I really don’t think doctor salaries are the primary difference when they make up less than 10 % of health care costs:
> However, new research by Stanford health economist Maria Polyakova and colleagues — using unique data on physician income — shows that physicians’ personal earnings account for only 8.6 percent of national health-care spending
That’s the thing about American health care costs. We pay so much more than everyone else, but there’s no obvious single thing that costs more, or even a few factors together. It’s a ton of different things all adding up. Which means it’s very hard to fix, because there are so many different things you’d have to fix.
Doctors are only part of the problem. Nurses and all of the other skilled positions also all suck up huge amounts of money because there are shortages of all of them.
It was bad even before COVID, it’s even worse now. There are tons of regulations prohibiting the significant increase in creating new doctors and nurses (and air traffic controllers, but that’s a different but remarkably similar story).
Limits on new providers, and tons of corrupt regulation keeping people from opening new medical schools, clinics, and hospitals.
A ton of it is simple supply and demand - and the supply side is capped. Go to a place with a functioning competitive market and the prices (and wages) are a fraction of what they are in the US.
Again like doctors, nurse wages aren’t a major factor in the discrepancy between US healthcare costs and elsewhere. They are a factor, in a death by a thousand cuts situation.
In a source posted by another commenter, their wages are accountable for 5% of the difference.
I also don’t think it’s accurate to say regulations are what’s prohibiting an increase in nurses. They don’t have a government imposed mechanism like residency funding that creates a bottleneck like the one in medical training.
We have a nurse shortage because we have an aging population increasing demand, it’s a tough job, and people are leaving the profession.
But why is it a tough job? Partially it's the shift hours, they could offer it with less hours and more nurses for example. But they don't due to undersupply, and on it goes.
You probably know this - but in most jurisdictions in the US, including federal, charges have to be approved by a grand jury of your peers.
There’s an old adage “a prosecutor could indict a ham sandwich”* implying that the grand jury is easily mislead - but in my anecdotal experience of serving on a grand jury - this isn’t really true. We definitely said no to overreaches.
And you can also see this happening in high profile cases with the Trump administration:
Ignoring that, it’s not clear to me why removing jury trials would reduce the likelihood of a prosecutor throwing a larger number of charges at a defendant. Prosecutors want to demonstrate a record of convictions. That career pressure is still going to exist without jury trials - they’re going to throw anything they can and see what sticks.
*Fun Fact - Sol Wachtler, the judge who coined this, was later convicted of multiple felonies, including blackmailing an ex-lover and threatening to kidnap her daughter. A bit more substantial than a ham sandwich.
I'm getting a lot of downvotes for the comment you're responding to so will likely withdraw from this discussion. But to be clear, I deliberately talked of prosecutors threatening charges, not actual indictments.
Conviction through plea-bargaining is almost exclusively a phenomenon in the US. It just doesn't feature in the normal process of public prosecution in countries like Ireland, the UK or Australia. Also as an aside, the grand jury system is exclusively an American feature.
And every common law country (including the US) has a bar in terms of seriousness of the crime, below which you are tried without a jury. Yes the bar is lower in the US (potential sentence of more than 6 months?) but this bar exists nonetheless without sensationalist claims that jury trials have been eliminated - which is what was stated in the comment I originally responded to.
Also, I feel like there is something important you don't understand about the US system. A grand jury isn't a jury trial. A grand jury just allows a jury trial to happen (for a defendant to be charged at all). The defense isn't part of a grand jury. That's why the quote is what it is. It isn't talking about jury trials, just that a prosecutor can charge someone with a crime (the outcome them winning at a grand jury) pretty easily. Hope this helps.
The relevant part is that the judge declared traffic ticket proceedings “quasi criminal”:
> In the order, the court found that red-light camera cases, although labeled as civil infractions, function as “quasi-criminal” proceedings because they can result in monetary penalties, a formal finding of guilt, and consequences tied to a driver’s record.
Which seems to just relabel any fine from the government as a criminal matter?
IMO when you register the vehicle for the right to drive on public roads, you are entering into an agreement that you will be responsible for following the rules of the road, and for lending the car to people who also do so.
Similarly, if I register a firearm legally, and then lend it out to anyone who asks, regardless of whether they follow the law, I don’t think it would be crazy to hold me financially responsible if a shooting happens with my gun.
Seems untenable because I can just lie to you about my intended use. I borrow your hammer to build a cabin. Oops, I actually used it to murder people. Enjoy the millions in damages.
The justice system can generally deal with gray areas like this. For example the parents of school shooters are usually not held liable for the crimes their kids commit. It depends on a lot of variables.
>I don’t think it would be crazy to hold me financially responsible if a shooting happens with my gun.
States have had to write laws for this to be a criminal matter. Before then it was a civil matter, but it was individuals against individuals and not state against individuals.
>Which seems to just relabel any fine from the government as a criminal matter?
It wasn't exactly about the fine, but points on a license I believe.
