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.

Romanian here. Can confirm.

Uh, I hate to break it to you, but Mini-split IS air conditioning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I have a good friend I'm still in touch with from high school who lives with his family on Long Island, New York. This is in the New York City metro area. So he and his wife bought a house approximately 30 years ago and he was at the time bragging to me about how he didn't have air conditioning in it at all because it was "too expensive to pay for when you only need it for one week a year". He did eventually cave in and they have some type of air conditioning now.

Very short version here. Leo Apotheker was the CEO of HP at the time of the deal. He pushed hard, really hard, for this deal. He either via intimidation or orders or both made it clear that any attempt from within HP to stop this deal or look more closely at it would result in termination. The HP board did approve this deal. Apotheker was a sort of desperation CEO at HP, having almost a year ago replaced a guy who left over some ethics stuff about expenses. HP's stock plummeted during Apotheker's time as CEO and he was replaced about a month after the deal. Yes, there were huge warning signs at the time about Autonomy. Months before the deal went through, some investment analyst wrote a paper that basically said "Autonomy is cooking the books. Their revenues reports have to be made up because...." The same guy also wrote a report on Chinese coffee company Luckin Coffee and a few months after that report said that Luckin had to be making up their numbers, it came out that they were indeed making up their numbers. Luckin is now delisted from major US stock markets and trades as a risky over the counter (OTC) stock. After Apotheker left HP, HP employees were able to examine the purchase and the Autonomy books and discovered that their revenue reports were fraudulent. My guess is that Apotheker was desperate to get Autonomy as he viewed it as his last chance to save his job.

For those who don't know, at one point there were 6 major airlines in the USA that covered the US from coast to coast. There are only 3 now. Here's who gobbled up who:
Delta bought Northwest Airlines
United bought Continental Airlines
American bought US Airways
Southwest Airlines is a really big small airline because it only cover major US cities.

Of the above, by the time of the various mergers, US Airways was easily the most consumer hostile major US airline. Many of their fares didn't earn miles at all, as I found out to my horror when I booked a flight on them intended to earn miles with a partner airline on the flight. Their whole attitude was basically you can over pay for your ticket if you want miles or you can get nothing. They had a branded credit card and it was horrible, offering the lowest miles accrual rates in the industry. So it made perfect sense that American would buy them as American was easily the 2nd most customer hostile airline in the USA. I can tell you that American does not value their customers at all and if they have a way to squeeze more money out of a customer and make that customer's experience worse, they will do it. United has at times been some incompetent in dealing with customers although I think they do care about them. Delta did value their customers until recently. Now their CEO, much to my surprise, seems to be fully committed to screwing all of them over.

Delta's biggest problem in my opinion was that for many years they made it too easy to earn special status. I'm not exaggerating when I say that every Delta flight has at least half the passengers with some kind of special Delta status. Even I have a special status with Delta, although it is rock bottom dead last of all statuses, through a branded credit card. I read the other day that Delta is testing a new type of screw the customers business class ticket where the default business class ticket won't give you anything unless you want to pay for it. No assigned seating. No checked baggage. Are there really customers who want to pay thousands of dollars for a ticket without assigned seating and no checked bags? Delta seems to think so. Or they simply now want all business customers to pay extra for those. And this demand pricing for sure means that you as a Delta customer will always get the worst price they think they can make you pay if you want to fly with them. I fly United sometimes and in this race to the bottom where Delta and America seem determined to see who can piss off the most customers, I guess going forward I'll just start using United more if they end up staying out of this.

I can tell you from personal experience that this is entirely correct. My last job was working for a Fortune 500 company with offices scattered all over the USA and in some foreign countries. A severance agreement that still has a bit to run prevents me from saying who they are. We had an office in a Los Angeles suburb. Special rules applied to those employees that didn't apply anywhere else in the company. For example, they were the only US employees allowed to carry over over more than 5 vacation days into a new year. As best I could tell, if they had a limit on carryover vacation days, it was 30 days. I lost a day of vacation at the end of a year because I miscalculated how many days I needed to burn before the end of the year and I accrued one more day than I expected, so I had 6 days to carry over instead of 5. I lost that 6th day on Jan. 1. Unfortunately we had so many people out during the last week of the year that once it became clear I was going to lose the day, there was no way I could take it off. No problem for our California employees who in the same situation would simply have carried over the 6th day.

