"In education, despite what the pro-LEARNS crowd says, Arkansas came in 43rd, which is two places lower than in 2021. Pre-K to 12th grade and higher education both fared poorly"
Arkansas is also 49th in the US for adults with a college education:
It makes sense to me. Donors are hard to come by -- you need someone healthy right up to the point that they died. People who die of rabies can apparently appear to have suffered a heart attack, which would make them prime candidates for organ donation.
This may be small potatoes, but I've heard it said that people like you benefit "by not living in a state full of dumbasses." There's definitely an indirect benefit from these payments.
> (I personally don't mind subsidizing my library + local school district... good schools and libraries are good for the community)
Just sharing random coffee break thoughts... it always blows my mind is how many people _don't_ think like this. When base conditions improve for society, the conditions improve for _everyone_ regardless if they directly benefit you.
I'm also in the boat where I don't have kids, but I'd also like to live in a place that has educated people - so schools make perfect sense to me. Heck, even if I didn't benefit from it, providing children education is just the gosh-darn right thing to do.
It's just lack of trust. It's not that people want a worse community, it's that they have a hard time believing that taking extra money from their paycheck will create a better community.
Part of it is real; seeing massive amounts of state/local government waste and corruption makes it feel safer to keep your extra dollars instead of giving them away.
Part of it is difficulty evaluating timelines; more tax dollars for a better elementary school to be built in 3 years and to yield higher educated people 18 years from now it a lot to bet on.
IMO it's because there's both benefit and waste/corruption in these kinds of social benefit structures. some people choose to only see one or the other:
"these benefit everyone including those who don't use them directly! how could you be against it?"
"this money that I'm having to pay is either overpaid to corrupt vendors, or just straight wasted, why would we ever want to increase how much we're paying into this system?"
in reality you can't have one without the other. it's up to each person to decide whether they can take the bad with the good
Yes, universal health will start saving money even during the first transition year. We spend almost 1/3 or more of those total health dollars on billing administration. That amount surpasses the uninsured number. And the reality is if we can get medical care during the daytime, eventually emergency rooms might get less hectic. My hope is that more days than not ER personell have to pass the time like at a Firehouse.
Be careful what you wish for. Having health insurance doesn't equate to having access to care. Especially in the mental health space, fewer and fewer providers will even accept new patients on government-sponsored health plans due to low rates.
That would require that the more tax money the school system gets the smarter the students will be. Every time I see a bill for increasing school taxes their justification is not for improving education quality, but for some other pet project they want to do.
My dream is that an increase in drones would lead to a decrease in vehicular deliveries, to the point that there would be a net decrease in noise.
But in my heart of hearts I am certain the convenience of drone delivery -- and an absence of sufficient regulation -- would lead to a drastic net increase in noise instead.
This dream is naive. One truck rumbling (or humming, in the near future) through your neighborhood delivering packages to each of your neighbors over the course of 30 minutes will be replaced with one drone per neighbor.
If they must exist, I hope they're priced/taxed such that they're used sparingly.
Bit of a travelling salesman problem, but I think a hybrid approach would be optimal. Have the delivery van drive to a neighborhood, then release drones from the van to deliver packages to individual houses.
Now instead of just one truck for a whole route of deliveries, or one noisy drone per individual delivery, we get multiple particular corners in any given area where the sound is concentrated like a buzzsaw testing facility every day because that's where the Amazon dudes like to park and release the drones.
It'll be awesome when they decide that the parking spot in front of my house -- with no trees or overhead lines -- is an ideal place for drone staging.
(And no, I'm not particularly worried about any of these noise issues. I predict that it'll all sort itself out just fine. Besides, I personally think the spectacle of a swarm of package delivery drones leaping forth from a truck is something that I would never tire of observing.
But it is fun to think about the problems and the solutions. The deeper one dives, the more complex they get.)
Could you explain how this would help? I'm struggling to understand where you're coming from here, besides perhaps a reflexive libertarian reaction to government.
