[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by freebeard

One instance would be me.

Bucky Fuller estimated that society runs at an overall efficiency of 4%. Simply incease that to 12% and everyone wins.

The point is, the potential to consume more given any particular state of efficiency is the definition of wealth. You can't have a bigger house by building a smaller house.

Furthermore, wealth depends on the output of everyone. If there's 2 people on earth, nobody's wealthy. There's no Delta Airlines if there's 2 people on earth.

Those facts aren't a dismissal of striving towards efficiency. The thing is, getting more for less only allows one to get even more.

Anyways....

The cartoonist doubled down today, then read the comment off his screen "Georgia Guidestones" and just snorted. His position is 'go by what they [WEF] say, not what they do.'

That's why I listen to him, to get the take that I might automatically dismiss or never think about. I appreciate that he differentiates between speculating on the future of things, and imposing a vision of the future of things.

For instance, I sometimes say that UBI is probably unavoidable. That isn't an endorsement of UBI, only my best guess of things to come given my limited understanding.

Maybe not worth another thread but someone that goes by Rogue Scientist put together a retrospective on D. John Campbell and his blue to red to black pill journey.

I have immense respect for John because he lets the data as he understands at the time inform his opinion. When understanding changes, so too does his opinion. That's the definition of a liberal mind.

Nobody is a bigger critic of medicine than me. The institutions don't even try to conceal their malevolence because people like me who know next to nothing about medicine and has next to no interest, notice glaring deficiencies and exploitations. Among by big criticisms is that analytics is hardly used at all. We'll use analytics to target ads at consumers, because that's super important, but quickly and accurately diagnosing life-threatening diseases isn't. Google can tell me what species of plant I'm looking at by pointing my phone at something, but dermatology diagnoses skin conditions by experience-based guesses by a single individual. Why would we leverage the sample set of millions of cases and the expertise of thousands when we could just ask Bob who has seen a handful of these symptoms what he thinks? I'm sure the fact that not getting the diagnosis right on first attempt generates more revenue by continued "care" plays no factor at all.

There's no incentive to improve patient outcomes, only to avoid liability while establishing a continued "treatment" plan. This is the reason I'm mostly indifferent about public vs private healthcare. Sure, government sucks and is super inefficient, but at least their apathy towards the profit motive means they aren't actively trying to be ineffective...

I've heard stories of health providers that would not refer patients despite a lack of expertise in an area simply because their continued reliance generated more revenue.

I'll limit my rant to 1 anecdote. I once developed eye herpes (initially that was my joke, but it turns out shingles in the eye is herpes) that progressed into a medical emergency... long story short I ended up seeing an eye doc out of pocket every week. He prescribed Combigan, which was a super expensive patented drug. I asked if there was something else that he could prescribe because it was silly expensive for what was like 1cc of an eyedrop. Either I was the very first patient to ever mention the cost of this drug, or he played dumb, but he admitted that the drug was patented because it was a Combination of 2 drugs, and that pharmacies are allowed to create a new patent if they merely adjust release rates or combine several drugs into a single application. So, the $280 prescription was replaced with a $6 prescription that functioned similarly. I didn't even have to take both drugs. It's like what would Vicodin be like if it was only hydrocodone but they left out the acetaminophen (Tylenol).

Anyhow, that A-hole, knowing I was paying out of pocket, kept saying he wanted to see me every week. Of course, because I was perfectly fine, he wanted to make sure I stayed perfectly fine. Something like the 3rd week I mentioned that he'd better come up with a very compelling reason to continue this arrangement of him spending 5 minutes with me and saying things look great and me paying through the nose, or I'd end that arrangement. He then mentioned things look good, so he didn't see a reason for me to come back again unless things took a turn for the worse.