"But millions of Americans who owe far more than $500 may not benefit — 1 in 4 U.S. adults with health care debt owe more than $5,000, according to a KFF poll conducted for this project; 1 in 8 owe more than $10,000."
And this is likely to be a severe undercount. Given that 1 in 4 Americans can't even afford treatment and so they just go untreated rather than take on the debt.
You’re presumably misreading that, under 1/3 of Americans have any medical debt and of people with medical debt 75% owe less than 5,000$.
Which means under 1/12th of Americans have more than 5,000$ in medical debt and 1/24th owe more than 10k.
That seems like a huge issue, but only 387,721 Americans declared bankruptcy in 2022. The discrepancy is people who get a moderate medical bill often just don’t pay it for years. Until they’re forced to pay, or the statute of limitations runs out and it goes away.
Yes, you're correct. The NPR article does state that it is 1 in 4 adults with debt owe more than 5k.
The article also states:
"Health care debt in the U.S. now affects more than 100 million people, according to a nationwide KFF poll conducted for this project. The toll has been especially high on Black communities: Fifty-six percent of Black adults owe money for a medical or dental bill, compared with 37% of white adults."
The US has a population of ~335 million people. If 100 million people have medical debt, that would be 1 in 3 people. And the census date seems to back that to a point.
The problem with all of these stats are that the definition of debt can change which can swing the number fairly widely. The KFF poll that is referenced by NPR mentions the debt is framed as either actual debt or other forms of debt such as "debt that patients accrue is hidden as credit card balances, loans from family, or payment plans to hospitals and other medical providers." Which means that if this form of debt is the metric that makes sense (I think it does given that the above are all forms of debt), then the percentage of adults
is really not 1 in 4, but 1 in 3, which is even more disturbing.
Taking such an expansive view of debt and things become largely meaningless. You end up defining some billionaires as being in medical debt. Here’s an analysis that ignores debt under 250$ as trivial.
“This analysis shows that 20 million people (nearly 1 in 12 adults) owe medical debt. The SIPP survey suggests people in the United States owe at least $220 billion in medical debt. Approximately 14 million people (6% of adults) in the U.S. owe over $1,000 in medical debt and about 3 million people (1% of adults) owe medical debt of more than $10,000.”
But of course that’s a biased survey. ~88 billion of debt that shows up on people’s credit reports suggesting the actual numbers are likely significantly below that estimate.
I have never had my utility power cut for any cause other than storm/ice damage. And it's generally back on within a day, without any involvement on my part. If a hailstorm destroys my rooftop panels or a misbehaving vendor remotely shuts off my inverter, these are problems I now have to solve for myself. No thanks.
Your panels are covered by your home insurance, just like your roof. So you'd already be talking to your insurance agent if you had any hailstorm damage to your home. I'm really sure I see the point.
YouTube is routinely broken for Firefox, especially when navigating around in places like shorts. I actually find this to be a feature because it prevents me from continuing to mindlessly consume. But it is broken.
Which would be great and all, but they already exist. But rather than take advantage of the cheaper existing solar panels and electric cars we'd rather impose massive tariffs on them because of the country making them.
I can't speak to modern hpc, since I've been out of the game for a few years but icc was absolutely the preferred compiler for almost any workload and Intel procs were the desired hardware to run on. AMD was joked about as the only reason Intel wasn't considered a monopoly at the time and that Intel would happily take wheelbarrows of cash over to AMD to prop them up, just to ensure they didn't even appear like a monopoly. But no one in the field was buying AMD procs for their workloads.
We are in the process of installing a 13 kwH system which is 31 panels at 430 watts with two Tesla power walls. Total cost (with snow guards) is just shy of 60k. The backup batteries are where this really shines. Our power provider had a blackout of 25 hours in April and if we were 6 blocks south, it was an entire week. The true cost of the system will be approximately half this after rebates and is more like 32k. The rebates are so good between Fed, State and the power company that we almost got the backup batteries for free.
It it certainly possible for incompetent managers to misuse SAFe, as with any other methodology. I've seen that if actually implemented as written it tends to work pretty well in large enterprises, at least in the sense of being the least bad option that allows product delivery with the level of consistency and reliability necessary to meet external commitments. Comparisons to "waterfall" are a rather silly strawman.
Do you have a specific criticism of the SAFe budgeting model, or a specific alternative to propose?
So I actually find this helpful because if the why doesn't match the what (code), I know to look back at the history of changes and see why there is a mismatch. This is honestly a great signal that something might have gone sideways in the past while I'm trying to triage a bug or whatever. So even if the comments are out of date, they're still helpful, because I know to go look at why they're out of sync.
This is really the problem. I was mid cut felling a 40' pine when I ran out of battery power and had to wait for the backup battery to finish charging so I could finish the cut, which was incredibly nerve racking because I was taking down a tree in my backyard but it abutted an area the neighborhood used as a walkway. I even had to redirect a few people who were trying to use the walkway for fear of killing someone if the tree fell while I was waiting.
My electric chainsaw has seem a lot of work, but you really have to be sure you have enough batteries to get the job done.
3 is the magic number in my experience. They’re comfortably done charging at that point. I have a lot of M18 fuel tools so I happen to have a bunch of those batteries around.
The experience is so much better than gas though. No terrible fumes, no continuously filling up two different tanks every 30 minutes, relatively quiet, no flooded engines, no having to pull start 20 times in cold weather, no dealing with fuel filters and worry about leaving gas in the tank.
Yep, I had already done that. But I wasn't confident that it would fall the right direction since the winds typically blow in the opposite direction of where I had intended it to fall. And I had 60 feet of fence 4 feet from the tree stump that I really didn't want it to fall on
The depreciation on EVs is actually quite ludicrous. I have a 2018 Leaf that has 30k miles on it. I took it in for warranty repairs to a local dealership and while I was waiting looked at some of the 2024 Leafs and the starting price was 35k. The trade in value of my leaf? 6k.
The dealer told me that the price of all EVs is much lower in resale due to the incentives offered on new EVs.
I found it entirely preposterous that the difference between the 2018 leaf and 2024 leaf was really 29k for 60 additional miles of range. Materially that was really the only difference between the two models (and 30k miles, but still).
Leafs are about the worst on resale value though. EV buyers have largely realized the battery life on Leafs aren't as good as liquid cooled EV batteries, and the fact they don't support CCS or NACS means they're incredibly limited compared to pretty much every other EV on the market.
Other than comparing the major price changes in OEM prices of Teslas no other EV has had nearly as bad of a time as Leafs.
I mean, sure. The charging network is actually why I've been telling people to avoid them, since CHAdeMO is very hard to find. But then why is the new sale price so high compared to the resale?
"But millions of Americans who owe far more than $500 may not benefit — 1 in 4 U.S. adults with health care debt owe more than $5,000, according to a KFF poll conducted for this project; 1 in 8 owe more than $10,000."
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/06/16/1104969...
And this is likely to be a severe undercount. Given that 1 in 4 Americans can't even afford treatment and so they just go untreated rather than take on the debt.
https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2024-11-21/...