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sure, but generally most businesses do wish to pay for fraudulent activity.

It seems we have reached a point in time where many "business people" seem unable to discern a difference between fraud and not-fraud, but whichever businesses those people are responsible for will not be sustainable enterprises in the long term.


The fraud/not-fraud axis is wholly irrelevant once you consider that the profitable/not-profitable axis exists in a vacuum detached from all reality.


yes, "heavily progressive" and advocating that market solutions would address the root causes of the healthcare situation in America. You guys are great


this shit is so depressing, having a "secret sauce" and it being just mystical and unknowable, a magic incantation which you hopefully scribbled down to remember later


yeah transparency is bad news, the real problem is voters demands for purity from their politicians


No transparency at all is also bad.

I'm afraid an ugly compromise of muddling through with some transparency is the best we can get in practice. At least if your democracy features voting, and especially first-past-the-post voting.

As one alternative, filling your parliament up via sortition might eliminate the downsides of transparency.


Even the nyt is willing to admit that work had begun on the dams before NATO started bombing, they feel obligated to let that tiny crack of truth in


It is doing the great and worthy work of connecting consumers with the products they desire.


The problem is with global brands that continue to advertise anyway. You can make the "discovery" argument for upstarts and niche businesses, but when Coke or Exxon are advertising to me, there is no pretense of giving me information I didn't already have. At some point it's purely about associating one's product with vaguely positive imagery and embedding it just a little bit deeper into everyone's consiousness. No end-consumers benefit from that.


I think this statement satisfies a working definition of irony: about half the audience is in on the joke, and the other half earnestly believes it. I guess that's also true of trolling. Kudos, I suppose.


There is probably some component of that in advertising, but most of it is about selling people Thneeds.


That's neither great nor worthy.

A truly good product sells itself. All advertising is just manipulation.


"A truly great product sells itself" is one of the most persistent myths engineers believe.

I don't understand how people can still believe this when it's so obviously false. It's a nice story, that if you make something great you'll get what you deserve. That sounds fair, but there's no reason to believe the market works this way.

A "truly great product" that no one (or not enough people) know about will go out of business and disappear.

Good advertising is just communication.


A truly good product sells itself.

That's completely absurd. How can a product "sell itself" if nobody knows it exists, or knows how great it is? How do they find out those things? Well, in part, by advertising.

I heartily agree that some advertising is manipulative and anti-social... but I can't buy this "all advertising is just manipulation" stuff.


Exactly


Try finding a psychiatrist willing to help you through that. Most won't (it is seen as risky and liability-generating).


That doesn't make any sense. So if a drug isn't providing any benefits (or too many side effects) your doc won't help you to quit it ??


Often the doctor that a person has when they realize that they need to get off a medication is not the original doctor that prescribed the medication.

And yes, most psychiatrists don't want the liability of weaning somebody off a medication.

You are right, it doesn't make any sense--it certainly is not good for patients.


Then you change doctors until you find someone that will listen to you.


Do you not get in trouble these days for that; as in, could it not look like you’re “doctor shopping”?


That's generally done to get more medicine, not to find one to help you quit using it.


With the ways we’ve seen other systems work, I’d almost expect to be placed automatically on some kind of list that would get you a stonewall response from most doctors you visit for the rest of your life. In fact, there are such databases; here is an article about one in MS: https://www.sunherald.com/news/local/crime/article62959432.h...

I’m sure there will be/are places where these databases are run by private companies with no accountability and no way to issue a complaint.


Hmm depends on the country I guess.

But believe me there are bad doctors out there (your specific case) so you'll have to switch.


I've successfully avoided this kind of crap (never fell for the medication frenzy). Somebody close to me was able to find a psychiatrist who would assist them in getting off meds only when a third party intervened.

The problem is not with individual doctors, it is that the structure {legal, economic} surrounding mental health favors getting people on medication, but doesn't create good paths for them to get off (at least in the US).


Right. I'm saying that is easier said than done.


Yeah. This very apparent imbalance creates a lot of distrust for the pharma industry (as well as for medical providers).


This is very weird comment. Are you saying that the USA was not a multi-ethnic/multi-religious state in the 1960s?

In a nation state, politics tend to be divided more on ideological and regional lines, because everyone shares an identity. There has never been a "nation" where everybody shares an identity in the sense discussed above.


The comment makes sense, but the US isn't best example. Although last century the US was somewhat dominated by one identity (which is now waning and leaving room for others to grow) it has always been multi-ethnic and multi-religious.

A better example would be European nations like Hungary, which have reinforced their national identities in the face of the recent migrant crisis.


[flagged]


We've asked you repeatedly to stop doing ideological flamewar on HN. A crazy number of times actually. Would you please really stop now so we don't have to ban you?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


If you define "British origin" to include Irish Protestants, which is reasonable.. But the country was barely 50 years old by the time that cultural hegemony started eroding as German, Dutch, Irish-Catholics, etc poured into the country.

There's even an infamous 1899 political cartoon that asks "Why should I let these freaks cast whole votes when they're only half American?"[1]

The fact is, the US has spent a majority of its existence feeling like there's an immigration and/or integration crisis, starting in the mid-1800s with Irish-Catholics and stretching to the modern day with Latin-American immigrants.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b9/Hy...


Uh, Pennsylvania Dutch much? Regular Dutch in NY, for that matter? German as the national language being a possibility?

If you want to mourn the WASPs Stewart Alsop might ring your bell better.


American, which is an ethnic group of British origin lol. Why would you ever say this?

Charitably, I assume that you are a troll out for giggles, rather than an actual white supremacist.


Would you please stop posting uncivil and unsubstantive comments to HN? We ban accounts that do that.

Instead, please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here. We'd appreciate it very much.


Please examine the post to which I replied.

===

Edit: sorry I see that you did. Thanks


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