bhupy · HackerTrans

6 gün öncediscuss

I don't think you fully understand who you are arguing against.

I also think Olise's yellow card was unjustified. I think it should be overturned also. Even without overturning it, at least he still gets to play, so that's good for all of us as spectators.

The process sucks since it's arbitrary. In a better world there would be a universal appeals process.

bhupy

8 gün öncediscuss

It's not just a random player, it's a player whose red card was contested even by the commentators as it was playing out. You should just watch the replay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuaS3jUAark.

"Does he endanger the safety of his opponent? You could argue it does, but I think it's slightly unfair because it's more of a stepping action that lacks force and intensity to create that red card."

"Is it the right call? I don't think it's the right call...I don't like that being the level that we're calling for a red card. I think that's a yellow card, I don't see that as a red"

After the match, there was continued debate as to whether it should have been a red. Messi didn't get a red card for a nearly identical incident.

FIFA has a rule to handle this sort of situation, and it's Article 27. In my opinion, that is a poor system as any process that's initiated by FIFA is bound to be arbitrary. It would be better to have a universal appeals process, and such a process might very well have resulted in an overturning of the red card nevertheless. Either way, the outcome was correct, even if the path to getting there was flawed.

And just taking a step back and taking stock of what we are arguing here; it's not as though Belgium were given a disadvantage, it is simply that they were being asked to play against the full squad. It was pathetic to complain about that, especially given that Belgium comfortably thrashed the USA's full squad.

As spectators of any sport, that's all we can hope for: take the best of 2 teams and pit them against each other. See where the chips fall. I don't actually enjoy watching an easy fixture, I want it to be a nail biter.

Belgium should have either said nothing, or just said "cool we don't care, we'll beat them either way, game on". Instead, they (and most Europeans) came across as sissies.

Looking ahead, for me personally, I'm hoping football comes home.

bhupy

8 gün öncediscuss

Yeesh, this conversation has run its course.

bhupy

8 gün öncediscuss

> I don’t see much controversy. It is a clear red.

You're entitled to believe it was a red, but it is objectively controversial. It's not just about what you believe, but what about others might believe. If there are enough people that disagree with you, then it is by definition controversial.

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7415223/2026/07/01/folarin-...

> You play with the team you have in the game. Players get injured, suspended or has previous yellows that would leads to a suspension if another is gotten.

> That’s all part of the game.

Correct, and players can get re-instated (as happend with Cristiano Ronaldo in the very same tournament) by FIFA per Article 27. That is also part of the game.

The Belgians now need to man up and play the game with a full squad rather than whine about not getting an easy fixture. Seriously just take a step back and take stock of what we are arguing here; it's not as though Belgium are being given a disadvantage, it is simply that they are being asked to play against the full squad. It is rather pathetic to complain about that.

bhupy

8 gün öncediscuss

No, those are not at all contradictory, it is entirely consistent.

Two things can be true at the same time:

1. There is no appeals process that USA (or any team) can initiate

2. There is a mechanism that FIFA can initiate to suspend a match ban at their discretion

That is why it's a bad system; as long as it's initiated by FIFA, it will always be arbitrary and capricious.

bhupy

8 gün öncediscuss

Correct.

Hence: “which in practice will be arbitrary.”

It’s on FIFA to correct for that governance failure by making it less arbitrary via a more universal appeals process.

In any case, the rules were followed to the correct decision. It’s just that these rules as written are arbitrarily applied.

bhupy

9 gün öncediscuss

You're right, it's a failure of governance that FIFA doesn't have a proper appeals process for everyone to use. It is unfortunate that the only rules-based mechanism to suspend the match ban had to come from FIFA, which in practice will be arbitrary.

It was the right outcome, but the wrong process.

bhupy

9 gün öncediscuss

> With respect, only an American would think that the competition ceases to be interesting just because the US loses

With respect to you, I'm a lifelong football fan.

And read more carefully, the argument I am making is not that the competition ceases to be interesting because the US loses. The argument I am making is that the competition ceases to be interesting because the US doesn't get to field its best squad on account of a highly controversial on-field decision (itself downstream of a mis-application of VAR).

Let the chips fall where they may, should the USA lose after this, at least they got to make their best attempt at it. That's all I want as a spectator.

bhupy

9 gün öncediscuss

> The goal is ultimately entertainment

This is something I see so many people forgetting.

The net result of this decision is simply that the USA gets to play with their full squad and you have an actually interesting competition. The reason we as a world spend hundreds of millions of dollars to let athletes play a game for a living is pretty much exclusively for interesting competition. It serves no other socially useful purpose.

