rhandyrhoads

Wouldn't the libertarians take more votes from the Republicans than the Dems?

Medicine in the US is the closest we have to a free market. (Newly developed pharmaceuticals being a bit of exception due to the nature of our patent system) In a free market you work on principles of supply and demand. An important concept here is that of inelastic demand. For certain goods, up to a certain point demand will remain constant regardless of price as they are essential to life or addictive. Think gasoline, water, cigarettes, etc...

With medicine people will generally spend whatever it takes often even going into debt if necessary because they value continuing to live very highly. As a result, hospitals are able to charge as much as they think people are willing to pay before they decide that dying is a better financial decision.

You could argue that in a free market, hospitals which charge less will see more business pushing costs down. For certain areas like elective plastic surgery the whole free market model actually works out fairly well since people have the option to shop around. However, let's say you get in a life threatening car crash. In that moment you don't have the time to shop around for the cheapest ambulance provider and run a cost benefit analysis on which one has the closest ambulance. After that you can't shop around local hospitals to see which can offer the cheapest solution for your procedure because first off you don't know exactly what's wrong until you get to the hospital. Second, you're currently suffering from serious injuries and need to get to the closest hospital. This is why just about the entire developed world apart from the US has nationalised healthcare. Is it completely free of issues? No. Are there some markets where private healthcare can offer better service? Yes. However, you don't have people going into financial ruin because they needed emergency medical care.

Not talking about the cable, yes you do want a durable cable, but end of the day, your cable goes bad you're out 10-20 dollars tops. On the other hand if something happens to the port you're out potentially a couple hundred dollars getting it repaired. Many people will even just replace the device at that point. The design of the lightning port seems much more robust than USB-C.

I didn't reply to this, but part of the reason why people type Reddit after a search is because more often than not it will yield the most useful results. This comes from the age and userbase size of Reddit. If you tried to do this with Lemmy odds are a good amount of the time you'll end up without results or with less relevant results than from Reddit.

It's honestly a bit of a miracle. The whole male port design looks like it would be asking for trouble compared to a female port like lightning, but the engineering seems to hold up.

9 times out of 10 it's just compacted dust in the charging port.

Can't really escape the power grid failures, but as far as hurricanes and intolerance go, there's always Austin.

As someone who's accidentally punctured a large lithium ion battery with 100% charge I can tell you that explode isn't exactly the right word. While I'm sure you could create an enclosure that could explode from the pressure, the battery itself just kinda shoots out a small jet of fire along with some toxic gas.

Assuming that a 500 dollar car won't incur major expenses potentially exceeding its value within 6 months is a super risky bet.

There is some stuff to be learned, but especially with USB-C I'd say the vast majority are not labeled. There's even some devices charged with USB C that can't be charged with a PD charger and need an A to C cable. Phones are a great example where you have to look up the specs to know data transfer capabilities. Additionally they renamed the USB 3.0 standard which has been established for over a decade to USB 3.1 Gen 1 which is completely unnecessary and just serves to confuse. The standard was largely understandable with USB 3.0 generally being blue or at least a color other than black and on decently modern devices USB 2.0 would be black. With USB-C indication has just about gone out the window and what used to be a very simple to understand standard has now become nearly impossible to understand without having researched every device and cable you interact with.

The passage of time is a cruel mistress.

Got it. I mean one thing about Reddit isn't necessarily that it shows up in search results, but that people will go out of their way to append it to a search in order to get better results.