We have been trying since medicine existed. Granted we can see much further now thanks to modern knowledge and tools, but we still can't see far enough to identify the causes or even speculate about actual solutions to aging. For all our technology and medical knowledge, getting somebody to live past 100 is still 95% a mix of genetic lottery and the chance of not developing too serious of cancer until really late.
The vast majority of medical spending is on treatment of illness/problems and always has. Very little money is spent on actually understanding and figuring how to pause aging itself.
Actually they said: "Aging isn’t a law of nature." But it kind of is. Almost all biological organisms age and the ones that don't are much simpler than us. That's not to mention entropy which is both a law of physics and dictates an inescapable form of aging for the universe as a whole.
They also said there isn't a physical reason, that is often meant to mean "it isn't a law of physics".
The fact that something happens doesn't mean it's a law of anything. Cars didn't exist before we built them - no law of "no cars". People died of TB before we had a cure - no law of "TB". Same for various types of cancer.
In practice when someone says "live forever", they don't mean to imply they'll live the 10^100 (or whatever the guestimates are) years to the end of the universe. They mean they'll stop aging in the sense that we do now. Maybe we could live to 10,000 or 50,000 or whatever. You can always get hit by a bus, or get some strange disease from a bat, or whatever.
Google and Facebook had negative free cash flow for years early in their lives. All the good investors were lolling at the bad investors lolling at the cash they were burning.
Ok and lets compare the cost of running those products and reinvestment vs the model businesses.
FCFF = EBIT(1-t)-Reinvestment. The operating expenses of the model business are much higher - so lower EBIT.
The larger the reinvestment the larger the hole. And the longer it continues (without clear steep barriers to entry to exclude competitors in the long run) it becomes harder to justify a high valuation.
I really dislike comparisons like this - it glosses over a lot of details.
One can explain the equation all they like - the fact is that negative free cash flow is just a reality of the early stages of some very, very good businesses.
In the 90's and early 2000s, but people laughed at businesses like Amazon & Google for years. These types of people highly focused on the free cash flow of a business in it's early years are just dumb. Sometimes a business takes a lot of investment in the early stages - whether it's capex for data centers or S&M for enterprise software businesses, or R&D for pharma businesses or whatever.
As for "clear steep barriers" - again, just clueless stuff. There weren't clear steep barriers to search when Google started, there were dozens of search engines. Google created them. Creating barriers to entry is expensive and the "FCFF people" imagine they arrive out of thin air. It takes a lot of time and or money to create them.
It's unclear if "the model business" is going to be high or low margin. It's unclear how high the barriers to entry for making models will be in practice. It's unclear what the reinvestment required will be. We are a few years into it. About the only thing that is clear is this: if you try to run a positive free cashflow business in this space over the next few years, you'll be crushed. If you want a shot at a large, high return on capital business come 2035, you better be willing to spend up now.
There is not a single thing in there which is counter to valuing a stock. Anyone with half a brain knows large free cash in the future can more than make up for negative free cash flow in the early years. You can't point to a single thing, you are just hand waving.
Unless you have good insurance, and then you get everything, the best, the quickest. Australia is a joke compared to healthcare in the US with good insurance.
Now, the US sucks really bad if you don't have good insurance / any insurance....
Such as? Have you ever had a major medical event using your health insurance in America?
"We have the best!". But like, so do dictators of 3rd world countries. Do you actually have access to the best care? Are you sure? Because about 1 in 10 Americans are uninsured[1] and a substantially larger percentage are underinsured[2].
Meanwhile Australian life expectancy is higher then America[3] (I mean let's be fair: most of the western world's life expectancy is higher then America...I wonder what common trait most of those places have...)
I don’t disagree about the overall healthcare system being broken in the US, but I find it pretty funny that you replied to that person with more arguments about how healthcare sucks for the average person… When they were discussing healthcare being excellent for folks with great insurance.
you two are talking past each other, and talking about two different cohorts of people.
The person talking about "good insurance" provided no examples of even what that statement is meant to mean, or what they actually expected to get from it.
Just "the best care ever", no qualifiers, examples and no indication of costs.
Just what does "good healthcare" in America get you, that you imagine people in other countries do not get?
"good" is a relative term. In health care insurance world, it's the expensive plans, with broad coverage, and the best facilities in network (who participate in research and are at the forefront of treatment - MD Anderson, Mayo, Cleveland, Sloan Kettering etc). You get fast access to the best facilities with the best doctors and best treatments.
Maybe look at the rankings of best treatment facilities globally. Here is the list for oncology. Choose any dropdown you like. You are going to see a lot of "US" at the top.
