Have you ever managed a complex, dynamic, changing system and found that the optimal size based on current conditions was 20% less than it was at some prior time?
I think Taiwan is worth adding to the list of healthcare systems that folks study. I believe it may be similar to the Swiss system.
Everyone has national health insurance, but you also get to choose where to go, and some doctors also offer non-insured services that you can pay for out of pocket.
The result is universal coverage combined with a competitive market that drives prices down and encourages innovation.
I know this is just anecdata, but having held an insurance card there for a while, our family was always able to see our family doctor the same day we called. And the one or two times a specialist or emergency room was needed, there was minimal hassle.
I'm sure there are problems with it, too -- I just don't know what they are. As a customer/patient, it seemed to work far better than the American system I'm used to.
Most of Europe has a similar model to what you've described: some form of mandatory state-backed insurance combined with a mix of private and public healthcare providers. In many countries, however, the biggest hospitals in Europe are owned by the government.
Unfortunately the healthcare systems are in the process of collapsing across the UK and the majority of the continent too.
My pet theory is I don't think it's actually anything to do with the overall funding model. I think it's to do with our inability to adapt to an increasingly elderly population. People's kids here are scattered around the country, often many hours of travel away, living in small apartments, and can't easily look after their elderly relatives in a way that's much more common in East Asia. As a consequence, we are offload that responsibility onto the healthcare system, which treats them as patients with medical issues, when often they are just old people with broadly normal age-related disease. Our systems were never designed to be capable of handling millions of elderly people, and it's not an efficient way of providing the required care, so it's falling apart.
This is an interesting theory. I just came back from Thailand where I needed to make an ER visit for a grand total of $89 USD, including the price of three prescriptions. I was touring with one of the natives who made a comment around the lines of, "We don't abandon our elderly parents here like you Westerners do." This was in a conversation around their multi-generation households.
It's not necessarily a correlation, but your comment reminded me of the conversation.
This is still mostly true. Kids books also have bopomofo rubies, like the kana rubies in Japanese. And occasionally you'll see bopomofo as a typographic choice to represent a sound that feels more natural in Taiwanese amidst an otherwise Mandarin sentence.
This is just my personal experience, but I think the big change in the past 15 years isn't Bopomofo -> Pinyin, but rather Wade Giles -> Pinyin. Bopomofo seems equally prevalent, but the Wade Giles romanizations on street signs have begin to get replaced with Pinyin for the sake of non-native speakers who are almost certainly more familiar with Pinyin than WG.
This is incredible --- @chearon thank you for open sourcing this!
I think most folks probably don't realize how difficult it is to go from HTML -> PNG programmatically. You get hit with a thousand papercuts related to either Node<>Browser differences or HTML<>Canvas differences.
This has some pretty great ideas within it. A few that stuck out to me in case others don't want to skim the full spec:
Start with YAML/JSON/TOML, but then add:
- Optionally strict typing and structs
- Inheritance
- Dynamically computed properties
- Functions & object methods, which are really more like computer properties
- If/Else conditionals, which are really more like a ternary
.. and managed to do it while still making it look like a simple config file.
The closest analogue from memory might actually be Terraform.
The one thing that had me squinting was the object extension syntax. It looks powerful.. and I understand its value.. but wow that's ends up being eye-full of () {} and [] all in one code bock.
The longitudinal studies of the of the kids who were 0-10 during the pandemic are going to be fascinating.
As a tiny example: I've anecdotally heard that kids in the 5-10yo bracket need their parents in the bed to fall asleep at a higher rate than would typically be normal. Probably because parents cuddled their kids to sleep during the lockdowns as a stress reducer for both of them, rather than turning out the lights and leaving the room.
People are really blowing this covid lockdown stuff out of proportion, like seriously we had to be more indoors for a while, how is that stressful? Some children are literally living in a warzone and don't know if they will survive through the week, some live in poverty, some lose one of their parents or both.
My son is 6 so it falls neatly in that bracket and if the covid lockdown is the most stressful thing to happen in his childhood I will consider us extremely lucky.
And even so, cuddling more with parents? How will they ever recover?
> Some children are literally living in a warzone and don't know if they will survive through the week, some live in poverty, some lose one of their parents or both.
This isn't the gotcha you think it is. Yes, there are children who experience worse trauma and stress than COVID lockdowns. However, those children of war will be also be developmentally stunted, far, far, more than the children of COVID lockdowns.
This is a "yes, and" scenario. Reducing stress in all its forms during early childhood development is the goal here, and the fact that some have more than others does not mean those with less stress are worthy of casual dismissal.
Evolutionarily speaking, social isolation is more stressful than violence
Soldiers develop mental health issues more often when they return home and become socially isolated than when they are at war, surrounded by their brothers
I was no "real" soldier but due to some weird circumstances I fought in a war. The difficult part of returning home is everything is so low stakes, the freedom to ride around on a Hilux living by your wits and a rifle turns into a world where you can easily survive flipping burgers and you have a toddler screaming at you because you selected the wrong color cup and the HOA has a meltdown because they decided the wrong species of plant is growing on your yard. Boring.
Sometimes you dream of the war because life is so simple and the goal is obvious, and every decision seems impactful to your survival.
There's a section of Gustav Hasford's 'The Short Timers' that describes this well. Two soldiers have recently returned from the front lines and hitch a lift to a base, or PX, or something of that nature. The gate guard - some fat fuck who's clearly never seen the enemy face to face - won't let them in because they're Marines and Marine day is Tuesday, or something of that nature, so our man just cocks his rifle and sticks it in the guy's stomach, finger on the trigger, and looks the guy in the eye.
It's a very well written book.
I don't know really whether I should recommend war stories to a guy who's been to war but if you do enjoy reading that sort of stuff, both of his novels (The Short Timers - which turned into Full Metal Jacket - and the sequel 'The Phantom Blooper' are excellent.)
> Probably because parents cuddled their kids to sleep during the lockdowns as a stress reducer for both of them, rather than turning out the lights and leaving the room.
That's a good thing. Child has a need, Parent meets that need. That is a healthy relationship. But... the parent should have worked to ween the child from this behavior back to a normal sleeping situation.
Funny. You translated “need” to “want”. A parent should meet a child’s need. That is absolutely necessary for development. If a child is nervous and needs cuddling, do it.
As for practical use cases, one is to find an approximate optimization to a function
- You want to find the min/max of some probability distribution P(x)
- P(x) is too complicated to find a closed-form min, but you can draw samples from it.
- So instead, you carefully construct some OTHER probability distribution Q(x|θ) that you claim is structurally similar "enough" to P(x), parameterized by θ.
- Now you find the theta which minimizes the KL divergence KL(P(x) || Q(x|θ)), which is equivalent to delivering you the parameters of θ to Q(x|θ) that make it [approximately] "most" similar to P(x) without ever having minimized P(x)
It was a trick that came up a lot when AI consisted of giant Bayesian plate models for each specific task that you had to hand-optimize.
I can think of all sorts examples.