It is well known that those are the only two options. Also, the problem here is that the task is not possible, according to UN personnel, not me or you. So this feels a lot as just a way to create plausible deniability by saying “we tried hard to spare civilians”.
Well yea I’m glad there was at least some sort of warning, but how do you move over 1million people in 24 hours and where? But how does telling civilians to basically leave their homes to be destroyed justified? First they cut off necessities of life now they’re telling them to get lost.
As far as I’m concerned the vast majority of the population (considering that over half is quite literally 18 years old and younger) did not do anything. Palestine =/ Hamas.
Time and time and time again. It has been shown that moral bombing does not work. The sort of organisation that would do what Hamas did would not stop because some of their civilians get hurt or killed. Steamrolling the gaza population to get to hamas will just create an human catastrophe that will likely inspire more violence and instability in the region. As painful as it is de escalation is the right move forward.
It has been shown that moral bombing does not work.
That’s why they’re invading. They spent the last 20 years using limited amounts of force to respond to Hamas’ provocations. 20 years where gaza has the 1967 borders, zero settlements, zero internal checkpoints, Jews evicted at gunpoint; everything that should be required for lasting peace.
And after all that time and effort, they get the elderly, inform, children, toddlers in peaceful communities executed en-mass. Rockets built by tearing up electric, sewage and water utilities and impoverishing it’s citizens, fueled by fertilizers stolen from it’s citizens, paid with money stolen from it’s citizens.
If it’s not clear that an Israeli pullback to the 1967 borders won’t be effective now, it never will be.
20 years where gaza has the 1967 borders, zero settlements, zero internal checkpoints, Jews evicted at gunpoint; everything that should be required for lasting peace.
You're a fascist idiot if you sincerely believe that, but just so nobody falls for your bullshit, there was an opportunity for peace with Hamas once. It was 2012, where a ceasefire was signed, and one of its condition was the lifting of the blockade. Around that time, the West Bank government and Hamas started working towards creating a unified government and seriously pursuing peace. Everything Israel would've welcomed if it wanted peace. Well what happened?
The Israeli government vehemently opposed the unified government, calling on Mahmoud Abbas to choose between "peace with Israel or peace with Hamas". They also didn't lift the blockade. Naturally, because people don't like being tricked, and really don't like living in open-air prisons, Hamas resumed its attacks and the whole thing fell through.
Everything that should've been required for peace, gone to waste because Israel didn't want peace.
Everything that should’ve been required for peace, gone to waste because Israel didn’t want peace.
Bullshit. Realizing that Hamas was tearing up it’s own infrastructure to build rockets and refusing to stop the blockade during. A period of regular rocket attacks doesn’t mean it didn’t wasn’t peace. 2012 was the “we cease you fire” ceasefire era.
I like how you just dismissed the conclusion without addressing the reasoning. Anyway for everyone who's wondering why there isn't peace in the region, there you have it.
From December 2012 to late June/early July 2014, Hamas did not fire rockets into Israel, and tried to police other groups doing so.[111] These efforts were largely successful; Netanyahu stated in March 2014 that the rocket fire in the past year was the "lowest in a decade."[29][111][112] According to Shabak, in the first half of 2014 there were 181 rocket attacks[113] compared to 55 rocket attacks in whole 2013.
They... Don't. There are resistance/terrorist organizations based out of the West bank; they just aren't as famous as Hamas. And it doesn't help that there are people who don't want peace and will actively work to disturb it.
Right. Killing thousands of civilians just to resolve a conflict that was escalated for some reason from both sides.
There’s only one noble side to be on in this, and that’s the side of civilians and humanitarians.
If you’re ever on the side of someone who is killing civilians, your brain made a left turn somewhere and your side is probably just as valid as the extremists on the other side.
Think about it. The only thing separating you from being the same monster you accuse those other ppl to be is being born on a different clump of earth.
This is bone chilling. I haven’t read a headline in a while that’s struck the fear of God into me like this. They need to be talked out of it. I worry they’re about to do something even worse than the Hamas attack, and that’s really saying something.
I worry they’re about to do something even worse than the Hamas attack, and that’s really saying something.
Bro they've already done that with their airstrikes actively engineered to increase, rather than decrease, civilian casualties (I can provide examples if you're curious). Now they're going full Holocaust.
