I don't get what the author is trying to do here. I mean he complains that talking about the limit of a sequence is too asbstract and unfamiliar to most people so the explaination is not satisfaying. But then names drop the notion of an Archimedean group and introduces with a big ol' handwave the hyperreals to solve this very straightforward highschool math problem…
Now don't get me wrong, it is nice and good to have blogs presenting these math ideas in a easy if not rigorous way by attaching them to known concept. Maybe that was the real intend here, the 0.99… = 1 "controversy" is just bait, and I am too out of the loop to get the new meta.
Have you? Humans can use anything as a form of oppression, they don't even need tools, they were oppressing the masses with "traditions" for millennia. I am not saying AI tools don't supercharge these things, but the solution to this problem is not crippling technology, it's to improve society. The printing press was used to both distribute hate speech and progressive manifestoes.
Who proposed "crippling" AI tools? Or "blaming" them?
We're still at the step of raising awareness, and that is achieved by making it clear that the situation and the trends are really fucking bad, no ifs and buts and maybes about it.
This tech as a body pillow stuff is really grating to me. Tech doesn't care about you, tech doesn't know you, tech doesn't need you -- other people (and arguably animals) do, right now.
Seems like we are getting to different conclusion from the same premise. Both agree AI tech isn't the problem, the system we live in it is. So I don't understand why should AI take up so much space in public discourse while we should be talking about how to fix the larger societal issues.
Elections are not, and should not, be the be-all end-all of a functionning democraty. Otherwise you just have an elective aristocracy.
And to be clear, I'm not saying pure polling driven policy is the solution, but saying politician should outright ignore them because not legally binding is a very weird stance.
If anything, the origin of the 5th republic under its founding president used referendums to validate the president's actions. He literally resigned after losing a referendum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_de_Gaulle#Retirement.
> You are attacking the wrong target. You are missing the big picture.
This is rich comming from someone putting Melenchon, basically an old school socialist (in the werstern Europe sense), in the same bag as Le Pen and Zemmour who are as far-right as it gets in Europe.
I agree that the situation is not very readable, but at least let's try to have a point of view consistent with the political history of the last few decades.
Yet there are lot of striking similarities. Lying, distorting reality to the absurd, openly supporting dictators, smoke-screen tactics, obstruction, inversion of reality, accusing others of things they are guilty. "Macron is a wanabee dictator!!".
In February 2022, Zemour, MLP and Mélenchon were all supporting Putin, his stance against the "evil US", saying that Putin would never invade Ukraine, that it was all US propaganda being spoon-fed to Europe. Then the invasion happened. Then they blamed the invasion on US, of course, and questioned the reports of war crimes, and justified Russia invasion by saying it was defending against "NATO aggression". But then, when Russia started to loose, they became "pacifists", saying NATO was prolonging the war by helping Ukraine...
If they were Russian assets, they wouldn't behave much differently, would they?
Same smell on both sides of the political spectrum. Who would have thought? Crazy, right? Like, imagine if far-right Hitler made a secret pact with the communist Soviet Union. Sounds familiar?
Le Pen is not "as far-right as it gets" and neither is Zemmour.
Melenchon is very left-wing, started as a Trostkist and is good friend Venezuela's Maduro, against the capitalist system, etc. So if you think Le Pen is extreme on one side then Melenchon has to be equally extreme on the other side.
So did more than half of the socialist party elit (elephant du PS), even freaking Cambadelis, are you suggesting he’s far left to ?
> against the capitalist system
Well yes, almost by definition of being on the left I would argue.
> So if you think Le Pen is extreme on one side then Melenchon has to be equally extreme on the other side.
No, this is a false equivalence. I mean the far-left as a political position does exist in France, but it is not represented by Melenchon who is still largely a socialist, although the actual socialist party has significantly shifted rightward in the 10's so there is a perception issue there.
The socialist party effectively no longer exists because its right wing has been absorbed by Macron and its left wing by Melenchon and friends. So now we're left with a large effectively far left group with Melenchon, Communist Party, LFI, etc.
My take on left-wing politics since the 1990s is that the fall of Communist/Solialist countries has made the old agenda difficult to sell so it's rehashed, repackaged, but at its core it's still the same. We've also seen that in the UK with Corbyn and McDonnell.
One thing in France is that it is usually better viewed to be far on the left than far on the right. For instance, the Communist Party are almost seen as nice guys these days...
Another point is that you do not explain why Le Pen is more extremist than Melenchon/LFI, etc.
I would ass a fourth reason: health is a very much a public (as in collective) issue, not a sum of individual medical problems. Something that is fundamentally at odds with the dominant ethos of how to deal with problems in america in the past 50 years or so.
That is what I was trying to convey on my second point, but perhaps I didn't do a good enough job at it. Yes as a European I see it as a mere "efficiency" thing. My (admittedly, very simplistic) thinking goes like this:
> In a population of 1000 perhaps 10 will get a Really Bad Health Issue that requires Really Expensive Treatment that costs 100. So those 1000 people pool their resources up and each pays 0.1 so that if they happen to be one of the unfortunate 10 they are covered. Given that this is a shared risk for those 1000 people, the higher possible entity (the state) is put in charge.
