>This paper shows that the main grid in the world’s fifth-largest economy was able to provide more than 100% of the electricity that it used from only four clean renewable sources: solar, wind, hydroelectric, and geothermal, for anywhere from five minutes to over 10 hours per day for 98 out of 116 days during late winter, all of spring, and early summer, as well as for 132 days during the entire year of 2024, without its grid failing.
The title of the article, and the initial framing, is not what most people would interpret as the meaning on their first read.
The title makes it sound like California ran on 100% renewables for 98 days, but it ran on 100% renewables for small chunks of time (as low as 5 minutes) over 98 non-consecutive scattered days.
Isn't it simply because these people won't ever get cancer, and so they die of something else. So if you reach a certain age you outlive most people that would die from cancer.
And then always researchers try to find a clue in the patient and see like oh hey they have more iron, iron must be the solution, but maybe the person just didn't get cancer because (s)he had a healthy lifestyle and relatively little stress.
Or they aren't. Nothing is telling me they are smart enough for that. In fact if you look at most scientific research it seems they don't think, or maybe care about this. Because their motives are finally to make new medicines they can sell. That is what they're interested in, not in really healing people.
Could this be an artifact of how we measure cancer? My own grandfather probably had cancer when he died, but so much else wasn’t working that I think the docs just didn’t bother testing for cancer or diagnosing it. Treatment would not improve his prognosis at that point.
I’ve heard from medical student, that at later age cancer is less risky due to slower overall metabolism. Not a fertile environment for cancer to grow.
Medical students often miss the fine nuances, I would know, I used to be one.
Cancer at a later age, like at 85, is "less risky", because you'll be likely to die of something else than the cancer before you're 90 anyway.
Cancer at a later age, like 60, is "less risky" because your body have had plenty of time to grow indolent and lazy cancers by then, and your immune system is winding down, letting them bloom up a bit.
Cancer at like 30, while many are treatable nowadays, is usually bad news as why are you having cancer at 30 of your genes aren't massively prone to spawn cancer or you had some environmental exposure to serious mutagens.
But even in the older age categories there's plenty of really nasty cancers that lead to ugly deaths, which is why I don't like generalizations like this.
That's not very simple. It's simpler that the observation is due to an unmeasured confounder or observation bias -- like, for example, a lot more people are dying of all causes at age 80 and beyond, so fewer people get diagnosed with cancer. Or, alternatively, doctors don't bother looking for certain cancers after age 80.
I'm not saying that these are the cause, but there are ton of similar, simple statistical arguments you'd have to rule out before arriving at a relatively complex conclusion about human biology.
>The news is perhaps not shocking given the relatively poor quality of health care in the US.
I'm not sure I agree with that? I'd think intuitively the delta between years lived and "health span" would be largest in countries with good health care. The end of the article does allude to this.
>While the US presented the most extreme example, the researchers note that the global trends seem to present a "disease paradox whereby reduced acute mortality exposes survivors to an increased burden of chronic disease."
I am not an expert but I think it may be more nuanced in my opinion. Fast food started in the US in the 70's. Other nations followed after some time and I do recall seeing a funny chart ... not sure if I can find it tonight but it is an overlay of when people started eating fast food and when there was a dramatic increase of type 2 diabetes. One graph followed the other perfectly. There is a time window offset and I think that's why people have a hard time grasping the cause and effect. Other countries have similar graphs and they have the same time window offset but the graphs map onto each other perfectly with that same time windows offset. It's only gotten worse since then. A bored journalist at Ars should try to find those graphs.
Lots of people want to vilify fast food and blame it for any unhealthy trends. But the timing of fast food's emergence correlates with all kinds of other possible triggers - massive increase in availability of snack foods (cookies, Domino's, potato chips) in the home, far more sedentary lives and careers, introduction of plastic 2-liter soda bottles, increased use of seed oils, more sugar-based breakfast food, etc. So it is lazy and biased when you look at a few charts and assume it's all McDonald's fault.
