They cost more money per year to keep alive while they're dying, and they contribute less to the economy (because they die early). The indirect costs of their mortality are far greater than the direct savings.
Speaking from europe where healthcare is basically free.
Medical care for these patients is extremely expensive. Each surgery costs around 50 to 60 thousand euro and it's not uncommon to get 2 or 3 of those before dying. Add to that the frequent visits to the doctor's office, the oxygen tanks if needed, the medications, etc. The other option would be to just "let them die" but that's not what we decided to do as a society.
The trend is that we are now able to keep them alive slightly longer, ( at a higher cost) and that they start developing symptoms slightly later thus reducing the potential "benefit" for society.
But, per that same study, "society" would net — inclusive, among other things, of pension funds not disbursed — lose ~€70k per individual, while saving less than €5k on medical expenses.
This is true, and I once quoted sources like it as a smoker that thought sin taxes were too high, but the larger truth is that smoking should be discouraged because we should make it socially unacceptable to stop our children from getting hooked like we did. I quit. It's good that I did for its own sake. We're not just numbers on a policy planner's spreadsheet.
The story you linked above, with over 170 upvotes and less than a day old appears nowhere on the first 5 pages of HN.
It's hard to imagine HN suppressing any similar story from a similarly credible source about a million people being detained in any predominantly white or English-speaking country.
There's a lot of money for YC to make in China, but this is a million human lives. Please at least try to think about that.
(And yes, the story is certainly drawing flags from Chinese patriots and wumaodang alike)
That doesn't reflect how HN is moderated at all. Your claim about who's flagging is equally made-up. Edit: the claim in your profile is also completely untrue.
In fact you have a long history of making things up about HN moderation, posting them, and continuing to repeat the false claims when corrected. You also have a long history of using HN for political battle about China. If you keep abusing the site this way, we're eventually going to ban you. Dramatic allegations about "censorship" and "suppression" don't immunize you against having to follow the rules like other users.
Seeing good-faith comments which break no rules I'm aware of being flagged is truly disappointing.
It's your forum and if you choose rule by law rather than rule of law, I am powerless to improve the situation. In ten years time, if you remember any of this, I hope that you might have a new perspective this topic.
Users flagged the comment. No moderator touched it.
It's time you stopped posting these tedious harangues, which baselessly insinuate corruption while sneakily pretending to be fair-minded ("cannot prove any wrong-doing of course").
Nothing sneaky is involved. Like you and most people, I believe I am fair minded. There's no pretending involved, either.
It is very surprising users would have even seen a comment buried deep in an old thread within minutes, but it is possible and I'm inclined to believe you in this case (though the next most likely case is a 五毛党 vote brigade). Nothing in the comment was a violation of guidelines, nor was the previous comment at all what it was maligned as.
That said, it's now clear that the very attempt "to voice minority opinions I believe to be true" is counter to the goals of the forum. While they're ideas and issues where one voice has a relative chance of making a difference, they're also very likely to lead to flamewars. It's hard to let go of the human rights issues, especially those I've seen some of first hand, but it's not productive here.
I'd be lying if I said YC's recent moves weren't terrifying, but I'll give up on voicing it in this way.
> I think this is all premised on the belief that American corporations somehow have the moral obligation (and right) to change the way things in a different country work.
> China has its own functioning tech ecosystem, so entrant companies need to play by its rules if they want to make a profit there. Period.
Nazi Germany also had "its own functioning tech ecosystem". So did Stalin and Mao's even more murderous regimes.
Straight to Godwin's law (in this case, I think it's germane).
My argument is about American corporations imposing morality (or thinking they can). Corporations' main motivation is profit, not improving human rights. Google doesn't go to China with the primary intention of improving human rights, rather to make a profit from Chinese citizens.
Google would have to pay Chinese taxes to operate there, their presence puts money into the hands of the CCP, an entity the author of the article doesn't approve of. Google has no leverage: China has its own perfectly capable search engine[s].