Good question. I actually think the US should have a healthcare system more like other countries, don’t get me wrong. But I can directly answer your question, as someone who lives in the U.S. and is very happy with the care i receive.
In the U.S. i’d consider good health insurance to be:
- low monthly premiums (majority of cost is covered by a generous employer). Say $30-50 per paycheck for a single adult.
- A PPO plan, not an HMO (HMO limits your options when picking doctors).
- A plan that does NOT require pre-authorizations for most procedures and tests. They are a pain in the butt. And many crappy insurance companies like United Healthcare tend to auto-deny many things as “not medically necessary”.
- A medical plan that covers almost every non-experimental drug prescription, at low cost ($30 or less). Including antibiotics, EpiPen, GLP-1 (Ozempic), inhalers, etc.
- A reasonably low annual out-of-pocket max, say $2,500 or less? ALL costs after that max are fully covered by insurance. So you have peace of mind if something really bad happens.
- $0 or very low deductible for seeing your doctor. Also a very low coinsurance rate, say 20% or less. Coinsurance is the % of the bill you pay before your insurance covers the remainder.
All the above basically means, “low stress” when you get sick or into an accident, or get pregnant.
What does good “care” look like? I think we all know. In the U.S. this is _very_ region dependent. Most people don’t consider this when buying a home for some reason lol.
There are many cities with excellent hospitals and medical centers and also some top notch hospitals GLOBALLY. And then there are many “medical deserts”, typically cheaper areas to live, where care is harder to come by.
Examples of good care:
- QUICK access to your primary doctor/PCP (within 1-2 weeks)
- ability to get care urgently, within a days notice, from another doctor. urgent care, etc.
- ability to see a specialist within 3 months, ideally less than 1 month. Yes this is possible in some parts of the U.S. believe it or not.
- Living near (45 min or less) a major, well-rated hospital, in case you have a heart attack, get into a nasty car accident, etc.
The unfortunate truth is a LOT of americans are in a “healthcare desert”, or they are poor and can’t afford care, or their employers are not generous and offer them crappy plans. For example where the out of pocket max is $15k lol. Or where monthly premiums for a single person are $400.
The US is not a fun place to live if you’re lower class or lower-middle class. And our healthcare system is a confusing mess. :)
This magical "good insurance" doesn't exist, because it's not up to the insurance company.
Scheduling is controlled by the hospital. Right now american hospitals are insanely booked out, and have been for many years. There's no magical insurance that bumps someone else out of the line.
If you aren't experiencing 3 month delays for non-emergency medicine, it's not that you have "good insurance", it's that you live in a place where the local medical infrastructure is seriously underutilized. This might mean you just live in a rich enough place where more hospitals than needed were built, or it could mean that a lot of your neighbors just aren't getting the healthcare the local hospitals were expecting to serve.
Or maybe what you are hinting at is that in your state, the affordable health insurance for most people doesn't actually get them any real treatment options, so only very wealthy people can afford to actually get treated, so hospitals around you don't do much healing.
And that's fucking ghastly and should be seen as the abhorrent thing it is. You have hospitals around you that are not treating people even though there are plenty of people needing healthcare. A lot of resources were already spent building that hospital and training doctors and we are not utilizing those resources because of some abhorrent "but then I might have to wait a month for a completely non-threatening medical concern" ideology. Yes, that's called efficient use of resources. Triage is a core part of healthcare. Sometimes that means someone else gets treated before you, and that's because they need it more than you do.
Please explain because it sounds like you might not have as good of insurance as you think. I have good insurance and pay basically nothing out of pocket beyond around $200 deductible.
I had the highest level of insurance from my company working for one of the big named ones. It took over six months to get a scheduled neurologist visit and that was after needing to wait four or so months to see a GP for a referral and some other things I needed done.
The fact that you immediately jumped to 'you might not have as good insurance as you think' tells me either you are fundamentally out of touch with how disastrous the system is or have had no need to engage with medical care outside of visiting a doctor once per year.
Your insurance is almost certainly a factor here, in that they require you to see a GP before escalating the issue to a specialist (one of the most highly-paid, I might add, who might have a busy schedule also). But what you've described is not uncommon for any insurance company.
Other countries with "universal healthcare" also have times consuming referral processes and wait lists for stuff. But they have it worse because there are more people seeking service, and less providing it (because profits are capped). I've heard plenty of stories of people in those countries dying on the wait lists for things that sound urgent or mundane, like appendectomy surgery. I even heard a few where people with ordinary problems like trouble walking were offered euthanasia. You should do a bit of research before you whine too much.
So, what would solve the problem of having to wait? Ultimately more supply of service providers, less demand, or an unlimited budget to pay for the scarce ones that exist.
