I believe THC is still illegal in France.
So it's mostly convenience - a certain base of weed users don't want to buy from dealers, or want the security of a well produced product - an illicitly produced THC vape can be dangerous [1][2].
CBD (particularly the terpene infused ones) fill that gap.
Nearly all A&E (ER) rooms are managed by the NHS. Private ones are few and far between so it’s likely that a tourist with insurance will end up in a standard A&E - which can have very long wait times[1].
The NHS is also using private clinics to help clear backlogs - so even private insurance can lead to a long time to see a consultant.
I hate to chime in with an ask, but does someone have a good read on healthcare in developed nations and mind commenting?
I always hear and read complaints that the US doesn't have a single player public option for health insurance, and that it makes our country one of the worst.
Other nations with "good health care" seem to pay their workers less, have higher taxes, have long wait times at the ER, weak militaries, etc. Something always seems to give.
How would you rank and quantify the various medical systems of the world? Where does the US fall? Why, and how could we make it better?
I'd like to be better informed about healthcare as a matter of policy and how it fits into the bigger scope of government spending.
> Other nations with "good health care" seem to pay their workers less, have higher taxes, have long wait times at the ER, weak militaries, etc. Something always seems to give.
What is a "weak" military for you, and what does it have to do with healthcare? The UK has aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines (including 24/7 nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile patrols). Only an ignorant American (and maybe Russian) would consider that to be "weak", because they're so used to the militarised culture and massive spends that everything below blowing half the budget on tanks is "weak".
As has been said many times, the US spends more public money on healthcare, per capita and as % of GDP than everyone else, and had some of the worst outcomes (infant mortality, birth mortality, life expectancy, etc.) of all the developed world.
It's not a matter of how much, but how. The US system has middlemen to manage the middlemen and mind boggling prices and practices. Other systems are underfunded or with corruption here and there.
Would you prefer to wait 2 months to see a non-urgent specialist doctor for "free" or have it in a few days, but billed $60k hoping your insurance covers it? I know that most people prefer not being bankrupt over speedy non-urgent treatment. And US nurses are still paid shit for terrible working conditions, so it's not like it's them getting the extra money, it's mostly at middlemen and to a lesser extent doctors.
The solution to the problems exhibited in systems such as the NHS are more funding and focus (e.g. helping more students get to doctor/nurse positions to ease the burden).
As someone working in the industry, I can say that unfortunately NHS funds are very poorly managed with lots of corruption within management. My believe is that a lot of the staff are passionate and hard-working, however at least an equal number of staff are worn-down, disillusioned and dispassionate due to years of managerial neglect and high public expectation.
There is also a believe that the NHS is a single national entity, which is not the case. Both Wales and Scottish have a national trust whereas England has 100's, totally 217 trusts as of April 2020 [1]. This does not allow for combined purchasing power, shared resources and causes duplicate effort in almost every area.
How about dentistry? Seems odd that for the most part that's not covered under the NHS. It wasn't until adulthood I understood all the jokes about British peoples teeth!
My hope is that we can move to another model that is directly free to the end user, reduce the eye watering waiting times and put the almost £200B annual funding to good use.
Although dental coverage on the NHS sucks, British people actually have quite good overall oral health outcomes. If you google, you can find that some studies place British overall oral health ahead of the US.
For anyone who's spent a significant amount of time in the US this shouldn't be too much of a surprise. Middle and upper class Americans have access to excellent dental care, but if you spend some time in the poorer parts of town, you'll see plenty of people with missing teeth and other severe dental problems. NHS dentistry is poor, but it's better than nothing (which is what a lot of poor Americans effectively get).
There's also the aesthetic aspect of it. Europeans in generally tend to be culturally less interested in tooth straightening and whitening.
The biggest problem with state-managed health care is when you get ideologues in control who's ideology is "state-managed things can never work well", because it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. A lot of European countries have spent the past decade or two attempting to privative their health care to varying degrees, since the ideology says that will make it cheaper, but instead it has just gotten worse.
> does someone have a good read
The question is complicated enough that any writings on it will inherently have a bias since there are so many details that are easy to ignore in your favor
And let's not even start about their 2-speed healthcare system, where the privately insured can get immediate specialist appointments while the pleb can join the back of the queue on the 6 month waiting list. Oh, the privately insured also get access to the hospital department head, and private rooms with a second bed in case relatives need to sleep over.
This is the big problem with healthcare in capitalism. If everything is about profit, then healthcare also becomes about profit, and hospitals will decide on treatment based on what's profitable to them, instead of what's better for the patient and for society.
There's always going to be some trade-off of course, because resources are never infinite. But preventative healthcare is a lot cheaper and better for quality of life than waiting until limbs need to be lopped off.
