This isn’t an attempt to estimate a typical bill for an asymptomatic individual. It’s an attempt to set an expected value for the costs that will eventually be incurred across the population of asymptomatic patients. They are using a mean to describe how costs will scale with the size of that population (asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 positive) and NOT as a way to describe the typical costs of individuals in that population. The cost distribution is almost certainly a power law. I’d guess the median is zero and the mean is many thousand dollars.
Every jurisdiction regulates financial institutions for good reasons (yes, also some bad reasons). While a great deal of misbehavior does persist under regulation (Wells Fargo, etc), it’s a fraction of what we would see if they were not or could not be regulated.
Inspectable and freezable payments systems are one core part of the infrastructure that enables regulation. The point at which it looks like Blockchain technologies are successfully enabling an alternative financial system that’s not subject to these controls is the point at which blockchain technology gets severely constrained by law.
Intermediaries aren’t always a bad thing. Stock settlement intermediation was transformative for the securities industry, greatly increasing the liquidity of the market.
Being able to embed assembly instructions directly in the code gave much needed access to all the PDP-10 byte manipulation instruction. I loved BLISS, but some had trouble with the pesky dots needed to indicate value of rather than addresses of variables.
Used it for a couple of years in the mid '70s before moving on to SAIL.
My first two programming jobs were in PDP-10/20 Assembly. Occasionally someone will complain about network specs that say octet instead of byte. And I‘ll just casually say, well some machines had variable byte sizes and go back to what I was doing, waiting for them to start sputtering.
Under-taxation of corporations plays a significant role in the decline of research spending. While potential competitive advantage is one reason to pursue research and development, taxes and the interplay between tax and corporate accounting are another reason (even prior to 1981).
While taxes paid by corporations benefit the general public, from the corporation’s point of view taxes are money out the door with zero possible return. So what does a prudent corporation do with its profits? It recognizes that they are potential capital and seeks to maximize the risk-adjusted return on capital.
It can bank them at the risk-free rate of return, but we should remember taxes will take a healthy chunk out of that return on the front end. It can pay them out to investors as dividends (increasing the return on remaining capital by reducing the denominator). Note that under rational tax schemes the risk adjusted return on capital should be equivalent to investing at the risk free rate of return (modulo management of cash-flow risks). It can buy riskier assets with higher return, such as other companies. And it can make much riskier investments, like research and development. As with most things financial, the best overall risk adjusted return on capital is diverse in both kind and in risk level. It should do all of those things (treating dividends as equivalent to investment at the risk free rate of return), with the proportion going to each tuned to achieve the aggregate optimum(1). Also, can you see how a regulated utility with(like AT&T of old) would find R&D attractive for spicing up its asset mix?
Think of R&D as producing a stream of lottery tickets with the drawing in the distant future. Those lottery tickets (for a tech company) can pay off in two ways. One is that they could produce or enhance a revenue stream. The other is that they could reduce risk in the form of patents (reduce competitive risk and risk of patent suits by threat of countersuit). Both of these payoffs improve risk adjusted return on capital (by generating return or reducing risk). The neat thing about R&D for a company that’s paying real taxes is that much of the cost is (from a tax point of view) is an expense. In other words, that allocation of capital doesn’t have the upfront bite taken out of it that occurs when profits are directed to risk free assets. Looking at this from a risk-adjusted return point of view, having a real tax burden increases the appetite for risk by decreasing the relative attractiveness of the risk-free alternative after taxes. This is doubly true for expenditures that look like expenses to tax collectors but look like capital investment for corporate accounting purposes.
None of this holds true if a company isn’t paying much in the way of taxes on its profits. It doesn’t mean some amount of R&D isn’t still attractive, but the appetite for risk is lower. And let’s be clear, R&D in research labs is the riskiest kind of R&D.
Well, you might say, the 1981 R&D tax credit is sweeter than a deduction. Doesn’t that tilt the scales back? Yes, but subject to the limitations of the tax credit (which are numerous). But, like the deduction, the tax credit is much less valuable for companies that aren’t paying taxes on their profits. And, to be clear, this is a Reagan measure taken with full knowledge of what was expected to happen to corporate tax rates and the impact that might have on R&D investment. It’s a partial mitigant for that, nothing more.
