Readit NewsNone of this is true.
Step by step:
>as it is fixed
Something not being able to be moved is a negative, not a positive
>finite
New land is created all the time. The netherlands has created an entire new province.
> and doesn't depreciate in value
Only true legally. I can assure you land does depreciate, as can any farmer that has used it to farm the same crop for years and now finds its yields reduced as a result.
>except through market trend
So, just like any other asset?
> it basically only go up as long as the economy itself grow.
Untrue, simply check any number of rural areas that have had the life drained out of them over the past 50 years.
Land is useful, but let's not pretend like it's something it isn't.
You're 'technically correct' but the total amount of land being created is so small as to be meaningless in a global sense.
Your arguments are fixated on extreme corner cases. I'm not sure what you are arguing for.
Actual good UI/UX design isn't trivial and it tends to require a tight feedback loop between testers, designers, implementers, and users.
A lot of FOSS simply doesn't have the resources to do that.
I'm not disagreeing with your basic take, but I think this part is a little more subtle.
I'd argue that 80% of users (by raw user count) do want roughly the same 20% of functionality, most of the time.
The problem in FOSS is that average user in the FOSS ecosystem is not remotely close to the profile of that 80%. The average FOSS user is part of the 1% of power users. They actively want something different and don't even understand the mindset of the other 80% of users.
When someone comes along to a FOSS project and honestly tries to rebuild it for the 80% of users, they often end up getting a lot of hate from the established FOSS community because they just have totally different needs. It's like they don't even speak the same language.
If you want to see true rationing, look to the UK (especially) or Canada (less so) where I know plenty of people who have to wait over a year to see a specialist even after doctor referral.
Meanwhile, my parents in the US at a hospital get a CT scan, MRI 'just in case' immediately (or close-to for the MRI) and pay nothing for it.
In the UK, you can pay more (say 30%-40% the cost of a US health insurance plan), get treated like royalty in private care, skip all the lines for specialists, still be covered by the NHS to pay 0 for anything catastrophic, and still never get a bill in the mail from anyone.
It's not an either/or situation. The US has the least efficient healthcare system of any country in the world. It provides less treatment per dollar than anywhere else. You can provide universal basic coverage and still provide luxury insurance plans.
I'd be interested to hear from a charge coding expert about Claude's analysis here and if it was accurate or not. There's also some free mixing of "medicare" v.s. "insurance" which often have very different billing rates. The author says they don't want to pay more than insurance would pay - but insurance pays a lot more than medicare in most cases.
It's pretty clear that even access to a potentially buggy and unreliable expert is very helpful. Whatever else AI does I hope it chips away at how institutions use lengthy standards and expertise barriers to make it difficult for people to contest unfair charges.
I'm a cofounder of Turquoise Health and this is all we do, all day. Our purpose is to make it really easy to know the entire, all-in, upfront cost of a complex healthcare encounter under any insurance plan. You can see upfront bills for many procedures paid by various healthcare plans on our website.
The information posted in the thread is generally correct. Hospitals have fictional list prices and they on average only expect to collect ~30% of that list price from commercial insurance plans. For Medicare patients, they collect around 15%. The amount the user finally settled for was ~15% of the billed amount, so it all checks out.
The reason for fictional list prices (like everything in US healthcare) is historical, but that doesn't make it any more logical. Many hospital insurance contracts are written as "insurer will pay X% of hospital's billed charges for Y treatment" where X% is a number like 30. No one is 'supposed' to pay anywhere near the list price. Yes, this is a terrible way to do things. Yes, there are shenanigans with logging expected price reductions are 'charity' for tax purposes. But there isn't a single bad guy here. The whole system that is a mess on all sides.
Part of the problem is that the US healthcare billing system is incredibly complex. Billing is as granular as possible. It's like paying for a burger at a restaurant by paying for separate line items like the sesame seeds on the bun, the flour in the bun, the employee time to set the bun on the burger, the level of experience of the bun-setter (was it a Dr. Bun Setter or an RN bun setter?), etc. But like the user said, some of these granular charges get rolled up into a fixed rate for the main service.
However, the roll-up rules are different for every insurance contract. So saying the hospital 'billed them twice' is only maybe true. The answer would be different based on the patient's specific insurance plan and how that insurance company negotiated it. Hospitals often have little idea how much they will get paid to do X service before it happens. They just bill the insurance company and see what comes back. When a patient comes in without insurance, they don't know how to estimate the bill since there is no insurance agreement to follow. So they start from the imaginary list prices and send the patient an astronomically high bill, expecting it to be negotiated down. In some areas, there are now laws like 'you can't charge an uninsured patient more than your highest negotiated insurance rate' but these are not universal.
If you find yourself in this situation, there are good charities like 'Dollar For' that can help patients negotiate this bill down for you. We are trying to address this complexity with software and have made a lot of progress, but there is much more to do. The government has legislation (the No Surprises Act) that requires hospitals to provide upfront estimates and enter mediation if the bill varies more than $400 from that amount. But some parts of the law don't have an enforcement date set yet, which we hope changes soon.
The entire history of the US car business has shown that the path to success is to produce different variants for different customer bases and refresh those variants to drive continual sales.
Some manufacturers take this to Nike-level extremes with rare variants, 1-of-1 models, etc (looking at you, Porsche). Other manufactures take it to the other extreme with base one platform being repurposed for 5+ different customer segments with wildly different body designs - for example the Toyota Tundra, Tacoma, Lexus LX, 4Runner, and Land Cruiser are all the same car with a different shell.
So the conventional wisdom in the industry is that Tesla is committing suicide by producing generic, stale cars without model variants. Tesla seems to have bet that the conventional wisdom is wrong and producing cheap, repeatable cars with less variation is a better business strategy. Time will tell.