Thanks, those are very interesting links with solid information.

I have a friend who works for a US company that has started hiring remote workers in Nepal because "people in India are too expensive". He has no idea what they will do when people in Nepal get "too expensive". His company basically froze hiring in India and while the current Indian workers aren't in any immediate danger of losing their jobs, he told me all of them got moved into contracting jobs that his company can end at any time. He was in low level management for a while and in his current job he is in a position to know that.

According to the article, the hit rate of drones isn't all that amazing, either.

Artillery pretty much works by saturating the area with explosions until some of them hit something. So a low hit rate is expected. Maybe a decade after the war ends we'll get some actual numbers to compare to other theaters.

That is correct, though it doesn't seem to have affected the course of the war noticeably.

Source?

That's a bold claim.

The article I linked to speaks about that. Essentially: Yes. But: Not the cheap stuff used, and stuff like fiber optics come with their own drawbacks.

The article I linked to includes prices.

The COVID mRNA vaccines were the culmination of decades of research into genetic vaccines that could be in essence engineered to target a selected antigen without the years of trial and error that are required by the methods we have been using since the 1950s. Within days of the virus genome being published, they had a vaccine design, the months it took to get to the public were taken up with studies of the safety and effectiveness of the heretofore untested technology, ramping up production, and preparing for the distribution of a medicine that required cryogenic storage.

It would be unreasonable not to give the Trump administration credit for not mucking up this process. But the unprecedented speed of development wasnâ(TM)t due to Trump employing some kind of magical Fuhrermojo. It was a stroke good fortune that when the global pandemic epidemiologists have been worried about arrived, mRNA technology was just at the point where you could use it. Had it arrived a decade earlier the consequences would have been far worse, no matter who was president.

The lesson isnâ(TM)t that Trump is some kind of divine figure who willed a vaccine into existence, itâ(TM)s that basic research that is decades from practical application is important.

Meanwhile, some reports from the frontlines indicate that while drones are ubiquituous, they aren't the game-changer the tech-industry wants them to be.

tl;dr essential bits: a) most drone strikes could have been done by other, cheaper weapons. b) drones are an unreliable weapon due to jamming, dependency on weather and light and many technical failures.

Like DEC and Sun Microsystems, Nokia is a lesson to future people on how not to run a business. The reasons for all of those companies to fail is different, but the bottom line is that the business around them changed quickly and they all had no answer for it.

Prior to iPhone coming out, I had Nokia phones. If you're a young person, you might be shocked at how phones were before the iPhone. There was no touch screen. You had to use the number pad to input letters. To spell "cat" you had to press 2 three times to skip A, skip B and get to C. Then press 2 once to get A. Then press 8 once to get T. I remember buying a pretty expensive Nokia phone that was state of the art but I bought it months before the iPhone came out. I remember being stunned at how much better the iPhone was with its touch screen and actual keyboard you could use. Nokia literally had no answer for this. None of their phones could do this. A few years earlier, Nokia had driven out almost all their competition. Ever heard of Ericsson? They were big at one time but they couldn't keep up with Nokia. Nokia crushed them. Nokia was all things to all people. You want an expensive state of the art phone? We can sell you that. You want a garbage quality cheap phone that only makes phone calls and can barely send and receive text message? Here at Nokia, we are the freaking kings of garbage phones! No market is so small and so terrible that we won't compete in it. Apple did not care about selling "phones that are only phones" in, say, Burkina Faso. They let Nokia have it. And then stole Nokia's share in more developed countries and it reached the point where all Nokia had left was the garbage phone market in the most undeveloped countries on earth.