I am fully aware that I have murdered both CAPM and the practice of accounting in compressing this down to a reasonable post with what I hope is a clear narrative. My apologies to practitioners of both.
(1) An important aside: People make equity investments to take more risk in the expectation of higher return. Beyond the cash cushion necessary for minimizing cash-flow risk, massive cash hoards do nothing but dilute the risk (and return) rational investors are actively seeking to take. There is some argument to be made that large tech companies keep huge cash hoards because their core businesses are riskier than they appear (esp black swan events), but it probably has more to do with founders desire for independence.
The freestanding house I grew up in (in Fieldston in the Bronx) looks just like it did when I was a kid. And it looked the same in Google Streetview until the pictures of that neighborhood were pulled (presumably at the request of the neighborhood association).
I think the photographs are all of properties on which property tax is paid. Also, I loved in that building too, when my ex-wife was doing her medical internship at the Animal Medical Center.
It’s not sound and ultimately it’s based in the grief of people who believe they have somehow lost their child (or spouse, or sibling) because they transitioned. I don’t want to minimize the pain of people who have this mindset, no matter how destructive it is. Their sense of loss is genuine and it drives them to the same level of commitment that you see from parents who lose a child to a drunk driver. But, while the pain is real, the loss is either not real or is self-inflicted. Trans people leave the lives of people who won’t let them be themselves, but we don’t stop loving our family because we’re trans.
More people are transitioning, at all ages. More of the people who do so are visible, because of modest reductions in stigma and because there’s no longer a requirement that we disappear and cut all ties (the medical establishment used to require this). Your typical 40-50 year old parent has no idea how many of the people they went to High School and College with are trans, because they were hidden. In much the same way people had no idea how many people were gay. So this looks like an explosive change. I do expect we will see much less late transition (later than early adulthood), because more of those trans people will transition earlier.
So, why are more people transitioning? Because it’s possible and they understand it to be possible, not because there are more people who are trans. This is why it’s happening across all ages. I am a late transitioner. I started to transition as soon as I understood three things: that being trans and transitioning was a real thing, that I would not destroy my life by doing so, and that trans people can live happy fulfilled lives.
What about desistance? Some small percentage of people who transition decide that it wasn’t right for them. Most of them because of oppression, but some because it doesn’t work for them. This is much smaller than the set of people who regret that they didn’t transition, or that they waited so long to do so. It’s lower than the rate of regret for any elective surgery. There is some risk that non-binary kids who emphatically reject their assigned sex at birth are getting social pressure to conform to the other end of the binary. The pressure to be not trans at all is still very high. High enough that I don’t worry about cis kids being pressured into transition.
And there are many trans people who don’t need or want to transition, who find sufficient expression or acknowledgement in other ways. They aren’t less trans, you just don’t know they are.
Thank you for the thoughtful response. I have no agenda here. I have one trans friend (that I know of). After seeing the topic on Rogan's podcast I did some quick searching online and it opened up a few lines of thought I hadn't considered or wasn't aware of.
Edit: added "(that I know of)" to acknowledge my limited knowledge of my friend's gender or sexuality.
Rogan has been, at best, insensitive to trans people. Given the volume of people who hold agendas against trans people and trans rights and Rogan's willingness to host people without holding a critical eye to their opinions, I'd be very careful about using his podcast as a jumping off point to the topic. I'd really recommend reading the stories of trans people directly and engaging with the scientific community.
so could you produce some numbers about transitions? because frankly this discussion (just as the more street-oriented fraction of BLM...) seems driven by a very vocal but ultimately minuscule number of people. And if now in some avantgarde-circles (which never were related to the majority of people and also today generally have their very own orthodoxy... ) trans is en vogue, I doubt that this is the mass phenomenon you think it is.
It’s not a mass phenomenon. Neither is Autism. Fewer people are trans than are gay, but nobody really knows. At the bottom end it’s 0.3%-0.6% of the population, but that’s only people who are out. If you survey people in their low 20s, it’s higher. We’re a little less common than redheads in all likelihood. Gay people in the early 80s knew there were a lot more gay people than straight people saw, but they had no idea what the true numbers were. It’s like that.
