It’s worth noting that William Osman stopped producing videos on his YouTube channel due to the fallout of this video.
It was a long time coming because he comes off as very aloof and has received criticism about the safety of many other projects, but this one appears to have triggered a lot of outrage.
FWIW, I think we need more young, brilliant minds sharing this kind of content. It has the entertainment value needed to capture the interest of young viewers who may not be otherwise interested in engineering disciplines. There are many, many other channels out there (backyard scientist, action lab, Cody’s lab, stuff made here, etc.) who are very successful on YouTube, but they tend to cater to viewers who are deliberately choosing to watch their videos.
Was it really the fallout from this video? William got hit by the same thing most other good Youtubers like him struggle with: Burnout. Youtube and the algorithm want you to put out content every day, and will penalize you, and literally give you less money if you don't. This sucks for the "science" youtubers because their videos are projects that often require months of work and sometimes don't pan out.
NileRed, and close friend of William Osman's, has also significantly reduced his output, because it's absurd. Google wants you to kill yourself putting out as much content as possible, and doesn't care if you have to reduce quality or literally die as a result. If you quit, someone new will take your place.
This sounds like an opportunity for multiple long-form video producers to join under a single co-op owned channel. The channel can meter out a video a day or so, from a group of several dozen contributors, each one getting a share of the profits based on individual video popularity.
That's clever, but I would be hesitant to join such a co-op because you also share strike count with the others, and if another creator gets your channel banned for wondering about the lab leak theory (back when that was still verboten) you are screwed.
Also I would make sure it's not against the terms of service somehow.
Where the creators themselves have strong say in the platform policies and the recommendations system is much simpler and more transparent. Money comes from subscribers, not ads. (sponsor segments seem to still be allowed)
Though the risk of the channel being the victim of a Google ban-hammer goes up given more contributors. Assuming some incident in which Google's response is warranted, they won't care if told that it was one "bad apple". Chances are they'll hit the channel (and in typical megacorp automated governance mode, not hit that "bad apple" user/contributor).
If Google were smart, they'd see this as an opportunity to "do better" and facilitate these kind of co-ops, with appropriate technical, financial and governance support.
You mean likea Patreon or an OnlyFans? I think this is what OF was originally intended for, and they were kind of caught by surprise that adult performers flocked to the site.
You wouldn't actually prefer if Google kept new creators from getting views just to benefit old creators who aren't producing as much content, would you?
> Google wants you to kill yourself putting out as much content as possible, and doesn't care if you have to reduce quality or literally die as a result.
No, Google does not want you to "literally die". They aren't taking anything away from old YouTubers by letting users watch content from new YouTubers.
YouTube is an increasingly crowded content and more and more creators are vying for views and advertising dollars. You're ascribing a lot of malice to Google, but you're literally just describing market competition.
The alternative (keeping new content creators locked out so old content creators could continue to profit more) is obviously not viable.
Because it's a systematic force affecting any and all content creators on YouTube.
Both the first person, and the person replacing them, would be under the same pressures.
The incentive is for frequently released bites low effort content at the expense of high quality content.
>You're ascribing a lot of malice to Google, but you're literally just describing market competition.
Sometimes the product of market competition is a race to the bottom, which is great if we're talking solar panels, but less so if we're talking viability of a job and quality of a work product.
I think the more charitable way of understanding the person you are responding to is that ought to be ways of rendering the model sustainable even for those not interested in racing to the bottom.
Google is constantly in the process of restructuring the contours of the experience, the relationship between the audience and the creators, and we're calling everything that happens within those strictures "the market" even though they're a product of Google's discretion.
> Because it's a systematic force affecting any and all content creators on YouTube.
It’s a systematic force for creators across all platforms, with or without YouTube. People make content on the internet and compete for attention. Google didn’t invent market competition.
It doesn’t make sense for you to blame Google for new creators making new videos.
> Both the first person, and the person replacing them, would be under the same pressures.
To compete for viewers? Again, how is this Google’s fault?
I have no idea what you actually expect Google to do.
Limit new creators so the old creators don’t feel competitive pressure?
Hide content from new creators so old creators don’t have to compete with it?
I think you’re angry at the fact that competition exists in the free market, but you’re laying the blame at Google’s feet instead.
Popularity and quality do not necessarily equate either, but I think there are many people not competing in this arena that would boost the overall quality. I remember the old commercials on TV about Slim Whitman claiming to have sold more albums than Elvis and The Beatles combined. Can anyone here name more than one song, if that, from Slim Whitman? I am in my late 50s and when I take a glance at the most popular Tik Tok or Instagram or YouTube accounts, it makes me think that a culture with lots of time and luxuries on its hands produces mainly garbage watched by people with seemingly nothing better to do, a lot of narcissism; I get guilty reading HN more than 20 min. per day, but I find the discussions thought-provoking, and having programmed since 1978 on a Commodore PET 2001, among familiar folks and subjects.
I don't think that's what's happening, I think these quality niche creators are just flooded out by the views from videos that get much wider audience adoption. Stuff like "Win/Fail Compilation 246" that gest 10mil views with a new release every day is more profitable for YouTube to show than a science video that gets 1m views with a release once a month, which is high for a science video.
It is not necessarily a bad thing, cause good and bad are metrics determined by different people's relative preferences. But I would say it would be nicer if there was more even spread in recommendations between the stars and the people who put out quality videos every so often but don't dedicate their life to being a superstar, rather than a heavily-lopsided. The original spirit was supposed to be "You"Tube, and now it is more like SuperStarTube.
(But I don't want to come across as hating YouTube...I can accept it for what it has become and get my enjoyment out of it and I enjoy the benefit from people stumbling across my videos. I just want to present a different perspective.)
I guess there's always a trade-off and fine balance between suggesting older good quality videos vs giving chance to the new ones. YT algorithm is probably skewed towards quantity than quality.. that means often favoring someone who releases more frequently with decent quality compared to someone releasing great videos at a far less frequency.
> Youtube and the algorithm want you to put out content every day
I follow a bunch of YouTubers who put stuff out less than weekly, and make a decent (in some cases huge) living off it. Their content is a bit niche, has zero outrage value, and is incredibly well produced.
Maybe I’m just in a very different part of YouTube but I can’t even think of anyone who posts content daily.
I was going to mention this: on 2019 I started a niche channel, through some good timed posts on reddit I gathered traction, and then my own interest in the channel waned. I still have ~400 subscribers (it stayed at about the all-time high level) and the channel is still gathering about 100 views a month on content that is 2-years old for the newest.
I'm not sure "The Algorithm" is really such a beast as it's portrayed, and some of these takes seem like reductionist views on something that is complex to understand. Two other important metrics that YT checks on videos are watch time and watch %. If those are high, they know the content is good for recommending, even if it's sporadic.
And yes, I also follow channels who post content on a per-week/fortnight/monthly basis and they do fine.
> Youtube and the algorithm want you to put out content every day, and will penalize you, and literally give you less money if you don't.
I am not familiar with Youtube's payment system. Are you saying they do something like reduce the $ per ad / per view you receive based on the age of the video?
I think your best videos don't get recommended in the sidebar of other videos as much, unless you prove to Youtube that you can keep your subscribers coming back to your content daily.
I think its why you see the Trend in higher quality creators, of cutting out snippets of their longer videos and posting those clips daily. That way they can achieve the frequency without needing to put out brand new content every day.
That's why a lot of project based channels lean more on sponsorships, patreon and youtube members for a regular income.
For example, thought emporium (my favourite science youtuber) puts out videos very rarely but they're always big innovative projects and he makes enough to have bought a new lab recently.
I'm not surprised most tech youtubers don't suffer with burnout with the amount of work and manual labour that needs to go into your standard NileRed, Stuff Made Here, mark Rober, Simon, Giertz, etc. video compared to the rest of youtube.
And that's even before you consider that his house and all his tools burnt down. It's heartbreaking to see that the same has happened to How To Make Everything and I hope he doesn't burn out too
I think it's certainly part of the discussion. The truth is that these 'big' creative channels often pale in comparison to the channels getting the big views. In their categories they're probably amongst the best, but YouTube also has thousands of videos every day of really lowest common denominator content that gets a much wider audience.
So what people are asking for I think is a way to make sure these niche channels are still viable, so that they don't get overwhelmed and ousted by the waterfall of wider audience content that gets the majority of the views. That may not make financial sense for YouTube, and I suspect there's room for a new platform that focuses on higher quality content creators.
I was saddened to see that he stopped producing videos after this. This is exemplary of a serious social problem we seem to have.
I feel for him personally, because I've had a similar personal "ultimatum" regarding online interaction:
I don't comment and don't contribute at all any more because the emotional load of what you receive in return just... Isn't worth it.
So much nasty, pointless noise. I was taught as a kid to "Say nothing at all, if you have nothing nice to say". Now I'm sticking to it, and some.
It's sad for sure, as this represents a macro-level chilling effect on social interaction.
I don't want to be "that Evan guy" in the comments trolling, and I don't want to risk receiving the noise of trolls. So I just opted out.
These days, I just passively consume things online, observing the waves of rage and bigotry, and letting them flow by, knowing I have no stake in their game.
Things are much better in real life, where I have great conversations with friends, family, and coworkers. We can get in to deep conversations and negativity isn't taken personally like that. Because the bandwidth is higher between participants and we care about each other.
The only remaining way I contribute, is to create one-off accounts, say what I think if it's nice, and never look at it again. I don't want to see the responses, because they just lure you in to wanting to respond, and they end up wasting emotional space in my mind.
I think that a lot of society has changed for the worse given the freedom and aggressive adoption of tech companies "disrupting." (What I mean is: They're given the ability to try to aggressively make money at all costs and force their will. Consequences on people, rights, laws be damned.)
Youtube has no interest in curating great content by creators. They just want to keep that money printer going and keeping people on the site. There was a comment somewhere about the views that someone gets.. honest, good, and educational content doesn't get rewarded as much as a person doing pranks that harm people.
I explained once that I think social media as-is must perish. A more humane business model should rise from the ashes. Responses boiled down to shrugs stating Twitter reflects society and we can't escape it.
Cody's Lab did a video series on making yellow cake uranium that got him a visit from g men. Most everything Colin Furze does has mortal danger. Styropyro is probably also on a watchlist. Williams project was dangerous, but I don't see a reason why he should be a pariah.
You can add: photonicinduction. Everybody looks crazy until they're next to this dude. The dimensions involved scare me, and his "goes to 11 is not enough" attitude makes it even worse.
Well, they’d probably need to make a law banning it - and who seriously believes anyone is going to do that anyway enough to pass a law about it? (Lol)
Also, even relatively nanny state UK probably figures if he’s only going to take himself out, why bother trying to stop him.
I also quite enjoy Edwin Sarkissian's "shoot at large/heavy/explosive stuff with very high caliber out in the desert" videos, although it's quite a bit safer than the stuff already mentioned upthread due to his simply being sufficiently far away from the impact/explosion.
Fascinating in the same way as the classic/famous Hydraulic Press Channel.
Colin Furze's videos are much worse in the way he shows not using safety gear. At least an X-Ray tube is hard to come by, hard to use and people generally know it's dangerous.