Once you consider seed oils (many people still vilify saturated fats) the fast food timing gets even murkier. Fast food restaurants originally cooked in beef tallow where as its all seed oils today. If the oil type makes a difference and it wasn't necessarily the design of a fast food restaurant, the clock would have to start when chains got rid of tallow.
Why are seed oils unhealthy, though? I can't find anything that's bad about them in particular. I've only seen people commenting online saying to avoid them.
There's too much there for me to give a great answer here, but I can recommend Dr Michael Eades as a starting point. He wrote a couple books over the years on heart health and has been writing a newsletter for the last few years where he discusses various related topics in detail.
At a super high level, it has to do with how seed oils ("vegetable" oils, etc) are produced and how oxidative they are in the body.
Fast food causing people to eat badly reflects poorly on US society as a whole, but not sure if it reflects badly on the US healthcare system. Especially if the stats show that the US is good at keeping these people alive.
Average lifespan is a terrible metric for quality of healthcare. There are dozens of confounding factors that can reduce lifespan even in the presence of high quality healthcare.
Child mortality is even worse. Not all countries count neonatal deaths the same. In many countries premature babies that die are "stillborn" and not counted.
In the US, very, very premature babies are resuscitated and if they pass away, are averaging "zero" into the stats. So in fact, aggressive medical care in neonates can actually make mortality measures worse.
The popularity of the infant mortality indicator notwithstanding, international variations in birth registration laws and practices have the potential to bias comparisons of infant mortality. Problems can arise from differential registration of live births and stillbirths, especially births occurring at the borderline of viability (e.g., gestational age <22 weeks or a birth weight <500 grams, who typically do not survive the neonatal period), and/or their classification as stillbirths versus live births
It’s like people just say this stuff as a meme. Is healthcare in the U.S. bad? Asian Americans in the U.S. live 84.5 years on average, longer than Singapore, an Asian country with universal healthcare. As far as I can tell Asian Americans have the same healthcare system as at least white Americans. So is the problem the healthcare system?
In Utah, LDS males have a life expectancy of 77.3 versus 70 for non-LDS males. (LDS have higher income but only slightly.) I don’t think there’s any special Mormon healthcare system!
It is objectively bad based on value, and it’s objectively bad on the equality of the care.
US healthcare is great if you’re in the top 50% of earners who have employer-sponsored healthcare and you can keep your job while you go through major care events. People like knowledge workers tend to fit this bill. Doesn’t hurt that they aren’t messing up their back doing construction or something.
Obviously the USA has a ton of excellent care available including some of the top technology, doctors, and hospitals in the world.
It’s not so great if you’re one of the double digit millions of people who have no health insurance at all. It’s not so great if you can’t afford anything except the yearly check-up.
Did you know that over 40% or people who get cancer in America lose their life savings within two years?
> It’s not so great if you can’t afford anything except the yearly check-up.
The people in your second demographic don't even get that.
They finally take unpaid time off work to see the doctor when they start pooping blood, and the doctor tells them to get their affairs in order in the few months they have left.
> And yet, in 2018, there were an estimated 280 deaths per 100,000 in Europe, compared to 189 per 100,000 in the United States, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer.
The article you linked explains this by pointing out how Medicare generously covers cancer drugs compared to European healthcare systems. It seems to have nothing to do with the private insurance system, which is what I was criticizing. Americans get great taxpayer value out of Medicare, much more efficient and equitable than private insurance.
Basically, America has the best socialized healthcare in the world for cancer, but only if you’re older than 65. Cancer just happens to be an illness that is primarily affecting that age group.
Americans have to wait until age 65 to get socialized medicine, which is why the majority of Americans approve of expanding Medicare to all age groups.
And there’s also a huge gap in smoking rates with the US smoking far less which was discussed in the article you linked.
I would love to see a comparison on outcomes for people below 65 especially as it relates to medical bankruptcy and inequality of access to care.