Most of the trans people I know aren’t remotely avant-garde. I know a bunch of suburban women in monogamous relationships with their spouses or partners. I know a couple of suburban trans guys who are still married to the men they married before they figured it out, one of them with kids. I know several trans guys in health care. I do know a few trans people who are artist and writer types and are more flamboyant. The first trans woman I met worked at the same Wall Street brokerage I did and was very quiet.
When I go to (back when travel was a thing) places that are less friendly than the coasts and people see the trans flag pin on my bag, I frequently have people come out to me and talk about how they can never transition.
There is really no orthodoxy beyond believe people about their gender. Trans people are very different from each other and their experience of being trans varies wildly. There’s some agreement around language and tropes that seem to provoke violence towards us, but many trans people use language to describe themselves that other trans people would be offended by. But that’s true of gay people too.
First off: yes, trans tends to be an umbrella term these days.
>how are people who still live their cis-lives, happy and don't really plan anything medical trans? Or is trans today just a catch-all phrase for everything a little androgynous?
If I understand correctly, you're misinterpreting this graf:
>When I go to (back when travel was a thing) places that are less friendly than the coasts and people see the trans flag pin on my bag, I frequently have people come out to me and talk about how they can never transition.
The trans people GP is talking about here are absolutely trans, but they don't feel safe transitioning because their local environment is more hostile to trans people overall than the west coast or northeast of the US. I know a lot of trans people like that and "living their cis-lives," "happy," and "don't plan on anything medical" don't even begin to describe their existence. I worry a lot about most of them. Being in the closet as a trans person is not inherently safer and in particular rates of suicide are much higher.
>this seems very much like some orthodoxy trying to prescribe their opinion. What's the problem with that language as long as (I assume) people are happy with it?
It's a question of respectability and what it means to reclaim something. Some trans people like to use traditionally offensive words to describe themselves, others don't. In general I think it's best that we don't describe others with offensive terms unless they ask for it, even as they become more frequently reclaimed, but I have no problem with whatever labels someone chooses for themselves, and different communities have different norms around these things.
So I got that after someone here talked about being nearly trans, because he had no stereotypical feelings? Shouldn't that be normal that your mood changes and you like different things on different days and in different stages of your life? I somehow find it very strange that now people are trying to box "normal" (as in that's how our system is supposed to work) behavior into "trans" - what's the purpose of that? I'm sure it's not helping acceptance from (frankly speaking) "weird" people which apparently can't accept other opinions. If everyone is non-binary to some degree (which seems the conclusion of some herr), why make a category for that and not just treat the psychologically ill who can't accept that?
and yes, that was a misinterpretation apparently. However, I am right that transition actually means taking hormones, getting an operation or daily crossdressing? Because if it's not and the people are unhappy, I think they should get psychological help (which might be a stigma itself). Except for the real external features I really doubt that people in the rural US really get to know that you are watching romcoms with your wife and enjoy it?
Btw: if there's 1 of 100 trans, how come you really know a lot of them? I imagine if they are in the closet, it's hard to get them talking about these things as well! So how do you do it?
EDIT: isn't something completely broken if some people binarize traits as female and male and accordingly everyone in between as non-binary? I mean, before we categorized people into genders by sex, now we categorize people into gender by their binarized behavior.
It's not really about the traits, though. You're making a category error if you think this is about gender stereotypes at root. It's possible that some people transition mostly because of gender roles, but for a lot of us it's because our bodies feel wrong on a fundamental level. It's hard to explain exactly what this means but suffice it to say it's unpleasant enough that it makes transition worth it for a lot of trans people.
I would say that if you find all of this strange that's a good sign that you're probably not trans and nothing more. You're right that transition is not something that just anyone does, there is an enormous amount of self-sorting that goes on.
Also, there's nothing wrong with transitioning and getting psychological help. In fact, I recommend it. Psychologists and psychiatrists these days really shouldn't be anti-transition or anti-trans people existing, the consensus on these things has shifted quite a bit, just like it did back in the 60s and 70s with gay people.
