It's not just the universal healthcare enables access to healthcare to more people. When healthcare is something being paid for by everyone, the state of other people's health matters to you too (not just your own).
Therefore, things like public smoking bans (as we have in the UK) as well as public health campaigns around alcohol consumption and healthy eating become palatable. Regulating harmful foodstuffs becomes more important. The cost of smokers' adverse health was (and still is) enormous, and reducing that burden benefits everyone.
> Smokers actually cost less than non-smokers because they die a decade and a half sooner, and old age is where most expense happens.
This is often mentioned, but it's simply not true. It's not old age itself that costs money, it's the part of your life where you need care and support. This is old age in otherwise healthy people, but smokers don't just drop dead one day, they go through as many if not more years of care and support as everyone else, they just do it younger (which costs in lost productive years too).
If you're making an icon of Tower Bridge, you're going to tag it with "London" and "bridge", so it's going to turn up in all searches for London bridge.
At this point though, the two bridges should just swap names.
Fantastic writing. Fantastic acting. It’s really hard to fault it to be honest. In a sea of Stars Wars slop churned out by Disney it’s incredible this got made.
Right now every UK company—regardless of what they actually do—is preparing to claim they're doing it with AI in order to qualify for Government grants. Or they should be!
Don't blame them, this is how products are marketed and sold now, e.g. AI washing machines, AI microwaves, AI features in cars, AI home lighting. Of course, most of these things don't have anything a software engineer or computer scientist might reasonably call AI in - they're just using sensor data and (conventional) algorithms, the same way they have for decades, but AI is the buzzword now.
This is absolutely insane. If they want to know where potholes are, throw up a basic site with a map for reporting, people are very motivated by issues on the roads. Or just ask Google to share Waze data - many potholes on major roads are tagged there. "Feeding AI through cameras" makes so little sense it's laughable, in the most depressing way.
As you've pointed out, I might let it slide if issues were actually being addressed, but they aren't. There are potholes that have been sitting in major city roads where I live for years, and nearly all the street markings around the whole city have completely eroded - junctions are becoming scarier as nobody knows what lane to be in. But I'm sure throwing money at AI can solve these problems.
Such a site already exists: fixmystreet.com. Most councils already use it (or an instanced version of it), and every time I've found an issue in public, it has already been reported on there. Often multiple times.
The issue is, as you say, the council doesn't have the budget to actually fix the reported problems.
The catch is that if your car is damaged by a pothole you have a chance to claim damages from the council only if you can prove that the council knew about the pothole. So even if most reports do not result in an action, they still have some values and are an incentive for the council to fix the road.
If only the councils were as good at fixing potholes as they are at coming up with excuses as to why the road surface is within acceptable limits[0].
Even when they do bother to fix the pothole, they seem to just dump a bit of cold lay asphalt in the worst bit and hand tamp it down rather than properly preparing the surface and levelling the repaired section. As soon as another lorry goes over it, it just breaks up again.
I've submitted many reports through similar apps to my local council and find 25% of them are even acknowledged, 10% at most are "fixed" and the fixes are worthless.
A pothole I reported last October was "fixed" in December, and has already opened up again after the ineffective repair failed to take.
Anecdotally, my local (UK) brewery’s most profitable beer is their alcohol free one. Partly this is because it’s priced the same as their alcoholic beers, but they pay no duty!
I think if they did, they’d sell less of it. Consumers would associate the cheaper price with a poorer quality product (most are probably not directly aware of the amount of duty they’re paying or even that they are). The whole goal of non alcoholic beer is to make it feel as much as a real beer as possible. A big price disparity would create more of a difference.
I'm not sure about that. As a teetotaler, I always cringe at how expensive a virgin mojito <or insert mocktail of choice> is, especially when they serve it in a tiny size appropriate for alcoholic beverages.
I'd order a lot more mocktails if they were more reasonably priced.
The alternative is an ethanol drink; there is basically zero economic incentive for a restaurant to lower it more than $1 or so below the price of a cocktail. Sure there's no sin tax but that is essentially pass through to the consumer, and the price competes against already sin taxed items.
Beverages at restaurants are always high margin and how they make much of their profits, they offer mocktails so they can capture the highest tier price preference for non alcohol consuming customers.
Not an expert, but as far as I know, the best way to make non-alcoholic drink is to make real thing and then carefully take alcohol out of it, so at least in terms of COGS the producer will spend more money. But mostly I think it is supply demand balance.
Therefore, things like public smoking bans (as we have in the UK) as well as public health campaigns around alcohol consumption and healthy eating become palatable. Regulating harmful foodstuffs becomes more important. The cost of smokers' adverse health was (and still is) enormous, and reducing that burden benefits everyone.