rhandyrhoads

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'm sure in casual settings they probably eat it more like an American, but honestly it doesn't seem like the worst idea with assistance from the knife, especially factoring in the history of the fork. I gotta give it a try sometime.

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.

Same here, but with stuff like rice I definitely have to do a decent amount of plate scraping, especially towards the end. It didn't take, but growing up my mom always told me to just use my knife to get the food on the fork when I was finishing my plate. I will say from my research (which could be biased more towards formal eating) the way they eat mashed potatoes is a bit wild to me. Keep the fork in the same position as when you're cutting meat and push them onto the convex side of the fork. For informal eating with something like rice it was fork left hand, but more of an American style of holding the fork. It does make some sense though. Apparently forks used to be straight and the curve was added so that you wouldn't poke the roof of your mouth so holding the fork curving downwards helps avoid that.

I feel like the American style is very much catered towards the culture of tv dinners and convenience around food. At the end of the day it's all just variations in how we decided to do a task across cultures that get the job done one way or another. With Asia we see the use of chopsticks, in India they use their hands for a lot of foods with a refined technique to push the food from the fingers into the mouth so you're not just shoving your hand in your mouth, in Ethiopian cuisine they use a special bread to pick up and eat the food. As long as the food is tasty and ends up in your mouth it's not too much different than something like driving on a different side of the road or different plug designs. There may be some downsides/upsides to one or the other, but at the end of the day it's just a different path to solve a universal problem.

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.

I did some research and it seems like they do use their left hand, but additionally they tend to always use a knife to assist with getting things on the fork. While for things like rice I see some benefits to the American system, the European system makes a lot of sense for something like steak where you may not want to cut the whole thing before you start eating. I often find myself compromising and precutting more than I want to when I'm eating steak since I change hands.

The whole concept of dominant vs non dominant hand can be over emphasized. For example when it comes to guitar the dominant hand typically handles strumming, but the non dominant hand is responsible for the complicated task of fretting. Using the "non-dominant" hand for a task isn't necessarily relegating it to a lesser status. It's often just a matter of practicality and if you grow up doing something a certain way you'll develop dexterity and be perfectly comfortable using your "non-dominant" hand.

They do that. They just don't switch hands to eat.

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

The tenets are in order of impact from greatest to least. They could have reduced by not making this.

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

Not to defend musk, but wasn't this because they threatened to arrest the legal representative so they got recalled back to the states?