I agree. I think both system have significant flaws, and that is coming from someone for whom the US healthcare system benefits the most (great health insurance, mid-30s, healthy, well-off, very capable of navigating complicated paperwork, and access to some of the best hospitals). I can’t imagine being a lower income, lower educated, aging person with chronic health problems, in a rural flyover state with limited community hospitals. Night and day difference.

On the other hand, some 20% of the total population of Nova Scotia is currently active on the waiting list to get a PCP. You don’t like your PCP? Too bad. You want to get a second opinion? Too bad. Your PCP retires/moves/closes their practice? Too bad. They have tried to plug the gap with allowing pharmacists to prescribe certain meds, and expanding PA/NPs. This is probably better than the alternative of no doctors, but its probably a net negative on the system as a whole compared to properly staffing with physicians.

Overall, it seems like chronic underfunding, and underpay for doctors has led to situation in Nova Scotia in which preventative care, or really, care for anything non-life threatening, has deteriorated quite meaningfully.

Also a Canadian living in the US, and I would tend to disagree. In major US cities, with good health insurance, there are plenty of PCPs, and availability of specialists.

For instance, I had a ganglion cyst that I went to see my PCP for. We decided to give it a couple weeks to see if it would go away by itself. It didn’t, so I messaged him, and was scheduled to see an orthopedic surgeon (probably overkill) within 3 days to have it looked at and drained. Total cost: $0 for PCP; $40 co-pay for the specialist.

Meanwhile, my father in Nova Scotia waited close to a year for a knee replacement surgeon consult and is now waiting for surgery slot, which is expected to be another 6-9 months, despite being in significant pain. That just would not happen in the US.

There are many problems for sure, and I don’t have a universal measure for efficiency, but anecdotally, in my experience, there is just way less waiting in many parts of the US. I also acknowledge how privileged I am to have good insurance, resources to not worry about large out of pocket maxes in an emergency, and to live in a city with some of the best hospital networks in the country.

I’d wager that owning an iPhone is cheaper than a Samsung Galaxy or likely any premium Android.

An iPhone is typically getting 6 years of iOS versions, plus an additional 1-2 years of security updates. For instance, the iPhone X, announced in Fall 2017 was on latest iOS until iOS 17 comes in this month. iPhone 6S, released in Sep 2015, is still getting security updates.

If you are someone who runs their phone into the ground until the end of security updates, iPhone wins hands down. If you are someone who wants the latest and greatest, iPhone hold resale value like no other and its not even close.

Obsidian is also in the “built with Electron, and doesn’t make me want to scream” bucket for me.

I would argue that VSCode is the big exception.

You should do this anyway - it funds great original educational content, and is quite good value.

Okay. Trying picking up a iPhone X (releases Sep 2017) vs iPhone 14 Pro and see the difference. There are a lot of quality of life improvements that make a noticeable difference in user experience.

• 120hz
• better battery life
• 2x as fast charge
• much brighter screen, always on if that interests you
• triple camera sensors, with wide lens vs double, no wide lens
• LiDAR to improve portrait photos
• faster Face ID (used 100s of times a day)
• satellite communication for emergencies
• MagSafe charging/docking ability
• 5G (really only find it useful for hotspots)

I can confidently say everyone of these features has improved my user experience. None of them by their self are earth shattering, but taken as a whole, the constant iterative improvements have amounted to quite a lot.

Agreed, but that is not what OP said.

Not sure I agree that phone tech has peaked a couple years ago for the average user. What technology peaked years ago?

Camera? Efficient processors? Display panels? Biometrics? Batteries? Cellular/Wi-Fi modems? Emergency satellite connectivity? I cannot think of a single technology (I am on iPhone 14 Pro) that is not at least marginally better than a year or two ago, and pretty meaningful improvement from ~5 years ago.

The rate of technological improvement has slowed or plateaued, but there is a pretty reasonable argument that current flagship technologies are the “peak”, even for average user, if only incrementally. I agree that this plateau, coupled with upgrade cost, is making it a harder choice to decide to upgrade for average user.

Thank you for this!

I dislike Musk as much as the next person, but most of the hate of Musk & Twitter/X fails to make the distinction that they are not the same thing. At this point, any additional capital injected into X is throwing good money after really bad money.

Another suggestion would be to not include the number of blocks in the label. That doesn’t make sense. If you want an absolute number to be included, but the weight (scaled to millions of tons appropriately). It is less abstract than number of blocks.

Also, this is more subjective, but the font makes it look very amateur in my opinion.

Interesting data, but I don’t think it is beautifully presented. Bar charts, or maybe a blown up pie charts may be easier to grasp the scale.

Blobs of the largely same color, dispersed in a random pattern make it hard to quickly see scale

Technology?

It’s getting close for me…

We left UNESCO too? Fuck he was petty.

Recently found Bitwarden from a Lemmy recommendation. I have been very satisfied thus far.

Integrates with Safari & Arc on MacOS, Edge & Chrome on work PC, & Safari on iPhone and iPad.

He did not borrow 44 billion to buy Twitter.

He put about ~13 billion dollars of debt on Twitter itself, so he had to come up with about 31 billion in equity. He was able to secure third party equity commitments of around 7 billion (Larry Ellison, the Saudis, etc.). He also held a minority interest of about 4 billion in Twitter. He funded the remaining 20 odd billion with a combination of cash (from cash holdings and selling Tesla shares in early 2022) and equity margin loans on his remaining Tesla shares. It is understood that he likely paid off most of his margin loans as he continued to sell further Tesla shares in late 2022.

The 1.5 billion interest expense you mention is just for the bank debt (that the banks still hold, and have been unable to sell), and is Twitter’s responsibility, not Elon’s.

This is a long way of saying that I think the banks will own Twitter within 6-12 months. They will not roll over like landlords, and its far more clear cut for a missed loan payment.

1. I didn’t say it was

2. I didn’t say it was

3. I didn’t say it was

I mean… the law itself is written in such a way that is intentionally ambiguous, and refers to delivery drivers as “workers” (rather than “employees” or “independent contractors”) and refers to the platforms as “third parties”.

I think delivery workers deserve a fair, livable wage, but I am not sure that this is the way to do this.

If this goes through, I could see this playing out in a couple ways:

1. I would guess that fees go up to cover increased mandated wages. However, since the apps will not want headline costs to rise much more (already have a reputation for large markups, large percentage of fees, and consumer is getting more and more stressed), they could remove the ability to tip, and advertise that slightly higher fee is now “all-in” pricing, to keep headline costs similar on average. This is potentially detrimental to delivery workers depending on earnings/tip mix and shares that the apps skim from each.

2. Adding an additional fee per order (on average $5 per order as quoted in a NYT article) on something that has relatively elastic demand, will likely be detrimental to all involved, as volumes could drop more than the increase in price. In this scenario, everyone loses: the consumer, the delivery worker, the third party, local restaurant.

3. Adding an additional fee per order, and the apps experience little to no change in demand (relatively inelastic). This would only hurt the consumer, and would benefit delivery work and tech co’s. However, I have a hard time believing that demand for delivery is super inelastic given food inflation, state of the consumer, and generally perception on food delivery price already.

Not trying to be a corporate shill, but the economist in me is always hesitant when the solution is market interference. In reality, its probably somewhere between the extremes of 2 and 3, and determining where on that spectrum it ends up is quite nuanced.