about the same. This correlates with the CPI and grocery price numbers I've seen.
2-3x sounds like you are getting robbed. I don't know if it's a locality issue which I mentioned above.. but yeah I haven't seen anything like that in Chicagoland.
Since whole foods and organic food has kind of always been a bit more expensive, I wonder if maybe that didn't see the same rise. My prices are coming from fresh food/store brands from Wal Mart, No Frills, Food Basics mainly.
Actually I wonder if that might account for the discrepancy a lot of people feel between perceived rise and the rise shown in the data. What if the cheapest things have seen a disproportionately large increase, I wonder? That would be hidden when the data averages everything together. But only certain parts of the population, likely those who would feel the impact the most, would notice the increase discrepancy from the reported numbers.
I don't only shop at whole foods. For example I buy all my produce, usually non-organic except greens as they tend to look better, at a local chain. I unfortunately don't have digital receipts for that though looking up print coupon ads from 2019 to now they are about the same prices (these are sales). Bone in pork shoulder $1.50/lb vs $2/lb. Avocados 2/$1 vs 5/$3. 24pk soda $7 vs $10.
Whole foods gets a bad rap for price, but their 365 brand is pretty solid price for non organic goods. E.g. canned beans are $0.10 higher than the store brand of the 'cheap store'. Even things like chips are a good buy at WF. Amazon just has that supply chain advantage I guess.
You definitely have to be mindful where, and how, you shop if you care about price and quality. It's why I mentioned in one of my other comments that basically food deserts are where I'd expect to see these issues. This would align well with the rural vote. A lot of people don't have a choice, where as I have over a dozen.
So yeah I have no doubts the degree varies across certain regions, but that's kind of always expected. In rural areas you'll have higher purchasing power for land but typically less wages and higher price of goods, with lower taxes on those goods.
Canada doesn't have any "hard right" party of note at the federal level.
Today, the Conservative Party is a centre-left party. They support big government, taxation, immigration, interventionism, and other policies that are inherently not compatible with "right wing" ideologies.
Comparing the Conservative Party's platform to that of the centrist People's Party makes the Conservative's centre-left positioning more obvious.
Recently, the Conservative Party's platform has more closely resembled the farther-left Liberal Party's platform than it has the centrist People's Party platform.
I would think that the social policies of the federal Conservative Party place it in Centre-Right to Right. It’d be closer to what you mention if Peter MacKay or Erin O’Toole had no opposition in 2020.
I understand that your political views might see the Tories as Centre-Left, but your pegging of the PPC as centrist strikes me as mischaracterizing the present federal landscape.
The last time I got an ID photo taken, I got to wait and watch as the dark-skinned Indian photographer repeatedly struggled to take a suitable passport photo of the light-skinned white woman who was in line directly ahead of me.
This was at a long-established mall shop that specialized in photography products and services. The same photographer had taken suitable photos of some other people in line ahead of us rather quickly.
The studio area was professional enough, with a backdrop, with dedicated photography lighting, with ample lighting in the shop beyond that, and with an adjustable stool for the subject to sit on.
The camera appeared to be a DSLR with a lens and a lens hood, similar enough to what I've seen professional wedding photographers use. It was initially on a tripod, although the photographer eventually removed it during later attempts.
Despite being in a highly-controlled purpose-built environment, and using photography equipment much better than that of a typical laptop or phone camera, the photographer still couldn't take a suitable photo of this particular woman, despite repeated attempts and adjustments to the camera's settings and to the environment.
Was the photographer "racist"? I would guess not, given the effort he put in, and the frustration he was exhibiting at the lack of success.
Was the camera "racist"? No, obviously not.
Sometimes it can just be difficult to take a suitable photo, even when using higher-end equipment in a rather ideal environment.
I think this comes down to there being different definitions of racism, that are sometimes flat out contradictory.