Colin Furze is basically a first world mining operation compared to the "look at how they do <insert thing here> in <insert equatorial country here>" type videos that nobody takes any issue with.
Of Course we should set a good example when it comes to working with dangerous things in our youtube videos. We should use PPE at all times and give clear warnings about the risks throughout the video…
… But Maybe if you’re too stupid to realise that a safety tie isn’t actually protective, then maybe your upcoming appointment with evolution is overdue.
Alternate option - stemming from the OP comment - if we want to get children involved in engineering and science fields, and this kind of cool shit science is how we can easily do it, they absolutely have to assume a portion of their audience won't know what is real and what isn't.
In other words, not everyone is you. Always remember that.
I don’t know what energies you need for medical imaging, but a keV linear electron accelerator is commonly called “a CRT”, and it’s already powerful enough to screw you up if you really try.
(Of course, the power supply, the flyback converter, and all the other stuff you get at immediately upon opening the case are plenty dangerous even without all the effort it takes to get ionizing radiation out of the tube.)
I believe (though my memory is foggy, so don't quote me on this) Styropyro was approached by some military/DARPA projects with an employment offer, but he reportedly turned it down.
From memory I believe the reason he got the visit was because he made a joke about creating a fusion reactor - something like "until I get my fusion reactor running I'll need to use the sun"
In contrast, I appreciate that ElectroBOOM carefully scripts every seemingly accidental fire or spark to ensure he's safe. He has had only one instant where he screwed up and survived through luck.
You're right. A parent giving children access to all of the physical equipment to make this, and leaving them so unsupervised that they can do it is fine. The bad thing is making a video of you doing it, in case people pretend you're promoting it.
This is why I will never let my children read a car manual. What if they build a car and run someone over?
It's frighteningly easy for children to get their hands on materials like arsenic and thallium. All they need is a credit card and a YouTube tutorial helpfully walking them through the dosage.
I used to share your perspective. Then I ended up with a [step]kid whose only interests in medicine and engineering keep me awake at night.
I get where you're coming from. I knew a kid who was really into making explosives, he ended up blowing himself up one night after cooking up a batch of TATP. Pretty tragic story, he was a bright kid. As I remember, I think he had a single mom who couldn't quite be there for him.
I think the best way of dealing with that sort of situation is to find them a mentor or role model that can show them how it's actually done and turn the interest into something that can be explored safely. I think if my friend had actually known real chemists that could mentor him and that he could talk to about his projects, there's a chance he might have been alive today.
There are things that have an element of danger, and then there are things that are reckless bordering on suicidal. Any real world chemist would probably just stare at you in disbelief if you told them you wanted to make TATP in your bedroom. That isn't just dangerous, it's moronic, beyond reckless.
This stuff is highly explosive and notoriously difficult to handle because of its volatility and propensity for spontaneous detonation. You don't know that if you're 15 and getting all your advice from the Internet, though. You may even hear a nickname like "mother of satan" and think it sounds pretty cool. Turns out chemists usually give substances nicknames like that for a reason.
I think what's the most dangerous is kids experimenting alone without any experience based advice from some dodgy internet forum.
Ok, but my point remains. The fact it has a bad reputation for blowing people up among people who have a bad reputation for blowing people up is pretty telling.
There is at least one vendor selling a sample of thallium in an acrylic cube as a collector's item. Unclear how much is actually present, but any perceptible amount would be pretty dangerous if removed from its enclosure.
Yah, no shortage of suppliers for thallium, I was just surprised you could find it on Amazon since its not really used for any consumer product I was aware of
The idea of children having access to a credit card strikes me as dangerous and irresponsible for many more reasons than just the odd chance that they use it to buy chemicals online.
If you want to buy something as a child, you use cash or get a parent's permission.
(Preempting the "ok boomer" responses, I'm 22 this year)
It's possible they have access to the credit card without permission. Most people don't keep their credit cards locked up in a gun safe.
Mine could be retrieved right now out of my wallet lying on a tray in my living room. I also don't have children, so I'm not particularly concerned personally. I haven't caught my dogs buying anything online yet.
If your kid can and will do things like steal your credit card, make unauthorized purchases and buy explosives.. the problem is not that William Osman didn't wear PPE.
I remember my own experience with "youtube explosives" as a kid.
I'd watched NurdRage's video [1] on how to extract lithium from a certain type of battery and thought that sounded like fun, so I asked my father to help me get the batteries needed. When he then asked me why I needed this specific type of (not cheap) battery, I showed him [1] and he said "That looks dangerous and fun, let's do it together" (or something to that effect).
One hour and some needle nose pliers later, we're down one battery and a burn hole in our bathroom tiles (as a result of a lithium fire that my father immediately suffocated), but up a bonding experience.
Had I tried to disassemble the battery alone (ignoring for a moment how I'd have gotten my hands on it in the first place without my father's knowledge, perhaps by stealing a credit card or with an Alexa's assistance, as other posters have suggested might happen), I probably would have attempted to extinguish the burning lithium by pouring water on it, which I'm sure would have gone excellently :).
I guess the moral of my story is that it's probably more effective to try to earn your kids' trust and ensure their safety yourself, rather than attempt to child-proof the rest of the world (with the assumption that your children will be going behind your back in their attempts to earn Darwin awards in new and exciting ways).
Stealing your parent's credit card strikes me as the more pressing issue here, rather than a youtube video that shows you how to do something dangerous.
Where and when don't we allow children to wander around the city by themselves?
In many large cities, kids are expected to use public transit to get to/from school. It's not unknown for parents to send kids on errands. And, how does the kid get to the park?
This "kids can't go anywhere alone" idea is very new.
My Mom complained that the one route that I never used to go to/from school is the one that she showed me.
It seems to be a recent development in some larger American cities.
I work in a company in Berlin that has job applicants from many different countries, including the US. Common question during the process (we generally require relocation at this point) are:
- "Can my 12yo children go somewhere alone? I'm from Portland/similar and this is not the case here and it's why we're moving."
- "We've been looking and it's really hard to find an apartment in Berlin. We have this ground-floor option, but they just shot the ground-floor windows in across the street here again this morning. Is ground floor safe in Berlin?
I'm no longer surprised when it comes up, but it's quite sad.
That's because they're from Portland. There are only a handful of cities in the US where people do not feel safe to let their kids run around, and Portland is one of them. Even there only certain neighborhoods are unsafe. Your view of America is the same as an American who believes that women can't go outside without being sexually assaulted in Germany because of the 2015-16 New Years attacks, i.e. incredibly out of touch.
YouTube Kids is mostly safe, but there's a small chance kids could see nudity, violence, or just weird stuff, as well as ads for stuff like junk food. Our study found that 27% of videos watched by kids 8 and under are intended for older target audiences, with violence being the most likely negative content type. . . . On the plus side for parents, YouTube offers fair warning that kids may see something that you don't want them to see and you can block and report inappropriate videos.
I checked out all of Alfred Morgan's books from multiple public libraries (a platform accessible by children!!!) in the seventies and early eighties. Probably saw the golden book of chemistry experiments at some point too - it looked very familiar when I got a copy of the pdf as an adult. I think the difficulty of obtaining model T spark coils, chemicals ("ask your druggist") etc kept me out of a lot of trouble.
And nukes! Its been a while since I read "The Radioactive Boy Scout" and after rereading it I'm defintely going to keep my kid close as he goes through TCOR's black powder and other experiments.
The truth is far more bizarre: the Golf Manor Superfund cleanup was provoked by the boy next door, David Hahn, who attempted to build a nuclear breeder reactor in his mother’s potting shed as part of a Boy Scout merit-badge project.
[...]
David Hahn taught himself to build a neutron gun. He figured out a way to dupe officials at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission into providing him with crucial information he needed in his attempt to build a breeder reactor, and then he obtained and purified radioactive elements such as radium and thorium.
[...]
David’s parents admired his interest in science but were alarmed by the chemical spills and blasts that became a regular event at the Hahn household. After David destroyed his bedroom—the walls were badly pocked, and the carpet was so stained that it had to be ripped out—Ken and Kathy banished his experiments to the basement.
[...]
Kathy then forbade David from experimenting in her home. So he shifted his base of operations to his mother’s potting shed in Golf Manor. Both Patty Hahn and Michael Polasek admired David for the endless hours he spent in his new lab, but neither of them had any idea what he was up to. Sure, they thought it was odd that David often wore a gas mask in the shed and would sometimes discard his clothing after working there until two in the morning, but they chalked it up to their own limited education. Michael says that David tried to explain his experiments but that “what he told me went right over my head.” One thing still sticks out, though. David’s potting-shed project had something to do with creating energy. “He’d say, `One of these days we’re gonna run out of oil.’ He wanted to do something about that.”
Its an amazing story, shows what you can achieve if you put your mind to it!
If someone has excellent knowledge of science and us willing to spend years of effort on a project, normal societal guardrails can't stop them. Whethervfir good or ill
It's strange that doing potentially-dangerous things with technology is frowned upon so much more than doing 'conventionally dangerous' stuff like base jumping, huge tricks on bikes/skateboards/snowboards, free climbing, and so on
Really? It seems to me like folk on YouTube generally get upset over folk doing dangerous things without framing them as such. Folk are upset at Alex Choi over his involvement with the recent Tesla jump that resulted in a crash and damaged property. There was a fair deal of outrage at Trevor Jacob within the aviation community over his apparent fake engine failure video, where he did the wrong thing even if the engine had failed. The Thought Emporium had folk wagging their finger at them when they had a video on a guy trying to modify his own genome so they wouldn't be lactose intolerant.
But folk generally aren't mad with about things the Mythbusters' did, even though they could have been dangerous, because they were presented as dangerous. Folk have gotten into competitions to fill their backyards with the most foam they can -- which can be dangerous. But it's generally presented as that and they talk about the heat generated and such. Those sorts of things are generally presented as entertaining not a way to get around an expensive medical system or good idea.
Is there anyone who doesn't understand that modifying their genome has risks? The bad engine recovery is misinformation, that deserves criticism. But the intersection of people who could copy the xray design and those who don't know xrays cause damage must be vanishingly small right? It feels like some sort of moral outrage.
I think you mean "free solo climbing," not "free climbing." Free climbing means climbing with a rope and belayer but without artificial aid, like etriers or jumars.
Skateboarders don't really create the impression that their sport is that one cheap trick to skip a propper medical X-Ray.
Or phrased differently: there are no people with broken bones and insufficient funds looking at skateboarders and thinking: "I should do that, because I live in a nation without a propper health care system"
Probably conventionally dangerous stunts happen much more often than potentially dangerous engineering stuff. By definition you'll hear more outrage around more densely outrageous things. If more people did dangerous engineering stuff then it would be vice versa.
Also perhaps a dangerous skateboard trick is less likely to harm anyone else but oneself, whereas an engineering disaster can catastrophic at a range
My big hate, is seeing the more common but much more dangerous activities on youtube not being called out for really stupid OH&S issues.
I watch a lot of car stuff on youtube and I wince ever time I see someone use an angle ginder without gloves, or worse the blade shield.
