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Cake day: September 15th, 2023

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  • Medicine in the US is the closest we have to a free market. (Newly developed pharmaceuticals being a bit of exception due to the nature of our patent system) In a free market you work on principles of supply and demand. An important concept here is that of inelastic demand. For certain goods, up to a certain point demand will remain constant regardless of price as they are essential to life or addictive. Think gasoline, water, cigarettes, etc…

    With medicine people will generally spend whatever it takes often even going into debt if necessary because they value continuing to live very highly. As a result, hospitals are able to charge as much as they think people are willing to pay before they decide that dying is a better financial decision.

    You could argue that in a free market, hospitals which charge less will see more business pushing costs down. For certain areas like elective plastic surgery the whole free market model actually works out fairly well since people have the option to shop around. However, let’s say you get in a life threatening car crash. In that moment you don’t have the time to shop around for the cheapest ambulance provider and run a cost benefit analysis on which one has the closest ambulance. After that you can’t shop around local hospitals to see which can offer the cheapest solution for your procedure because first off you don’t know exactly what’s wrong until you get to the hospital. Second, you’re currently suffering from serious injuries and need to get to the closest hospital. This is why just about the entire developed world apart from the US has nationalised healthcare. Is it completely free of issues? No. Are there some markets where private healthcare can offer better service? Yes. However, you don’t have people going into financial ruin because they needed emergency medical care.






  • There is some stuff to be learned, but especially with USB-C I’d say the vast majority are not labeled. There’s even some devices charged with USB C that can’t be charged with a PD charger and need an A to C cable. Phones are a great example where you have to look up the specs to know data transfer capabilities. Additionally they renamed the USB 3.0 standard which has been established for over a decade to USB 3.1 Gen 1 which is completely unnecessary and just serves to confuse. The standard was largely understandable with USB 3.0 generally being blue or at least a color other than black and on decently modern devices USB 2.0 would be black. With USB-C indication has just about gone out the window and what used to be a very simple to understand standard has now become nearly impossible to understand without having researched every device and cable you interact with.






  • There’s a pretty big difference between being a billionaire and having a relationship. At the end of the day pursuing or discovering interests with a social aspect will result in making friends and here and there you’ll click with someone romantically. At the end of the day even if you’re lacking socially, it’s a learned skill and when there’s shared interest people will look over some things while you learn. As long as you put in the work to learn, you’ll improve.


  • The things is that time zones are a natural part of the earth. Back when people told time by the position of the sun, people in different places would naturally observe a different time. Should everyone around the globe have somehow established contact and said, hey one day we’re all going to be in constant contact, could you change your sundials to read the time where I am instead of where you are? At the end of the day, although time zones and daylight savings time have created some slight variations on this concept, noon/midday was defined by the concept of the sun being directly overhead. Since the origins of time telling are based on the sun, there is no first place where we didn’t start with time zones. Unless we somehow advanced as a society to create computers and the Internet without having ever created a system of time.




  • The detriment to society came when the standard for text messaging between all phones was updated to support more features and a major manufacturer intentionally didn’t update to drive sales. The US used to heavily punish that sort of behaviour, but in this case it took EU Chinese action to reign in a US company.

    Samsung, Google, Sony, and a million other manufacturers could have implemented their own messaging system, but instead they chose to facilitate the use of devices however customers want without punishing them based on the personal preferences of their friends. In some circles people may even choose not to communicate with people who don’t have iPhones or exclude them from group chats which is bad in just about any way you spin it.






  • The issue with having billions is that with maybe a miniscule amount of exceptions, no one person is able to generate billions. 99% of the time someone becomes a billionaire by starting or buying a company and maintaining a disproportionately large stake of ownership while the dozens or hundreds of people working for them receive a salary less than the profits they generate while receiving equity that is significantly smaller than the value that they contribute to the business. A truly ethical billion or trillion dollar company would be composed of a large group of multi millionaires along with a few millionaires and people living comfortable lives rather than a small group of multi billionaires and a few millionaires along with countless people struggling to get by.