I don't think anyone is saying that the universities or the software companies have some kind of secret agenda to keep black people out. As far as I can tell there's good evidence they're mostly trying to get more black people in (and in some cases to keep Asians out, but that's another story). I also don't think anyone here was acting out of fear or hatred of black people.
What I am claiming is that the universities in question ended up with a proctoring product that was more likely to produce false positives for students with darker skin colors, and did not apply sufficient human review and/or giving people the benefit of the doubt to cancel out those effects. It is quite likely that whatever model-training and testing the software companies did, was mostly on fair-skinned people in well-lit environments, otherwise they would have picked up this problem earlier on. This is not super-woke Ibram X Kendi applied antiracism, this is doing your job properly to make sure your product works for all students, especially as the students don't have any choice to opt out of using the proctoring software beyond quitting their college.
To me it's on the same level as having a SQL injection vulnerability: maybe you didn't intend to get your users' data exposed - about 100% of the time when this happens, the company involved very much did not intend to have a data breach - but it happened anyway, you were incompetent at the job and your users are now dealing with the consequences.
And to the extent that those consequences here fall disproportionately on skin colors (and so, by correlation, on ethnicities) that have historically been disadvantaged, calling this a type of racism seems appropriate. It's very much not the KKK type of racism, but it could very well still meet legal standards for discrimination.
>What I am claiming is that the universities in question ended up with a proctoring product that was more likely to produce false positives for students with darker skin colors, and did not apply sufficient human review and/or giving people the benefit of the doubt to cancel out those effects.
The issue is that, for most people, the term "racism" connotes a moral failing comparable to the secret agendas, fear and hatred, etc. Specifically, an immoral act motivated by a deliberately applied, irrational prejudice.
Using it to refer to this sort of "disparate impact" is at best needlessly vague, and at worst a deliberate conflation known to be useful to (and used by) the "super-woke Ibram X Kendi" types - equivocating (per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy) in order to attach the spectre of moral outrage to a problem not caused by any kind of malice.
If you're interested in whether someone might have a legal case, you should be discussing that in an appropriate forum - not with lay language among laypeople.
I agree with your point that we should have two different words for two different concepts (even though they can lead to the same effects), especially as one is motivated by malice and one is not.
But from the point of view of a black person who has not got a job / college place / tenancy that a comparable white person would have got, I guess it makes sense to say "whatever the cause, I want this problem fixed" and give the symptom rather than the cause the name "racism".
If the outcome of a system is biased against people with darker or lighter skin, it's obviously racist and should be adjusted or eliminated. It doesn't really matter what the cause of the problem is when making this determination -- we can't just say "lol sorry, some people can't get passport photos."
> Despite being in a highly-controlled purpose-built environment
Frankly it sounds like the environment was not purpose-built at all. It was built to meet insufficient standards, perhaps.
Every major system in the US academic system is aimed to reducing Asian population. It often comes in the guise of DEI with a very wide definition of "Diversity" that rarely includes Asian.
These systems will use subtle features to blackbox racism. They may just be overt and leak over metadata to achieve it, or get smart and using writing styles.
> Will we start to constantly question human advice or responses and what does that do to the human condition.
I'm surprised when people don't already engage in questioning like that.
I've had to be doing it for decades at this point.
Much of the worst advice and information I've ever received has come from expensive human so-called "professionals" and "experts" like doctors, accountants, lawyers, financial advisors, professors, journalists, mechanics, and so on.
I now assume that anything such "experts" tell me is wrong, and too often that ends up being true.
Sourcing information and advice from a larger pool of online knowledge, even if the sources may be deemed "amateur" or "hobbyist" or "unreliable", has generally provided me with far better results and outcomes.
If an LLM is built upon a wide base of source information, I'm inclined to trust what it generates more than what a single human "professional" or "expert" says.
If an LLM is built upon a wide base of source information, I'm inclined to trust what it generates more than what a single human "professional" or "expert" says.
