A system that can't even provide dental slots without needing police to break up fights is a catastrophically failed system and it is a huge problem of the UK that people have loyalty to this dying corpse of a department.

And then of course you have the constant strikes and inability to even see a doctor at all unless you win the game of phone lottery.

The NHS may have a simple user interface, but it doesn't actually work when you need it so that's not very helpful. And the idea this is a Tory problem is propaganda. The NHS budget only ever goes higher yet service gets worse. Dumping ever more money into this third world system is never going to work.

Concrete examples from your comment history: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32104731

"Given the weak sourcing, it feels like this article, in particular, flunks the "divisive subjects require more thought and substance" test."

(on a Bari Weiss article arguing that health authorities weren't really driven by science, something they now admit themselves was true).

In other comments you asserted that COVID vaccines can't possibly be dangerous but also said, "Convincing suspicious vaccine-skeptics of the value of vaccines is not the goal here. We're not a public health service; we're a forum for curious conversation. Tedious rehashes of antivax arguments aren't curious; they're just tedious."

If you don't like such discussions, ignore them! Nobody forces you to click through to the comments section. But this tactic of trying to define disagreement with your very strong opinions as not "curious" enough is tiresome. Other people do in fact want curious conversation, which will sometimes mean conversations about topics that you don't like. I'll say it again: leave those discussions alone. Stay away by all means, but don't interfere with other people's curiousity.

But I don't get your reply at all, wtallis. "the next few paragraphs should be about backing that claim up with convincing evidence and explanations" - which is what the stuff about the Diamond Princess, SARS-1 and Hong Kong was about? Evidence and explanations for why the droplet model was wrong. Do you see that? The connection is that the claim exposure as simple as inverse square law on distance assumes no aerosol transmission, which is incorrect.

It's hard not to feel that if people didn't keep flagging these kinds of discussions off the front pages, the wider HN community would be aware of all these basic facts which as the sibling post points out, is actually not controversial and hasn't been for years. HN is supposed to be about intellectual curiousity but the aggressive flagging behavior talked about by others in this thread means that too many posters here are stuck in a timewarp where it's still Jan 2020.

But you also say that making it undiscussable is also not about making the topic untouchable. That's just playing with words, isn't it? It's exactly what you're trying to do and exactly why you're flagging it.

This particular case is really egregious. Fauci has said this draconian policy "just sort of appeared", yet you damn anyone questioning his competence or motives as lacking humility? What would it take for you to allow criticism of this guy?

But this attitude explains a lot of the abusive flagging that goes on here. Stories get flagged because they make people feel ick, and they feel ick because they previously took positions that were wrong. So they flag. And when asked, why do you flag, they say "I don't know, I just don't like it", forgetting that the site exists supposedly to help drive intellectual curiousity. You may not like these stories, but other people do find them useful and you should not interfere with them.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39219906

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

China isn't really a capitalist country. It's more capitalist than it used to be in the 70s, but as this refusing-to-liquidate nonsense shows, the basic rules of capitalism don't really work there. China ignores many things that are required to really do capitalism properly:

- IP rights aren't enforced

- Other kinds of property rights aren't enforced (see the ARM subsidiary that simply declared independence)

- Staying out of private business (see Ant Group)

- Many companies and industries are state owned

- Industrial policy is still the standard in China (compare to the USA)

- Markets aren't informed (rampant censorship, bad data)

and so on.

https://pubpeer.com/search?q=scigen

Or for a more serious example of problems (medical AI):

https://pubpeer.com/publications/ABB8F161E6691210C44545FF899...

The authors report an AUROC of 1.00. This is extremely high and implies perfect discrimination between cases and controls, which seems unlikely given the highly heterogeneous nature of ASD and suggests some sort of data leakage

...

The highlighted point estimates are not in the middle of their confidence intervals, either by a modest amount (yellow) or by a large amount (pink). In some pink cases, the point estimate is not inside the CI at all.

...

I have rather strong concerns regarding the apparent absence of a hold-out dataset.

https://www.karlstack.com/p/the-curious-case-of-claudine-gay

... after a whole article full of explanations, none of which involve surveying white men to ask them why they don't want to sign up anymore. Classic journalism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#/media/File:Sunde...