1. Nick Szabo on how small price changes can become
3. Why Facebook isn’t the future of the web
4. Follow the numbers: why U.S. health care won’t be cheap anytime soon
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Regarding granularity, I hate to be boring, but one can keep accounts of internet activity or whatever in thousandths of a cent,
but when it comes time to pay the bill, there will be a rounding to the nearest legally defined unit of granularity for which
payments can be made, and that is a cent. Ironically, we have had such accounting before, on the stock market until quite
recently, prices were denominated in eigths of a dollar, recalling the pieces of eight or bits of the Spanish dollar era.
But, while two bits are a quarter, nobody can pay one bit, or 12 1/2 cents. So, granularity may exist more finely mentally or
in accounting, but when money has to change hands, there are arbitrary limits.
Actually, going Don one better, my two major concerns about national health care are:
1. They would stymie pharmaceutical innovation.
2. They would stymie or delay medical outsourcing, which offers the greatest promise of lowering health care costs and increasing access.
Eriks, at best one can say Klein’s post implies that overly strict IP laws may lower innovation. Okay.
I don’t see how that alleviates my concerns about national health care, unless you believe that our current health care system or any other possible system besides national health care is doomed to such an overly strict IP regime that R&D gets destroyed anyway and we may as well have national health care.
And maybe you could address #2 by assuring me that we’ll starve the national health care system of funds while demanding so much from it that it will be forced to pursue outsourcing, so we’ll gain that, too. Generally, bureaucracies are only innovative when you starve them.
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