It's a lot more common to go turn on a power tool and rip a finger off than to do a bmx jump, or build a killer robot or some such. There's a degree of normalization of deviance there.
The risk of catastrophic harm for BASE jumping (and I say this as a licensed skydiver who has many friends who are base jumpers) is high enough it’s almost certainly safer taking a machine gun, pointing it straight up, and emptying a couple belts in the air trying to hit yourself in the head.
As a noob, it’s more like putting on a blindfold and wandering across 101 at 8pm for a few minutes.
Skateboarding for noobs is much safer as it’s more on the broken bones side than fatalities.
It's like how stabbing yourself in a random spot on the torso with a knife would be (in my estimation) more frowned upon/antisocial than playing Russian roulette with a six shooter.
Doing stuff with science and technology is dangerous in non-obvious and unintuitive ways, and making experiments safe requires expert knowledge. So, the analogy doesn't hold. I don't know anyone who considers those other things you listed as not dangerous.
> It’s worth noting that William Osman stopped producing videos on his YouTube channel due to the fallout of this video.
Was it really because of that video? My impression from his last video was just people being unnecessarily mean to him for no reason in general, not just because of that video, but maybe I missed something.
Personally, I was super impressed by this video. It was the first time I had seen his videos (or heard of him). It was an instant subscribe for me when I saw it.
I hope he's doing well. He seemed in a really bad place in his final video.
he's okay and currently does a super nice podcast with other youtubers like nilred and the backyard scientist called "safety third". He will release videos sometime soon again - He talked about his backlog with his releases because he wanted to release a video about his mr. beast's squidgame involvement first and didnt find a good angle to tell the story.
I enjoyed his main channel content, but found the first few episodes of the podcast to be a little rough going because they had a strong focus on complaining about the people complaining about their lack of safety measures. (Which just wasn't interesting listening to me.)
Have the more recent episodes moved past that? I'd like to give it another shot.
They have for the most part. It comes up occasionally now, and for the most part they're still as unfocused as normal. They rotate in people all the time which is fine. The last few episodes have been weirdly a lot about Taxes but the Nilegreen episode was interesting.
After watching his X-Ray video, I watched the video where he said he was done with it. The guy needed to stop reading all his comments. Joe Rogan literally has a bit about this exact situation with Youtube comments.
Why is the reaction "stop making videos?" You can serve videos from Cloudflare and sell your own ad placements to pay the paltry fees...with no one hanging over you. These content creators could easily use YouTube to promote their own site and pivot away.
Poor Joe Rogan just can't get a break while singing dangerous praises as though Gospel. He uses his platform irresponsibly, gives voice to crackpots and idiots, and is prone to disseminating misinformation, which makes him remarkably dangerous. Rogan, Hannity and Carlson are only for the weak-minded.
Damn after I found out he made it a habit to say a particular racial slur on the show I figured people were done with this guy. Can't fathom how people think he's defensible (and indeed, not a single downvote has left a defense).
Sorry people you dont agree with can have a voice. Theres no such thing as a "dangerous" opinion. Learn to listen to all sides and let others listen to all sides and then make independent decisions. The way you battle terrible speech is with countering speech, not shutting down conversation to your liking.
You really can't think of a time where powerful people used their platform to spread misinformation or persuade people towards terrible outcomes? And besides, no one is shutting down conversation. They are simply publically denouncing Joe Rogan. Isn't that exactly what you're saying we should be doing, countering speech?
Safety concerns are real and I believe William Osman manages them pretty well.
Here's a "reacts" video where a radiologist agrees he's being pretty safe and what he's doing isn't that risky (assuming he knows what he's doing with high voltage.)
Might I suggest that even on occasions when the Daily Mail (/ Mail Online) has accurate content, they still don't deserve page views or advert impressions and that when not too hard other links would be better. I'm not sure how the exact content stacks up, but this Smithsonian Mag link was high in my search results https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/clarence-dally-the-ma...
Anyway, thanks for the story that I hadn't heard before!
That's an interesting suggestion. May I ask why? I really don't know anything about it.
The hesitation I had with sharing a daily mail link was "Is it accurate?" rather than whether they deserve impressions. It hadn't occurred to me that it might be a bad idea to support them.
They're widely (although not universally) considered to be irredeemable in England after an article they published in 1934 entitled "Hurrah for the Blackshirts".
Wikipedia is probably a good place to learn a handful of examples and go further down the rabbit hole from there if interested, starting with these sections:
7 Libel lawsuits
7.1 Successful lawsuits against the Mail
7.2 Unsuccessful lawsuits
7.3 Legal action by the Daily Mail
Although of course the wikipedia page just has a small number of examples, I'd say that the first words of those 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.6 subheaders above, and lack of 8.7, do a decent job of surmising the Daily Mail.
At the very worst (and it's not even at the worst) you can call this guy stupid for building something like that.
But 69k for an xray? That's where the outrage should be directed. That's evil in it's purest form. More then just simple outrage, the person responsible for charging that 69k bill is someone that needs to go to jail.
The sad thing is, the responsibility is distributed among the entire medical industry. It's very similar to the phenomenon of software engineer salaries.
It's relatively early. Nobody is associating this with software yet. But given the unique salaries in the US (with the epicenter being the bay area) it's quite obvious this is what's going on.
He hosts a podcast channel called Safety Third[1] with a few of his science friends, and has some interesting guests too. I quite enjoy it, check it out.
Yes, I agree it was many factors. This video seemed to be the breaking point, but it was certainly a long time coming. I recall several videos over the past 2 or so years where he drew attention to the invective he receives. I don’t really participate beyond watching the videos, so perhaps there are others who are more informed about the factors behind his decision.
Regardless, I wish him all the best and hope he’ll find a way to showcase his talent or at least find fulfillment elsewhere.
As far as I heard listening to the podcast, I am not convinced he is done making videos. And even if he does end up stopping, they got a pretty great podcast which he seems to enjoy.
They'll come back eventually. Everyone who becomes big on the internet has the problem of not being able to disconnect from it's commenters. It goes against our nature even because real humans don't talk like that.
You eventually learn that these are ignorant people commenting because they don't know any better - and the sea of opinions doesn't matter. Either you let them hold you against your will or you just do what you want. It's a hill anyone has to climb.
That video also resulted in him, Osman, setting up a fake job application interview with one commenter for the sole purpose of filming and posting it online on his YouTube [0]. Which is, in my opinion, very petty and immature. It's good that he stopped making videos for the time being while learning what most creators online have to deal with and don't take to this level.
If you watched the video, I'll have to be the one asking you — why do you think looking up somebody from your comments section, making them sign agreements under a false pretence and setting up an interview, and then making fun of this individual talking about how "embarassing" he is in your videos is not immature? I won't even begin talking about brigading against somebody when you have a vast user base. Content creators have some unwritten responsibilities and such acts are uncommon because they usually do not fall into these things trying to make "a point".
It is irrelevant who said what, only what was said. It is not possible to validly counter an argument by attacking the man, which is why ad hominem is a fallacy. The logical way to have approached this is to ignore the man and point out the argument from authority, also a fallacy.
Getting worked up enough about a random internet comment to go to that length to try to humiliate the person is immature. Especially with a fraudulent job application.
Here, let's try something out: Neatze, I think you're a big ol idiot.
Now, what is your response going to be? Will you just shake your head and move on with your life? Or will you try to e-stalk me, set up a fake job interview for me, just so you can get a one up on me?
Probably not, because I bet you're more mature than the dude in the video.
In a somewhat comical sense, it's pretty "mature" to draw up a contract with someone (a very "professional" thing to do) to prove a point that someone trolling on your video has no idea what they're talking about. How else could he prove the point in any other realistic manner?
Calling something immature when it's a well thought-out and explored topic doesn't seem fair. He's touched on how random internet trolls hurt other YouTubers, not just him, in other videos (to show this isn't some impulsive thing).
If you make tens of thousands of dollars a month on YouTube with AdSense, you are effectively a business. And indeed, many of these YouTubers have setup businesses in their name that receive the AdSense funds, and pay themselves a salary out of that.
A company does not publicly humiliate a customer who makes a detrimental statement to its products - can you imagine the devastation from someone who is socially awkward and receives this kind of backlash for the horrific crime of speaking slightly out of line?
Does your employer have a "worst employee of the month" poster with enumerated examples of all of the fuckups they made in the last month? That would be a million times less harmful than a pop-culture hack doing the same thing to you because you said something out of line.
People should be free to abuse each other online, call each other all sorts of stuff and ESPECIALLY lie or stretch the truth, without facing offline scrutiny or embarrassment.
I disagree with your opinion that people should be free to abuse others online without any scrutiny offline. Especially when people claim to be experts and assert authority on subjects.
Also, what is with creating these fictional scenarios about an employer punishing a customer or employee? Even if “he” were a business, he’s free to react to criticism however he chooses.
My local barber chose to respond to negative reviews by chastising every single one. They still somehow have plenty of happy customers.
> A company does not publicly humiliate a customer who makes a detrimental statement to its products
This happens quite often.
It's very common to find reviews on Yelp where someone leaves a less-than-honest review and the company owner comes in and explains what a piece of shit that person was and how they aren't telling the whole story.
If you come into a store and act like a dick towards the staff, you will almost certainly be publicly humiliated.
It even happens with larger companies where someone goes to the media with some BS story, and then the company issues public statements about how that person is full of shit.
I see nothing wrong with what William did. It may be petty, but who cares. If you don't want to be called out, don't be a troll.
There are three differences between what Osman Unincorporated and the companies that you describe have done.
# Number one is scope:
- They do not have the same amount of readers, evangelists etc. that could harass the person making the erroneous claim
# Number two is positioning:
- Reviews can be, by their very nature, points of discussion, therefore meaning that anything underneath a review, including a comment from the company that makes the product, is a point of discussion and thus necessary to protect in order to have a free and open dialog.
# Number three is punching power:
- William Osman published a fraudulent job application and got someone to sign a contract while promising him that he moving up in the world, only to pull the rug out from underneath him and instead shock him with the fact that he is now going to be harassed due to his uninformed "trolling" (which happens plenty of times from informed professionals even on Hacker News). This kind of bait and switch is mentally devastating, and the person is undoubtedly shocked from such an act of bullying which could be argued to be traumatizing. All of this happened because the guy spoke out of line on a specific technical issue on which both people were wrong.
There's nothing mature about violating contract law. It feels like fraudulent misrepresentation to me. Key aspects of fraudulent misrepresentation[0]:
1) a representation was made
2) the representation was false
3) that when made, the defendant knew that the representation was false or that the defendant made the statement recklessly without knowledge of its truth
4) that the fraudulent misrepresentation was made with the intention that the plaintiff rely on it
5) that the plaintiff did rely on the fraudulent misrepresentation
6) that the plaintiff suffered harm as a result of the fraudulent misrepresentation
I don’t think Will committed fraudulent misrepresentation, if that could even apply or if this somehow caused harm. Either way, who said violating contract law was immature? Only you. Why suggest I did? What motive do you have here?
Thanks for that video. I now have MASSIVE respect for this dude. I don't think it's immature at all. It was a very fun way to call out this piece of shit of a person.
