Joined 6 years ago
I always found it interesting what the direction of the data has been in this dystopia, might not be signficantly interpretable (as in, "capitalism mainly uses the internet to blast propaganda and ads" instead of "capitalism uses the internet to spy on the citizens"), because the up/downstream direction of data will probably be dominated by video, so the direction only tells us which way video is going, and it makes sense that corps want to send videos, but consumers are more apprehensive about sending huge volumes of theirs.
But in general, it does seem to be that as time goes by, the corporations seem to be less interested in receiving messages, as opposed to sending messages. Maybe a decade or two ago virality was this interesting organic phenomenon that emerged and was followed by the companies, nowadays it seems to be more of them controlling what is viral and what is not, preferring to distribute a unified message.
Interestingly a tax on consumer bandwidth would not deter peering and huge volumes of traffic on the backend, so I feel it would greatly deter edge caching, which relies on reducing traffic distance instead of end-user traffic. I'd assume that at least video would be a bit less top-heavy and more indie/personal. That said, that's just video, the rest of the media forms will probably be unaffected by such a tax, 5 cents per GB is only relevant to video.
Also, in technical terms the tech is the same, the internet connects corporations with consumers so it's not surprising that the connective tissue is homogeneous, and there is no strict protocol asymmetry (unless you posit that there's an upload/download semantic association with upload producers and download consumers) so if there's any difference between an consumer and a corporate connection, it comes down to raw traffic volume, which in this case is 1Gbps, which both theoretically and empirically has been fine for years.
> "per capita"
I don't quite get the difference, patients pay a fixed amount for insurance, hospitals charge "fee for service" to the insurance. Both systems coexist, it's not one or the other.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting changing the whole system, I think that's infantile sorry to be blunt, I'm proposing a more down to earth (and commercially appealing approach) of increasing the price (and thus financial incentives) of medical goods that have low cost but high health values.
My economic theory clearly isn't as strong, because how much should a CT scan and a pill be priced at relative to a heart attack response with a 1 week hospitalization and a bunch of work. Because the cost of a CT scan and a pill is low (100$), the value of it is high (50K$ lower bound), and the cost of treating a heart attack is clearly around 50K$, but the value of it is clearly lower than the preventive treatment (perhaps stochastically adjusted).
So should we be pricing by cost or pricing by value? The naïve approach is pricing by cost, so that everything is cheap, the first issue with this approach is that it disincentivizes research, which is why legal systems widely recognize patents, copyright and intellectual property.
I looked into Shkreli's case a bit deeper, and he was a stupid kid of course, but it's what comes to mind when thinking of 'raising prices' of medicine, there's not many faces to that idea.
That said, I'm not saying that prices SHOULD be hiked, just that I'm not convinced that medicine pricing should be cost based, or that it should be value based, or that some supply-and-demand principle would magically find a value in the middle. I'm just saying that it can be either way, and I just don't know which way it ought to be.
And ultimately, it's a decision that every actor in the industry can make, what they price their products and time at. And to reiterate my thesis, pricing your product as cheaply as possible might counterintuitively reduce it's impact, since there is no incentive for intermediaries (or even yourself) to work on it. So I'm not saying that prices should be maximalized either, just that the relationship between price and value contributed to society is not linear, if you price your medicine at 0, you go bankrupt, that's not helpful obviously, and evidently pricing a CT scan and a heart attack pill at 100$ is not cutting it either, hike that up.
Recently there was an old lady in the family that had an appendicitis, an ambulance rejected her, and the next day it got worse, and at that point she was accepted, but it was a bit too late.
One hypothesis is that triaging is hard and there's a lot of demand so things only go in when it's bad enough (considering there was medical insurance, they aren't charging per patient, so there's no incentive to take on more patients). But if that were the case, then preventive measures would actually reduce the total burden on their system.
The more cynical hypothesis that I'm holidng is that that health system is maximizing for work, if there's 10 appendicitis per month, and they are all handled in time, that's maybe like 5 hours of billable hours per patient? But if the appendicitis becomes bad enough and there's a puncture, then you have infections, complications, the patients have to stay for weeks and often come back for checkups, we are looking at maybe 100 billable hours? So the financial incentive is there.
In that sense what I want to add is that the title would be completely wrong, the solution is not for the hospital to pay 100$ for prevention, but for prevention to be more accurately priced, we should be paying 50k, and maybe even 100k for prevention, because we value it more than emergency action.
In a broader economic sense, there's a lot of cases where there's a huge difference between the cost and the value, Shkreli got a lot of heat for surging up medicine prices, but I don't think it's immediately obvious that something should be valued in proportion to what it costs. Maybe if we price heart prevention at 100K, there would be more incentive for everyone involved to just get a fucking pill to those in need, imagine how many people would jump at that opportunity to make it happen, call centers, bureocrats, NOC support, legal teams, all dedicated to making sure a pill gets to the patient before a heart attack does.
Sure you can print USD to make it all magically go away
But it would be very convenient if there's some experimental token of which a majority was stolen, so that irreversible damage was caused. If the token is experimental it could have a low damage, but could demonstrate the irreversible nature of these types of attacks, returning fiat money doesn't waive the issue away.
There's also the fact of funding criminal networks for billions of dollars, which probably causes them to scale cyber or non cyber operations or otherwise gain power.
It's closer to radiofrequencies I think, these are heavily regulated.
However radiofrequencies are purely natural resources, while IPv4 have a specific copyrightable spec design, domains have trademarkable TLDs
We run a public facing server, we aren't going to ask patients and external physicians to configure a DNS or run a (linux) script
>Then maybe call up your ISP and rant
You wouldn't be surprised how unhelpful and unfun that is
In any case it's not relevant to the case from the root comment, since the ISP doesn't offer IPv6. IPv6 folk are siding with the ISP here or getting distracted with IPv6.
Essentially IPv6 people are delusional about the state of support of the tech and the extent of issues it brings, there's regions where there's no IPv6 support, so when a network with IPv4 has an IP related problem, IPv6 folk will blame it on IPv4 even if it's entirely unrelated, even if the infrastructure isn't even at dual-stack phase.
One of the thing the ISP did was try to upgrade the connection from copper to fiber optics, like instead of understanding the issue, "let's just try upgrading from your OLD technology which is OUTDATED, no wonder you were having issues? Also have you tried turning it off an on again that helps? Talk to you tomorrow.". IPv6 guys so far have been a distraction, get walmart to run their website on IPv6 before you push it to a hospital in southamerica who is having downtime.
I work for the hospital, occasionally, they are my client.
> You have an actual contract with the ISP, right?
They do not, it's an implied consumer contract, like when someone buys a hot dog from a stand.
I'd like a written contract too, but when trying to negotiate one, they want a lot more money for them, it depends of the nuances of the terms, but I've talked to sales reps, and it comes down to having a 1Gbps line that works right now vs a 100Mbps line that's more expensive, with the only difference being that the contract is now written and there's a symbolic SLA with some 10% penalty, and a single professional beration receiver instead of multiple anonymous on call rotation.
It's not a clear choice, especially considering that the dedicated route with SLA means introducing change risk to the operational and SLA benefit of the ISP, fiber, new holes, new lines, etc..
>You could also update to IPv6.
I would, they don't offer IPv6
>You don't need an address block from an RIR. You just need your ISP to give you an address.
Yeah, maybe. If I get an IPv4 block though what I'd do is a regional entity whether for profit or NFP to offer emergency regional tunneling, potentially while finding alternative revenue streams like collecting lists of wronged ISP customers and notifying them of class action lawsuits they may participate in. A 25K check, or a 5K check with an ipv4 block and I'm golden.
