It makes sense that states with the most progressive tax systems often get into fiscal trouble. High earners have especially volatile incomes.
A new study for the Mercatus Center at George Mason University ranks each US state’s financial health based on key fiscal obligations.
These considerations wouldn’t matter so much is there were no costs to actions/policies based on worst case scenarios. If all actions and their effects were equal, then go with the worst case! Nothing to lose and everything to gain!
Whenever we seek goals under conditions of uncertainty – not knowing the best way forward, perhaps not being sure what success even looks like – we are faced with explore/exploit trade-offs as we guess our way to what we think we want.
The AMA campaigned against Medicare, FDR’s efforts to include health insurance with Social Security, Harry Truman’s universal-insurance scheme, and Bill Clinton’s healthcare plans.
Life is full of unavoidable suffering: we can’t hold onto happiness, everything changes, nothing lasts, everybody dies, pain in inevitable, we are endlessly seeking and desiring without lasting satisfaction; an inner emptiness haunts our every moment.
Here is the theme of endemic pain and suffering in our everyday lives, in which minor and transitory negative feelings become something deep and debilitating...
Some neural networks are associated with attention capture, where the stimulus rules. Other networks are associated with attention deployment, where goals rule.
...attitude is rooted in 19th Century romantic aesthetics, in which emotion, imagination, freedom from rules, and spontaneity are opposed to soulless capitalism and the instrumentalist mindset it engenders.
Between increasing adoption of sustainable practices (e.g., cover crops, conservation tillage), precision farming and ever more resilient crops, agricultural productivity in the US and other developed counties is likely to maintain its upward trajectory.
... we often consider effort through proxies like time spent, sacrifices made, opportunities turned down, pleasures denied, unpleasantness endured, and money spent
So, per the IPCC, there is medium confidence in a 0 to -2% median yield impact per decade this century for the major crops (wheat, rice, and corn). There is high confidence the effect on crop production will be consistently negative in the low altitudes, while "climate change may have positive or negative effects in northern latitudes".
The threshold of conscious experience is about 200 milliseconds, or one fifth of a second . This is enough time to pronounce a syllable....If the “psychological present” is 3 seconds long, the longest thought that is articulated subvocally “as it unfolds” is 15 syllables.
They all agree that some people are insufficiently skeptical, fail to appreciate their own fallibility, and/or are way too swayed by some version of authority (e.g., the consensus, unorthodox thinkers of one’s own choosing, this particular subset of research, gut feeling…).
Of course there are reasons other than I've discussed why healthcare spending is so much higher in the US than other developed countries. Drug costs play a role, as do high administrative costs and patient characteristics (e.g., demanding, non-compliant and obese).
...specialists get paid more in The Netherlands and Australia, but the healthcare systems in those countries use GPs as gatekeepers, meaning to see a specialist, your GP has to refer you to one. Gatekeeping is an important cost-containment measure... Gatekeeping is not nearly as widespread in the US.
...a hospital stay in the US is over $18,000 on average. The countries that come closest to spending as much — Canada, the Netherlands, Japan — spend between $4,000 and $6,000 less per stay.
The imminent dismantling of Obamacare is a shame and an opportunity to do it better next time. Two main challenges: reining in cost and achieving universal coverage. This series will address the cost issue.
Why does this matter? Because losing focus and having attention captured by whatever can enhance creativity, problem-solving, even wisdom.
The problem with sentences is that we rarely know what they mean without knowing what came before and what came after. Not to mention all the background information. Plus all the non-sentence-like stuff going on. Bigger worlds and smaller worlds. All are being spoken to. Or “thought” to.