It’s insane how with all holocaust talk Israeli have no issues applying the same tactics. Cognative dissonance, religion and nationalism just triumphs over logic huh.
Considering how much money both Israel and Arab worlds have you’d think the land wouldn’t be much of an issue, right? Instead of building the Line UAE could literally save every single Palestinian like that.
The thing is they both want this conflict. Israel - some dirt country in the middle of nowhere - is making so much money through this war and Intel industry that they place right there with world economies. Arab world has an enemy that distracts people from literally being slaves to the most oppresive government and religion. Nasty people all around.
Thinking about this region is just so depressing that I’d simply ignore all news if it was practically possible.
I’m reminded of one of the things that radicalized me. It was Angela Davis explaining how violence in service of black liberation wasn’t becoming violent but rather returning fire after decades and centuries of a one sided race war.
The rich decry class war when the working class step out of line, but every poor family struggling to meet their needs is a victim of a class war. Every hungry person, every homeless person, every person relegated to the criminal class is a victim of class war. Every worker struggling with any or all bills needed to keep their life together is a victim of a class war. We’re taught to sympathize with the rich, expected to see their success as necessary, taught to not demand too much of them, taught to forgive any evil of theirs. They have been waging a class war on us for a very long time. We can continue to suffer or we can strike back.
They can join us on an equal footing or they can find the final equalizer.
There was a video clip of a woman speaking about supermarket looting that made me start questioning my total pacifism. This is a different video transcript from her but, on the same topic. I really appreciated how she laid it out.
... So if I played 400 rounds of monopoly with you and I had to play and give you every dime that I made, and then for 50 years, every time that I played, if you didn’t like what I did, you got to burn it like they did in Tulsa and like they did in Rosewood, how can you win?
- Kimberley Latrice Jones on the topic of the social contract.
Skin colour was just a visual indicator of class that told white people that black people were lower in the social hierarchy than them. There's a lot of overlap, it's not like white people were terrified of the colour brown generally.
I think it would be a mistake to say that the Tulsa massacre, also known as The Black Wall Street wasn't a heady mixture of both classism and racism.
Your first paragraph reminded me of a song that has stuck with me since I heard about it. Give the song “Long Violent History” by Tyler Childers a listen. Obviously I don’t know your musical tastes, but it’s a powerful message in a genre that typically doesn’t embrace the same ideologies.
This is some /r/im14andthisisdeep garbage. Don’t turn this place into some wannabe terrorist keyboard warrior forum. This Fain guy is being completely nonviolent and seems to be going well with negotiations. Grow up.
Potentially violates both of these conditions from the GA bond conditions.
The Defendant shall make no direct or indirect threat of any nature against any codefendant;
The Defendant shall not communicate in any way, directly or indirectly, about the facts of this case with any person known to him to be a codefendant in this case except through his or her counsel.
Yeah Jack Smith is gonna rub his hands in anticipation of the next motion for stricter bond conditions for Trump.
What trump doesn’t realize: SBF did the same thing and took it to far, he now has bond revoked and has to prepare the case behind bars which costs him a lot of time and resources and probably sanity as well. Trump will end exactly at the same spot if he continues.
I’m not an attorney, but I think the judge can either fine the Attourney, take the bond money and make Trump repost to stay out of jail, or just revoke bond and put him in jail.
Trump's attorneys are not responsible for his actions. The bond posted - through a bail bondsman, by the way - would be returned if Trump was detained pending trial. (Returned to the bail bond office, not to Trump. His payment of 10% of his bond amount is the fee paid to the bail bondsman.)
An appropriate response from the Court would be to call Trump into a hearing, address his inflammatory, jury-pool-polluting, and tampering public statements, followed by a Consequence. Ideally, said Consequence should be severe enough to prevent Trump from making future statements of the kind he has made to date. Because it appears that there is no "bottom" to Trump's potential actions, the only sure way to prevent his continuing to make these kinds of public statement is to detain him.
Detention pending trial will not be the first consequence the Court gives. If anything happens at all, the first consequence will unfortunately be a stern talking to and a furrowed brow. The second consequence (because we know Trump will say more things which should prompt a second, third, fourth consequence) would be a fine. And we all know that if the punishment is a fine, it's only illegal for poor people. The third consequence would be ... another fine. The fourth consequence would be ... another fine. Et cetera.
