I'd love to see a new SQL program that focuses on the design view/access style with the tables joined with lines. For people who aren't used to code its the easiest way to get what is in each table
it probably is you just need to spend more time finding it. why would you choose this over finding music that has been made by someone interesting that lets you form a community or see a band live?
In Australia I just take my blood test form to any pathology place and they do it for free (for me) and bill the government a set price from the medicare benefits schedule.
Hmm sure, but there must similarly be things that are denied right?
I lived in both systems. In a single payer system, the state essentially decide what is allowed and what is not. And with the state as a single payer, they also go back and forth on price with the hospitals.
It still is a better system overall but there is no places where you can just spend as much as you want on healthcare without some type of centralized supervision.
Yes, in Australia what and how much of it a doctor can prescribe is tightly regulated. Many medications require a specialist referral and approval. Any medical procedure requires a specialist to sign off on it.
That and there is often a 'gap' that needs to be covered for GP and specialist services, although that tends to be balanced out by much cheaper prescription costs. (Prescriptions in Canada for example easily cost 2X as much).
However, Australia has a two-tier system where you can buy private insurance cover that can cover the costs of gaps and allow you access to private hospitals. This insurance is much cheaper than the equivalent US versions.
It's not a dichotomy between single payer and US-style private insurance. You can have public healthcare that isn't single payer - that describes a good half of Europe, for example.
There are tests, proceedures etc that are 'denied' coverage by Medicare(universal health coverage) but you can try get your private health insurance to cover it, or just pay out of pocket, unless it's the doctor refusing the request as not medically necessary.
I had a test recommended once that was not covered, but my Dr explained this in advance and the cash price to me was $110. There are no 'surprise' denials after the fact.
It's absolutely fine (and required even) that single payer public healthcare doesn't cover every conceivable thing under the sun. It should cover the most common, easily scaled and mass produced items.
For the remainder, the patient should be told and know what to expect price wise - private or self-paid etc. And this also allows competition between entities offering this thing that's not covered.
Having opaque and unknown pricing (until after you've done it) is basically a form of highway robbery.
In Britain the national health service is a single payer and there are some things it won't fund, but you are still free to take out health insurance or be a self pay customer and go to a private doctor or private hospital.
In my experience, its not so much what the NHS won't fund but getting access to what it does fund in a timely fashion.
Of course there is dentistry, which is a complete nightmare... people trying to do their own extractions with a pair of pliers is the sort of thing you used to associated with the US but I've actually met some people who have tried that due to how poor NHS dental services are and how expensive private treatments are.
Weirdly enough the US is actually amazing for dentistry.
With any insurance you get 2 cleanings every year fully included and most routine fillings are almost completely covered. Easy to find appointments everywhere
My experience in Europe has been that it is super difficult to schedule anything. Waiting time of multiple months for new patients.
Yes, my (private) dental insurance in the UK is similar. If you go private then no real problem getting treatment as soon as you need it (I got an appointment in the same day recently when I broke part of a tooth).
In their minds, everyone is either a criminal or about to be the victim of a criminal. Developing this world view is a hazard of the job, and is completely understandable based on what they have to deal with every day. The problem is the lack of accountability from larger society, and their push back against that accountability under some mistaken narrative that it's everyone else with the warped world view.
> seems dumb to have electricity needing to be wasted when there is seawater to desalinate
That's a much more complicated problem. On an energy market, you have only one price to look at, and the battery operator can always buy, sell, or hold energy. The article here talks about optimizing this problem at 5-minute to several-hour intervals.
If you drop excess power into desalination, however, now you have two prices to worry about: energy and water. I also doubt we have 5-minute spot markets for water, so the operator must probably commit to some medium-term water delivery regardless of price.
This means that a desalinating firm takes on much more risk. This might still be profitable, but it's a long-term play based on a deep model of expected energy prices (i.e. knowing that energy is "always" almost free at noon in summer) rather than short-term time-shifting.
Desal plants are also extraordinarily expensive and need to operate at very high 'capacity factors' in order to payoff the capital investment that was required to build them. Operating for a a few hours every day because your operating costs are low/negative only works if you don't have a hugely expensive piece of infrastructure depreciating as you wait for those prices to come down.
could we build them different if the goal is just to waste excess energy?
Why couldn’t it just be a giant heating element and some sort of steam condenser at the top and some way to flush it periodically?
It might burn some laughable 3kWh per kg of water, but who cares? every water utility on the coast could add a few megawatts of tea kettles and get opportunistic little splashes of water in volumes small enough they can probably already handle them and the brine discharge would be so small, disperse, and infrequent it’d be easier to deal with, and it’d basically cost nothing
It doesn't only need to make economic sense now but you also need to be fairly certain that all the battery capacity that is likely to be added to the grid in the future will still allow this to be profitable until your expected break even point.
Industrial processes like desalination tend to call for some optimal amount of near 24-7 utilization (barring maintenance and such) for capex reasons and efficiency. You want to use it as much as possible to get the most bang for your buck. The entire reason why there are these excess power periods is because we cannot predict accurately how much power we would really need.
Desalination plants really don’t like being ‘throttled’, and are quite capital intensive. Stopping production for any length of time can even destroy the plant, if not done very carefully. Similar for geothermal, though the specific details are different.
Even free power would likely not be worth using if it was sporadic, and it’s extremely energy intensive. So that really is saying something.
I'm a fan of weed but for me it's more something that I use when I have something I want to be introspective about or open my mind to new ideas. E.g. I find it makes it easier for me to "get" genres of music or art that I previously struggled to connect with.
Unfortunately though, I find that it's a bit too much for me to use regularly. In particular, the day after I find that I often have a bit of a "hangover" where it feels like I used up too much of my emotional/creative juice. Not sure if that makes sense?
There are definitely people who find weed as comforting and as innocuous as a cocktail. I have never been one of those people, and I have given it the old college try.
For my body chemistry and or psychological makeup, alcohol is like a carousel that can be fun to ride for a couple drinks. It's starts with a pleasant 'whoosh' and then eventually I feel a bit tired and go home.
THC, on the other hand, is like a Gravitron ride – more forceful and longer-lasting than expected and requiring all of my energy just to get through. If I'm a little high, you can easily tell by the way I struggle to carry a conversation. When I let myself get stoned, it was game over and I just held on while I waited for the ride to end.
I used to feel a but jealous but with the hindsight of decades I think I'm better off for not having the weed gene.
markov chains are used for my favourite financial algorithm; the allocation of overhead costs in cost accounting. wish there was an easy way to visualise a model with 500 nodes
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