It seems the Americans thinking starts the other way around:
> Anything public is awful and should be avoided at all costs. I'd better take my chances with a private entity (even if that means grouping with another 100 people instead of 1000, and that the private entity takes one cut, so we end up paying 2 each instead of 0.1) because the alternative is just awful.
... But then they are fine with having a very well publicly-funded military and police departments.
A risk pool being split among multiple companies doesn't actually increase the average amount that each group would have to pay. For the group of 100 in your example, only one tenth of a person is going to have to get one tenth of the expensive treatment, so each one still has to pay 0.1. As long as each underwriter has a sufficiently large group to ensure that the average cost incurred by its members is sufficiently close to the population average, the relative sizes of those groups isn't going to affect their members' premiums. Insurance administration is not an economy of scale so competition in the marketplace would ensure downward pressure on prices. In contrast, a state provider would have little incentive to cost-cut or innovate since they wouldn't have to earn people's business, and any public option would necessarily be attempting to balance the interests of multiple groups (such as public sector unions/government employees, health care providers, and health care consumers) at the expense of the consumers whose interest would have been prioritized in a competitive market. Taking that into consideration, it's doubtful that the lack of shareholders in a public system would represent enough of a benefit to actually lower costs for consumers. Americans have enough experience with poorly managed government programs to intuitively understand that a socialized health care system isn't going to be an improvement over our current system.
And yes, since national defense and law enforcement are desirable services that can't be provided by a competitive market, we are fine with the government providing those specific services in a constitutionally-limited way. That preference is actually more ideologically consistent than your preference to socialize our healthcare system unless you're going to advocate for abandoning capitalism entirely.
> For the group of 100 in your example, only one tenth of a person is going to have to get one tenth of the expensive treatment, so each one still has to pay 0.1
That makes no sense. It will be one person. Not a tenth. And also if that was true the private insurance would raise their quota to 1.9. And then deny treatment to that unfortunate person anyway because it’s cheaper to pay a lawyer to litigate the expensive cases than to pay them.
Your last bit makes no sense to me at all. It is clear that health care is desirable, and can’t be provided by a competitive market. The richest country in the world can’t pull it off. You lose much more people per week to health care unavailability than to wars. From the point of view of mere efficiency of capital it makes no sense.
And are talking as if there was no proof that socialized care works in other countries. It’s right there if you’re willing to look for it.
If your state agencies are poorly managed and you go private, that is a self-perpetuating cycle. Fewer people will use them, they will get budget cuts, and get worse. The solution is to revolt, strike, demand better, and help each other, even if they are poor.
Abandoning some aspects of capitalism is completely possible and rational.
It does make sense. A smaller group will have a correspondingly smaller number of people who will end up needing treatment, so the expected value for an individual's cost doesn't actually depend on the number of people in the group, just the probability that any specific person will end up requiring treatment and the cost of the treatment. Maybe you are confused because you chose a specific example wherein the expected number of treatments required is less than one? Are you thinking that because it's not possible to have only a fraction of a person require treatment that we need to round up to 1 person? That's not how probability works and if you simply extend that logic to a group of a single person then your error should become immediately apparent. While it's true that only whole numbers of people can get sick, when you take repeated samples of small groups you will find that occasionally one group member will require treatment, but much more commonly than that, zero group members will require treatment. When you weight each case by its relative probability of occurring, then you get the same expected cost per person that you calculated for the large group.
Your lack of intuition about such a simple linear relationship should be extremely concerning to you. It suggests that you are approaching the question with an emotional attachment to a particular outcome that is blinding you to the extremely simple and intuitive correct answer.
There's a lot more to unpack here, but I don't have time to address it point by point. You are making a lot of assertions that seem much more reflective of left-wing ideology than actual conditions on the ground. You suggest that consumers demanding better is a solution to public systems that don't actually meet consumers needs, but the very nature of public goods ensures that no individual consumer will ever be in a position to make a demand that administrators will have to prioritize over competing demands from producers and public employees. The nature of democracy gives outsized influence public sector unions and interest groups that can then turn around and contribute a share of those benefits back to politicians campaigns. In contrast, a competitive market affords consumers to actually make demands with some weight behind them. A producer has to take a consumers demands into account lest that consumer simply take his business to a competing producer. The weight of the empirical evidence affirming this fundamental difference between public and private systems is completely overwhelming, and your resistance to the idea that capitalism is a far better system than socialism for the vast majority of goods suggests an emotional attachment to an ideology that has very intentionally been sold to the public in such a way as to make uncritical advocacy for that ideology very self-flattering to those very advocates.
I know that I didn't really address the middle part of your argument but let me assure you that those ideas are just as contrary to reality as any of the ideas that I chose to address. I might come back to those in a future post if I find myself with both the time and the inclination to do so.
> Maybe you are confused because you chose a specific example wherein the expected number of treatments required is less than one?