It will never get to the point where Trump is jailed for contempt (in the "one to three days'" timeframe). It will never get to the point where Trump is detained pending trial.
Weird. I’m on an iPhone 14 Pro and it used to work fine but it hasn’t in quite a while. It doesn’t work in both my in app browser (Safari) nor Firefox (tbf also Safari in the backend). I checked on my desktop and it works there
The thing is, there is some merit to the idea that some of these jobs will be threatened by AI, but not quite in the ways people seem to be obsessed with, which is being fully replaced. This is just like any other advance in software, with better tools being created that allow fewer people to do the same amount of work. There are certain parts that truly cannot be done yet, and you still need to have someone that knows how it is supposed to work using the AI not just a manager.
And the article content posted is just an excerpt. The rest of the article focuses on how AI can improve the efficiency of workers, not replace them.
Ideally, you’ve got a learned individual using AI to process data more efficiently, but one that is smart enough to ignore or toss out the crap and knows to carefully review that output with a critical eye. I suspect the reality is that most of those individuals using AI will just pass it along uncritically.
I’m less worried about employees scared of AI and more worried about employees and employers embracing AI without any skepticism.
This propaganda to constantly scare workers has got to stop already.
Well for decades all the talk of “global warming” was dismissed as fear mongering propoganda, and now look where we’re at.
Instead of being scared at scary news, let’s use it as a call to action to start solving these problems when they’re not yet problems, and stop waiting until they’re problems.
I can’t recommend reading A Chemical Hunger enough. These scientists are right, obesity isn’t a willpower issue, despite common belief to the contrary.
TL;DR: We don’t know why obesity is. Yeah sure you eat to much, you get fatter. But why do some people crave so much excess food? Why does their metabolism try so hard to keep the fat in? Why is the obesity epidemic worsening everywhere in the world, despite measurably improved eating habits over the last ~15 years?
The article goes at length to disprove mainstream myths like “not enough exercise”, “too much shit in our food”, etc. Truth is, we don’t know what’s happening chemically (same issue as the scientists encounter in the NYT article). However, the thesis of A Chemical Hunger is that there are good reasons to think that everyone has a “lipostat” which dictates how much fat we should have. Too skinny, and you will want to eat more and gain weight faster, and vice-versa. Yet for an increasing number of people, the lipostat is breaking.
The open question is, why? Right now, we don’t really know, but we really aren’t studying the biochemical causes of obesity hard enough due to this stupid belief that fat people are fat because they’re “weak minded” or whatever.
Nutrition is also particularly hard to study because there’s no way to accelerate it. It happens at a snails pace and we can’t speed up the human digestive system. It’s why so much food science is disproven 10-15 years later as new results appear.
I like the concept of the lipostat, but I disagree that it will be a purely biochemical model that will explain how it is regulated, because fat accumulation is not just about past and present, it may also be about stress and more generally about the subjective feeling of “how you perceive your future ability to eat to be at risk”. It’s certainly not just about willpower in general, but about mechanisms different people use to handle frustration, about certain types of depression, even when they have plenty of willpower to do other things.
However, I read somewhere else (can’t find the specific article) that Ozempic seems to act as an anti-depressant (some anti-depressants make you lose weight e.g. SSRIs) to cause weight loss. So, hey, maybe it is biochemical :)
plus that on top. Epigenetics+psichiatry+nutrition the combination of unholy medical arcane topics that is entwined with sociology and economics, no wonder it’s much harder to figure out than cancer.
It’s a mix of willpower and habits, America has bad regulations on foods making that most foods have added sugars, portions in American culture are massive and everyone drives everywhere because cites were built for the cars.
In Europe we have strict regulations on food, with food scores on the packages telling you how bad it’s for your health, our portions are smaller and we generally prefer fresh ingredients to heavily processed products and most European cities are made for walking and cycling.
40% Americans are obese vs ~22% in Europe
You get the same with Australia another car centric country
You, as a human being, have a limited ability to resist temptation.
Anything within your means that you want badly enough you’ll eventually have. The only way around it is to want something else, mutually exclusive to the first temptation, more.