Tangentially, I believe Josiah Zayner's YT channel got pulled when they found out he was documenting a DIY COVID-19 vaccine along with 2 or 3 fellow biohackers in 2020.
I was one of the commenters criticizing him, though I did not post anything until his dismissive response video.
I made no personal attacks, but highlighted how dangerous it is to the audience to present 10+ kV supplies as no-big-deal toys. Everyone can acquire an HV supply and play with it. Many of them even should, but certainly not because of a video demonstrating ways to kill yourself with absolute no risk assessment.
This line of thinking is quite confusing to me. The amount of neglected children lucky enough to participate, unsupervised, in an experiment like this is certainly dramatically less than the amount you could save by hiring more social workers. With respect to supervision, why is responsibility being shifted away from parents? Blaming a YouTube video for your child's chronic exposure to X-rays is a poor excuse for not paying attention to you kid. Not to mention, the proliferation of this type of video would automatically expose the inherent danger as the safety-adverse content providers reveal the consequences.
I am not talking about children. Children do whatever the hell they want.
I'm talking about adults who see some guy playing with HV with no safety systems, causing arcs that could have easily killed him, and vehemently defending this behavior. Adults can trivially acquire HV supplies. If they listened to this guy and never stopped to research things further they'd be dropping like flies.
Steve Yegge tells the story[1] of his dad cooking:
> When I was a teenager, my dad and my brother Mike decided to make homemade chili. I'd never seen it made before, and I watched with keen interest as they added beef, beans, some veggies and spices, and other ingredients. Dad would taste it, add some more ingredients, wait a bit, taste it again. My dad has some pretty good recipes. So you can imagine my puzzlement when he opened the cupboard, pulled out 2 cans of Hormel chili, opened them and dumped them in. I waited a respectful moment or two before asking him why he was adding canned chili to his chili.
Similarly, I think it detracts a bit from building a home-made x-ray machine if one of the ingredients is an x-ray tube from an old x-ray machine.
“””
I waited a respectful moment or two before asking him why he was adding canned chili to his chili. They both said it tasted terrible, but, as my dad now-famously observed: "You can start with dog shit, and if you add enough chili, you get chili."
Similarly, if you start with an Agile Methodology, and you add enough hard work, you get a bunch of work done. Go figure.
But that's a tautology; you can substitute anything you like for "Agile Methodology" and it's still true. It's probably not difficult to find people who believe that Feng Shui has brought them success in their projects for years. Or throwing pennies in fountains. Heck, there are probably some people who practice witchcraft to help their projects out, and a great many of those projects — probably the majority — wind up being successful.
If you do a rain dance for enough days in a row, it will eventually work. Guaranteed.
So I'm not saying Agile doesn't work. It does work! But it's plain, unadulterated superstition.
“””
Diy xray tubes are doable, but I don't fault them for the store chili or the reused tube. It's not always important that parts be as authentically diy as the whole, in my view.
so, I'm a maker, and there's some things that aren't worth making yourself, but if you integrate them, you're still a maker. x-ray tubes are an example (in my case, microcontrollers, stepper motors, and microscope objectives).
(I have actually built a crookes tube, for fun, but it wasn't particularly reliable or safe)
There's an irony in the breathless "built his very own x-ray machine" slant - x-rays are literally Victorian technology. Not for the reckless or uninitiated I suppose, but I remember books showing how to make x-ray devices from the wrong vacuum tubes and spark coils and such. Probably by Alfred Morgan but I can't find the reference now. Don't try any of this today, only bad things will happen, right?
To quote the more contemporary source below "Any person who regularly works with any combination of high voltage and vacuum should maintain a dosimetry program."
Yea exactly. Anyone with experience with electronics who is willing to work with high voltage and has some knowledge of vacuum tubes could probably make one.
Side note: old TV rectifier tubes from the 1950s and 60s were notoriously known for being x ray emitters, and were often made with leaded glass or kept inside shielded enclosures specifically because of the X-rays. So X-ray emitters were literally in everyday standard consumer electronics back then! Kind of crazy to think about these days...
Exactly, indeed. One of the links I gave shows how to use a 6BK4B rectifier tube for the purpose. No special X-ray tube or glasswork required. Most of the high voltage parts can be scavenged from old color tvs or monitors. Remember, though, only bad things will happen and the inside of a color tv is not a place of honor, no great deed is commemorated there, nothing of value is stored there...
Edit: that might sound tongue-in-cheek but please take it as hahah, only serious. You can hurt yourself with these things, you probably don't have a good reason to be experimenting with them, and if you do need to learn how to work with high voltage or ionizing radiation safely, this is not the place and I am not teaching you.
And the TVs themselves were three particle accelerators steered by magnetic coils slamming voltage rails of a few kV 15,750 times a second. The beams emitted X-Ray Bremsstrahlung. In everyone's home.
The last truly cool piece of physics in the house today is the magnetron, which is pretty damn cool.
They were certainly still around in the dusty corners of old shoe stores in the seventies and eighties but I never saw one used or even turned on. People were pretty aware of the hazards of that kind of thing by the fifties and sixties.
The standards of safety and ethical engineering were very different during that time. I don't think William Osman is building an unsafe X-Ray, whereas I doubt that Victorians understood the full impact and implications of the early X-Rays.
The point was that building a simple x-ray device is about as technically far-out as say, winding your own transformer. Sure, not too many people do it, but it's not exactly on the forefront of technology either.
To your point, safety standards have evolved enormously in the last thirty years even. You don't get to modern safety standards by accident or good intentions or earnest application of the best practices you know. From that I would assume Osman built an X-ray that was potentially unsafe in ways he did not anticipate. That is, it would not have been a suitable replacement for a commercial X-ray compliant with FDA regulations. To be fair, I haven't watched the video but I did read the summaries and it sounds like Osman had a healthy and reasonable regard for the risk of building and operating his device, as manifest in the fact that he didn't operate it much and decomissioned it afterwards.
And also, we know for a fact that the Victorians injured themselves with X-rays. Nothing to doubt or wonder about.
^^ I won't editorialize much, but this is the first thing I thought of.
It was involved in at least six accidents between 1985 and 1987, in which patients were given massive overdoses of radiation. Because of concurrent programming errors (also known as race conditions), it sometimes gave its patients radiation doses that were hundreds of times greater than normal, resulting in death or serious injury.
interesting thing to see a week before my concurrent programming course finals! I hate race conditions. I don't blame those programmers 1 bit. It is extremely hard to find race conditions, and 10x harder to fix them.
Do you work in concurrent programming? If yes, then considering that you can get a race condition after 10,000 times you run that program, you shouldn't blame the programmers.
It's not like they hire the best of the best, because they simply cannot afford to. We want software in medical devices to be very safe, but we also want cheap competition there. We can't have both.
I get where you're coming from and why you might suggest that. However I do happen to work on those kinds of codebases and if there was even a .00000001 percent chance of _death_ by using my software I'd make sure it didn't go out the door. No question. It's possible to work smart not hard and avoid entire classes of issues like manifested in the link I posted above.
As-is Medicine / Aviation and other such "mission-critical" real-time / life threatening industries do take this sort of thing very seriously. Programming has come a long way since the 80s and at least in aviation I'm aware that code undergoes audits to ensure that things like dynamic allocations / malloc aren't done at all in critical sections of the code. Lots of limitations are placed on software run in those environments and it's justified and warranted.
"The machine had three modes of operation... A "field light" mode... Direct electron-beam therapy... Megavolt X-ray (or photon) therapy, which delivered a beam of 25 MeV X-ray photons"
So, still x-ray radiation, but at much higher voltages than diagnostic x-rays.
(The accident was indeed overexposure to the electron beam, not to the x-rays, but the electron beam was part of the process for producing the x-rays in normal operation)
I was looking for mobile x-ray truck services when I came across this article.
I do wish by now there was some kind of DIY at-home safe alternative to x-ray with resolution say better than ultrasound, so you could check for fractures in your feet, etc.
Guess we have at least another decade for that, requires a leap in technology. But I bet by the end of the century you'll be able to do it on your smartphone or whatever people are using by then.
How about some kind of film or sensor that needs minutes of particle exposure from a far lesser powerful source? You would rest your foot or limb on the film or sensor for a minute. There would be a little blur but manageable, maybe corrected digitally?
We had home-use x-rays in 50s. There is a reason we stopped having those, there are reasons why medical devices are regulated. Promoting home-build stuff is dangerous. Especially since non-trained people just don't know what they are looking at when looking at x-ray pictures.
> How about some kind of film or sensor that needs minutes of particle exposure from a far lesser powerful source? You would rest your foot or limb on the film or sensor for a minute. There would be a little blur but manageable, maybe corrected digitally?
I think that blur would be problematic for fractures, at least for the variety where you aren't sure whether you should go to the hospital or not.
More generally speaking, even if we had a safe way to get X-rays at home diagnosing them is hard. The "bone is torn in half" ones are easy to see, but I don't think you'd even need an X-ray to diagnose that. The more subtle breaks are hard to pick up on. I googled for fracture X-rays, and on a lot of them I can't tell whether there's a fracture or not unless it's obviously snapped in 2.
At home X-rays make less sense to me if you're going to have to have a radiologist look at it anyways. You might as well go to an outpatient imaging place anyways.
American medical industry is worried that once the xray is taken, you can ship it to another country where a trained physician can look at it and diagnose it for $50. The problem is that the American doctor needs to make orders of magnitude more money to diagnose. Hopefully we will see this kind of disintermediation, because for routine stuff (broken bones) costs should be way lower than they are.
The imagery equipment is one thing, the other is the skill to interpret what you see. Sure, a bad fracture might be obvious but there are many very subtle things that are not so easy to see or understand. The radiographer will know the equipment but will usually have to defer to the Doctor for expert advice.
Mobile equipment does exist, however it is usually used at smaller hospitals who don't have the space or money for a permanent unit.
> How about some kind of film or sensor that needs minutes of particle exposure from a far lesser powerful source?
This makes sense only if the source is powerful enough to penetrate what you want to image. That’s why we’re usin x-rays for this and not visible light. And a much less powerful x-ray source will deposit more energy in the hand/limb of the spectrum that does not penetrate. Hence relatively high-energy radiation delivers good images and minimizes the dose to the patient.
I just saw someone on tiktok showing how they made their own invisiline from a scan of their teeths. They programmed their own multi-step adjustment, bought a special 3d printer and printed all their invisiline things. Unsure how efficient or comparable theirs will be to the right thing, but I found that very interesting what a single person can do nowadays!
Note that guy said he had personal connections to an "dental mechanic" (mecanico dental, don't know what it's called in English). Basically someone professional and licensed to verify his molds and steps were correct.
As with all of these things, it depends how much you can research what you are doing and what risk you want to take.
When I first had a retainer, they put this hair-thin wire in the clips and it didn't make any sense to me, it was so thin, it seemed pointless until the next morning when my teeth were really sore.
The dentist knew that because they are trained. They know when to adjust wires etc. same with invisiline: sure you aren't going to die but that doesn't mean you can't do some damage to your teeth or jaw.