> I've heard plenty of stories of people in those countries dying on the wait lists for things that sound urgent or mundane, like appendectomy surgery.
Emergency procedures like this wouldn't be put on a waitlist, you can just go to ER and settle administrative stuff later.
First of all, a problem should not have to take you to within an inch of your life to be treated.
Secondly, good luck with getting treatment in the ER! https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ont-teen-death-1.7616... Emergency rooms offer advanced first aid. They are not equipped to do specialist surgery. They have to call doctors in and stall you or even send you away until the proper care can be arranged.
That isn't even the case I was referring to. I've seen many stories and verbal accounts of people waiting for months for essential treatment in "universal healthcare" countries. Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of how supply and demand works would expect long waits.
Ok, let's say you have excellent insurance. That's great for you. But what about the rest of the US citizens? Should they be satisfied with zero or little insurance?
Maybe you didn't have good health insurance? If you have children or anything big happen, you want to be in major metro area of the US with broad network, expensive insurance. It's the best in the world, by miles.
The interstate road system in the US is world class. Airports and ports are publicly owned, and seem to function very well in most cases. Education including the infrastructure and buildings is managed incredibly well in many jurisdictions. There are many, many examples of well run public infrastructure. We only notice the failures because 1. they are an easy punching bag 2. they are noteworthy because we expect them not to fail.
It is hardly a maxim that public operation of infrastructure is incompetent, and I would argue that "often" is not the right word.
Many airports and ports are privately owned in the US. Much more infrastructure is privately owned than you might realize, including water systems, sewage, roads, bridges, ports, railway, pipelines etc.
Agreed, and much of that private infrastructure is mismanaged as well.
The point I was making is that public or private management is not a determining factor in the competence of infrastructure management. That is the point from the GP that I was rebutting.
While it's hard to prove in any water tight way, folks who understand infrastructure management will tell you it is a determining factor all things considered (ie, cost included).
This is common mythology but it's a bit more complicated than that if you look at the data. Student performance is highly correlated with their parent's socio-economic status – a trend going back roughly a century in studies – and our educational system includes a wider range of students differing in both SES and, starting around that same time period, mainstreaming of many disabilities which used to get kids excluded.
That means that when you're making comparisons to either the past or other countries now, you want to compare cohort-matched groups. If your area has a bunch of poor brown kids used to leave school for jobs in the 8th grade and are now going all the way through graduation, that looks like the schools are getting worse even though the school's educational practices haven't changed and the problem you really want to solve is poverty or social mobility. This is especially true for international comparisons if you have things like tests where the population in one country going in is highly selective but broader somewhere else – everyone's acting in good faith but you still have distortion due to sampling bias.
The situation is similar: if a kid with dyslexia, ADHD, etc. in the 1960s would have been pushed out but now they're included, if you're looking at the global average it looks like test scores have gone down but if you look at subgroups of the student population you'll see that the top performers are still doing well and what changed was that another group was added.
At my son's school and some of the schools I went to as a kid, the subgroup breakdowns on stats are really stark: the kids from stable, middle-class or better groups do fine but the children of immigrants who are still working on their English skills struggle – and the lesson I've drawn is that we should have more support available for them outside of regular classes because it's such a powerful amplifier for everything else.
This feels like Churchill's democracy quote applies:
"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time"
It has been said that public operation of infrastructure is the worst form of operation of infrastructure except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
It's gone fine.
It's always fun to hear about the wonders of privatization where everyone conveniently ignores that the vast majority of private businesses fail miserably. Over 50 percent in five years. Mostly due to mismanagement of money, the thing they are supposed to be better at. The rate is even higher (80-90 percent) if we were to look at small businesses.
We are all aware that public projects can fail. However, it does not logically follow that because some public projects fail, that all public projects fail, or even that most fail. Nor does it logically follow that because some private projects succeed, that all private projects will succeed.
Your LLM mentions two examples of failed public airports. Counterpoint: ATL is the worlds busiest airport by a few different metrics, and it is publicly owned and managed. So are most (maybe all?) of the rest of the worlds busiest airports. What does that mean?
By analogy: just because a person doubles down on a misinformed take using an LLM's output as evidence, that everything they think and know is false and misinformed by LLMs is not a foregone conclusion. It would be silly for me to think that someone that uses bad arguments once, or the same bad argument repeatedly in an online thread, is always going to be wrong.
You could do us all a service if you used your chatGPT account to learn about the basics of formal logic and sound arguments instead of spamming this thread with the same response from a machine that you asked for a biased output.
All over Europe state utilities were privatized over the past 30 years or so. Has it been an improvement? Not really, things just got more complicated and more expensive. Rail especially is a disaster. Upgrading the electric and telecom grid is made more difficult because of all the (supposedly) competing utilities.
