I'm not worried if we're being complacent, rather are we being complacent *enough*? (shrugs)

(yawns) Maybe we should schedule a meeting to discuss the pros and cons of checking our storage to see if it's exposed.

(consults calendar) Hmm, looks like the bigwigs are out this week. They won't have anything useful to contribute, but get upset if they're excluded from something important enough to be in the news. Hmm, next week a couple of key people are out for training. Well, the 15th is recuperation from GoT season 8, episode 1, and tax day, so --- okay, how about Tuesday the 16th at 3PM Central so we can include our West coast folks after their lunch but catch the East coast folks before they go home?

The new Wendy's campaign will be called "What is beef?" and show young folks enjoying the juicy faux meat burgers.

Six months from now: "While Facebook wants to comply with this subpoena, that information no longer exists. It was purged long before any subpoena was conceived much less issued."

5400 rpm HDDs? Let's not get crazy now, there are plenty of ways to make that a premium option

*4500rpm HDD, 1TB base model
*5400rpm HDD, 4TB (premium add-on), add $100
*7200rpm HDD, 8TB (super premium), add $500

Then you can add on the SSD options for ultra premium. ;)

Nobody uses phonograph (wax) cylinders anymore? They'll play in any standard Edison cylinder player. There's something to be said for more newfangled technologies like wire recording or minidisc.

Not sure why Venmo is in the list but Square Cash isn't.
10% cash back at Whole Foods. Or $1 per cup of coffee everywhere.

Now how the Hell are we supposed to rip on someone's shitty code and general incompetence?

Maintainer's Hurtful Comment: "We don't merge kernel code just because user space was written by a retarded monkey on crack."

Contributor's Complaint: "[Piercing whine] The Maintainer's comment was harassing and hurtful by ridiculing my autism and other learning disabilities when calling me retarded, belittled both me and my contributions as unimportant by revealing my minority status as an uplifted rhesus monkey, and has created an exclusionary and hostile working environment by holding me up to ridicule by publishing private information about my struggle with non-prescription drugs."

Enforcement Kangaroos: "After careful review and deliberation, this Technical Advisory Board has determined that the while the Maintainer in question has maintained the kernel with an exceptional level of quality and transparency for many years. Further, the Technical Advisory Board finds that the Contributor has made no positive contribution of any kind an any point to this Project and an objective analysis has shown that the Contributor has proven to be an ongoing hindrance to this Project.

"Nevertheless, despite the facts uncovered by this review, the Technical Advisory Board has determined that the Maintainer has not followed or enforced the Code of Conduct in good faith, continues to express public distain and disregard for the Contributor. The TAB has decided that while the Maintainer's comments are objectively true and the Maintainer's actions are objectively justifiable, that the Maintainer is, effective immediately, permanently removed from the Project because the appearance of meanness is more important than the actual success of the Project."

This is good news and it's rare for someone to acknowledge abusive behavior, much less do something concrete and productive about it. Linus Torvalds has recognized that (a) his bullying behavior has been counterproductive to collective work, that (b) his abuse has had real consequences for real people, driving some out of Linux development entirely, and (c) he's taking concrete steps to address his problems.

Only because he was addressing his binary friend.

Disabled people, particularly those with cerebral palsy, Parkinson's disease, and other neuromotor conditions, are absolutely going to be misidentified as drunk and discriminated against by Uber. Uber currently has a crappy track record serving the disabled, refusing service to those with wheelchairs, guide dogs, and so on. The drunk hail an Uber when they shouldn't be driving. Many disabled hail an Uber because, sober or drunk, they cannot drive at all.

For federal IT folks the penalty is public execution.

The things you choose to engage on is kind of odd.

That observation was very much of a tangential to my argument. I was speaking more generally there as McKinsey has published several high level analyses of healthcare for public consumption and you seemed to be making a broader statement (RE: "I'll rely on McKinsey"). I know a a good number of current and former McKinsey people and stand by what I said.

Jean Drouin is in his mid40s

We're about the same age and surely know several people in common between Princeton, Stanford, and McKinsey. I would not call him a kid now, but at the time the particular analysis you cited was published (2008) he would have only been a few years out of school. Further, there's a good chance much of the (percieved) scutwork has performed by people even more junior than he was at the time.

The point is not that I have any particular reason to believe any of them are stupid or particularly naive, but that I don't put much weight on so-called expertise generally (especially not when I have better information to go on) and even less on this particular "mile wide inch deep" approach to the world. Getting to the bottom of topics like this tends to require a lot close independent study of the details and the McKinseys of the world basically represent the antithesis of this approach (not usually a lot of value add).

And if you think what you're linking to is "science", you're indulging in more of the same

It is the approach the makes it science whereas appealing to expert opinion is pretty much the opposite of science.

I think you may be confusing me with someone who gives a shit about arguing economics with you.

In other words, "I don't have any substantive objections and my sole contribution here is to blithely paste links to widely cited documents that just about everyone has already seen". Why even bother?

I'll rely on McKinsey and Stiglitz, thanks.

I'll take science over expertise any day. I am especially wary when the so-called expert analysis is a little more than the rudimentary analysis of a bunch of kids fresh out of school with only a skin-deep exposure to these topics (I have known many such people, including peers of these authors, and while most of them are reasonably intelligent people, their bluster far exceeds their subject matter expertise).