Massive government subsidies for health care consumption not only eliminate, but disincentivize price discovery. If your biggest consumers of health care (seniors) have access to the best health insurance plan in the world (Medicare), that's going to drive costs up
Your whole argument is that the health care system should be optimized for the most productive members of society (like you, right now).
You are perfectly fine to have that belief, but the majority of people disagree with you, which is one of the primary reasons the system is designed as it is.
I think the market can do a better job of optimizing than central planning ever can - the problem is we have both the costs of capitalism and socialism concurrently with the model we have now. A worst of both worlds scenario.
When somebody is sick we generally save them even if the cost/benefit is poor. No market is going to solve this if you want to save sick people who don’t have a lot of money.
There is no place in the world where health care is solved, it’s one trade off vs another.
The US system is also far far from perfect but your solution is quite shallow and unlikely to fix things in a way society wants.
Have you ever looked into the way the market works for medical devices? And what happens if the implant or device you need to live is from a company that went bankrupt?
If you've ever spent even five minutes reading up on that stuff you would understand that health and medical cannot be a free market. It can never be a free market.
You know what actually drives costs up? The fact that healthcare doesn't work as a market. I can't shop for medical care. I don't have the knowledge and it's usually extremely time sensitive. This is a ridiculous statement that's only parroted by the most market-pilled right-wing economists.
They disable so many features when you remove "Smart features" i.e.
Grammar, Spelling, Autocorrect, Smart Compose/Reply (those templated suggested replies), Nudges, Package tracking, Desktop notifications.
Google really wants to punish you for doing that.
Turning off the inbox categories feature was particularly annoying. A feature they had for a good decade before deciding they weren't jsut happy with collecting my data.
It is unbelievably manipulative that they tied this organizational feature with this new LLM-training scam they have running now.
Learning to not rely on inbox categories does make it easier for me to finally leave Gmail for a real email provider though, so maybe this will all work out in the end.
Yep I went through this sad journey with my gmail this week. Got tired of seeing "coming soon" packages cluttering up my inbox, so I looked into how to turn them off. It turned off the categories. Reminds me of the dark pattern used by many apps, where if you turn off notifications to avoid ads/spam, you also lose useful notifications.
I never enabled that and I verified it's not enabled. However I still have the "Happening Soon" section in my inbox that has status of some packages.
My guess is that Smart Features will (along with everything else it does) scan your emails to populate "Happening Soon" with package status, and if you then enable "Turn on package tracking", it will also periodically poll the shippers for those packages to keep the status up to date.
My complaint still stands. I want to entirely remove "Happening Soon" without disabling categories. It's not even the "Google reading your emails" creepiness. I just don't want my UI to be cluttered.
I see. The "Happening Soon" section of the inbox is populated with stuff other than order tracking, such as your airline tickets. So I can see why you'd have to disable the whole shooting match to get rid of it. But I agree that it would be nice for some people if there was an inbox layout setting to just get rid of it altogether.
These switches don't control whether your emails are used to train models. They control whether you get to use machine inference features on your own emails.
I'm Australian, I use Australian idioms, spelling, contractions, et al in emails to regular contacts for 20+ years via gmail (Yet Another Early Gmail Invite User).
Despite having selected UK English (there's no 'Strayla option) gmail via the web still insists on suggesting I morph into a cookie cutter middle north American Engrish typer.
In addition to being a short classic, I think teens could identify with Gatsby being obsessed with getting the approval of people who have nothing but contempt for him. There's a devastating scene at the end where the narrator, Nick Carraway, organizes a funeral for Gatsby and literally none of his friends show up. I think that might resonate deeply for more than a few teen readers.
> compared to what some of your 'competitors' may do.
Or your boss. Once you're working for a drug cartel, I don't think you have a whole lot of autonomy when it comes to determining your specific role. If your boss tells you to get in a fishing boat and you refuse, you risk getting killed on the spot.
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/01/08/arkansas-named... :
"In education, despite what the pro-LEARNS crowd says, Arkansas came in 43rd, which is two places lower than in 2021. Pre-K to 12th grade and higher education both fared poorly"
Arkansas is also 49th in the US for adults with a college education:
https://uca.edu/acre/citizens-guide-educational-attainment/#...
reply