And when it comes to weight loss, even if you’re in the 5% of attempts that are successful, most people will still gain weight back because once the motivation of setting numbers go down fades, old habits are always just as easy to fall back on as all the new ones are.
But obesity rates in Europe are still steadily climbing, despite food scarcity not being a widespread issue for decades and food quality increasing in the 21st century. Sure we’re behind America, but it’s not getting any better; we’re seeing the same kind of linear increase in obesity cases, on both sides of the former Iron Curtain (and obesity was already growing in many communist countries where access to cars was… elusive at best before the fall of the Wall):
The essay I linked talks about The Australian Paradox where “obesity in Australia nearly tripled between 1980-2003, while sugar consumption dropped 23%”.
It’s not as simple as “our food is better” or “they have more cars”. Yes it’s better (significantly so), and we aren’t as car dependent as Americans (though it’s still very bad here outside of historical city centers), but the correlation with obesity in particular is more elusive to find than you’re implying since things have also been steadily getting worse on this side of the Atlantic.
I would highly recommend reading the article I linked, it goes to great lengths to thoroughly debunk common myths like this about the causes of obesity.
This is just their politics backfiring further. They’re trying to run the 90s playbook they ran in the Clinton’s, and in the same way the Dems fail to understand the electorate by running conservatives, the Republicans fail to understand their electorate here. Any Republican convinced by anything that comes from this didn’t need this to be convinced of anything because they already believe a bunch of other dumb shit nonsense about Biden. No Democrat worth carrying about in a general will pay this any mind. So some edge Republicans who might be swayed to vote Democrat will be annoyed by more trash politics from the Republicans.
They have no policies. Only whatever ‘this’ is. The more they show it off, the more it works against them.
It’s pretty crazy. Say what you want about the Democrats, and you can say a lot, but at least they hold each other accountable to some extent. This is brazen
It’s important to note that the #1 rule of Misinformation is: Be First.
The information doesn’t have to be accurate, verifiable, etc., it just has to Be First and it’ll get repeated often enough that people will start to believe that it’s true. “Oh Shirley, how can ‘Biden Eats Babies’ be wrong when I’ve already seen 18 shared posts on my wall this morning [Meta/Facebook] talking about it. I’ve received 3 e-mails from other family members talking about it. Why I even saw 4 articles on my favorite websites last night and this morning reporting on it. They can’t all be wrong!”
Then when the truth tries to assert itself there’s so much noise that it gets drowned out.
Adrianne Peterson, the manager of the Rancho Peñasquitos branch of the San Diego Public Library, was actually a little embarrassed by the modest size of her Pride Month display in June. Between staff vacations and organizing workshops for graduating high school students, it had fallen through the cracks and fell short of what she had hoped to offer.
Yet the kiosk across from the checkout counter, marked by a Progress Pride rainbow flag, was enough to thrust the suburban library onto the front lines of the nation’s culture wars.
Ms. Peterson, who has run the library branch since 2012 and highlighted books for Pride Month for the better part of a decade, was taken aback when she read an email last month from two neighborhood residents. They informed her that they had checked out nearly all of the books in the Pride display and would not return them unless the library permanently removed what they considered “inappropriate content.”
“It was just kind of like, ‘Whoa, curveball,’” Ms. Peterson said. “I began to wonder, ‘Oh, have I been misunderstanding our community?’”
Soon, she would get her answer: Stacks of Amazon boxes containing new copies of the books the protesters checked out started to arrive at the library after The San Diego Union-Tribune reported on the protest. Roughly 180 people, mostly San Diegans, gave more than $15,000 to the library system, which after a city match will provide over $30,000 toward more L.G.B.T.Q.-themed materials and programming, including an expansion of the system’s already popular drag queen story hours.
In an ever divided nation, Americans are waging battles in big ways and small, right down to turning their library cards into protest weapons.
Right-wing activists have challenged the recognition of June as Pride Month and have sought to remove textbooks from schools and L.G.B.T.Q.-affirming picture books from libraries. In Republican-led states, those in office have used their power to change policy and ban materials contested by conservatives.
But even in California and other states led by Democrats, demonstrations against Pride events and L.G.B.T.Q.-themed books have broken out in recent weeks.
