In that counter-factual do you propose that she/her company actually/eventually develops what they said they did? So a fake-it-until-you-make-it gone right?
She was saying that they had developed a system that could run a bunch of tests on a single drop of blood, and do so with better accuracy than existing tests. When in fact what they were providing used the off-the-shelf systems on diluted blood, returning horribly incorrect results.
Note that it was not "we will deliver this", the company (and often Holmes herself) were touting the existing customers already getting this. I should also note that behind the scenes Holmes had no great insights into how they were going to accomplish this leap forward, and knew that all of their work at that point had failed.
> In that counter-factual do you propose that she/her company actually/eventually develops what they said they did? So a fake-it-until-you-make-it gone right?
No, I mean the fraud continuing, and how much of a culture of knowingly cheerleading and gaslighting fraud exists in a forum such as this. Is it the majority, or is it a loud minority.
From Theranos to meme coins and NFTs, there is a long history of shilling for outright fraud here.
My parents' cat delivered a live baby bunny to the entrance hallways in the middle of my pre-wedding dinner. Once released the thing unfroze and zoomed under some baskets. It was an all-hands-on-deck exercise to corral both the terrified bunny, as well as the over-excited large dog who "wanted to get to know it".
Why is it unfair to tax a property that is receiving services at a rate proportional to its value? One part of the value of the police service this is paying for is for protecting your property, and certainly that is more valuable the more valuable your property is.
And one value of property taxes (one that is dysfunctional on empty lots) is that it encourages "maximum" use of high value property (lots of bad particulars here, but the overall direction is about right). While we may dislike an elderly person being effectively forced out of the home they have lived in for decades, it is usually for more "productive" uses (for the market definition of productive).
As an example my in-laws have three properties in Hungary that are empty, and have been for quite a few years. Cumulatively they get something like ten weeks of use in a year. But since Hungary does not have property taxes there is almost no incentive to make better use of these properties (yes, they could rent them out for an advantage, but there is no disadvantage pushing them to sell).
The argument of empty lots imo doesn't hold. See NYC and other cities where all homeless could be housed in currently sitting empty properties.
It is a problem though, I doubt a property tax is a solution, the proof is, it doesn't solve it.
I wouldn't be against taxing owners on their income, including dividends. To fund municipalities.
My argument isn't that taxes are bad. Public services need funding. Rather, that certain taxes are absurd.
If anything, this particular tax serves one thing that the working class on rental denounces: prime real estate neighborhoods typically are better policed, have better schools, and better infrastructure than what we call "poorer" area.
Edit: I don't imply it is due solely to this tax, but the concept of taxing properties imo makes redistributions naturally or cynically more localized to areas where more gets collected.
The reason Apple went to the trouble was not really a marketing exercise, but rather because a lot of U.S. government contacts required it, or a waver. This is the same reason versions of Windows were also UNIX certified. In neither case did this certification actually make them more "standard" in the way that the rules originally envisioned.
So Apple's use of UNIX in marketing was to make sure they never ran into that as a disqualified on a government contract. My impression is that those contracts largely no longer require that (one small measure of common sense has caught up).
Why do you think Republicans would institute an export ban? Trump has been touting every export deal he can (especially promises to purchase petroleum), he has even been measuring import/export levels as if foreign countries are cheating the U.S. if they export more to the U.S. than they import from it.
I am not confident that the Democrats would even implement such a ban, as they get pretty big campaign donations from the oil industry as well.
While they have been under heavy sanctions, they have largely gotten around this, for example by trading with China (who have just said they will not abide by our "unilateral sanctions"). So their oil has still been going to service global needs, and its lack will still have an effect (as will the missing Russian oil products).
Oddly, since the Iranians (and Russians) have been selling their oil products at a discount, they were actually having the effect of holding down the price of petroleum prior to the war. No idea about how much in real terms, but...
Your first statement is pure opinion (and a prejudiced one at that), so I will skip that.
Your second statement is a question worth investigating: why should the government be involved here? The simple answer is that the market has not moved for the problem of tire efficiency. There is a quote in the article that goes to the heart of this: “It’s very difficult or impossible for consumers to know how energy efficient their tires are going to be, as a result, many people unknowingly buy tires that cost them more money than necessary”. Large imbalances (like this) in information are one of the things markets do not work well in.
So the solution here is to (gradually) put a floor under how inefficient tires can be. This is one way to solve the market inefficiency (since it treated this as an externality).
I would rather have had them use an approach more like the EnergyStar system, where it requires a simple rating for the efficiency, including average savings and where this sits in comparison with competitors (in that range). I would even add to that a green/yellow/red system that would be allowed to slide the ranges over time to reflect what the market can currently produce.
You have started out with the assumption that these higher efficiency tires are worse gripping. However, the article states that the manufacturer-supplied tires are generally more efficient (in order to get the milage numbers they advertise), and that it is the third-party replacements that are worse.
So either the manufacturer-supplied originals are more dangerous than replacement tires, or your argument is missing something.
The rest of your quasi-questions all would need to be evaluated to see if they are true or not... and one would hope that at least some of them were evaluated when creating the policy. You seem to be assuming they were not, without any real evidence one way or the other.
