Billing and Sherman have some pretty robust statistical controls to address these kinds of alternatives. Worth reading the paper.

Fully spoiled food is inedible, but there’s a long window of pathogen growth before that point, which can be lengthened further by spices. Why would some meat not be consumed immediately? Because life is messy, people make mistakes, and animals are large.

Yes. But if surveyed at a random time, including now, I’d be most likely to be classified as NEET.

Then why does people’s preference for spicy food correlate to local food pathogen prevalence?

See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9586227/

To elaborate a little further. “Just not eating” something is a modern luxury. For most of our history, you ate everything that was available or (someone, usually your youngest kids first) starved. The argument isn’t that spices cover the taste of rotten food, but that they actually kill the pathogens that make humans sick, making more food edible for longer. This is a spill over from these plants’ long evolutionary arms race with phytotoxins. Cultures in places with high food pathogen prevalence, where spicing makes a real difference to survival, develop a preference for spicy food, despite their initially aversive taste. Cultures in cold climates with few food pathogens don’t.

I do high skill work that pays a lot. I could do a lot of it and have a lot of money, or do a little and live modestly and not work much. I chose option two.

Oh, also, no kids. Also, live somewhere where labor demand is high but supply low.

Just curious, and I’ll admit it’s too my discredit that I’m even engaging, but why are you behaving this way?

What?

Government funded and administered health care systems being a form of risk pooling and insurance are not controversial ideas. These are standard definitions.

I’m not sure where you’re getting these ideas. Why would taxpayer paid services not be a form of risk pooling? There are hundreds of countries around the world with government run health systems, or government funded and privately run systems, or private-public partnerships in various forms. Pooling taxpayer money to fund health care for those individuals unlucky enough to need it absolutely does make it insurance.

I recommend reading the Wikipedia pages on “universal health care” and “health insurance” if you’d like to start learning about these topics.

I’m an academic statistician who discusses risk and related concepts with experts every day…

I mean, I agree with the first part fully, but I think what you mean is that we shouldn’t have for-profit corporate run insurance.

Any socialised health care is a form of insurance—a way for us to pool the risk of large bad events, so that everyone (or a lot of people) pays a little so that a few people aren’t totally destroyed by the catastrophe. The alternative to having insurance is that we let people die when rare but really bad things happen. We absolutely should have insurance, but we should all share the cost equally, or the rich should pay more, rather than a few people massively profiting from running the enterprise.

But, however we run it, we’ll need to treat dental differently from medical because of what I said in my first comment

This makes perfect sense from the supply side. Very few (younger) people need expensive medical care, so we can pool the risk. Almost everyone needs some, regular dental care, so it’s more like a savings account than insurance. I’m not claiming that the insurance systems in any given country aren’t exploitative, just that medical and dental insurance should be different.