In North Hollywood, a neighborhood within the liberal stronghold of Los Angeles, a Pride flag was burned at an elementary school and dueling protests days later over a Pride assembly devolved into scuffles outside the campus. In Temecula, not far from San Diego, the conservative majority of the school board twice rejected elementary school materials that discuss Harvey Milk, the slain gay rights leader, and L.G.B.T.Q. history before agreeing to acquire them after Gov. Gavin Newsom threatened to fine the school district $1.5 million for not complying with state standards.
And in Chino, the state’s superintendent of public instruction, Tony Thurmond, was kicked out of a school board meeting on Thursday after criticizing a proposal by conservatives that would notify parents if a student asks to use a name or pronoun that does not align with their birth certificate.
In San Diego, supporters of L.G.B.T.Q. rights were quick to counter opponents. The city council member who represents Rancho Peñasquitos, Marni von Wilpert, condemned the library protest against Pride books and asked the community to help restore the display.
Like many Southern California suburbs, Rancho Peñasquitos, in the northeastern part of San Diego, was once solidly Republican territory. But the community has become more liberal over the years, attracting a diverse range of residents with its highly rated schools and glimpses of the Pacific Ocean. Ms. von Wilpert is the first Democrat to represent the neighborhood.
The political shift reflects changes in San Diego at large. Long known as a military town with religious roots that date back to the first Spanish mission in California, the city had favored Republicans for most of its history. But like other parts of the state, San Diego has grown more diverse after decades of immigration and the establishment of a booming biotech sector.
The city also has embraced the L.G.B.T.Q. community; in 2020, voters elected Todd Gloria as San Diego’s first openly gay mayor, and have sent Toni Atkins to the State Legislature, where she has become the first lesbian to serve as the leader of each house. Both are Democrats.
Ms. von Wilpert grew up in Rancho Peñasquitos and in 2020 won a closely fought race to represent her home district, where Democrats now have a plurality of registered voters and there are almost as many independents as Republicans. Ms. von Wilpert, who is a member of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, said she appreciated how quickly her neighbors rallied to support the library.
“Suburban, formerly conservative communities are still not buying into this culture war idea that we can’t have love and tolerance and acceptance,” she said. “That has been amazing.”
Conservative groups nationwide have pushed to ban books that discuss L.G.B.T.Q. issues from libraries and schools, saying that parents should be able to control what their children are being taught.
The San Diego residents who sent the email to the Rancho Peñasquitos Library, Amy M. Vance and Martha Martin, did not respond to requests for comment. City officials said they have not heard since from the library patrons.
The text of their email was identical to a template posted online by a right-wing group called CatholicVote, which has an office in Indiana and is not affiliated with the Catholic church. The group has promoted a “Hide the Pride” campaign that encourages supporters to check out or move books that depict L.G.B.T.Q. characters and families. Organizers have described such material as pornographic and obscene and said it should not be available to young library patrons.
“The library needs to use its discretion in how it will make certain content available to people who have very different beliefs about whether this is appropriate for kids,” said Brian Burch, the president of CatholicVote.
Among the books on the group’s target list are “Julián Is a Mermaid,” a picture book about a little boy whose grandmother takes him to a mermaid parade at Coney Island, and “Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress,” another picture book about a boy who loves using his imagination and wearing an orange dress to school. Both were checked out by the protesters in San Diego.
Mr. Burch said that his group does not encourage supporters to break the law. But, he said, if one decides to keep a book indefinitely, “that’s perfectly fine.”
The mission of public libraries is to provide access to any kind of information, even if it is offensive to some, said Misty Jones, the director of the San Diego Public Library. The San Diego library system also does not restrict children from materials that have adult content, according to its library card form.
Librarians say that it has become more difficult to retain open access as book challenges have exploded in the past two years.
Last year, 2,571 unique titles faced censorship attempts — a 38 percent increase over 2021 and a record high, according to the American Library Association. The A.L.A. also documented 1,269 demands to censor library books or materials, the highest number since the association started collecting data more than two decades ago.
In Greenville, S.C., library board members sought to ban two dozen titles this year, though they ultimately dropped that effort in favor of rules that restrict books on gender identity to adult sections. Last year, a Michigan town defunded its library after librarians refused to remove L.G.B.T.Q.-themed books.
Deborah Caldwell-Stone, who serves as director of the association’s office of intellectual freedom, said that the protesters in San Diego and elsewhere have taken advantage of relaxed policies intended to make books more accessible to patrons who cannot afford hefty fines.