Embarrassing for the Belgians and the Europeans to respond any other way than: "we look forward to beating your best team, game on".

bhupy

5 ay öncediscuss

This comment is a hilarious example of: https://x.com/AustingrahamZ1/status/1029385497213366279?lang...

bhupy

2 yıl öncediscuss

This has been a dream project of mine too, so happy to see that it exists.

One thing that I've also wanted was to be able to reason about the total timeline using the Holocene calendar[1] instead of the standard BC/BCE AD/CE timeline. It makes it easier to internalize how long ago (or how recent) certain civilizations were without having to do the wrap-around math in one's head. Would be nice to be able to maybe toggle that view.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar

bhupy

3 yıl öncediscuss

Censorship != moderation: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moderation-is-different-fro...

bhupy

3 yıl öncediscuss

Git operations are 503'ing for me.

bhupy

3 yıl öncediscuss

To be clear, there is certainly a spectrum/degree for bias.

The best kind of news/journalism informs readers based on factually accurate and unbiased data — and perhaps uses noteworthy current events and human interest anecdotes to corroborate that data.

A worse kind of news/journalism partially misinforms readers by presenting factually accurate data in a biased way.

The worst kind of news/journalism entirely misinforms readers by presenting an anecdote (or a statistically insignificant collection of anecdotes).

Unfortunately the majority of news today (at least in the US) falls into that 3rd bucket.

bhupy

3 yıl öncediscuss

The biggest problem with news is that it's fundamentally an exercise in elevating anecdotes over data. Every time the news reports on an incident or a happening, it's a deep dive into one single data point — and how that deep dive is characterized can influence how the reader thinks about society as a whole. The narratives used to characterize that data point vary based on the biases of the news institution, but either way it (more often than not) paints a distorted picture relative to the macro reality.

bhupy

4 yıl öncediscuss

This is where you might be out of your element, it seems. Life-threatening / chronic / bankruptcy-inducing conditions do not represent a "relatively small" — at least in the US, 90% of health expenditure is on chronic health conditions (https://www.cdc.gov/chronicdisease/about/costs/index.htm) — this includes heart disease, stroke, cancer, and diabetes. I work in the industry and this comports with what I see on the ground as well.

In Switzerland (and also the Netherlands), the vast majority of this is covered by private health insurance, not via any sort of public health insurance. That's what sets Switzerland and the Netherlands apart from other peer developed countries, and they have results to show for it.

Regarding rare conditions, we agree — even the US has a public healthcare system alongside which covers rare conditions (e.g. end stage renal disease). US's Medicare Advantage system of private individual health insurance for senior citizens (with Original Medicare as a public option) is also a proven model with results to show for it. The CBO expects that by 2032, 61% of health insurance expenditure for senior citizens will be by the private sector (https://www.kff.org/medicare/issue-brief/medicare-advantage-...).

bhupy

4 yıl öncediscuss

That's not what I'm suggesting at all. The point I'm making is that employers are not capable of being optimizers because they will generally be willing to spend more on medical care than individuals, and it's because they think about money very differently from individuals. Employers are generally able to swallow a premium increase of $15,000 -> $20,000 per employee per year (it just gets rolled up into total compensation). It's usually a drop in the bucket for employers, but to an individual that's actually a lot of money. It's the same reason why corporations typically cover business class (or economy plus) air travel without blinking an eye, whereas many individuals spring for basic economy depending on their willingness to pay. Showing employers the shape of their medical care spend doesn't change that equation all that much for the same reason that enterprises today are willing to spend more on SaaS licenses than individuals (or even small businesses) regardless of how precisely their QuickBooks or NetSuite instance shows them the shape of their SaaS spend. I work in insuretech too, sometimes even work directly with employer HR teams, and see this behavior all the time. We agree that employers should not be the optimizers here. It's not that they need to step up their spend management game, it's that the way they play that game will always be different from the way individuals play that game, and that's a big part of why per capita $'s spent are even able to be so inflated in the first place.

What I'm suggesting is that the proven private sector model is one where employers are simply not involved, not a part of the equation. Private insurance purchased on the individual market. That's exactly how it works in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and also how it works in Medicare Advantage (seniors directly buy their insurance plans using dollars they theoretically set aside over the course of their lifetime through Medicare FICA taxes).