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That, and if the prompt to the LLM has been made with a minimum of thought you may get a reasonable answer, perhaps a better one. The consensus is powerful but the two limitations "wide base" and "thoughtful prompt" are big limitations because for specialised fields these limitations apply often. So I am surprise people are inclined to believe the machine more than the human.
does this mean you trust complete randoms just as much?
if i need advice on repairing a weird unique metal piece on a 1959 corvette, im going to trust the advice of an expert in classic corvettes way before i trust the advice of my barber who knows nothing about cars but confidently tells me to check the tire pressure.
this “oh no, experts have be wrong before” we see so much is wild to me. in nuanced fields i’ll take the advice of experts any day of the week waaaaaay before i take the advice from someone who’s entire knowledge of topic comes from a couple twitter post and a couple of youtube’s but their rhetoric sounds confident. confidently wrong dipshits and sophists are one of the plagues of the modern internet.
in complex nuanced subjects are experts wrong sometimes? absofuckinlutely. in complex nuanced subjects are they correct more often than random “did-my-own-research-for-20-minutes-but-got-distracted-because-i-can’t-focus-for-more-than-3-paragraphs-but-i-sound-confident guy?” absofuckinlutely.
does this mean you trust complete randoms just as much?
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Personally i trust the consensus, not necessarily one random person.
I have the same problem as the guy above, at this point i assume doctors are almost always wrong if the problem isn't something really common for specific enough
I don't see how any government, regardless of location, that spends large sums of taxpayer money on a construction project could ever be considered to be "right wing" in any way, let alone "far-right".
Such behaviour fundamentally contradicts even the mildest of right-of-centre ideologies.
An actual right-of-centre government would never even consider starting such a project.
If a right-of-centre government happened to inherit one that had been started by a previous administration, for example, such a project would be immediately terminated, any assets liquidated, and the proceeds directly returned to the taxpayers.
The only way that such a project would ever exist under a right-of-centre government would be if it were initiated, funded, built, operated, and maintained solely by the private sector, without any government involvement at all.
Practices such as the collection of taxes, raising public debt, and government built/run infrastructure are part of left-of-centre ideologies, and certainly not right-of-centre in any way.
Sure if you define terms in your own strict way you can write a long comment on how everybody else is using the term wrong. Why should people use your definition though?
Left-wing ideologies inherently promote concepts like collectivist big government, high taxation, massive government spending, and government-controlled infrastructure.
Right-wing ideologies, on the other hand, inherently promote individualism, minimal to no taxation, minimal to no government spending, and privately-controlled infrastructure.
That's just the fundamental nature of a two-dimensional political spectrum. It has nothing to do with me.
Anyone claiming that a government exhibiting decidedly left-wing traits is somehow "far right" is simply making a wrong analysis.
> Left-wing ideologies inherently promote concepts like collectivist big government, high taxation, massive government spending, and government-controlled infrastructure.
Incorrect. Left-wing ideologies promote downward distribution of power from established elites; one particular subset of left-wing ideologies (socialism) promotes labor control of the means of production, and one particular subset of socialism promotes a situation in which the working class controls the state which then acts as the vehicle through which control of the means of production is exercised (but libertarian socialism, for instance, also exists.)
Right-wing ideologies instead promote systems which concentrate power in narrow elites; different varieties of right-wing ideology justify this based in various mixes kf views of inherent merit, whether based on sex/gender, race, individual bloodline, “revealed merit” in notionally competitive environments where capacity at time t is heavily influenced by success at t-1, or whatever else.
You are confusing the left-right axis with the libertarian-authoritarian axis, which is a different axis of ideological (or sometimes merely praxis) variation.
> Right-wing ideologies, on the other hand, inherently promote individualism
Right wing promotes authoritanism, which is pretty much the opposite of individual rights. Right wing governments stand for strict laws and strong enforcement, where the people must obey or else.
This is observably false. One observation is that the US government debt grows more quickly when the Republican party is in power.