In the San Diego Public Library system, card holders get five renewals for materials as long as no one else has requested them. Then, once a book is overdue, library patrons have two more months to return it before it is considered lost, and then they will be billed for it.
“Things intended to broaden access have been weaponized to engage in censorship,” Ms. Caldwell-Stone said.
At the Rancho Peñasquitos Library, the Pride display has since been replenished. As for the books checked out last month?
The community donated large amounts of money to the library in response, the display was replenished with books bought with that money, and the originals were eventually returned
that sounds less like a backfire and more like a temporary reprieve because the groups that take these actions are better organized, funded, and with more members than the library's supporters can ever hope to match.
the examples they cite in the article happening across the country for this type of behavior proves that they usually win.
Dr. Einav is a professor of economics at Stanford. Dr. Finkelstein is a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
There is no shortage of proposals for health insurance reform, and they all miss the point. They invariably focus on the nearly 30 million Americans who lack insurance at any given time. But the coverage for the many more Americans who are fortunate enough to have insurance is deeply flawed.
Health insurance is supposed to provide financial protection against the medical costs of poor health. Yet many insured people still face the risk of enormous medical bills for their “covered” care. A team of researchers estimated that as of mid-2020, collections agencies held $140 billion in unpaid medical bills, reflecting care delivered before the Covid-19 pandemic. To put that number in perspective, that’s more than the amount held by collection agencies for all other consumer debt from nonmedical sources combined. As economists who study health insurance, what we found really shocking was our calculation that three-fifths of that debt was incurred by households with health insurance.
What’s more, in any given month, about 11 percent of Americans younger than 65 are uninsured. But more than twice that number — one in four — will be uninsured for at least some time over a two-year period. Many more face the constant danger of losing their coverage. Perversely, health insurance — the very purpose of which is to provide a measure of stability in an uncertain world — is itself highly uncertain. And while the Affordable Care Act substantially reduced the share of Americans who are uninsured at a given time, we found that it did little to reduce the risk of insurance loss among the currently insured.
It’s tempting to think that incremental reforms could address these problems. For example, extend coverage to those who lack formal insurance. Make sure all insurance plans meet some minimum standards. Change the laws so that people don’t face the risk of losing their health insurance coverage when they get sick, when they get well (yes, that can happen) or when they change jobs, give birth or move.
But those incremental reforms won’t work. Over a half-century of such well-intentioned, piecemeal policies has made clear that continuing this approach represents the triumph of hope over experience, to borrow a description of second marriages commonly attributed to Oscar Wilde.
The risk of losing coverage is an inevitable consequence of a lack of universal coverage. Whenever there are varied pathways to eligibility, there will be many people who fail to find their path.
About six in 10 uninsured Americans are eligible for free or heavily discounted insurance coverage. Yet they remain uninsured. Lack of information about which of the array of programs they are eligible for, along with the difficulties of applying and demonstrating eligibility, mean that the coverage programs are destined to deliver less than they could.
The only solution is universal coverage that is automatic, free and basic.
Automatic because when we require people to sign up, not all of them do. The experience with the health insurance mandate under the Affordable Care Act makes that clear.
Coverage needs to be free at the point of care — no co-pays or deductibles — because leaving patients on the hook for large medical costs is contrary to the purpose of insurance. A natural rejoinder is to go for small co-pays — a $5 co-pay for prescription drugs or $20 for a doctor visit — so that patients make more judicious choices about when to see a health care professional. Economists have preached the virtues of this approach for generations.
But it turns out there’s an important practical wrinkle with asking patients to pay even a very small amount for some of their universally covered care: There will always be people who can’t manage even modest co-pays. Britain, for example, introduced co-pays for prescription drugs but then also created programs to cover those co-pays for most patients — the elderly, young, students, veterans and those who are pregnant, low-income or suffering from certain diseases. All told, about 90 percent of prescriptions are exempted from the co-pays and dispensed free. The net result has been to add hassles for patients and administrative costs for the government, with little impact on the patients’ share of total health care costs or total national health care spending.
Finally, coverage must be basic because we are bound by the social contract to provide essential medical care, not a high-end experience. Those who can afford and want to can purchase supplemental coverage in a well-functioning market.