Invisiline are actually 3D printed. Formlabs markets a printer for dental usecases. As long as your models and movement calculations are correct they'll work the same, but probably not an easy task.
True, but it’s also more complex than that. I don’t know the story here, but the $69k bill sounds like he went to a hospital to get treated.
Hospital prices in the US are always lies; his insurance company probably paid around $10k in total and perhaps even less than that. Of course the insurance company doesn’t generally tell their customers exactly how much they actually paid the hospital. He could have gotten a more reasonable bill by asking the hospital for the cash price for everything, writing them a check for that amount, and then getting reimbursed by his insurance company. It might still have been more than his out–of–pocket limit, in which case he still would have paid the $2,500.
But his real mistake was probably going to the hospital in the first place. He probably should have gone to his Primary Care Physician or to an Urgent Care Clinic. Either one of them can admit him to a hospital if it turns out to be necessary, but it probably would not have been. I see in another comment that he needed an X–Ray, a CT scan, and some medication. He could have gotten all of that at an urgent care clinic for $1,000 or so, and slept in his own bed that night.
It pays to shop around, and you can do so _before_ you get hurt.
Finally, don’t forget that in addition to the $2,500 he paid, he also paid his insurance company even in years that he wasn’t injured or ill. Likewise, you pay taxes every year and part of that goes to pay for healthcare, even if you aren’t actually injured or ill.
I was just in the ER in SouthWest Florida: $12K for two CT-scans and blood tests over two days, basically to check if I was having appendicitis (I did not- probably infection from prior kidney stone). No overnight stay, but two visits over two days. $12K is the initial bill to my insurance company, so not sure what they will actually receive.
I had a similar ER visit for "possible appendicitis". It turned out to be a sprained psoas.
I've since had it again, but was more aware of what to feel for and didn't seek out the ER. Might be worth it to keep in mind if you have something similar again.
In Brazil an x-ray exam will cost you no more than 90 BRL, or less than 20 USD in todays rate. And this is out of the pocket, without insurance. If a 3rd world country can have affordable healthcare, why should having minor health complications be synonym to bankruptcy in the richest country in the world?
I live in one of the highest–priced areas of the US, and a simple x–ray exam costs about $200 whether you have insurance or not. The difference in price is primarily due to the higher cost of living here than in Brazil; the tech who takes the x–ray and the doctor who looks at it to diagnose the problem get paid more here than there. I should know; I got hit by a car last year and sprained my thumb when I hit the ground. The x–ray was to check that the thumb was only sprained, and not broken.
But if you go to a hospital to get the same thing you will pay 10× as much or more. You’ll also have to wait a lot longer, as anyone with a more serious complaint will get prioritized ahead of you. Both of these are reasons why people should not generally visit the hospital, unless they have a problem which is immediately life–threatening, or they are admitted to the hospital by their primary–care physician.
> why should having minor health complications be synonym to bankruptcy in the richest country in the world?
It’s not. For all of the problems that our health–care system may or may not have, people don’t go bankrupt because they needed an x–ray.
> I live in one of the highest–priced areas of the US, and a simple x–ray exam costs about $200 whether you have insurance or not. The difference in price is primarily due to the higher cost of living here than in Brazil
Well, most x-rays are free here in Australia I believe, thanks to Medicare, so that "higher cost of living" explanation seems not to be right.
There is no good reason the US can't bring down healthcare costs, but there are also some not so good reasons that some countries have very cheap healthcare.
Genuine question, how are you so confident that reducing prices from current levels wouldn't cause unintended consequences like causing innovation to stifle, hiring to become more difficult, or health infrastructure to degrade? You can point to other countries having lower prices, sure, but just like you said - there are plenty of reasons why other countries can be cheaper than in the US.
Because we have inefficiencies that are baked into the status quo. Insurers, for example, provide little value to health outcomes. Their purpose is purely financial, and there are much more simple ways to shift that money around that requires less administrative overhead, and allows prices to be set by better methods than threats by insurers, which is basically how they're set now.
That's a very fair point. I think transparency in pricing for medical services would help out a lot with cleaning up the insurance mess. Not that either of us have the answer, have you put in any thoughts on how to eliminate those inefficiencies?
You mean back in the 1930s when you stuck your foot in a wooden box with an open X-ray tube and got yourself and nearby customers exposed to radiation at a significantly higher dose than even a full torso x-ray in modern times? Okay, my guy...
You’re right about that, but cost is a funny thing. The x–ray photograph itself costs mere pennies, especially with a modern digital imaging system. Even x–ray film is just an incidental cost.
However, when you are getting an x–ray to diagnose a medical problem, you do want more than just the image itself. You want the person who takes the x–ray image to be practiced and able to reliably take the correct image with the correct camera settings and so on. But most importantly, you want the diagnosis to come from a highly educated doctor who knows what your insides are actually supposed to look like. Whether these two roles are handled by one person or multiple, you are monopolizing someone’s time. You can’t really expect them to take x–rays of multiple patients at the same time, or to look at two x–rays and diagnose them both simultaneously.
If it takes the imaging tech 10 minutes to set up the x–ray machine for you and make the images the doctor asked for, then you have to pay 10 minutes of that tech’s salary. If the doctor spends 20 minutes asking you questions about your injury and then 10 more minutes looking at the images and telling you that you will live, then you’re going to have to pay for half an hour of their salary. The staff at the front desk who hand out forms and answer phones get a slice. The nurses who do most of the grunt work get a cut too.
The shoe salesmen didn’t directly charge for use of the x–ray fitting machines, but they did recoup their costs out of the shoe sales. Either by increasing the price of every pair of shoes by a small amount, or just by selling additional shoes (due to the novelty factor, or because it genuinely saved time allowing them to sell more shoes in a day).
The bulk of the price of any good or service comes from paying the people.
> The shoe salesmen didn’t directly charge for use of the x–ray fitting machines, but they did recoup their costs out of the shoe sales. Either by increasing the price of every pair of shoes by a small amount, or just by selling additional shoes (due to the novelty factor, or because it genuinely saved time allowing them to sell more shoes in a day).
Well sure, that's why they were saying the price should be capped at a pair of shoes, not literally free.
And while a few minutes of a doctor's time costs more than a salesman, the entire materials costs of the shoes goes away. It seems like a reasonable benchmark.
The problem is that the cost for healthcare is hidden. In the UK, we have "National Insurance" but it doesn't work like normal insurance. It goes into the same big pot as everything else and gets spent on whatever.
It is a hard balance but sometimes when I see people doing stupid things that land them in the ER, I kind of wish that their premium would increase as a result. That said, I think the largest cost in healthcare is the care of the elderly: We somehow keep people breathing for much longer than 50 years ago but it doesn't stop their bodies needing some big maintenance or long-term residential care.
Health insurance premiums in the US don't raise people rates if they do stupid stuff, with the single exception of smoking. Rates are basically set based on three factors: age, location, and smoking status. You do share costs if there's an accident, but daredevils and school teachers get the same rate at the same age in the same city.
So about 3-4 days of work as an entry-level Facebook developer, or 3-3.5 weeks of work at a McDonalds (based on every fast-food place around me having billboards up offering starting wages of $18-20/hr).
Getting access to emergency life-saving treatment, which leverages billions of dollars in research & development and hours of work from a team of doctors, radiologists, nurses, pharmacists, support staff, etc in exchange for being asked to contribute back to society by cooking burgers for a month feels like a pretty amazing offer compared to how almost all humans have existed in history and most still do around the world today.
The fact that we have better health infrastructure in most places worldwide than ever before in human history is true. But saying a surprise, out-of-the-blue 2.5k medical bill can be taken care of by working nearly a month at McDonalds without factoring the high cut of that wage that goes to living is facile at best and cruel at worst.
Since the typical fast food service worker see almost their entire paycheck go to living expenses before any opportunity for luxuries or savings, that does indeed sound like a crippling if not insurmountable financial burden for someone who incurs an x-ray expense like this unexpectedly. Especially since whatever reason they have for needing an x-ray could affect their ability to earn income from McDonalds. I don't think hourly wage work offers the same perks as entry-level development roles at facebook with regards to paid sick leave.
This example is totally unrealistic. In the USA someone supporting themselves working at McDonalds would qualify for Medicaid and have essentially no out-of-pocket medical expenses.
I don't have any insurance and during the last 1.5 years I suffered symptomatic Covid (medicines and vaccines free), then a road accident with multiple fractures: left arm, right shoulder, both wrists and L4, (nearly 2 months hospitalized plus long rehab to learn to walk again: all free excluding the fees for printing the medical data, which were over 400 pages, and MRI/RX/CT images DVDs: around 20 Euros all included), then last January I got a heart attack and was hospitalized in a coronary care unit for 4 days plus 1 day at the ward where I was planted two stents: again all free including the 1st bag of medicines.
20 years ago I worked in the IT, pays were very good and therefore taxes were high, but all considered, in the end I got a lot more than I paid for. I could think of a thousand things I don't like at all about my country, but healthcare is definitely not one of them.
I think my post major car accident care (x-rays, ct, ambulance ride - had concussion) 10 years ago cost me $100 all said and done on my parents' kaiser plan in California.
When I walked into a kaiser urgent care last year for serious back pain I had chest X-rays and a CT and I paid $20.
The major issue is that you only get that kind of healthcare working for a decent company (and using an HMO plan). Not everyone has the access and that's the issue.
The even better thing now is that with the "No Surprises Act" taking effect, I could presumably walk into any hospital in the US and never get billed more than I'd have to pay with Kaiser.
If you're in an area where Kaiser's hospitals are, non-Kaiser hospitals will generally work with Kaiser. It's not like you get to choose which one you go to in an emergency. Outside of the states that Kaiser is in, you're usually fine but there are many horror stories about hospitals asking for fees beyond what Kaiser will cover under their global ER coverage.
Your healthcare cost a lot more than the 20 euros or “free” that you said. In the US it’s a bit more transparent since you’re receiving the bill. In a shared public healthcare system everyone foots the bill via their taxes. I’m sure hospitals make out more in the US — the entire system is designed to create profit at every stage - but saying things are “free” elsewhere is disingenuous.
He also built an x-ray machine, but his charges per the article were for a CT scan and staying at the hospital. A CT scan is a totally different beast than an x-ray machine, and staying at the hospital means you’re actively under medical care the entire time. It’s all very clickbaity.
Some days I wonder if we're subsidizing Europe's healthcare in a way.
European counties impose stringent controls on how much money their public health system will pay for something and in response, since said company still wants that money, it ends up jacking up rates in the US.
We certainly are. But I think global healthcare spend would still decrease if the US were to adopt strict price controls a la Europe. Of course, Europe will need to pay a bit more towards healthcare but the burden on the states would be much decreased.
I don't imagine it would come anywhere close to the cost we currently pay for services here though.
It's the same as university here in the states. If colleges know that students are walking in with a minimum of $45k, guaranteed from the federal government, why wouldn't a university charge anything less than that for a degree?
I don't think it's actually possible to get $45k in federal loans. The max is about an order of magnitude less than that, depending a little on personal circumstances.