As for Stiglitz, he has not published anything on healthcare and shared any sort of rigorous analysis, so far as I can tell, so I see no reason to defer to his professed (left wing) preferences. He has, however, published stuff closer to his knitting with Amartya Sen, Jean-Paul Fitouss, and others that pertains to the discussion. Indeed, they recommend AIC and AHDI over and above GDP as an indicator of material living conditions.

Here are just a few instructive quotes:

"GDP mainly measures market production.... However, it has often been treated as if it were a measure of economic well-being. Conflating the two can lead to misleading indications about how well-off people are...Material living standards are more closely associated with measures of net national income, real household income and consumption – production can expand while income decreases or vice versa when account is taken of depreciation, income flows into and out of a country, and differences between the prices of output and the prices of consumer products.
[snip]
In a world of globalization, there may be large differences between the income of a country’s citizens and measures of domestic production, but the former is clearly more relevant for measuring the well-being of citizens...the household sector is particularly relevant for our considerations, and for households the income perspective is much more appropriate than measures of production.
[snip]
While it is informative to track the performance of economies as a whole, trends in citizens’ material living standards are better followed through measures of household income and consumption. Indeed, the available national accounts data shows that in a number of OECD countries real household income has grown quite differently from real GDP per capita, and typically at a lower rate. The household perspective entails taking account of payments between sectors, such as taxes going to government, social benefits coming from government, and interest payments on household loans going to financial corporations.
[snip]
Properly defined, household income and consumption should also reflect in-kind services provided by government, such as subsidized health care and educational services. A major effort of statistical reconciliation will also be required to understand why certain measures such as household income can move differently depending on the underlying statistical source"

Also, you mention Legatum as a data source

As a source? No, I don't think you don't understand. These services, of which Legatum is just one, have helpfully aggregated a wide variety of indicators from various 3rd parties that measure the sorts of lives that people live (health, happiness, material conditions, etc) and these indicators are overwhelmingly better predicted by household measures like AIC, the same measures that Stiglitz et al recommend, than GDP.

For instance:

Social Progress Index: r-squared and OLS.

World Happiness Survey: r-squared and OLS

Legatum: r-squared and OLS

The point, to be clear, is not that (self-reported) happiness or what have you causes more health spending, but that AIC and AHDI actually measure the household perspective and that these measures are theoretically and empirically more robust predictors of the behavior of a society than domestic production levels (GDP). Overwhelmingly, GDP only predicts "good" outcomes to the extent it predicts the household perspective, but once we have robust household measures (e.g., AIC, AHDI, etc) GDP tends to be insignificant to even a net negative on the margins (i.e., conditional on AIC, countries with more net exports, CFC, etc don't enjoy significantly better outcomes and often do worse in the great majority of cases)

In other words, it is not just luck that AIC or AHDI fully mediate GDP with respect to HCE, as we find the same patterns with just about anything else of significance, and these same measures quite well explain why the US spends as much as it does. Whether or not high US spending is "worth it" is another question entirely, but the evidence suggests this spending is not substantially a result of idiosyncratic features of the US health spending and that other countries behave very similarly with respect to the household perspective (despite essentially no relationship between spending and life expectancy amongst the OECD)

That's not much of an argument.

A few points:

1) Adjusted Household Disposable Income and Actual Individual Consumption are widely acknowledged by people that have studied this to be superior indicators of material living conditions. GDP is a measure of domestic production, full stop. It is not and was never intended to be a measure of resources actually available to households and it is the household perspective that matters here. GDP is often used as a proxy for these types of measures in lieu of better data, but they're not the same and they can and do deviate quite significantly for a number of reasons.

2) When it comes to predicting national health expenditures and other health system characteristics, these measures, AIC and AHDI, fully mediate GDP in multiple regression and in multiple specifications (much the same if one subtracts HCE from these household measures).

3) CMS uses a close analog to AHDI, disposable personal income, as the dominant exogenous variable in their long-term projections because their research and theory suggest it's much superior as a predictor.

4) These measures are also much stronger predictors of essentially all other measures of living conditions (e.g., life expectancy, life satisfaction, satisfaction with financial conditions, poverty rates, access to clean water, etc). Indeed, if one sets about systematically comparing indicators from organizations like Social Progress Index, Gallup/WVS, Legatum, and others, at least 90% of these indicators have markedly higher r-squared with AIC than GDP. Likewise, in OLS, AIC clearly mediates GDP or, if one disaggregates GDP, the remaining components of GDP (e.g.,net exports, CFC, etc).

5) There is also tremendous consistency in consumption patterns if one looks at disaggregated SNA data by function (COICOP and the like). The patterns the US exhibits in consumption across individual categories/functions is highly consistent with its aggregate AIC, adjusted household disposable income, and so on. The US consumes much more of almost everything in real terms (especially those goods and services that are clearly elastic at a national level). It certainly consumes more in most categories than the handful of significant countries with higher GDP, so it can hardly be surprising that the US would also consume much more healthcare (one of the most elastic categories with respect to national income).

Note: These results are also consistent with what we find if we look at other sorts of more granular measures (e.g., number of rooms per capita, household possessions, private car ownership rates, frequency eating out, etc).