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Comment Re: This is why we need public health insurance (Score 4, Informative) 106

You should be careful of taking the claims of the Chinese Communist Party at face value. China has universal health insurance, but it is administered in a way that many people canâ(TM)t access critical care *services*.

For example if you are a rural guest worker in a city, you have health insurance which covers cancer treatment, but it requires you to go back to your home village to get that treatment, which probably isnâ(TM)t available there. If you are unemployed you have a different health insurance program, but its reimbursement rate is so low that most unemployed people canâ(TM)t afford treatment.

Authoritarian governments work hard to manage appearances, not substance. This is a clear example. It sounds egalitarian to say everyone has the same health insurance, but the way they got there was to engineer a system that didnâ(TM)t require them to do the hard work of making medical care available to everyone.

If you want an example of universal healthcare, go across the strait to Taiwan, which instituted universal healthcare in the 90s and now has what many regard as the best system in the world.

Comment 1) not news, 2) better way to shut things down (Score 3, Interesting) 36

1) This isn't news. The "recent" announcement was posted a year ago. No new links have been added since 2018.

2) A better transition would be to make the forwarding non-automatic for a period of time. Keeping a non-auto-forwarding, read-only (no new entries) link-forwarding service in place for a long time shouldn't be a burden for a company like Google.

As a courtesy, it would be nice to include an explaination/warning that the "short link" was set up in or before 2018 and that the destination link may or may not be what it was back then.

Comment Luckey's answer (Score 1) 229

Luckey is shooting for "turtles all the way down," or, as I put it, "doing it with nothing that is imported at any stage of manufacturing" to the extent humanly possible. Or, in the words of the Federal Trade Commission quoted in the article:

"For a product to be called Made in USA, or claimed to be of domestic origin without qualifications or limits on the claim, the product must be 'all or virtually all' made in the U.S. [which] means that the final assembly or processing of the product occurs in the United States, all significant processing that goes into the product occurs in the United States, and all or virtually all ingredients or components of the product are made and sourced in the United States. That is, the product should contain no - or negligible - foreign content."

Comment What does "made in America" really mean? (Score 2) 229

Does it mean "in name only," where everything except the final screw in the case is done overseas, then someone in America does the "final final assembly" by screwing in the final screw?

Does it mean what we normally thing of as "final assembly," where the circuit boards and non-electronic parts are made overseas, shipped to America, then put together in America?

Does it mean "one more level down," with an American factory soldering the components onto the circuit boards then doing the "final assembly"?

Does it mean making the major chips and maybe custom-formed plastic or metal parts domestically but using imported "commodity/jellybean" electronics, screws, and other similar parts? What counts as a "major chip?" What counts as a "commodity/jellybean part?"

Does it mean manufacturing every manufactured part domestically down to the most commodity screw, but using raw materials that may have come from overseas?

Does it mean using only domestic plastic, glass, and steel, but not caring if the manufacturers of the plastic, glass, and steel use imported feed-stocks (e.g. oil, sand, iron/iron ore, other industrical feed-stocks).

Does it mean doing it with nothing that is imported at any stage of manufacturing save the air, water, or energy that may have crossed a border before it entered the manufacturing process?

How you answer this question makes a difference in the cost of the final product and, likely, the premium the "Make American Manufacturing Great Again" crowd will say they will pay for the final product.

Comment Re:Hopefully (Score 2) 72

If you make it illegal to pay ransomware, what is the business model?

The business model becomes "wreck havoc on companies that are prohibited by law from paying up, to send a message to other countries to not pass such laws" followed by attacks on companies in those countries, accompanied by a "we've got a deal you can't refuse" ransom-payment offer.

Comment Trust and don't verify Re:peak hype (Score 1) 125

We are fully into "Trust, and don't even try to verify" territory at that point.

I've been trusting-and-not-verifying the output of my compilers for almost* my entire programming career.

Someday "AI" vibe-coding will get to that point. For some specific use cases, we may already be there.

* There were those times I suspected a compilier bug or was just curious how the complier implemented something, but both are very rare these days.

Comment But will it be real Coke? (Score 2) 1

Will it be "another product" or will it be "The Real Thing?"

The closest thing we have to "The Real Thing" these days is "Passover Coke" which is available only around Passover and only in certain stores. Look for the yellow cap and "cane sugar" in the ingredients list.

I'm not sure if "Passover Coke" is 100% identical to the pre-corn-syrup coke of the before-times, but it's close enough for me.

The biggest advantage of "Passover Coke" over "Mexican Coke" is the price: It costs the same as regular Coke in 2L plastic bottles. Mexican Coke comes in 0.5L glass bottles with a much-higher cost-per-half-liter.

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