What is true is that left-wing ideology promotes taking a bit from everyone to give a lot to everyone, while right-wing ideology does not promote giving a lot, or anything, to everyone, but often still promotes taking a bit, or a lot, from everyone and funneling it to places that do not benefit very many people.
Leftists will promote plans like: tax carbon emissions and use the money to subsidize clean power plants. Rightists will enact (without promoting) plans like: give a lot of taxpayer money to this company for unclear reasons, and don't worry about how to raise the money - make it the next government's problem to deal with the debt pile. The latter is, of course, individualist.
Destroying "degenerate" cultural institutions is very much right wing; so is giving taxpayer money to cronies; so is overloading the government with debt.
This entity you're describing clearly isn't "right wing" if it uses left-wing practices like taxation, public debt, and government-funded "cultural institutions" (whatever that actually means).
Taxation is inherently a left-wing concept. Under right-wing ideologies, there would not be any taxpayer money to give "cronies" because such funds never would be collected from taxpayers in the first place.
Public debt is inherently a left-wing concept. Under right-wing ideologies, there wouldn't even be any government entity capable of incurring debt.
"Cultural institutions" involving the government are inherently a left-wing concept. Under right-wing ideologies, the government simply wouldn't have the resources to create "cultural institutions" and any such entities that did exist would be created, funded, and operated by the private sector alone.
If you're truly upset about the things you just described, then it's because you dislike left-wing ideologies, even if you don't recognize it.
Unfortunately right wing parties throughout the West have been taken over by grifters, and anything like traditional conservatism has been tossed by the wayside.
You're absolutely right that some political parties wrongly use a term like "conservative" in their party name, or otherwise incorrectly portray themselves as being "right wing".
Ultimately, though, they're still left-wing parties in practice, pushing left-wing ideologies, regardless of the facade they might try to put up.
A party doesn't just become "right wing" because they claim to be, especially when their actions and policies are decidedly left-wing.
Left wing, due to the use of large and intrusive government, collectivism, government-run make-work projects, government-run infrastructure projects, central economic planning, conscription, a disregard for individualism, and other policies that are inherently incompatible with right-wing ideology.
The widespread need for medical insurance only exists because regulation has introduced many artificial inefficiencies within the health care sector that in turn severely distort the pricing of medical services and medical products.
We'd see far more reasonable pricing, and much less need for something like medical insurance, without the regulations that artificially limit the supply of practitioners and clinics, that prevent competition, and that introduce unnecessary costs, among other distortions.
Healthcare is cheaper in every country everywhere regardless of whether they have public or private coverage. This implies that the difference isn't public vs. private, it's some other regulatory differences which are driving up costs in the US.
"Regulatory capture" is the regulations the people complaining about regulations are complaining about.
"Lack of government oversight" almost never leads to high consumer prices. It can lead to externalities, but if there are no regulations preventing anyone else from competing with the incumbents, it's very hard to sustain monopoly rents.
> Most people in the U.S. think regulations are bad in and of themselves. Regulations as a concept are the wrong target.
Regulations as a concept are the category of thing which is causing the problem. You then have to look into which specific regulations are contributing to the problem, but there are 10,000 of them. You can name some of them, like Certificate of Need laws, but that's just a representative example rather than an exhaustive list of every problematic regulation. So people say "regulations" or "inefficient regulations" because what else are they supposed to call them?
Hardly anybody thinks the ban on leaded gasoline is a bad regulation.
> Lack of government oversight and regulations almost always leads, eventually, to cartel pricing and/or monopolistic type pricing.
Only if you're specifically talking about lack of antitrust regulations, which is the exception rather than the rule in the overall category of regulations.
Most regulations simply increase costs. This is true whether they're good or bad. The ban on leaded gasoline increases the price of gasoline; lead is a cheaper stabilizer than what they use now. The ban on circumventing DRM increases the price of playback devices (or reduces quality at the same price); device makers have to pay to license the stupid DRM and it impairs competition by preventing anyone from making a device with features Hollywood doesn't like. But the ban on leaded gasoline is a good regulation because it's preventing a major externality, whereas the ban on circumventing DRM is a bad regulation because it doesn't do what it was sold as doing and instead is used by the studios to capture the market for playback devices.