So I guess there are two classes of student loans then (regarding interest)? When I went to school there were "Parent Plus" loans (the part in my parents' name) and I don't remember what they called the ones in my name. Both were unsubsidized - i.e. interest accumulation starts on day 1, although accumulated interest is not added to the principal until repayment starts following leaving school (graduation, a break, quit, etc.) for >6 months.
I really don't recall how much I borrowed versus the interest accumulation, but when I refinanced it a year after graduation I borrowed nearly $120k to do it. The early loans (from 2011) were 8% and I think the interest dropped to ~5% for the ones my senior year. I didn't have the money to pay for it directly and neither did my parents considering they had to put 3 kids through school and we lived near the bay area in CA.
Admittedly, I'm a bad example for loan burden because I went into tech and was able to pay them off in 5 years while living comfortably, but the take away is that unless you go into one of the wealthiest professions in the US, the cost is ridiculously high. Sadly, there are plenty of professions important to society which require a ton of education but just aren't that lucrative financially. We're putting pressure on people not to enter those fields.
The other thing that doesn't make sense to me is that after high school you are legally considered an adult. Why should your parents' financial situation have any effect on was kind (if any) aid you get? Say you have a bad relationship with your family, what then?
You mean because a large chunk for R&D in medicine is done in the USA? Maybe that is because in the USA pharma companies can go mental about pricing their products, who wouldn't want such a lucrative market that's easy to exploit thanks to a well-oiled lobby machinery? I highly doubt that pharma companies would stop their R&D if the USA was to introduce universal healthcare for everyone of its citizens.
Every single time American healthcare comes up, some European chimes in with this stupid comment.
First of all, yeah, the US system is pretty atrocious.
But healthcare in the EU means months of waiting in line or outright told to look somewhere else as they're full, cheapest procedures with no alternative, having to quite literally beg for prescription medicine that worked for you before but the new doctor doesn't want to give you, tons of preferential treatment and discrimination.
Let's be real here, the only good thing in the EU is emergency care, when you break your arm or something. Good luck with any non-life threatening problems and mental healthcare.
I mean, sure, many people have it easy, living in the good part of a country. But I'm not the only one who has experienced what can only be called absolute horseshit. Reddit is full of such threads.
I don’t understand the connection between the cost of hospitalization and a DIY 2d x-ray machine. Where exactly do you go with that? The article states that he underwent an abdominal CT, but of course that’s not what he built. Probably a good thing, too, as whatever radiation he’s emitting would have been substantially higher. I’m just confused about the motivation. There are lots of costs embedded in procedure pricing - some legitimate, some less so. Heaven forbid he goes into hospital and has to have an MRI. I can’t imagine the monstrosity that would result from that DIY project.
It just sounds to me like a good story to introduce the project. I suppose he is kind of saying "how can they charge this much when I can build one of these at home".
Yeah it seems like an excuse to do the project. X-rays aren't all that expensive, usually under $100. Maybe with a reading by a radiologist it can go into the hundreds
You are right to question the narrative. These days it's common for news articles to play this kind of trick. There are just a lot of hidden costs the DIY youtuber is ignoring.
I know dog shit isn't worth 69k and nobody needs to acquire a dog shit maker, and operate a dog shit maker nor pay for the staff making a dog shit maker to know that dog shit isn't worth 69k. Basic common sense.
Maybe the above is a bad analogy. Put it this way.
I've been to hospitals outside of the US and paid for x-ray services. That's how I know. That's how Everyone knows ...
69k a crime.
What I don't understand is why there exists someone defending something so obvious. Are you an X-ray operator?
No, I'm not an x-ray operator, but I work in health care and have good knowledge of what it costs to run a hospital in America.
What you are describing is what your out of pocket expenses were. That's completely different from "what an x-ray costs". For example, if your expenses were lower than it cost the x-ray provider, they had to have some extra credit from- say- a health care org or the government. Where did the government get that money... well, taxes, of course! That money you paid to them (if you had to pay taxes) eventually gets converted into paying doctor and X-ray tech salaries, the cozy office for the hospital administrator, electrical companies, x-ray companies, etc (x-ray machines cost $5-10M to install and over a million a year to operate).
The way to think about this is the "all-in" cost: if you could somehow magically see the bills the hospital pays you'd see that out of pocket payments are only a fraction of the total costs of a service.
(I am not arguing that $69K is a reasonable expense for a routine x-ray. It's just that most people don't pay that, and in this case, nobody did- the health care org paid a different amount entirely, which was negotiated between the health care company and the service provider).
> No, I'm not an x-ray operator, but I work in health care and have good knowledge of what it costs to run a hospital in America.
That's the key word. "In America," and nowhere else on the face of the entire earth. You are one component of a criminally corrupt system. By being a component, you are shielded from full responsibility. It's like being a shareholder of a corrupt company. Same thing.
>if you haven't done that, I'm not sure you have the experience to say how much an x-ray should cost.
>I am not arguing that $69K is a reasonable expense for a routine x-ray.
Don't try to change the topic. You were saying that I am not justified to know how much an x-ray should cost. I'm saying I am justified, and that YOU are the beneficiary of said high costs and THEREFORE YOU are actually unqualified to justify ANYTHING related to this.
Let's say the cost is 5k. It's still a criminal rip off. Also who is making up that BS number 69k? Which industry is making up that number and for what insidious purpose? I'll tell you the answer. Your industry: The American medical industry. You.
Don't come on this site and tell me I'm not justified in saying something is a complete rip off when you're part of the industry taking advantage of peoples lives.
I don't benefit from you being ripped off. In fact, my entire career has been dedicated to identifying unnecessary medical costs, and eliminating them. It's an uphill battle.
I find this perspective absolutely alien when discussing healthcare, so I don't think there's much useful I can say about how it isn't crazy. Different cultural attitudes I suppose.
No, that's the opening to a negotiation. Many uninsured people either pay a fraction of that, or don't pay anything at all (at which point those costs are then borne by somebody else). My wife spent a bunch of time on the phone after her father died and basically by saying "we can't pay this" they would just offer another, smaller amount, until we agreed on a payment plan. This is actually how a lot of debt collection works in the US.
Are you framing this as a defense of the practice? It's hard to imagine that you view it as a positive thing that you get a massive bill you can't hope to pay, and you then have to call and beg to be lowered to some reasonable amount.
you're right about the hidden costs not mentioned in the article. He stayed at the hospital for 2 days, consulted with doctors, and received medication. this is why the bill is so high.
however, an x-ray should cost around $200. there's no need for an "expert" medical billing administrator here, $200 is double or triple the price of an x-ray in many european countries, and many facilities in america (where the youtuber lives) will charge less than $1000.
So, an x-ray machine costs $5-10M to purchase. That's just the capital cost. You operate it 8 hours a day, 6 days a week, 50 weeks a year- that's 2400 x-rays.
So the amortized cost for one X-ray over a year is $2400. But! The x-ray machine runs on special generator power because it's expensive to shut these machines down, and it's run by a fulltime tech, and the hospital has many other expenses related to your visit. This is why hospitals run their x-ray machines at such a high rate of utilization- to amortize the capital costs. NOte that x-ray machines in modern hospitals aren't cheap off the shelf units- they're major installations which require dedicated rooms with shielding, etc, etc.
$200 is the out of pocket cost. Your government has already prenegotiated some payment details that you couldn't see.
Turning off comments as an independent YouTube creator is these days potential career suicide, as ‘engagement’ is a huge part of the algorithm.
What you’re “supposed” to do these days, is engage with comments (literally like and reply!) early in your career, when the stream of feedback small and manageable, to drive engagement, and stop looking when they become unmanageable. This strategy is rewarded by YouTube.
Many creators struggle to draw that line because it can feel like turning their back on their fans.
Rightfully so. I've worked with people who are qualified to do this (literally, a person who stared into a synchrotron) but they limit their commentary to the scientific literature.
It always bothers me when blogs don't include the person name's in the title and just refer to them as "YouTuber". It's less egregious when it's social media like Reddit, but it's different when it's the way they earn a living.
> After receiving a medical treatment that included a round of antibiotics and an X-ray scan, Californian Will Osman thought he got stuck with a $69,000 hospital bill. Luckily, Osman's insurance covered most of the bill, but that still left him on the hook for $2,500.
That's the first sentence of the article. Doesn't that cover that pretty well?
Doesn't really make sense to me. If it would say "Will Osman Builds His Own X-Ray Machine" it doesn't really convey the same message as "YouTuber" which is kinda equivalent to "a regular person" and not a professional x-ray engineer.
And there's no way the insurance company paid $66.5K. The dollar amount on the bill is like the opening of the negotiation, it always starts way high and comes down from there. There's a rule that if an insurance company pays the bill you send them then you undercharged.
It's in the video, the insurance company paid about $8.5k and he paid another $2.5k. So you're absolutely right, that $69k bill turned into $11k pretty quickly.
Because, like every other rage-bait article about healthcare in America, it's a blatant lie.
The article states in addition to the x-ray that "the bill included an abdominal CT scan, medication, and two nights in a hospital room". American hospitals are full of multimillion dollar equipment and trained specialists staffed around the clock.
"The full price" is a fiction relevant only to negotiation of actual price between providers and government/institutional payers, no individual ever pays that. It's an imaginary number used to start price discovery so that the hospital, insurance companies and critically the government medicare/medicaid program can make some set of concessions and discounts so that in the end everyone comes to a "win-win" agreement.
My comment was not intended to indicate whether or not $2.5k is or is not outrageous.
The point of my comment is that $69k was apparently deemed to be sufficiently more outrageous and hence clickbait worthy such that it incentivized the writer to lie about the facts.
No. If I go to a hospital and get things done, and do not give them an insurance card, they can send me a bill for whatever numbers they want, and I am legally required to pay that!
The fact that you can often negotiate when you have a large debt that you are unlikely to pay does not change the fact that the debt is legitimate
Sure, but that is not relevant here because the person in the article did not receive a bill for $69k. My comments were strictly about the “journalist” painting the wrong picture about this specific scenario in order to incite emotion, presumably in order to get more people to click.
This is just how you write headlines though. It's not "<some person you've never heard of> proposes bill", it's "California state senator proposes bill". It's not "<some random engineer> makes new technology", it's "Engineer makes new technology".
I don't think it's related to trying to devalue 'YouTuber' as a profession.
If someone works in legacy media, like network and cable television, printed newspaper or magazine, and they don't clearly see the shift away from print and broadcast media to Internet video, then they're totally behind the curve, and they doing exactly what you always see people in dying prominent institutions do - struggle to maintain relevancy using any method possible. In this case, I would argue, "downplaying" so-called "new media" people.
Sam Harris said it best when explaining why he doesn't make book writing his focus any longer: "I can reach 100,000 people by writing a book, which will take about a year from idea to published hardcover, or I can record a podcast, which will take a day, and reach 500,000 people."
No, they mark it down as $69,000 and then show the "insurance negotiated" rate underneath. They do this regardless of whether or not you are paying out on of pocket. If you are uninsured they do the same thing but the discount is for "self pay" or whatever. It just seems kind of stupid but most people just see the insurance rate that applies to them when they are paying out of pocket in the deductible range. It's propaganda/manipulation.
