If you count the massive increase in 3-letter-agency budgets along with the costs/effects of PATRIOT ACT type laws, then I think google's estimate is probably an order of magnitude low. Yes, the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan were running about $1B per day for 20 years. We could have had UBI, universal healthcare, ended homelessness as well as going to/from Mars several times for the amount wasted on Bush's wars. And we're starting a war with a country 4x bigger, 2x more population and unlike Iraq, occupies 3 dimensions while alienating every ally we had for the Iraq/Afghanistan war.
I follow a tax guy on Twitter and he said it is because of regulations.
I just wonder why Intuit can't have some local model and do it within guidelines.
And you can add me to the list of people who ran my tax filings through AI and found mistakes.
Most were the CPAs fault but I forgot to include a local folder when uploading and codex was able to recognize that my CPA did not include those forms.
I would not advocate replacing CPAs with AI but they can definitely fact check the CPA.
I have a smart plug that can turn on and off...I have my coffee maker switched on, and it only switches on when my wifi plug is on. So I can have the water heating before I come down stairs. Whether it's better than a smart coffee maker or not I'm not sure - but at least I have a popular device that has more eye. Not sure how many people are looking at niche coffee makers.
My understanding, and I would love for someone to explain why, is that they measure current with a shunt resistor which is fine for inductive loads like a water heater, but not fine for a big motor for example.
>we'd already be seeing vibed stuff succeeding everywhere, and pricing out incumbents, but I guess I'm not seeing this? Like at all?
As a small business owner I see this. Random people contacting me to sell a software where I can instantly tell it is vibe coded. Subscription prices half or 1/4th of incumbents. Domain names registered in the last few months.
Kind of similar to rabies. If you get bit by a rabid animal in an area with lots of rabies, the doctors know what to do and you get meds immediately for cheap.
In the US it's a few thousand dollars for the treatment.
It's wildly inconsistent. Surgeries, hospitalizations and specialists are mostly ridiculous. You can find affordable general/nurse practitioners if you know where to look and what to ask for.
Call around and ask "What is your self cash pay cost?".
Most people don't know to ask that and if you don't speak the magic phrase then you get billed at the rate the office would normally charge insurance. Not all places have self pay discounts.
Some states have special programs for hospitals but they vary wildly by state and you have to know how to navigate that particular program and be very patient. Some are need based so if you are above a pretty low income threshold you won't qualify.
It's really not, for common/minor issues. I use a little cash-pay clinic in a MCOL area and mostly spend <$100, never over $200, per visit. Also, my wife recently had some major dental work done, and it was about $350. All of this without getting insurance involved.
There are definitely ways to rack up big bills fast, though, just by being unlucky.
It's not quite PE (yet); doctors are getting annoyed themselves at how healthcare is playing out. Picture things like electronically messaging your doctor now has convoluted billing behind each conversation now based on the level of effort the doctor has to put in. They're getting annoyed now that they've been bought out by hospital systems and been working underneath them for a while doing family practices and other healthcare services. The paychecks were good, but the red tape got annoying over the years.
So they exit the whole system and go to a direct "you pay me monthly for access" model. Hundred bucks a person or so per month, factor a ~25% discount for families. Doc gets to keep a cap on the limit of incoming patients to manage their own day pretty nicely while getting a recurring stream of cash paid direct to him.
Even better if your wife's also a doctor (hey, healthcare partners run together a lot!), you just band together, see 5-600 patients a month as a couple, and pull in a decent $million or so on a fairly light workload and selling extra things like GLP-1s and wellness programs for a year's work. Triple-points if you're doing this in rural America - that million might not be a lot to the big techies out there, but that's big bucks that go far in some really nice places tucked away in the trees and forests.
You still need insurance for the rest of the 'stuff' they don't do, but some of these DPCs are doing everything they can in house (like prescribing and dispensing generics at the office directly in a single visit to lower your extra out of pocket costs).
If you're on a high deductible healthcare plan with an HSA and an employer contributing healthily into it, these direct-patient-care clinics may be an attractive option if you're reasonably healthy and young.
It isn't a homogeneous experience, so you will get different stories. Most Americans get their healthcare provided by their employer, so their company determines what is covered and their financial exposure.
My United Healthcare plan limits my out of pocket expenses to $2,000 per year.
Like most Americans, "United Healthcare" is just the company that does the billing and adjudication. My Employer sets policy and pays for treatment at the end of the day.
I used to think I wasn’t very good at math, because I struggled to route memorize formulas and the like. Then I had a calculus professor in class that took a bunch of time explaining how to derive the formulas we were using and it unlocked everything for me. I’m much better at deriving from core principles than trying to remember a bunch of formulas and algorithms for solving problems.
Why do you deny blaming Trump? Most other republicans wouldn't have done that. He's opened up a new ability to ignore standards of behavior, but without him I really think it wouldn't have happened. And average voters have never heard of treaties like that. They voted for idiocracy realized, and they got it, but they didn't know what they voted for.
So voters are responsible (and I never convinced my dad even to this day that trump was bad, how much am I at fault), but he's an out there candidate in many ways too.
Its not about not blaming Trump, its about making it clear that its also the fault of every US American to even allow this in the first place. Not standing up, not fightning against it etc.
I think that's a fair comment. We are all responsible for our collective actions as a country, even if we are a tiny voice in the nation, even if whatever side you are on is small. We can all dare to speak our thoughts to others, share our views.
In 2016 Trump got 46.1% of the popular vote vs Hillary Clinton's 48.2%.
Expressed as fractions of the total US population in 2016:
- about 28.5% of the population was not eligible to vote (due to age or other reasons)
- about 31.6% of the population was eligible to vote but did not vote for either candidate
- about 20.4% of the population voted for Hillary Clinton
- about 19.5% of the population voted for Trump
If approx 1 in 5 is 'tiny' then support for the alternative was also 'tiny'.
So you are telling me we could have gone to Mars and back a few times instead..
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