I’m quite doubtful that affluent European countries have similar inequality levels that the US has with, e.g., the wide gap between infant mortality rates between Black and white women.
> Americans have to wait until age 65 to get socialized medicine, which is why the majority of Americans approve of expanding Medicare to all age groups.
It’s hard to analyze. But people slightly under the age 65 line with private insurance (60-64), and those slightly over with Medicare + private insurance (65-69), have higher survival rates than those with Medicare alone (65-69).
https://hollingscancercenter.musc.edu/news/archive/2021/05/1...
> I’m quite doubtful that affluent European countries have similar inequality levels that the US has with, e.g., the wide gap between infant mortality rates between Black and white women.
Having had to take a few different family members to the ER over the last few years, I'd rate their care as pretty bad. If your metric for success is staying alive they did okay, but I can't say much good beyond that.
I have two elderly parents and three kids, and take them to a mid size hospital near a small city (under 50k people). The ER waits can be long, but they’ve accurately addressed the problem every time. Are ER waits shorter in other countries?
It also takes no time at all to get an appointment. I take my kids to the pediatrician for basically nothing. My 5 year old ran face first into the edge of a table. The pediatrician saw him an hour later, authorized a CT scan, and we got the images and the doctor reviewed them an hour or two after that.
Sounds like you definitely have better access to good care than I do. In live in a bit more of a rural area, but were only 45 minutes from two different cities with large medical support, including one of the larger medical schools.
I haven't actually had issues with wait time but with actual quality of care. I'm by no means a medical expert, but on at least two recent occasions I had to be the one pointing out factors to the doctor when my father in law had a kidney stone then gall bladder issues. Specifically, the doctor simply forgot about the gall issues an hour later and was pointing back to another potential kidney stone.
Its been a while since I've had to schedule a doctor's appointment, but anecdotally I hear it is pretty slow. After the stones my father in law had an annual checkup and was referred to a cardiologist, the fastest they could book was 2 months out though that was for a check without immediate symptoms which would play a factor.
Once at the hospital I haven't seen issues getting specific tests run, like a CT scan for example. Here it does seem like they have the bandwidth for that kind of stuff once you're in the door.
Oh it’s very bad. And I say this as someone very healthy (luckily). I grew up in a different country with a functioning healthcare system system, and the US one is horrible.
I mean, there kind of is a special Mormon healthcare system in that they are traditionally forbidden to take part in drug use or to drink alcohol. I would not be super shocked if alcoholism made up some of that seven year gap between non-LDS and LDS males.
It sounds like lifestyle has some significant effect on life expectancy. The difference in life expectancy between the U.S. and Canada pre-Covid was about 3 years—half as much as the difference between two mostly white groups within the state of Utah that differ mainly based on religion. How much of the life expectancy difference between the U.S. and Canada is attributable to lifestyle versus healthcare system?
The same is also true if you use 2005 or 2009 as your start date. I agree there is variance in theory, but in practice it has been about the same as the national.
I don't have the most faith it will be easy to execute but I would imagine:
- Some disgruntled people at company's could leak directly, which would make engaging in this behavior riskier
- Random individuals or competing companies could monitor product reviews and report. For example, show that an Amazon product ID used to be for another product 3 months ago when reviews were written.
I'm optimistic. There are a lot of regulations (including digital regulations) that everyone ends up following even if the government isn't monitoring things themselves. The risk of penalty just needs to be high enough, and hopefully places like Amazon realize the downside/penalty of fake reviews now makes it worth policing.
It obviously won't help your "first impression" review problem but that's not the intent of the law and not sure why the government would be involved in that. A lot of movies don't hold up well on a rewatch, too. If you are that particular about buying something that lasts X years then you can seek out dedicated advice blogs/youtube channels.
The potential regulation is about the government making phones unlock automatically after two months of purchase. The regulation isn't about banning discounts or sales.