> So either the manufacturer-supplied originals are more dangerous than replacement tires
There's 3 main components to tire performance: efficiency, grip and longevity. OEM tires optimize for the first. They can compromise on grip and longevity. Most often I've experienced is the latter. So yes, OEM tires are "worse" in some aspects as replacements.
"the assumption that higher efficiency tires are worse gripping" This is fact not assumption. Ironically you are the one who made an assumption here. People who don't understand a topic should not attempt to regulate it based on assumptions.
> You have started out with the assumption that these higher efficiency tires are worse gripping.
Generally speaking, with tires you are trading off wear, grip, efficiency, and cost, among other things (like off-road durability which is irrelevant here). When you make a tire roll more efficiently, it tends to make it perform worse at gripping the road in all sorts of conditions, especially adverse conditions like rain and snow. I am speaking in generalities because there are thousands of tires from dozens of manufacturers and this is not a law of physics, but it is generally true in practice. Tires today are worlds better than tires of 50 years ago but this is still true to a first approximation.
So yes, I am making that assumption.
> So either the manufacturer-supplied originals are more dangerous than replacement tires, or your argument is missing something.
The tires that come on your car from the factory are optimized for one thing and one thing only: for the OEM to sell you the car.
OEM tires are famously (infamously?) often worse in terms of wear and grip than the equivalent tire available aftermarket because they are cheaper to produce (bringing down sticker price), roll more efficiently (helping them hit EPA fuel economy numbers), and quieter on test drives. Having a cheaper tire that is quieter on test drives and hits EPA numbers that are competitive with comparable models helps sell the car.
Higher treadwear doesn't help the OEM sell the car because your test drive isn't long enough to drive the car for 60,000 miles let alone 600. Higher grip doesn't either, as average buyers won't notice tire grip on a 15 minute drive on dry pavement and enthusiasts will replace the tires anyway. With the exception of certain enthusiast vehicles, if running a cheaper tire from the factory gets the price of the car from $40,000 to $39,950, the OEM will do it, even if the buyer has to replace the tire 20,000 miles sooner and it doesn't grip as well on dry pavement or in rain or snow.
> The rest of your quasi-questions all would need to be evaluated to see if they are true or not... and one would hope that at least some of them were evaluated when creating the policy. You seem to be assuming they were not, without any real evidence one way or the other.
I'm not sure what makes my questions "quasi", I'm just having a friendly conversation about tires on the internet.
There's almost nothing in human history with a worse record of causing unintended consequences than government regulation, even well-intentioned (cookie banners?), so I think I say charitably with some basis in historical fact that governments have a spotty record when it comes to understanding and predicting the second-order effects of the regulations they make. I ask my questions with that understanding. And I say all this as someone who is broadly sympathetic to and often in favor of many government regulations that reduce CO2 emissions and make cars more efficient. I enjoy clean air as much as the next person.
I agree that this proposal would not solve all of the problems; absent more changes you would still see the creep up of healthcare costs at too high a rate. But slashing $1 trillion off of a $5.3 trillion costs is a pretty big bite of the apple. Even if you go with the more conservative $663 number, that is still a great first step. And both of those numbers are after adding the costs of covering currency uncovered people. So we are collectively getting more for significantly less money.
It does this by eliminating a very inefficient layer of our current system (insurance companies), and by having there replacement for that (the government) negotiate on drug prices (how much savings there is the reason there are two estimates). Currently insurance companies almost have a negative incentive to push down drug prices (their profits are limited to a percentage of total spending, and most large companies are pushing against that limit).
Most of the cost control pressures in our current system come out of Medicare/Medicade, and this would widen that out to the whole system. That in turn would wedge open the door to pushing on the other drivers of the cost spirals: hospital administration, new expensive drugs that are not worth the additional costs, doctor salaries ballooning, and the broken system between malpractice insurance and dysfunctional enforcement against malpractice.
I understand that theres an argument for removing private insurance companies in favor of thr government can cut costs. It can also increase them.
I'd argue that the primary issue with insurance costs today is the lack of market competition, obscurity of what costs and prices are, and government protections that prevent insurance companies from being legally liable for many of the problems they cause.
Corruption and monopolistic practices is a big deal in healthcare, for example. We'd be better off, in my opinion, by solving that rather than killing an entire private industry and hoping our government can continue to do it better indefinitely.
The "just" is doing some heavy lifting there. Clinicians aren't required to participate in Medicare; in fact they have to go through a complex process in order to join. And there's no way that such a mandate could ever pass Congress, or be effectively enforced. Let's focus on reforms that are actually achievable in the real world.
She was saying that they had developed a system that could run a bunch of tests on a single drop of blood, and do so with better accuracy than existing tests. When in fact what they were providing used the off-the-shelf systems on diluted blood, returning horribly incorrect results.
Note that it was not "we will deliver this", the company (and often Holmes herself) were touting the existing customers already getting this. I should also note that behind the scenes Holmes had no great insights into how they were going to accomplish this leap forward, and knew that all of their work at that point had failed.