Your IP address is revealed when you use a torrent, which opens you up to criminal prosecution. Running Bittorrent over Tor is also slow, and tends to overwhelm the volunteer run network. And someone also has to pay for the bandwidth, hardware, and sysadmin time to scan, upload, host.
Incentivized onion routing networks like the Oxen network or Nym offer the potential for fast, anonymous filesharing, while decentralized storage networks like Sia or Filecoin could act as censorship resistant repositories.
Price discovery is indeed difficult in the current market. However, the current healthcare market is no where close to a free market.
For example, suppose you wanted to start a hospital that offered price transparency, like the Surgery Center of Oklahoma does. (1)
In thirty-five states and the District of Columbia, you'd first have to acquire a certificate-of-need (CON) from the state healthcare regulators.
In order to get certificate of need, you must prove that the community “needs” the new or expanded service, and existing providers are invited to challenge your application.
Existing hospitals typically don't want new competitors taking away their patients, so they vigorously fight to prevent new CON's from being issued.
For example, Dr. Mark Monteferrante wanted to buy a second MRI machine for his radiology practice in 2003. But it took five years and more than $175,000 in fees to get the certificate. (2)
And conlaws are just one example of perverse effects of state intervention into the healthcare market, from state laws restricting insurance competition, to severe restrictions on new entrants to the medical labor market, to drug monopolies.
I don't begrudge people having children. If you want to have more children--and pay for them with your own time and money--more power to you.
What I begrudge is being forced to donate _my_ time and money to subsidizing those who have children, at the expense of the things that _I_ value. Subsidizing the creation of the 385,001th child born today is quite low on the things that I would spend money on given the choice. I would rather spend that money on anti-aging research, or prison reform, or a new startup. And if I were inclined to give money to help children, I wouldn't give it to the relatively wealthy parents of children in the US, but to the children of parents who make less than $2/day.
"unplanned" Does this women not know how sex works? Does she lack access to IUD's, condoms, abortions? There are rare instances where women have a child against their will, but the number is vanishly small. The vast majority of children are carefully planned _choices_.
I agree that raising children is taxing. However, the mere fact that you _chose_ to do an activity that is taxing does not, to my mind, entitle you to impose costs on your fellow employees. Volunteering for the Peace Corp is taxing, caring for elderly parents is taxing, climbing Mt. Everest is taxing. Yet, alone of all those activities, parents think they deserve to be subsidized.
Kudos to Kapwing for being attentive to their employee's family and emotional lives. However, it's irritating that parents receive perks at the expense of single and childfree employees (who don't get weeks of time off for _their_ families, and who are expected to cover for the parents on leave). IMHO, all employees should get the same amount of time off, regardless of whether or not they have children.
Neat! How would you differentiate picolisp from say, Clojure (which also interoperates well with Java libraries). When would you use picolisp vs Clojure?
Increasing immigration rates would benefit both US citizens and immigrants alike. However, many native citizens believe immigrants impose more costs than benefits, by increasing crime, consuming welfare services, and changing the culture. So they naturally oppose increasing immigration rates. Sponsored immigration incents citizens to support increased immigration by a) giving them a personal choice in who they allow to immigrate b)a direct financial stake in the immigrant's long-term success.