Getting rid of bad regulations improves efficiency and lowers prices.
We tried the no regulation method after the Civil War. It lead to robber barons and an overall shitty country. Regulations as in the concept is not the problem. Bad oversight and governance is.
I honestly don't understand why someone can't say "we should get rid of these bad regulations which are causing problems" without someone hearing "we should get rid of all laws of any kind whatsoever".
Because for 40 years now the Republican party has demonized regulations as a concept. So now we are in a situation where people like you write:
Regulations as a concept are the category of thing which is causing the problem.
No sensible person thinks regulations as a concept is bad but, well, roughly 1/3 of the U.S. population is not sensible on this topic. No sensible person thinks all regulations are good. Regulation is not the thing to talk about since the issue isn't regulation but bad governance and oversight. The issue is politicians in the pockets of insurance companies. The issue is that we live in a country where profit is the holy of holies that must not be messed with.
The actual problem is that "regulations are bad" has become a decent heuristic, because such a high proportion of the existing and proposed regulations are a result of regulatory capture. Your objection seems to be that you want to call this "bad governance" instead of "bad regulations" but it's not clear how that's even supposed to be different.
The number of people who think that all regulations are bad is limited to a handful of actual anarchists with no real power and a presumably larger number of rules pedants who want to play different definitional games where they use "regulations" to refer to the things they don't like and call the things that they do like "laws" or "rights" or some other allegedly distinct thing where the distinguishing criteria is doing all the work.
Of course, getting people to spend all day arguing about terms is to the advantage of the people who like the status quo, because then they can get the people who claim regulation is generally good to pass their regulatory capture rules and get the people who claim regulation is generally bad to repeal or fail to enforce the e.g. antitrust rules intended to protect people from their predatory behavior. But then you're just playing into their game -- the Certificate of Need laws etc. are of the first category.
But not sure americans would be okay with the limits on healthcare you got in europe. I'm from sweden and here you often have to wait several months to see a doctor if it isnt "im dying right now"-urgent. And if you got something complicated that isnt easy to diagnos but isnt killing you they will just not do anything about it.
The healthcare is good if you got something well defined and urgent like a hearth attack or cancer (but less good than cancer treatment in the US). But if you got something less urgent then you are kind of screwed.
The healthcare outcomes in most European countries are better than in the U.S. The wait time of someone without access to the healthcare system is infinity. In all healthcare systems there is rationing of care. In the U.S. we ration in an immoral way.
I think the causality runs the other direction. Europe has an efficient system so they can easily afford to give everyone health care. We have a very expensive system so we don't.
Medicare costs do not look like the rest of the world. Medicare has slightly lower costs than private insurance but that's mostly bargaining power not any increases in efficiency. They free ride a little off money made off private insurance.
High costs are certainly present in socialist medical systems, they're just somewhat obscured.
I'm more familiar with Canada's taxpayer-funded, "universal" provincial health care systems than the European ones, so I'll describe the costs we typically see with them.
Government health care spending makes up a huge portion of the provincial budgets each year. This results in costs like high tax rates, and significant government debt. (Those, in turn, introduce other costs, such as the stifling of business development and employment, among others.)
Another significant cost is the poor quality of service. Long delays are the norm. This can mean single-digit hours-long waits for emergency service, double-digit hours-long waits for semi-emergency situations, and weeks to months for routine diagnostics and specialist appointments.
A lot of Canadians don't have a family doctor, and walk-in clinics are typically quite busy and have relatively short hours, so people end up going to emergency rooms even for relatively minor health issues. That only exacerbates the problems there.
Even once you're finally seen by a practitioner, there is little incentive for them to do a good job because there's pretty much no competition, and no punishment for providing poor service. Don't expect a favourable outcome, especially for anything requiring in-depth investigation or long-term treatment.