>EDIT: isn't something completely broken if some people binarize traits as female and male and accordingly everyone in between as non-binary? I mean, before we categorized people into genders by sex, now we categorize people into gender by their binarized behavior
Trans people are likely to be the last people to automatically characterize people based on those traits. To me at least, really what matters is what you tell me your gender is. I think people should have the freedom to choose the gendered existence they most desire, in body and in character. Trans women are definitely not all stereotypically feminine, though this is widely believed. I wear a t-shirt and jeans and have a buzzcut.
>Btw: if there's 1 of 100 trans, how come you really know a lot of them? I imagine if they are in the closet, it's hard to get them talking about these things as well! So how do you do it?
The internet :). 1/100 is quite a bit in a world with 7 billion people in it. And more and more of us aren't in the closet anymore. Moreover, closeted trans people often want to talk to trans people who aren't closeted, or have transitioned, because they're looking for validation that what they know to be true about themselves is possible and legitimate and many cultural and societal forces tell them it isn't.
I also suspect the real prevalence of trans people and gender dysphoria is not well understood. I don't know whether the real number is lower or higher, though.
Ok, if I'm making a category error, then, why do we have this transgender debate over the transsexuality-debate (which imo is different, because people there are actively using medicine to change facts about their body, which is not necessary true for any transgender?)?
And what makes cis-gender then, except the fact that you are fine to be called he/she?
> to choose the gendered existence they most desire
so: what is gender then, if it's neither sex, nor stereotypes?
Thanks for answering all these questions and having this discussion, while I also (like a lot of people here) sometimes question the wisdom of artifical images which are projected as a role model, I don't grasp the idea of non-transsexual transgender (which, if I'm correct today is a thing in the discussion).
Also, while I actually sometimes talk to friends about their feelings, I've not encountered anyone expressing discomfort with their "gender", but I'm obviously not actively searching for that (which you probably do on the internet).
>which imo is different, because people there are actively using medicine to change facts about their body, which is not necessary true for any transgender?
Transgender people can get HRT, socially transition, and undergo GCS. The people who use the term "transsexual" to describe themselves today are usually doing so to draw a line in the sand between those who are "trenders" and those who are "true trans". This line in the sand can be identifying as a man or woman and not taking anything else seriously (regardless of HRT and GCS status), demanding rigid gender role conformity, or wanting to exclude those who are unable to afford/access HRT and/or GCS from being trans. If you want to see how deep this rabbit hole goes, google "truscum" and "transmedicalism".
The term "transgender" is considered the more appropriate term, and the initial push for it was that "transsexual" sounded like it was a sexual orientation. It is only relatively recently that using "transsexual" became a bit of a political stance within the trans community.
> And what makes cis-gender then, except the fact that you are fine to be called he/she?
If you are cisgender, you agree with the sex you were assigned at birth. That does not mean you must agree with or conform to most or all of the cultural expectations foisted upon you due to what you were assigned at birth, just that the sex you were assigned at birth seems right and does not clash with your gender identity.[0]
There is some debate over whether non-binary individuals are transgender, but given that most definitions of transgender revolve around someone's gender identity being at odds with the sex they were assigned at birth, unless they were pronounced non-binary at birth (which does not happen to my knowledge), they are trans. That said, using the transgender label is an individual decision - trans people who "go stealth" (typically involving moving to a new place and abandoning your old friends so nobody would know you are trans and never telling anyone about your past) would not use the label publicly, but it does not make them not-trans. In addition, many non-binary people view themselves as unworthy of the transgender label or do not use it in order to avoid stigma and invasive questions. This is a personal choice and I do not blame people for not wanting to tell others they are trans, whether they identify firmly as male or female, or somewhere in-between.
[0] I want to elaborate on this point - gender identity can really be thought of as the "sex" of your brain. The sexual differentiation of the genitals occurs during the first 2 months of pregnancy, while the sexual differentiation of the brain occurs during the second half of pregnancy. If there are plenty of androgens (testosterone, DHT, etc) in the womb during the first 2 months but few during the second half, you could have a child with masculinized genitals but a feminized brain (a trans woman), and vice-versa for trans men.[1] (I have not found any research related to this and non-binary individuals, unfortunately.) However, an imbalance between these periods does not guarantee a trans child - we do not fully understand the mechanisms at play, but it appears that there is a genetic component,[2] so there is no way to predict if someone will turn out trans or not.