So as I see it, the options are:
1. American corporation enters China, plays by rules, causes no political change.
2. American corporation doesn't enter China. Local Chinese companies fill the void, causing no political change.
In neither case is any political change effected. If the bemoaning comes from the point of view of "well Google could have changed something," I think that's naïve and I'd like to see evidence of this happening successfully
If it comes from the perspective of "Google is capitulating or funding a government that I as the author/Westerners don't support in general", then that's an argument involving moral absolutism, which is a longer debate.
If you have time, I'd like to hear your thoughts on what you think Google should be doing.
But by entering the Chinese market, Google allows itself to be influenced by the requirements of The Party. At this point the main motivation of profit can be turned into whatever The Party wants outside China.
It's time to give a spotlight to NeoVim that puts efforts into getting rid of legacy craft while maintaining compatibility to move vi past 50 years of usage.
Last time I checked, there's no clear advantage from users' perspective for now but some plugins have started targeting it as the primary platform and also a few GUI are being developed too.
C shell could have been the de facto standard had the parser not been buggy as hell and had there been proper facilities for stdin and stdout like in Bourne shells.
tcsh is my default shell, but I never program in it because of “C shell considered harmful”[1]. I write my programs in original Bourne shell instead for maximum portability.
> Boston is the world-center of biotech startups and VC
Beijing is likely far ahead. Beijing's total VC investment is much higher, it accounts for over 1/3 of Chinese domestic VC and Chinese firms have accounted for over 40% of the biotech investment in US drug startups in the beginning of this year.
I don't think that's true. China is doing some amazing things in biotech, and they have perhaps the best young drug discovery talent base in the world, but most VC and innovative startups are in the US for now.
Most of the Chinese VC investment has been in Series B or later stage rounds in US-based companies (some UK / EU as well). Most Series A rounds are led by US biotech VCs, and these VCs seed most of the funded startups as well. There are some large Series A rounds led by Chinese VCs (mostly Sequoia China), but not as many as by US VCs [0] -- disclosure: i created this database, it's still in alpha
There have been a few mega-rounds for Chinese biotechs recently, but it seems like a lot of those are aimed at developing Chinese versions of drugs originally developed in the west. There are exceptions of course, like Legend
Don't mean to knock China's biotech scene, but Beijing does not seem "far ahead" to me
For PizzaGate, Sandy Hook, and his many numerous other acts of slander and incitement against private individuals, he's being sued up the wazoo. (These acts are torts, not crimes.)
For calling for Hillary's and Obama's assassination? The Secret Service investigated and determined that it would be too difficult to prosecute in the absence of someone actually taking Jones up on the offer. (If someone had, we wouldn't be having this discussion right now--he'd be serving life in a SuperMax for conspiracy.)
> (If someone had, we wouldn't be having this discussion right now--he'd be serving life in a SuperMax for conspiracy.)
Pure speculation, and unlikely at that. There were dozens of assassination attempts against past presidents, not once has anyone been imprisoned for allegedly inciting the attempt.
This comment, and your previous one as well, are trying to criminalize acts of speech that are protected by the First Amendment.
Which is why there are no current criminal proceedings against Jones.
> You cherry picked and forgot the first line which puts the rest in context.
How uncharitable of you to write that. I didn't "forget" it. It wasn't relevant to my point. The first line was specific to this situation, but the final two I quoted represent a very universal and timeless position.
In fact, ancient Athens suffered greatly when "silence the voices of the enemies of democracy" became the dominant position in their society:
You're "point" was a snarky off the cuff one-liner.
Universal and Timeless position is a stretch. It is not black and white, it is grey and the first line in OPs comment put context to that grey.
While it would be lovely to have a democracy with an educated rational electorate resilent to hateful demagogues and other threats to the stability of that democracy, we are not there. In that situation you can let it fester or reduce the impact.
Yes it can be abused and we have to be careful. But we are in a Paradox of Tolerance situation.
The larger concern here isn't the laws of the US. It's the power that internet giants have to shape the opinions that flow through the media.
That power cannot be underestimated. Consider how the leaders of both China and Russia have overwhelming popular support and poll better than any democratic leaders in the world. Google doesn't have anywhere near the influence over media that the CCP does, but its influence is considerable and its reach is nearly global.