There’s no secret sauce here - their guess as to how the case is going is as good as any outside observer, and based on the questions made by the justices.
The state isn’t enforcing your rights for free - you still have to hire a lawyer and pay legal expenses yourself.
The state is just providing the infrastructure where you are allowed to make a claim, if you choose to do so.
This is like complaining that businesses get to use roads for free - ignoring that we all pay taxes already and built this infrastructure for enabling exactly that purpose.
This will arouse the ire of the “copyright infringement isn’t theft” people - but we also have the government enforce shoplifting and larceny from retail businesses.
I believe the legal cost to recoup the loss of either IP revenue or physical property will be born by the victim though.
Retail businesses pay property taxes to support that. I fully support copyright enforcement being funded by intellectual property taxes:
* You declare your property’s worth.
* You pay IP taxes on that worth.
* You cannot sure for recovery of more than that worth, total. If you have a song worth $1M, and sue 2 people for $500K, then consider it sold. If someone steals a car from you, you can’t collect its full worth each from multiple thieves.
And if you have a $1B film, you can’t sue for $1B if you’re only paying taxes on $1M.
Why are your and my taxes subsidizing theft from the public domain? Let them pay for it, just like our property taxes pay for roads and schools and fire departments and police.
> Retail businesses pay property taxes to support that.
But they don’t?
Copyright infringement is a federal crime - your property taxes don’t fund that. The income tax that we all pay, including the IP holders, do the funding.
Additionally retail theft, at least in my jurisdiction of Massachusetts is prosecuted by the state - my income taxes fund that, not property taxes.
Criminal cases aren't a substitute for civil suits, not for copyright... or for any other type of loss.
People generally do have to pay their own way to bring a civil case to recover for damages in a copyright infringement case... or any kind of case.
The fines/jail time typically ascribed by a criminal case do not go into a victims bank account. A criminal case is between the government prosecutor and the defendant. The copyright holder wouldn't even be a party to the case.
Many states do collect restitution funds from revenues generated by the work of encarcerated people, and those funds do go to victims. I don't know that that applies to copyright infringement, but it is possible to get some recovery from criminal proceedings.
If a criminal case ever happens, it is a possibility that restitution can be awarded. But generally, if somebody's infringing your copyright and you want to seek damages, you need to bring a civil case yourself. Well over 99% of copyright cases are civil.
Sometimes for physical property the police take it and the owner can get it back from them. That much is sometimes free. My motorcycle got returned, but if I wanted compensation for the substantial damage done to it I would have had to get it from the thief.
That doesn’t seem to match up with the original tweet though - it sounds a heck of a lot stronger:
> Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic
Emphasis mine.
And I’m looking at news organizations that presumably have staffs of legal analysts pouring over this stuff, and they also seem to be saying that it can’t be any commercial activity:
> The label means that no contractor or supplier that works with the military can do business with Anthropic.
Ok Looking at Anthropic’s response they agree with the parent response:
> Secretary Hegseth has implied this designation would restrict anyone who does business with the military from doing business with Anthropic. The Secretary does not have the statutory authority to back up this statement. Legally, a supply chain risk designation under 10 USC 3252 can only extend to the use of Claude as part of Department of War contracts—it cannot affect how contractors use Claude to serve other customers.
Unless he links directly to evidence that backs up what he says, I’ve learned to tune out Robert Reich.
For a guy who is a Rhodes Scholar, a college professor, and a former Secretary of Labor he has a remarkable tendency to leave out qualifying context when making these statements.
He’s smart enough to formulate arguments with the appropriate context and still make it accessible to the general public - but he consistently chooses not to.
A few weeks ago he was trying to compare the “millionaire tax” of my home state of Massachusetts, with the proposed California wealth tax as evidence that the California tax would not cause flight of wealthy taxpayers:
Never once did he mention that the Massachusetts tax is a bog standard conventional tax on income, compared to this new concept of a global total wealth tax.
Lies, damned lies and statistics. They are fudging statistics so they arent technically lying but leave out context and stretch definitions to make their point.
The site guidelines is supposed to be anything that a hacker finds interesting.
This feels a bit like dumping the manual to a Toyota Camry without explanation. It’s technical, but what’s interesting?
Maybe there is interesting stuff in here - but I’d love to see submissions do some kind of analysis to justify it - like an appreciation of an example of well-run user documentation, or a highlighting a clear and concise explanation of how a particular subsystem works.
These posts just rocket to the top of Hacker News with no discussion.
Half of these items can be attributed to the fact that low density, rural states have a structural advantage in representation in federal governments, and in the current political era these states lean conservative.
Some of these are just wrong - unions generally lean democratic:
I’m also skeptical of the media organization claim.
And it should surprise no one that purely profit driven corporations switch their professed values with different administrations - see the rapid adoption of DEI programs during the Biden administration, then subsequent abandonment in the Trump era.
According to what? Laws can be whatever a country says, so long as they have the mechanism to enforce it.
See: the US using special forces to kidnap Maduro
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