Federated Republic of Sean @freakazoid@retro.social

They ALSO see the protons as being closer together, but not by as big a factor as the electrons, and protons in the same wire will appear the same way.

The result is that the electrons in each wire "see" a negative charge on the other wire and thus are repelled.

Even though the electrons involved in an electric current usually move very slowly, there are a ludicrous number of them. As a result, even at very low velocities, relativistic effects are noticeable. For example, electrons moving the opposite direction in a parallel wire will see the electrons in the opposite wire as being closer together because of the Lorentz contraction of length.

For some reason electromagnetism usually seems to be taught separately from special relativity. As a result, it seems like this complicated force that just magically arises when "magnetic domains" are aligned or a current flows. But there's a much simpler explanation.

The average health insurance cost for a 21 year old in the US is around $250/month. About the same as the average car payment and average monthly food spending. It's much lower than rent, but it's still a huge cost, and one shouldn't have to choose between being able to have a car and not going bankrupt if they end up in the hospital.

Anyway, point being: we need to focus on the cost of, and access to, healthcare in the US.

This wasn't super expensive (for the US) because it's a public hospital, but it also was an expense a distressing fraction of the population wouldn't be able to absorb. They won't deny treatment if you don't have the means to pay, but that doesn't mean they won't bill you for it anyway.

They sent us home with a silver foam bandage, something I'd never heard of before. They apparently reduce pain and the chance of infection rather dramatically. The burn (2nd degree but mostly not "deep" 2nd degree) was mostly healed within a few days, and there's almost no scarring. What is there you have to look very closely to see and will probably be gone by the time he's a teenager

I'll leave you with an anecdote, not that it means anything. My younger son, who was 4 at the time, spilled coffee on himself that had just been poured from the pot. His mom pulled his shirt off, and his skin came with it. So she took him to the emergency room at a nearby private hospital. They dressed the wound and sent them to the *public* hospital a few miles away, which as it turns out has a top-notch burn unit.

But all this comes back to the high cost of our health care system. It could definitely be much cheaper. It could definitely be way more equitable. There are probably classes of problems for which the system does a bad job. There are plenty of places where emergency care can be expanded and/or improved. But for a lot of stuff, the US health care system does a good job.

Part of that is because we tend to catch it earlier. We may even be treating cancers (and calling that a "survival") that would never have become life threatening. But the studies do account for what stage the cancer was found at.

Another factor is that in the US we will use very expensive treatments to extend life by just a few months. Which has a big effect when you're talking about stage IV.

The Oregon Medicaid study was unable to demonstrate improved health among the people who got coverage. What it did show was an improvement in financial security. Certainly one could say the study was too small or too short to show a health effect, or it didn't matter because the health care was shitty, but in fact outcomes from treatment in the US are pretty good. For example, we have among highest cancer survival rates in the world.

It's possible this leads to a reduction in life expectancy. The folks who don't have good access to health care also happen to have lower life expectancies, but there isn't good data showing how much of that is CAUSED by worse access to good health care, versus higher murder rates, worse diets, smoking, etc.

There was this WHO report that tried to use life expectancy and infant mortality rate as a proxy for the quality of countries' health care systems, but it did not look at cause of death, nor did it look at how infant mortality was being counted in each country. What it did get right was cost. The US health care system is *expensive*. It also does a bad job of making sure the people who need it most have good access.

The thing that's wrong with the Electoral College is actually that, if they ever do engage in their actual function and override the will of the voters, it's far more likely to be due to a conspiracy or to protect white people from a President who might actually improve things.

The ease with which we can send written text has made it so we don't bother going back and reading what we wrote before sending it anymore, even when it's short. And even when we can't recall it and it goes to a lot of people, as is the case with a long email.

As a result, one often sees things like sentences where the end of the sentence doesn't quite match up with the beginning, because the person misremembered their phrasing partway through.

Of course, advanced traction control systems already do this, but they can't provide realtime feedback to a human operator that they can make use of during an emergency. So you'll never know with precision just how much harder you can turn, brake, or accelerate.

A thing about humans: in emergency situations we must look straight ahead, because that is the direction of travel and therefore the direction of greatest danger. Computers can always look everywhere and always check their speed, even of each wheel. They can even know which wheels have lost traction and how much torque they can apply to wheels that still have traction, and how much they need to apply to slipping wheels.

To my knowledge nobody is applying these technologies to automated cars yet. We're just trying to get them not to crash in situations where humans wouldn't. Next step will be to get them not to crash in situations where no human could avoid crashing because of their reaction time and the fact that human controls and human senses have too few channels.

Given the limits of tire traction, it may not be physically possible to construct a vehicle that is maneuverable enough to attain safety levels that will get people to accept automated cars.

On the other hand, an AI can make better use of maneuverability improvements than a human can: 4 wheel steering, independent braking with independent wheel speed sensors, active suspension. Maybe that will be enough?

But automated cars will fail in different ways than human drivers, and we will always second guess all of them when they do fail, even when a human *would* have failed in the same situation. Add people's nervousness when they don't feel in control, and you have a recipe for reticence.

Which means they not only need to be pretty close to perfect, but we'll also need a huge amount of data showing that before we'll accept them.

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