OK, that didn't really do a comparison. But here are the examples that are considered better run than corporate infrastructure:
Singapore MRT (Mass Rapid Transit)
Fully government-owned and operated through Temasek holdings. Known worldwide for punctuality, efficiency, affordability, and cleanliness. Consistently outperforms privatized systems like the UK railways in reliability and customer satisfaction.
Paris Métro & RATP (France)
State-owned, with fares subsidized for accessibility. High ridership, integration with buses and trams, and affordable tickets outperform privatized systems in cost to the public.
Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (USA)
The largest municipal utility in the U.S. Provides electricity and water at lower rates than surrounding private utilities (like PG&E), and is often more reliable due to public accountability.
Norway’s Energy Sector (Statkraft, state-owned hydropower)
Provides cheap, renewable electricity. Profits flow back to the public treasury instead of shareholders. Norway has among the lowest power costs in Europe.
Germany’s Municipal Waterworks
Almost all publicly owned; provide safe, affordable, and reliable water with strong reinvestment in infrastructure, outperforming privatized systems in the UK (like Thames Water, plagued by leaks and debt).
Singapore Changi Airport
State-owned and consistently ranked as the world’s best airport. Clean, efficient, profitable, and reinvests in expansion. Private-run airports often prioritize concessions and profits over passenger experience.
Dallas–Fort Worth Airport (USA)
A publicly owned joint venture between Dallas and Fort Worth. It is one of the busiest and best-managed airports in the world, consistently profitable and reinvesting in facilities.
ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation)
While not "utilities" per se, ISRO’s infrastructure (satellite launch facilities, tracking networks) is a prime example of state-run infrastructure outperforming expectations at extraordinary low cost.
Has launched satellites at a fraction of the budget of Western private and public space agencies, and even provides launch services internationally.
There are many more such examples. Public ownership tends to work best in natural monopolies (water, power grids, rail systems, airports, healthcare infrastructure), where competition doesn’t function well and the priority is universal service rather than profit.
When you include costs, "better run" takes on a whole new meaning.
But, more simply - no one is suggesting all public ownership is bad, or all private is good. There are situations where governments have just decided they aren't doing a good job running something (all things considered) and that the amount of money they'd get for selling it is a better option all things considered.
Could you list some examples of where public infra hasn't "gone well"? Because from my own view of things it's the exact opposite, whenever anything became privatized that shouldn't have been (rail, water, electricity, public transportation, healthcare) it inevitably follows the same churn as all the other things getting enshittified continuously.
The national railway in the Netherlands is a great example of this. They've privatized but with gov't subsidies, yet there's less trains, less people getting moved by the remaining trains, ticket prices skyrocketing YoY, worse service, rail workers getting shafted and basically being forced to go on strike in order to improve conditions. They're (NS) a monopoly too and handle something like 95% of all rail traffic within the Netherlands.
I believe the UK is going through a similar issue, where their railways are now privatized and in turn it's lead to increasingly worse service despite there being plenty of competition in the market in the form of many rail companies.
This lolbert fantasy of the "free" market being good for literally everything, including critical public infrastructure is a complete farce.
The basic problem with the way you are thinking about it with respect to the national railway is that you don't seem to include cost to the government (ie, the people) to run it. Much infrastructure might appear to be "well run" by the government until you see the massive hole in the their budget. Sometimes the service has to get worse. When the government decides some piece of infrastructure must "pay for itself", they often sell it or hand over management to a private entity as a way to shift blame.
There are many private companies/PE firms etc who are competitively bidding to own these assets. It's not some license to print money, they are low return low risk assets.
Erh... if a public service is publically deficit financed (no debts incurred) and not for profit (lower priced) those are two positives, not negatives as your generated answer seems to suggest.
No, it's not positive. It's just a choice - do you want users of said infrastructure subsidized by non-users or not? Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes no.
The railway system in the Netherlands is not privatized. The structure is publicly owned but operated under a concession model where both state-owned and private companies may run services. There are some regional operators that are private companies, but by far the largest part, NS and Pro-rail, are wholly government owned.
I'm not in favor of privatizing a natural monopoly like railway infrastructure, but in the case of NS I'm not sure privatization would be worse than what we have now: "market friendly" salaries for management, and yearly losses go to the tax payer.
Yup, they are low cost. But not zero. The money is still owed, too. The bondholders are not going to just let the public take the asset back because people have been paying for the service all these years.
They worked at it for a long time before launch, started with a very narrow product and only had customers they actually knew (reduces fraud a lot), worked like crazy, operated in a market where the competition was abysmal.
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