Not a completely unreasonable headline, considering that an uninsured person would get a bill for something probably closer to $69k than $2.5k. I've gotten one of those bills before, and IMO the insanity of it cannot be pointed out enough times.
This is true and the system is incredibly wasteful and dumb, but to be clear those uninsured people would immediately negotiate it down to about $250 by calling and saying "wtf am I supposed to do with this bill".
No. What really happens is that the hospital does a check on whether the uninsured person has any assets.
If yes >> garnish the assets. This can include your business, your house, whatever you have.
If no >> ok they're poor, let's negotiate it down to the limit of what they can pay.
If they're really, really poor, it gets written off... and the other uninsured people bear the cost of that writeoff. That's one of the major reasons that the costs for uninsured people are so crazy; the hospital system is allowed to do that.
It costs that much in an emergency room, where the price is based on having multiple x-ray machines + radiologists available, 24/7, 365 with a 5 minute wait.
If you go to a clinic, which works 9-5 M-F, they're $40 (chest x-ray for a green card), 20minute wait.
7-11 is 24/7 hours too and an even faster wait time for a ice cold coke.
I can't tell if your post is just illustrating the difference or justifying it because a 5 minute wait time and 24/7 radiologists on call doesn't justify 69k in any reality.
It's not just an x-ray machine. The ER must amortize all equipment required to support their peak usage.
So that's MRI machines, doctors, nurses, radiologists, orderlies, everyone.
Then that cost is spread across all patients, regardless of what they use.
This is why in countries with socialized healthcare, there is a lot of encouragement to go to "Urgent Care" instead of "Emergency". Those centers don't have fancy equipment, but they're able to xray and set an arm. That allows the healthcare system to reduce the opex - but does increase capex/patient.
Think of it like having machines allocated to deal with a monthly 5x traffic spike (it's a sale!), and an annual 10x traffic spike (Christmas!). The rest of the time, they're sitting there idle, but the capex and unsheddable opex is amortized across all of the traffic. No, you can't scale dynamically, you're the primary occupant/hosting provider.
Here it costs the same no matter clinic or 24/7 hospital. The whole visit actually costs around 20€ or less than 30€ in late hours (there's also yearly maximum you need to pay). There's no extra cost for x ray or anything else.
It depends on how the ER is being funded. Since you're in the EU, I assume you've got socialized health care. That means everyone has health insurance with a co-pay. A co-pay is intended to discourage use, not cover costs.
The rest of the cost of the ER still exists, it just isn't directly funded by people attending the ER.
>> How on earth can x ray cost $69,210.32? Here in Finland it costs something like 20 € (well, I know that's not the true cost, but still).
How can an x-ray cost more than a pair of shoes? They used to use x-rays at the shoe store to check fit - for free. Say this to any doctor in the US and watch the silence on their face.
> "I avoided surgery, but they still billed nearly $70,000," Osman tells Popular Mechanics, adding that the bill included an abdominal CT scan, medication, and two nights in a hospital room.
Still exorbitant, but it wasn’t just for the X-ray. Ultimately it’s because hospitals and insurance companies are part of a legal price-fixing scheme.
Most people don't pay rack rates (that's the quote for $69K), many orgs amortize costs across many people, and hospitals run 24/7 and have to maintain a lot of standing infra. The capital costs for acquiring a pro-grade x-ray (and staff it) are nontrivial.
But yes, a single x-ray should never cause a bill for $69K. Even if the user only pays $5K.
I was wondering the same. Sure, I get the fact that people can hike the prices but I thought that the insurance companies would not allow a hospital to charge whatever they like, at least if you want to claim it from insurance.
XRay machines are pretty basic afaik compared to say, an MRI and at that price you could get 2 nights in the New York Hilton penthouse!
I can't quite put my finger on it, but there's something in Osman's style that feels like contempt to me, where he's kind of ruthless in his critique of many things, and then very sensitive to criticism coming his way. Admittedly, many commenters are over-the-top critical of him, and there are a lot of commenters. I can imagine he might feel ganged up on.
I pay cash for a lot of my medical care thanks to my HSA and this is exorbitant but but not insane assuming it’s about 2x thanks to the insurance premium which you would never pay yourself. The subject is sweeping under the rug the two nights in the hospital which is for sure the bulk of the cost — two days in the hospital is expensive as hell. Lots of hospitals bill by the half hour and an 8 hour overnight is about $10k when paying cash.
I can't figure out in what way $1000/hr is tethered to any kind of reality. The bed and room don't cost that much. Nursing doesn't come close. The doctors tend to bill you separately for their services.
I get that isn't the game here. But most games are based on some kind of reality. This one seems completely disconnected.
Your $1000/hr bill is really covering 5 other indigent hospital patients who can't financially cover the care the hospital is legally required to give. Rather than design a medical system that works for everyone no matter their finances we'd rather stick it to the middle class (the rich go to very different hospitals) since they have the most to lose and are the weakest to negotiate.
My roommate's bill for my own 5 day, $24k hospital stay was $0. My after-insurance cost was $2k, though I negotiated that down to $800 that I was able to pay off over a year (grad student on a stipend). Initially I was a little bitter about my roommate getting a freebie due to lack of insurance, but I eventually learned some compassion. In his case, he was unemployed and couldn't work due to a back injury.
So, we end up in this situation where those who have insurance subsidize those who don't. Many people who are ok with this are very much against an identical arrangement where the government is involved.
Yes, in my city there is a trauma 1, a few trauma 3s, and multiple hospitals who have no ER at all. T1 is downtown, surrounded by homeless encampments, and is perpetually broke. By city charter T1 cannot file for bankruptcy protection and cannot turn away anyone seeking emergency treatment. T3 and outpatient hospitals are in rich suburbs, no homeless camps, and the parking lot is full of luxury cars. They also cannot do most emergency services and will send you to T1.
The overnight stay in the T1 is $10k for a grimey room while the T3s are closer to $3k-5k before insurance. I've volunteered at both types and it is night and day difference in the staff and the patients.
It's because it's the cash price. Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements are significantly less, so in order to make budgets make any sense, the bills that can be increased, increase enough to cover all of the others.
Even employer sponsored insurance will get significant discounts on that price.
Too funny after a huge vet bill for x-rays I was trying to look up how to build an x-ray machine myself but only for the question of if it was possible not to actually do it. I questioned why so much for something that probably doesn't cost that much. Some will say it costs lots because of certification and upkeep and licensing but I call bs especially after seeing this video.
Please at the minimum do the required lead shielding the regulations require... There's a reason all those pesky laws exist.
This sort of youtubers who try to convince people with no relevant background that xray tubes are super safe, metallic mercury is fine to handle with your bare hands and magnetrons are ok to run in the open (or even pointed at your skull) are unbelievably irresponsible. There's a whole generation of teenagers growing up not realizing that these are basically stunts.
Stunts even more dangerous than those fake parkour videos showing people jumping off the 3rd floor of a building, because at least in that case we have build-in reflexes stopping us from reenacting them.
Also consider that you'll need someone to develop the films and read the xrays. They aren't doing it for free.
My issue with X-rays is that they are massively overused and rarely help the diagnosis. 99.9% (an estimation) of X-rays are used to rule out diagnoses. Sprain your wrist? Need an X-ray to make sure it's not broken, which your orthopedic already knew. Unless there's a broken bone or cancer, all X-rays do is pay for the X-ray machine.
Tip: never X-ray your pet (unless there is a broken bone or cancer is suspected). Trust me, it is very unlikely to show anything. If you're very concerned, go right for the ultrasound, which probably also won't show anything. Vets are generally awesome individuals, however, veterinary medicine is a business for profit quite unlike the health system, and most vet X-rays merely serve to pay for and justify the expense of the machine.
Humans are far more likely to break bones than pets - so I agree that it's almost never worth it to get a pet xray.
For humans though, as someone who's worked in a hospital, xrays are extremely useful. We see lots of broken bones. Confirming the break is important so that you know to put the patient in a cast, but more importantly, the type of break can sometimes require surgery to set the bone.
I'm not sure how many xrays rule out a fracture, rather than confirm it, but it's not 99.9%. If I had to guesstimate, maybe 10-20% of possible fracture xrays confirm a fracture. That percentage probably increases greatly as patients age. Kids very often come in with sprains that their parents want xrays, whereas a lot of elderly people break bones more easily.
I think a broken bone, or a reasonable possibility of a broken bone, or suspicion of cancer, are excellent reasons for an X-ray. But I refuse to believe an orthopedic can't tell the difference between a broken bone or fracture and soft tissue trauma. At some point during the physical examination, they know. It's not like they don't know, and they need to eliminate possibilities to whittle them down to reveal the problem, otherwise hidden from their eyes and mind. They know. And yet, we'll order $2000 worth of X-rays just to be sure the damn machine gets paid for.
This is not my experience. I've seen a lot of borderline cases where the doctors don't really know if there's a minor fracture or if it's just a partially torn ligament. Typically these are hairline fractures, but it's still valuable to know that it's there to ensure the patient protects the bone until it's healed.
My, admittedly, personal anecdote is a torn rotator cuff caused by an identifiable injury, for no reason, reaching across to shut the passenger door with the wrong arm awkwardly and pulling against the weight too hard too fast, immediately knew there was a problem, right then called orthopedic office assoc. w/ hospital, on its campus, first I made very sure they took my insurance, was assured no treatment would not be covered. They squeezed me in 6 weeks later, saw the doctor and explained what happened. I was in a lot of pain the whole time, basically crippled and one armed. I knew I was looking forward to maybe a year of recovery before the pain really went away. I complained about the pain, but I asked about a cortisone injection. He said he wanted to X-ray the area. I still don't understand why, and he wouldn't say, I thought stubbornly, but I was in pain and irritable. I told him I didn't want the X-ray. He said he wouldn't treat me without the X-ray, and directed me to physiotherapy, which was $1000 and not covered, and they sent me a $125 bill for the visit. Took a year and a half before my arm was 100%
Few years later, no recent associated injury with right forearm, but maybe something decades ago, as a child, someone squeezed my wrist way too tight. One day 45 years later, no action or movement, sitting upright, reaching for the wheel, I feel something, idk, muscle, ligament, I do not know, told different orthopedic in the same office it felt like rubber band stretching from my wrist area to my elbow had snapped, and for the next 5 hours I could feel it snaking down my forearm as the elastic whatever relaxed, not painfully at first but then the weirdest burning scraping sensation, in a linear path slowly from elbow to wrist, I thought an elastic slowly being pulled back to where it was still anchored on one end. While it was occurring, I wondered if I was experiencing an extremely slow stroke and was feeling the blood clot drag through a path of veins in my arm. Until, unexpectedly, when the sensation finally got to my wrist, it suddenly sped up, encircled my wrist really fast, and my wrist and hand swelled suddenly in less than a second... while I was staring right at it doing nothing but wondering what was happening. This time, I acquiesces to the X-ray. Orthopedic said it didn't show anything, and maddeningly did not give me any explanation for what had happened to me. Insurance covered the $2000 in X-rays. And they sent me another $125 bill for the visit. Hand useless for a few months.
