Expez

The article doesn't cover this, but it's worth pointing out why the study asks this particular question. With a single-payer system the Nordic countries want to know what the ROI is if we sent letters out to everyone above a certain age offering a free colonoscopy. The study is well-designed to answer that question.

The study does a poor job of helping an individual asking a similar but different question: Is it worthwhile for me to pay out of pocket for a colonoscopy?

The latter question is very important in a system that isn't single-payer and so this has sparked a lot of debate in e.g the US.

One of the four parties in the ruling coalition has rural voters as their main constituency. This weirdness might be the result of them negotiating to keep the cost of driving a tractor around low. I'm not sure what they are doing on the local roads, but I see them a lot when driving outside the city.

> How come they can lose more money than they raised?

The difference is debt they've taken on.

In his book Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi dives a bit deeper into what sort of "problems" we should choose for yourself if we want a happy life. The gist of it is that we should pick activities that we can loose ourselves in. Everyone's experienced this, where they work on something, look at the watch, and a surprising amount of time has passed. A few examples of good "problems": learning an instrument, coding something or learning a sport.

I highly recommend reading the book, as he goes into the key features that get us into the pleasant flow state, so you know what variables to tweak if you can't get there.

This is a good point.

In practice people (e.g. exchanges, that know who you are after KYC) still opt to wait a little because if something does go wrong it's a hassle to actually get paid. For the same reason, we are likely to check some of the bills in a large cash payment for authenticity, even though we have effective recourse through the police and the judicial system.

The block time is 2 minutes. You can choose to wait for 0 blocks or 100. The longer you wait the better the security of your transaction, because there's more PoW behind it. All crypto work like this. You also get more security behind your tx by waiting in a PoS system.

If you're buying a coffee the vendor is likely to let you leave the shop after no confirmations (as soon as their node hears about the transaction) but if you're buying a car the same is unlikely to be true.

Get one of the apps with a sleep timer :)

The post has a good quote from Bill Murray:

> I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: ‘try being rich first.’ See if that doesn’t cover most of it. There’s not much downside to being rich, other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous, you end up with a 24-hour job. . . . The only good thing about fame is that I’ve gotten out of a couple of speeding tickets. I’ve gotten into a restaurant when I didn’t have a suit and tie on. That’s really about it.

> Scientists also developed a way of "carbon dating" mutations. They showed that more than a fifth of them occurred years or even decades before a cancer is found.

> He added: "Unlocking these patterns means it should now be possible to develop new diagnostic tests, that pick up signs of cancer much earlier."

The journalist probably pressed this last point, because it can't possibly be true in a practical sense. Even if you can detect these changes early on in cells, we can't possibly test every cell in the body for mutations on e.g. a yearly basis, right?

I just listened to the book Bad Pharma, by Ben Goldacre, which deals with this problem. The author works as a doctor and so has a bit of an inside view of how the industry does 'science' and how this affects doctors and patients.

The lack of published negative results isn't a problem unique to pharma but the drive for profits and the actual life and death outcomes makes it particular severe in this area of science, I think.

I highly recommend the book, it was both hilarious and terrifying.