In my example 10 people out of 1000 required the treatment. If it's 100 people, then 1 will need it. You must have misread.
> Your lack of intuition about such a simple linear relationship should be extremely concerning to you
That's very condescending and a bit ironic. I think you should apologize.
> much more reflective of left-wing ideology
"Left" means different things in different places. In my country, a big chunk of the people on the "right" feel the same way you feel about the army, but about healthcare. Which is that some things like life-threatening problems are too important to let personal gain interfere. More on that in a second.
> actual conditions on the ground
I am writing this from the ground. My son just got treated by our public health system twice this week - the last one today. (His pediatrician was on strike today, actually. That is a bit inconvenient for us but it is fine. It's not life or death). My sister in law got diagnosed with cancer and got treatment for it. This is reality that I am telling you is happening right now. Not a theoretical thing that I am imagining might work on a communist country. It exists, and it works.
For the life-threatening cases at least. It is not perfect - there's sometimes long waiting lists for non-life-threatening ones. That is where private health plays a role. Those who don't want to wait, or want a private room in the hospital, can pay for it.
But if you are poor and you get cancer you don't necessarily die. Your family doesn't have to beg in gofundme for your treatment, nor they are left bankrupt. Which is absolutely a reality in the US.
> The nature of democracy gives outsized influence public sector unions and interest groups that can then turn around and contribute a share of those benefits back to politicians campaigns. In contrast, a competitive market affords consumers to actually make demands with some weight behind them.
I prefer referring to people as people. Or, citizens, in the context of a country.
Perhaps that is where our difference of opinion comes from. I don't see a country as a business. So naturally its people are not "consumers". Poor people may not be able to consume much, but they are still people.
On buying public administrators: in my country, lobbying consists in "having meetings with politicians". It does not mean "giving presents" or "contributing to campaigns". That is called bribing, and is against the law. Again, not a perfect system by any means. There's plenty of corruption, as well as other problems. One of them, and one of the places where I do agree with you, is that that interest groups (especially those sponsored by the extremely wealthy) still have much more levers to pull than the average person.
Where I differ with you is in how to fix this. You propose that "people vote with their wallet". The problem with that is that the money that consumers use to vote with their wallet eventually goes into the pockets of the ones funding the interest groups that eventually make laws against them. This is a problem both in my country and in the US. It gets worse with inequality, which is getting worse everywhere, but especially in the US.
My proposed solution is simply that there's other things besides the consumer-producer relationship. This doesn't necessarily imply a communist regime or an anarchist revolution. It just means Europe, man.
Ok, I see where the problem is. The 10 people requiring the 100 treatment in your example will cost 1000. That's one dollar per person, not one tenth. For the group of 100, 1 person will require the 100 treatment and it is still 1 dollar per person. You very obviously made a mistake and I incorrectly assumed it was in your calculation of the costs for the second group. The underlying point is still the same though, and you should be concerned that such a simple relationship is not intuitive to you. I'm not going to apologize because I still feel that this is indicative of emotional reasoning on your part. If this sounds condescending then that's only because this is about as simple as math can possibly get and yet you still failed to recognize the glaring logical contradiction.
If the cost is 100 for 10 cases, then it's going to be 10 for 1 case. Cost per person is still the same. You need fewer doctors, nurses, and medical devices to treat fewer people.
> So, he is an author that has a track record of understanding a thing or two about money.
On the contrary, while he is indeed a good author and has written highly enjoyable fictions (well, heavy on the nerdy side but this is HN after all so I think a lot of us have no problem with that), his understanting of how money and knowledge work on a societal level is quite frankly laughable. It is deeply rooted in the californian ideology and very naïve. But it still good fun, and it doesn't take itself to seriously.
Maybe there is something akin to belief in the belief, i.e. "I'm not religious but will pray for god or whomever in dire situations". The mind is a weird thing and truth is, we don't have a good understanting of what's going on with the placebo effect.
> I’d much prefer the free market approach where there are multiple actors each making different bets on future demand than some overarching rule about how future demand should be planned for (thats how we get famines).
Interestingly, food production is heavely planned through regulation, subsidies and incentives in most countries precisely because the free market cannot be trusted with such a sensitive matter. Famines cause riots and that's bad for buisness.
If that's the defining characteristic of being a communist, then the defining characteristic of being a capitalist must be thinking "maybe the relentless pursuit of financial equality above anything else is bad".
If both of those things are true, then I would guess that at least 90% of people in the world are simultaneously capitalists and communists.
Not quite 2022, but yeah I was maintaining a token ring based network for some subway at my last gig in 2019. As far as I know, no work is done on it now but the subway-car using the system are schedule to run for at least another decade so another bugfix release of the networking firmware is not entirely out of the question.
Now don't get me wrong, it is nice and good to have blogs presenting these math ideas in a easy if not rigorous way by attaching them to known concept. Maybe that was the real intend here, the 0.99… = 1 "controversy" is just bait, and I am too out of the loop to get the new meta.