If unlocking is made mandatory, the phone subsidies will end. People will be forced to pay full price up front, or else effectively pay more as interest (even if that interest is effectively "hidden" in the overall increased price). So yes, this regulation is exactly about that.
You are wrong, empirically. We tossed that bollocks out in Canada seven years ago.
Miraculously, carriers simply started offering "tabs" or other language where you pay the subsidized phone cost as an addition to your plan bill for the contract period, with a clause that if you cancel early you still have to pay up the difference.
Arguments in favour of locking are nothing but corporate apologia and business crying wolf.
Sure, but how does the company account for the losses from people who get the phone and then stop paying and switch to another carrier?
What happens is the overall price goes up to offset those losses, even when it's not explicitly labeled as such. That's just basic economics. Empirically.
Or they buy the phone with a credit contract, as happens in the rest of the world.
If the major telcos only offer exorbitant interest rates, some other player will step in and offer the credit at better rates that fairly price the risk.
The interest rate on a credit contract will depend on the default rate. Arguably, a phone company can offer loans on a locked phone for lower interest rates than anyone else could, because they can cut off service if the loan isn't paid, which is an incentive to actually pay it.
I'm not all sure this is a good thing, but I can see the argument for why it might result in lower interest rates on phones.
None of this is going to matter to people with good credit.
...alternatively, the cell companies will just sell unlocked phones with the subsidies, since you're still locked into the same 1-or-2-year contract that was paying for the locked phones. This won't stop them from making those precious fractions of a cent from bundled shitware. They'll still make their money.
LA Fitness wanted me to mail something to their headquarters, which was intentionally onerous. I filed a complaint with BBB and cc'd LA Fitness on them, and they ended up cancelling it for me.
Still, I did originally sign up for the gym in person, so I wonder if they'd be allowed to force the person to come back in person to cancel. This still seems like too much work, especially for when people move.
It's not an alignment problem, it's a distribution problem. Automated ports would acutely hurt a very small group of people and help all other people a small amount.
Is our economy aligned to the benefit of people? Are we capable of aligning it to our benefit? Do we have any obligation to people we hurt through the decisions we make?
It's like asking if we should install a manned toll booth that raises exactly enough money to pay the toll booth workers. Or if everyone should pay higher taxes to raise the social security benefits of a randomly selected group of people.
That's not an alignment issue, because it's not clear if raising prices on everyone to support a few thousands workers is pro-worker or pre-human. You could just as easily argue (and I do) that lowering prices and freeing up man hours is pro-worker and pro-human.
I disagree on the part about alignment issues needing to be clear. They don't need to be.
It is a reality of misalignment discussions esp those involving AI. Part of that ambiguity is baked into the problem. For example, we can't be sure that AI is aligned with humanity if one of the fundamental issues.
The fact that we can't be sure that the economy is aligned with human benefit is itself a huge problem given the scope of the economy. The fact that we've normalized this is disturbing.
I think the nanny state charge is appropriate when people engage in dangerous behavior (like riding a motorcycle without a helmet) where almost all the risk of the potential harm is taken on by the user.
With large cars its the opposite. The people who drive large cars take on no risk, while everyone else is subjected to their negative externalities.
So this is the first time I've seen it on the front page of the NYTimes. The Biden administration has been doing this consistently for years now and normally it's buried deep inside.
EDIT: actually it's nowhere to be found on the front of nytimes.com, which is dedicated to the DNC. You have to scroll to get it. Whereas the positive jobs reports are often the headliner.
It's not a conspiracy. It's just something I've noticed when talking to people. They will happily cite the jobs number that came out in the original report and then look blankly at you when you mention the revision. To me that indicates an imbalance.
The title of the article, and the initial framing, is not what most people would interpret as the meaning on their first read.
The title makes it sound like California ran on 100% renewables for 98 days, but it ran on 100% renewables for small chunks of time (as low as 5 minutes) over 98 non-consecutive scattered days.
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