In general, UK system is hands down great i think. Other countries may have even better ones perhaps, but none of the horrors of US.
But in recent years, it's been struggling, certainly it wasn't high on the conservative govt funding list, and COVID caused extra burnout. Winters we're always tough, and this one is thought to be especially so.
It is unclear to me if it is a lack of money or poor spending.
> Other nations with "good health care" seem to [...] have long wait times at the ER,
How are you measuring wait times? How are you defining Emergency Departments?
In England there's a 4 hour target for people to be seen, treated and then discharged (or for a decision to admit to be made). Currently the English NHS is meeting that target for 75% of all attendances. This has declined from a 95% rate a few years ago, and it's seen as a massive problem.
This is it for me, I used Apple Music for a few years and eventually I noticed that some of my playlists would have tracks missing - sometimes a listing would be ghosted, sometimes it would straight up vanish. I called time, brought a A50 and haven't looked back: https://chanc.ee/posts/20200830-abandon-stream.html
Granted my music tastes are esoteric but silently modifying my playlists felt grievous. Now I make sure that subscription money goes on supporting artists directly.
But the nice thing about apple music is that you can add any song to it on your PC and it syncs it to all your devices. So if you have an esoteric taste, you can mix it in with the streaming service.
I think this is the correct take. Most comments have been developers complaining that Safari doesn't do esoteric task _x_ rather than their clients can't achieve _y_
Apple make products for the top end of customers and they don't want to be dealing with complaints from Grandma about battery life because they hit a series of dark patterns and accidentally installed Chrome and made it default.
They've made it quite clear IMO that pwa style products would be better served by a native app.
It's not important to me that your job is easier. I'm a dev and I deal with hard shit 5 days out of the week. My users don't give fk about that, they only care that my product works on their phone.
It would be remiss not to mention Gold makes incredible jewellery. And jewellery - or the act of decorating ourselves to distinguish between one another - is an innate part of all our cultures.
An item can last longer than a lifetime, be passed down generations, melted and reformed into something new whilst being the "same" material. These are astonishing properties. Tulips and currency both rot, but at different rates.
The value of it is relative. In happy times, sure, not worth so much. Bartering to get yourself out of trouble...a Rolex tells the time and opens cell doors.
This feels a little nitpicky to me - as a short hand for language and currency flags are commonplace. But I understand the thinking: "a language is nothing but a dialect with a flag"
The alternative is to use ISO (En, De, Es) in brackets before the text begins. i.e. [DE] Wie Studien verdreht werden
Flags for currency mostly work because nations choose their flag and choose their currency. Flags for languages doesn't work because it's common for the same language to be popular in different countries and for multiple languages to be popular within a single country.
ISO language abbreviations would be a better alternative than the flags but I don't think anything is needed at all; anyone who knows German will recognize the post titles written in German and anyone who doesn't know it will still recognize that they're not in English.
The links do have `hreflang="de"` which in theory can programmatically indicate the language used at the destination, I'm not sure there's any technology that takes advantage of that. They could use a ::before pseudo-element with content: attributes(hreflang) to display the ISO code instead of the flag images. I would like to see `lang="de"` attributes on the German headings and paragraphs on the home page, they would tell screen readers to switch to a voice appropriate for the language when read aloud.
Which flag would you use for euros? Obviously not the european union flag, since there are many countries inside the EU with a different currency (like Sweden or Poland) and even countries outside the EU whose currency is the euro (Montenegro, Kosovo, Andorra, ...).
Yeah, you're right. I did think EU membership was more aligned with use of the Euro (I only knew about the UK using the Pound but they're out). It's still true that each country chooses its currency but it would be just as weird to pick one country in the EU to represent Euros as picking one country to represent a language.
Same goes for Spanish. Which country's flag should represent it? Most people probably don't even know the flag of Spain and readers in Latin America might be offended.
I think the fact is that languages simply don't have visual symbols for them. They are spoken or written, not "looked at". Languages are linear, not 2-dimensional. Euros and Dollars have their symbol because that's what is printed on the 2D surface of bills.
From the article, it looks like Gwern, at least, thought quite a lot about text justification --- see the "Abandoned" section --- so the "learn how typography works" comment seems a bit unfair.
My point being that applying rules learnt from hundreds of years of literary culture and printing do not 1:1 translate into digital.
Justified copy is as much about saving paper as it is about any formality/legibility. It really has no place in long form digital space where space is infinite.
Type designers like consistent and even rhythm between the ink and page. Rivers of white and large gaps between words give the ick.
CBD (particularly the terpene infused ones) fill that gap.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/vaping-cannabis-oi... [2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/xweejk/cannabis-vapes-pens-b...
Edit: Should also mention there's a market for the effects of weed, without the 'high'.