Latest thing is sprained or strained my left wrist, I think just repetitive injury. It's coming along. I don't see the need to pay $125 and see my insurance milked another $2000 to learn nothing and not be treated.
I also just want to lament that thanks to Sacklers' Oxycontin, gone are the days of getting a week or two of Vicodin or Hydrocodone for some absolutely appropriate pain management for injuries like these. Sucks. That constant pain is maddening, an OTC painkillers just don't have the ability to quite restore sanity. But cannabis helps not care about the pain, thank goodness.
>Need an X-ray to make sure it's not broken, which your orthopedic already knew.
Not sure where this assumption is from. A doctor can sometimes tell when something is outright broken, but in a lot of cases they need to take x-rays to tell if there's a hairline fracture or something small that might not present with a lot of pain. X rays also tell the actual severity.
Ruling out possibilities is important, yes, when you have no idea what it is, you start by ruling out possibilities until one is left... When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
When you already know what it is, however, why go through all the motions of ruling out what it's not? To pay for the X-ray machine, that's why.
Fine US lawmakers should have Congress outlaw scalping. Then victims of the US medical system would have a novel argument to sue goodness into the damn thing.
I can't get past the paywall on the article, but how exactly did he get a bill for an X-ray that totaled $69,000? Much more advanced diagnostics, like CT scans, MRI's, etc. cost a tenth of this.
Apparently it was an x–ray, a CT scan, some medication, and two nights in a hospital bed. That’s the real problem. Hospitals are great if you have been in a car accident and could die at any moment, but terrible for anything else.
In particular, hospitals in the US are well–known for lying about their prices. You’ll get a bill for some ridiculous amount, and your insurance will negotiate it down to something more reasonable. Of course they don’t negotiate prices on a case–by–case basis; instead the large insurance companies negotiate “bulk discounts” ahead of time. It is unlikely that his insurance paid more than $10k. Ironically he probably could have paid even less if he had asked for the cash prices at the hospital, and then gotten reimbursed by his insurance.
But even that is too much. If he had gone to his primary–care physician or an urgent–care clinic he probably would have paid a tenth of that or less, plus he could have slept in his own bed.
Whoever charged 69k for some tests and a couple of days in hospital should be put in jail for fraud. That’s about 10x what it actually costs the hospital.
People need to stop quoting bills before insurance discounts. Hospitals always use ridiculous numbers. They do this for the insurance, not for you. For the example in the article, NOBODY pays that much, uninsured included. If you are uninsured, a simple phone call would get this particular bill reduced to $5,000 or so. Sure, it is still a lot, but it's not $69,000. Note that some/many states REQUIRE hospitals to have financial assistance, and those that don't typically have judges that frown upon absurd costs, especially considering the insured/uninsured data becomes factual information in the lawsuit should the defendant hire a competent lawyer. (Translation: if the average person + insurance pays less than you are being sued for out of pocket, the hospital will win a judgement, but not for the amount they are demanding, that is provided you fight it and either make smart arguments or get a lawyer)
Note that I'm not advocating for "paid" or "for-profit" healthcare here, rather, I'd like to see people use factual information for the basis of an argument against an unpopular subject. I am socialist, and I've been trying to get Bernie and others elected to office for years.
You know it consistently baffled me that someone can look at a person who struggles to pay a hospital bill and think that moving to a different country is a viable option.
Second, what is the break down that gets you anywhere close to $690 to move to Europe, or even Canada? Does that include the upfront costs of renting a place to live? Work visa? Passport fees?
For the VAST majority of people who are under-insured or completely uninsured, moving to a different country isn't even close to an option
I'm weirded out by the number of people on HN defending the US medical system. As someone living in the US mayself, everyone is well aware how crazy the medical system is, but in this thread there's a large number of people trying to justify 69k for an "expert" pushing a button to zap you with rays.
Anyone who thinks these are comparable should withhold judgement until they learn more about how different kinds of "radiation" work. It's an overloaded term.
X-rays generated by slamming accelerated electrons into a metal plate turn off immediately once power is removed. There is no residual radioactive decay, because there were no unstable or decaying isotopes at any point in the process. It's not a nuclear process. It does not involve the nucleus.
In contrast, the Goiânia accident was the result of beta radiation from a pile of decaying Cesium 137 that could only be contained, not turned off.
Comparing screwing around with dental xray equipment (or any x-ray equipment really) to distributing the radioactive bits of chemotherapy equipment across a neighborhood is like saying "be careful, you wouldn't want to accidentally blow up a government office building" every time someone starts talking about plant fertilizer or lecturing someone who's installing 12v car audio about transformer substation safety practices. The magnitude difference between the subjects is so big it constitutes a qualitative difference even if there is a common element.
Not every discussion about something in the physical world needs to start with a low effort comment about how you can die by cranking it to 11 and then abusing it.
In the context of buying used hospital equipment and the concerns of a layman making a mistake due to the very confusion you highlight... Seems at least relevant.
So much hospital bill stuff is just rampant clickbait. A man got a $120k hospital bill after an allergy attack, a baby costs $36k to be born, etc.
No one actually pays these amounts without insurance and if you have no insurance you probably don’t pay at all and just default on the debt. No one is paying this. No one. You never hear stories of people being utterly bankrupted by a huge hospital bill.
The idea that medical bankruptcy is the leading cause of bankruptcy is a carefully engineered fiction. The claim is normally worded something like "2/3 of bankruptcies are caused by medical bills" and includes a reference to an academic study[0], so it sounds super legit! But not only does the study not support the claim--it clearly contradicts the idea that Medicare For All would improve the situation.
You're probably rolling your eyes right around now, so I'll dispense with the characterizations and move on to the proof.
First of all, here's the actual main takeaway from the study:
> 62.1% of all bankruptcies have a medical cause.
Huh. "having a medical cause" is far from "caused by medical bills", right?. I wonder what "a medical cause" means?
> We included debtors who either
(1) cited illness or injury as a specific reason for bankruptcy (27%), or
(2) reported uncovered medical bills exceeding $1,000 in the past [two] years (27%), or
(3) lost at least two weeks of work-related income because of illness/injury,(27%) or
(4) mortgaged a home to pay medical bills. (2%)
So if I had a $1000 dollar operation two years ago, paid it off, then filed bankruptcy when my small business tanked last month, mine would be a "Medical bankruptcy".
Further down in the article, it gets better:
Only 35% of debtors had medical bills >$5000, while 92% of the 62% ("medical bankruptcies") had medical bills >$5000. But the average net worth for "medical bankruptcies" was -$44,000 (negative $44,000), while the average annual income was $31,000. In other words, these are people who, even in the absence of their medical debt, would almost certainly have been filing for bankruptcy anyway.
BTW--the median income of one of these bankruptcies, in conjunction with their median household size of 2.79, makes it clear that the vast majority of them were be eligible for Medicaid! Would a rebranding of their state-run healthcare leave them any better off?
Why do you think insurance companies are so happy to pay these exorbitant sums to the medical industry?
Like what is there motivation?
Anyone with a brain can see none of this makes sense. You have planted an entire forest of bullshit above that nobody can verify is true or not.
The middle class is being wiped out. Everyone knows this. It's happening from all angles and everyone knows medical bills are one of the main weapons used by the government to do it.
> Why do you think insurance companies are so happy to pay these exorbitant sums to the medical industry?
I have no idea what you're asking.
> Anyone with a brain can see none of this makes sense.
We're in full agreement!
> You have planted an entire forest of bullshit above that nobody can verify is true or not.
If only I'd linked the study!
> The middle class is being wiped out. Everyone knows this.
Yes, with more people moving to the upper class than the lower.[0] And the increase in lower-class households is totally unrelated to the fact that all US population growth is driven by low-skill immigration!
> It's happening from all angles and everyone knows medical bills are one of the main weapons used by the government to do it.
Of course! Democratic governments with consumer-driven economies are notorious for their hatred of the middle class!
Ok well you made me think twice about a few things and I will cede some ground to you and I hope you are right.
I might have a warped view of reality from reading too much of the chans, echo chamber of similar friends etc.
The American Insurance companies paying out $1000 for a pill that costs $20 in Europe in my mind is just the Insurance companies actively enabling a situation where insurance companies are compulsory and a situation where anyone can be bankrupted if these companies refuse to pay the bill
Democratic governments with consumer-driven economies = demon-cratic with manipulated plugged in naive people in satanic-greed-driven economies
US population growth is drven by low-skill immigration = weimar situation is developing all around your house and neighborhoods and soon you will be outnumbered and the economy will collapse taking you down with it
In my mind the USA is an absolute sh*t hole now compared to how it was before the 1970s. Everyone is a wage slave working insane number of hours , both parents are forced to do it and being middle class or upper middle class is as bad as being lower class now. Like dont you have to wage slave just the same and you just get more material possessions which are meaningless ? Is your child hood not spent in a prison like building being forced to do rote memorization ? Are you not angry about that and how it was to condition you to work as a wage slave ?
Isin't a large percentage of the population on drugs , ssris, drinking soma (coffee), binging on food and now incest filled porn tubes, is this all to cope emotionally ?
A self destructive way of living , a slow suicide of the nation ? This is the culture there in my eyes.
Im the type of guy who loves a nice walk in the morning along the beach and then to get working on his hobbies and intellectual interests for the rest of the day in peace. I can fit everything I own in a big briefcase. The way most people live in the USA and what they accept seems insane to me.
The point is that a "destroyed credit rating" only matters if your credit rating matters.
For many people, their credit rating is irrelevant.
For folks with unpaid medical bills, their credit rating is often in the crapper anyway (because loss of income tends to do that), so unpaid medical bills don't matter.
> Medical bills will not affect your credit as long as you pay them. However, medical debt is handled a little differently than other types of consumer debt. Since most health care providers don't report to credit bureaus, your debt would have to be sold to a collection agency before appearing on your credit report. Most medical providers won't sell the debt to a collection agency until you are 60, 90 or even 120 days or more past due. Exactly when that happens depends on your health care provider.
Sounds to me like it's still going on your credit report. Just might take a little longer.
Part of the reason why health insurance is so expensive is that so many simply do not pay their bills. You subsidize all these people with your premiums.
An article about insured people going medically bankrupt. When things go according to plan and insurance covers everything it all good but when it doesn't it next to impossible for people to afford it. And it's not like bankrupois without consequences
The medical bill isn’t why they go bankrupt. They lose their job to disability and thus their income and now they can’t pay any kind of bills. Or they were just in a bad financial state to begin with.
> and if you have no insurance you probably don’t pay at all and just default on the debt. [..] You never hear stories of people being utterly bankrupted by a huge hospital bill.
... I mean, I assume one of the more common methods of defaulting is bankruptcy?
It was a long time coming because he comes off as very aloof and has received criticism about the safety of many other projects, but this one appears to have triggered a lot of outrage.
FWIW, I think we need more young, brilliant minds sharing this kind of content. It has the entertainment value needed to capture the interest of young viewers who may not be otherwise interested in engineering disciplines. There are many, many other channels out there (backyard scientist, action lab, Cody’s lab, stuff made here, etc.) who are very successful on YouTube, but they tend to cater to viewers who are deliberately choosing to watch their videos.