The most practical way to get there, in America, would be to either enact Medicare Advantage For All, or to tweak the employer mandate to only include ICHRAs rather than group health insurance. ICHRAs are employer-sponsored funds (in lieu of employer sponsored insurance) that the employee-beneficiary uses to buy health insurance on the individual market.

bhupy

4 yıl öncediscuss

I'm not sure that your argument makes the case you think it does. The majority of Swiss health expenditure is in the private sector (which differentiates it from many other healthcare systems). Subsidies and municipal market participants do not change that fact. In every industry in the world, the government may play a participatory role within a greater market. We see this in the US in the food industry as well (food stamps, food banks, etc) — but that still doesn't change that it is essentially privatized. If the US adopted, like-for-like, Switzerland's healthcare system, the US's public spending towards healthcare would decrease, not increase.

bhupy

4 yıl öncediscuss

> And the US's problem is that the list prices it pays for GPs, nurses, and services are subject to market forces and thus are too high. The government is currently failing to address the service provision loss with little political will to decrease list prices (even though they would propagate through to consumers as decreased costs).

Yeah that's completely untrue; the list prices that insurers pay for GPs are heavily inflated by the market distortions introduced by the Federal government. I don't know if you read any of what I've written up-thread, but I'll paste the relevant parts here for your benefit:

"First of all, the non-Medicare private insurance industry is heavily regulated, often more so than Medicare Advantage private insurers. In fact, you raise an important point: it's important to consider which specific regulations are helping and which are hurting. Outside of Medicare Advantage, there are regulations that strictly control insurance company's profit margins, how much of premiums can be spent on collecting medical claims (see: the 80/20 rule and Medical Loss Ratio rules), the fact that every beneficiary must be treated exactly the same (ERISA, parts of ACA), a minimum amount of coverage required (the ACA added this), the employer mandate (ACA), etc.

To give you a sense for some of the unintended consequences that have been created by regulations on non-Medicare Advantage health insurance plans, due to Federal mandates and tax incentives, health insurance is predominately provided by employers rather than the individual market (unlike Switzerland, Germany, or the Netherlands). What we're seeing in healthcare costs is analogous to what you might see happen to airline ticket costs if we all got our air tickets through our employers: the vast majority of us would fly business class, while the unemployed would be simply unable to pay for business class fares out of pocket. A big reason for this is that employers (especially medium-to-large businesses) have a much higher purchasing power (and hence, willingness to pay) than individuals. If you take this behavior and combine it with the fact that health insurers' profit margins are capped by law, insurers pay more absolute dollars for treatments (which doctors happily accept), charge more to employers (who are generally less price conscious vs individuals), thus bring in more absolute revenue, and therefore more profit because a capped profit percentage of a higher revenue is higher than a capped percentage of lower revenue. It's somewhat counter-intuitive, but the policy combination of an employer mandate and insurance profit cap results in increased prices."

Put simply, the US healthcare industry is not subject to traditional market forces.

> The government is currently failing to address the service provision loss with little political will to decrease list prices (even though they would propagate through to consumers as decreased costs).

It's quite clear that the reason the government is not doing this is because it would further exacerbate the staffing shortage and lead to even higher wait times. That's not a political problem, that's a hard economics problem.

> It seems to me that there's no getting around the need for good governance here. And that lack of it is no excuse for not governing at all.

There is a key governance difference between making the decision to lift distortionary regulations once & up-front so as to unblock efficient resources allocation vs actively having to continuously adjust resource allocation. With the former, you just have to trust that the "good governance" happens once, whereas with the latter, you have to trust that "good governance" happens forever (politics notwithstanding). The Swiss chose the former, whereas the UK struggles with the latter. Domestically in the US, Medicare Advantage is a proven model — and the governance prescription here is to have the entire private insurance industry look more like Medicare Advantage.

bhupy

4 yıl öncediscuss

The NHS's difficulty lies in the simple fact that it is understaffed (https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/1633058/general-...) and the staff are underpaid (https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-62290577) — leading to unprecedented wait times. This is because the "list prices" that the NHS pays for GP, nurses, and services are not subject to market forces, they are set by the government. The government is currently failing to address the supply loss with little political will to increase list prices (which propagate to the consumer through increased taxes). Brexit's influence is tenuous at best. Switzerland is also not part of the EU and doesn't face this problem. At best, Brexit exacerbated an already existing pricing problem.

Where you're correct is that the difficulty lies in leadership's inability to actually change the prices to attract the supply necessary to reflect the increase in demand — and that's because the Single Provider system is tied to politics rather than market forces. The NHS is a third rail of politics and real reform is extremely difficult given the political buy-in necessary. In contrast, the private sector can (and will) increase prices to overcome demand — we see this happening in Switzerland (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26766626/).

> The system offers a high degree of choice and direct access to all levels of care with virtually no waiting times

So where we may agree to disagree is that the NHS's woes are in fact a very strong example of the greater argument, on net.

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