Regarding the people who have approached me regarding transitions they want but feel they can never make. They are not happy at their situation, but cultural, economic, and other barriers seem (and may be) insurmountable. The vast majority of these trans people merely want to interact with someone who will see them as they see themselves. Some of them want to hear first hand about situations where trans people can be themselves safely. It’s the comfort of catching a glimpse of the promised land, even if you can’t enter it yourself.
Regarding what transitioning is. For some people, transition can be entirely social with no medical element. Hormones are not a required part of medical transition. I know at lease one trans person who has had some surgery and no hormones ever, by choice. I also know of two trans people who have had some medical transition but haven’t socially transitioned.
For many trans people, there’s a set of incongruities between how they experience themselves and how they are seen, their bodies, how they’re allowed to present themselves, etc. Things that are actively distressing for one trans person may not bother another one. One way to look at transition is the process addressing the important (to the individual) self-perceived incongruities.
Regarding how many trans people there are and how do I know so many. Everyone I have spoken about is someone that I have met in person. A couple of hundred, at least. A lot of that is involvement in LGBTQ rights, which tends to put me in the presence of people who are social super-connectors. Some of that was a period of being the only out executive at a big company. There was a while where HR would give my contact info to every person who told them of a desire to transition at work.
But the two biggest factors are a) living somewhere that it’s relatively safe to transition and b) being deliberately visible in a lot of ways. Trans people absolutely migrate to places where they can be themselves safely. Trans people pretty much have full legal equality in California (not The same as social equality). So trans people come here. Washington and Oregon come close to legal equality, as does most of the east coast as far south as Virginia. A lot of cities in otherwise hostile states provide protections. Iowa City and a few other towns in Iowa are decent places to be trans. And even without legal protections, some places are islands of relative safety.
So, in my extended community of friends there are several trans people, and not because I sought them out. Just because there are a lot of trans people here. Three people from the 50-odd person Company I worked at in 2008 have subsequently come out as trans (pre-transition for me and the introduction to them was made by a former Wall Street colleague).
Being willing to be publicly identified as trans means cis friends connect me to trans friends, especially those just coming out. Occasionally some of those people become friends.
Closeted trans people are still trans. Many trans people regard themselves as having always been trans, even though they figured it out later in life. Some trans people talk about “before I was trans”. There’s no monolith of experience or language for describing it.
I actually think the number of trans people is closer to 2-3%, but the studies for that have methodological problems (the percentage is much higher, but there’s a failure to distinguish between types of gender non-conformity). I don’t really care, other than the increasing number of people who decide transition being seen as contagion.
There is one thing that’s “contagious”. Seeing a happy trans person changes your world if your trans and you believe trans people are sad and tragic. You can’t unsee that. Almost every trans person I know has some story about how someone they barely knew came to them and told them that seeing them changed their lives.
Market surveillance is much better than most people realize. The accounts making money on a scam like this would be identified, filtered for anomalous activity, and the people at the other end investigated.
>>..it does make people feel uncomfortable and unwelcome..
Does it really? Have they told you that, or are you feeling offended on their behalf?
I'm from an Irish / Scottish background.
Maybe I should start crying and wailing, next time someone in the office says, at lunchtime, that they're "starving" - --because it reminds me of the Irish Famine. It might even be cultural appropriation to claim to be "starving" if you're not from a part of the world which has suffered famine.
And if I walk past any shops holding a "Clearance Sale", I'll most likely pass out from the sheer horror of being reminded what my ancestors went through, during the Highland Clearances.
Yes, I have been told that more than once. Usually in requests to address the issue as quietly as possible. It’s always been in the context of new development rather than a request to retrofit older systems), but I don’t know if that’s self-censoring or indifference.
We aren’t talking about cultural appropriation, so why bring it up?
This is about an under-represented group (in tech) subject to current-day prejudice. That’s not irrelevant to how the language is received.
Half my ancestors (English) brutally oppressed the other half (Irish and Scottish). None of that oppression is part of my current day experience. But this isn’t true for Black Americans.