Here, an analogy to airline travel may be useful. The main function of an airplane is to move its passengers from point A to point B. Almost everyone would prefer more legroom, unlimited checked bags, free food and high-speed internet. Those who have the money and want to do so can upgrade to business class. But if our social contract were to make sure everyone could fly from A to B, a budget airline would suffice. Anyone who’s traveled on one of the low-cost airlines that have transformed airline markets in Europe knows it is not a wonderful experience. But they do get you to your destination.
Keeping universal coverage basic will keep the cost to the taxpayer down as well. It’s true that as a share of its economy, the United States spends about twice as much on health care as other high-income countries. But in most other wealthy countries, this care is primarily financed by taxes, whereas only about half of U.S. health care spending is financed by taxes. For those of you following the math, half of twice as much is … well, the same amount of taxpayer-financed spending on health care as a share of the economy. In other words, U.S. taxes are already paying for the cost of universal basic coverage. Americans are just not getting it. They could be.
We arrived at this proposal by using the approach that comes naturally to us from our economics training. We first defined the objective, namely the problem we are trying but failing to solve with our current U.S. health policy. Then we considered how best to achieve that goal.
Nonetheless, once we did this, we were struck — and humbled — to realize that at a high level, the key elements of our proposal are ones that every high-income country (and all but a few Canadian provinces) has embraced: guaranteed basic coverage and the option for people to purchase upgrades.
The lack of universal U.S. health insurance may be exceptional. The fix, it turns out, is not.
Also if you’re quick, before NYTimes pops up it’s “subscribe” window, you can hit Ctrl-A and Ctrl-C to copy all the text from the article… which is how I got the text from my previous post.
Lol I pay for NYTimes but they consistently want me to login and hit buttons before I can read an article so I usually end up just bypassing their paywall because it is easier.
I also pay for the NYT and I just love getting full page ads multiple times in the articles I paid to read. Sometimes it’s the SAME full page ad five times in a row, just in case I missed the previous 4 copies!
I get the feeling we didn’t read the article in the same way. I didn’t see any excuse making for American exceptionalism at all. At the very end it points out the essential flaw that Americans are already paying for basic health care but not receiving it.
Lack of universal coverage. The piece argues that the only solution is universal coverage that is automatic, free and basic. The current U.S. system has many pathways to eligibility and coverage, resulting in many people falling through the cracks and remaining uninsured.
Incremental reforms are not enough. The authors argue that incremental reforms like extending coverage to more people or imposing minimum standards will not work. Over 50 years of such piecemeal policies have shown that this approach is not effective.
Coverage is complex and uncertain. Health insurance in the U.S. is complex, with many different plans and eligibility requirements. This leads to many people losing coverage or facing the risk of losing it. Even the Affordable Care Act did little to reduce this uncertainty.
Cost. While the U.S. spends more on health care as a percentage of GDP, only about half of that spending is financed through taxes. The authors argue that U.S. taxes are already paying for the cost of a universal basic coverage system, but Americans are not getting it.
The trouble is, none of those are the real reason, which is that the ruling class wants it to have all those “problems” because increasing the risk and cost of people changing jobs helps suppress wages.
You’d think a couple of ivy-league professors of economics would’ve figured that out. So why didn’t they mention it?
Because their arguments can be made empirically and therefore justified. Please find me a member of the ruling elite who will admit what you just proposed. No evidence, no change
Good question. I know this is an unpopular opinion but maybe… they are actual subject matter experts and you’re not?
I know, blaming a group of evil people is tempting, easier to understand and more satisfying that than a complex system of misaligned incentives grown organically through many decades of well intentioned but ineffective measures. Not that I know much about it, but, you know, conspiracy theories tend not to be true.
If SCOTUS thinks it’s discriminatory to select for race then it also stands to reason that it’s discriminatory to select for legacy. In both cases the applicant has as much control over the status as the other.
The issue is that it was discriminatory on the basis of race, which is explicitly protected in the Constitution. The educational history of your parents is not, nor does the Constitution contain a generic anti-discrimination section.
This case is apparently attempting to argue that legacy admissions is de facto discrimination in favor of white applicants, which I struggle to imagine they'll be successful with, particularly with this Court.
nytimes.com
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