Common dental, vision, and pharmaceutical costs often aren't covered by the provincial systems, which results in many Canadians paying even more money for costly private medical coverage on top of the "universal" coverage they've already paid for via taxation and public debt.
It's very revealing that despite paying a lot for the local health care systems, Canadians with the means to do so will often seek treatment in the US anyways. Even if they have to travel and pay a lot more money to do that, at least it tends to result in much faster, and much higher quality, service than they would ever have received in Canada.
To be clear, the "artificial inefficiencies" here include treating poor people, treating elderly people, and treating people regardless of their conditions.
The alternative, which we have lived, is those people just dying. We, as a collective society, decided these features are "non-negotiable". Hence, the US has a semi-socialized system in the form of insurance.
The reason your premiums are so high is because some homeless man somewhere is getting Narcan as we speak. Your woes of a communist future have come to fruition, but it has been packaged in such a way that the average American does not realize it. We have the worst of both worlds - the sheer greed of the private sector, with the burdens of a public policy.
If we seek efficiency, as you say, the answer is obvious. Abolish insurance, and provide single-payer healthcare. Delete the middle men on top of middle men.
What matters to me is the validity of the content being produced, regardless of who produces it. If foreign-owned outlets do a better job than locally-owned outlets at providing factual, complete, and as-objective-as-possible reporting, that's fine with me.
When I consider events or situations I've had direct knowledge of, or where I've had access to direct witness accounts and raw footage that I trust, some of the worst reporting in my opinion has been from CBC News. With CBC being a Crown corporation, CBC News could perhaps be considered the most inherently "Canadian-owned" of the mainstream news outlets.
On the other hand, for such situations, I've generally found reporting from Postmedia's various outlets to be among the most accurate, complete, and objective of that from the mainstream outlets, even if it may be considered foreign-owned.
>What matters to me is the validity of the content being produced, regardless of who produces it. If foreign-owned outlets do a better job than locally-owned outlets at providing factual, complete, and as-objective-as-possible reporting, that's fine with me.
As we've seen time and time again, the content produced is only "valid" if your personal interests happen to align with those of Rupert Murdoch, or whomever.
CBC definitely has its own problems but being beholden to the biases of the billionaire class isn't one of them.
It's perfectly reasonable for current customers and potential customers to be concerned and cautious when a company shows a willingness to resort to knee-jerk reactions, especially when such reactions can suddenly harm the customer and are due to something that the customer has no control or influence over.
The company involved doesn't matter, and the reason for the knee-jerk reaction doesn't matter. It's a business practice that all customers should definitely watch out for and take seriously, even if they haven't been affected by it (yet).
Knee jerk reaction? Their country almost got toppled by a dictatorship.
Namecheap at the same time said it had over 1,000 employees located in Ukraine, comprising most of its support staff, mostly in Kharkiv (which was a major location of fighting).
How were their customers harmed? They could have transfered their domain within the two week grace period.
Any customer they'd want to have understands that it wasn't a knee-jerk action by any stretch. Rather that it's just something that (responsible) companies have to do once they realize that overarching conditions have emerged that make it simply untenable to keep doing business in certain environments -- completely irrespective of the conduct of any business or individuals in that environment.
Like when there's just too much corruption in a certain country. Or that country starts going on old-school (and very large scale) military campaigns against its neighbors.
So if anything their better customers will not only instantly understand their decision, but will hold them in incrementally higher esteem for it.
It's weird. Usually when a company announces an ethical stance to avoid doing business in ways that support unjust wars, we applaud it, but when a company actually stops doing business in a way that would send money to continue unjust wars, we suddenly decry it.
It's something I've seen time and time again, in a wide variety of discussions forums, for decades now.
Such people will happily do it for free, and they're willing to dedicate many hours per day to it, too.
I don't understand their motivation(s), but perhaps it simply gives them a sense of power, control, or influence that they otherwise don't have in their lives outside of the Internet.