It’s really, really not. Crop land per capita has been going down for decades despite richer diets, and all the biofuels and livestock feed [1]. Let’s not forget that advanced drugs to stop people from overeating the abundant food are a $60 billion and rapidly growing market.
Please consider extending the game at least by a couple weeks! I’m very curious what percent of all California payphones could be captured with an extended game. I know the game’s phone number isn’t free but I’m sure it could be largely covered by donations.
Without even going and playing the game yet, it’s already let me understand more of the local geography. Lots of small nursing homes, behavioral institutions, and halfway houses have a payphone. Places that thankfully I haven’t had to think about and didn’t even know were there. I doubt most of these will be captured.
Many have lamented the demise of the payphone but it really bears repeating. If someone loses or is robbed of their phone, they have to rely on the trust of strangers (when they may be looking pretty rough themselves) or scrape up $20-40 for a prepaid phone at a store that’s open, rather than calling at a payphone that’s open 24/7 for 25 or 50 cents or even for free with a collect call.
Landline phone calls should just be free at this point. Put like 0.0001% of mobile profit into a fund and surely you can maintain the existing POTS payphone base. POTS-quality voice is like a rounding error in bandwidth, but we're saddled with POTS-era costs for connections.
There are phones like this along the highways. They also tend to use high-power microwave links instead of mobile networks, so they work even with no regular phone coverage.
You are underestimating just how many people that are out there that want free long distances calls lol. I worked at a phone company and this was a never ending persistent security issue. There are lots of tricky ways to get someone to pay for your long distance call. If the pay phone was free then the local provider would be on the hook for those calls.
Just block long distance calls right? If it was that simple it would not be a persistent issue.
I’ve heard this called “technical deflation” and it works similarly to how economic deflation can play out, causing you to forego actions in the present because you think they’ll be easier in the future (or in this case, possibly not needed at all). Time will tell if this results in a “software deflationary spiral” or not.
One of those specific issues is that California electricity prices include what amounts to a redistributive tax, in the form of programs like CARE and FERA - probably about a third of households in the state are eligible for CARE which provides a 30% or more discount on normal prices. While there are low-income discount programs for other states none of them have nearly the reach of the CA programs.
I find it amazing that even with the redistribution subsidy, the resulting electricity is still more expensive than the national average unsubsidized rate. We are just so incredibly good at vaporizing money.
Something no one else mentioned so far is that, depending on your state, some IRA funds can be subject to judgments or non-exempt from bankruptcy, whereas 401k accounts are untouchable for anything except federal tax liens and divorce.
It seems like you've been referring to "Hospital Services", which was 31% of all healthcare spending in 2023, and "Physician and Clinical Services", which was 20% of all healthcare spending in 2023, according to the CMS spreadsheet. But this is made up of revenue to the hospital or doctor's office, not just compensation for the medical professionals. These numbers include all the administration/dealing with insurance that has to be done at the hospital or physician office, as well as rent, malpractice insurance, drugs provided at the hospital, imaging costs and almost everything else that pays for capital spend, etc. The fees at the point of service basically have to account for all the bloat in the system, which of course includes some overdelivery and bloat inside the hospitals and clinics. But I really don't think this builds a case (like you seem to be doing) that doctors and nurses need to be squeezed in order to reduce US health care costs, especially when total healthcare expenditure has grown much faster than clinician pay over the past decades.
I agree that the figure includes administration costs. CMS won't tell you that US physicians are paid 2x-3x more than they are in Europe, but OECD numbers will. CMS won't tell you about upcoding and overprescription, but the Dartmouth Atlas will. Meanwhile: the CMS picture will at least tell you that the majority of spending in our system is in on the provider side, and not in either prescription or insurance.
Again: I'm not out on a limb with these claims. I'm literally just remembering things Jonathan Gruber told Derek Thompson on a podcast, then looking up and bookmarking the numbers to confirm them. Many of the most popular message board narratives about healthcare disintegrate in the face of even these simple CMS numbers!
I once interviewed a very good candidate - good skills, interest in the business, a few years of experience, could definitely do the job I thought I was interviewing him for - only to find out after the fact that we actually only wanted an industry veteran with very specific, particular domain knowledge, and neither the recruiters nor me and my immediate manager had really caught up to that requirement.
This is false for H-1B - there is no "labor market test". Such a test is required for the PERM process in which an H-1B visa holder would seek a green card through their employer, although the definition of "prove" is up for debate [2].
H1-B applications must have a Labor Condition Application which requires a prevailing wage assessment and that hiring a foreign worker won't adversely affect US workers.
It is true that the LCA (and PERM!) processes are have grave flaws that leave them open to abuse.
I sincerely doubt the Namibian government is giving out thousands of dollars per household in solar subsidies, like the US does up until the end of this year. I doubt Pakistan does either, another country noted in the article where solar usage is expanding. If solar is a mature technology and an economic inevitability as contended in the article (I agree), there is a much weaker case for subsidizing it. In any case, most solar installation costs in the US seem to go to permits and expensive, inefficient contractors - endemic problems which affect all types of development and are probably only made worse by throwing free money at them.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cropland-per-person-over-...
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