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$1,394, including a $1,262 facility fee listed as "operating room services." The balance included a clinic charge and a pharmacy charge. Lee's portion of the bill was $354.68.

Lee owed more than 10 times what she had paid for the same procedure done before by the same physician, Dr. Elisabeth Roter.

Lee says it was the "same talking, same injection — same time."

In Houston, as millions suffered power and water outages, food shortages and subfreezing temperatures, another problem confronted families: price hikes.Steep increases in the price of food, gas and fuel have been reported across Texas. And as millions of Texans lost power, exorbitant prices were being asked for hotel rooms with power, with some climbing to US$1,000 a night.

Disaster creates a scarcity of basic necessities; retailers and providers respond by sharply raising the price tags on sought-after commodities.

Contrarian voices argue that price hikes are good – they provide incentives for sellers to bring extra supplies and prevent hoarding.

For more than a century, the United States has been the world's economic powerhouse.

The US is on the verge of its longest economic expansion on record

Last May, the US economy's streak of more than eight years of economic growth became the nation's second longest on record. It's been a slow climb following the Great Recession, but it's growth nonetheless.

Computational modelling is also used to estimate the properties of materials. However, there is usually a trade-off between the cost of the experiments (or simulations) and the accuracy of the measurements (or estimates), which has limited the number of materials that can be tested rigorously.

Materials scientists commonly supplement their own ‘chemical intuition’ with predictions from machine-learning models, to decide which experiments to conduct next

More importantly, almost all of these studies use models built on data obtained from a single, consistent source. Such models are referred to as single-fidelity models.

Why do so many of us hide our heads in the sand when faced with the possibility of a catastrophic future event?

we are governed by two cognitive systems: one that is more automated and drives instinctual decisions—like quickly moving away from danger—and another that involves more considered thought and drives deliberate decisions—like deciding what house to buy.

In these cases, we tend to rely on six biases that can lead us to misperceive our situation and potentially take wrong action (or avoid action altogether). These are nicely described in The Ostrich Paradox, as follows: Myopia: The tendency to focus more on the short-term costs than the future potential benefits of investments. Amnesia: The tendency to forget the lessons of past disasters. Optimism: The tendency to underestimate the likelihood of future hazards. Inertia: The tendency to maintain the status quo or adopt the default option when uncertain about the future benefits of investing now. Simplification: The tendency to selectively consider only certain factors when making choices involving risk. Herding: The tendency to follow the “wisdom” of the crowd.

Social scientists have long known that we perceive risks that are acute, such as an impending tsunami, differently than chronic, ever-present threats like car accidents

Part of what’s happening is that covid-19 — which we initially saw as a terrifying acute threat — is morphing into more of a chronic one in our minds. That shift likely dulls our perception of the danger,

Now, when they think about covid-19, “most people have a reduced emotional reaction. They see it as less salient.”

for hurting others relies on a part of neural anatomy, one that likely evolved before the brain regions responsible for analysis and planning.

hypothetical;

Babies as young as 10 months can assess how much someone values a particular goal by observing how hard they are willing to work to achieve it, according to a new study from MIT and Harvard University.

This ability requires integrating information about both the costs of obtaining a goal and the benefit gained by the person seeking it, suggesting that babies acquire very early an intuition about how people make decisions.

“This paper is not the first to suggest that idea, but its novelty is that it shows this is true in much younger babies than anyone has seen. These are preverbal babies, who themselves are not actively doing very much, yet they appear to understand other people’s actions in this sophisticated, quantitative way,”

As Dutch company Pal-V unveils its flying car gyrocopter at the Geneva motor show, we ask if the dream of flying cars for all could ever become a reality. Or will they remain toys for the rich, superseded by sky taxis that can fly autonomously?

President Trump’s decision to cut off critical payments to health insurance companies ratcheted up the pressure on Congress on Friday to take action to protect consumers from soaring premiums, while also adding a combustible new issue to negotiations to avert a government shutdown this year.

It came just hours after he signed an executive order that also undermined the health law by encouraging the development of lower-cost insurance policies not subject to the Affordable Care Act’s rigorous coverage standards.

“Our patients will ultimately pay the price,” said Dr. David O. Barbe

It was a picture-perfect launch, just before sunrise on a sandy coastline. The rocket, bright as a candle flame, climbed steadily, leaving a spindly trail of smoke that split the sky in half, with the sharp darkness of night on one side and the first pastel hues of daylight on the other. It carried a capsule, bound for the International Space Station, to the edge of space and let go.

The trouble started after that. The capsule, built for NASA by Boeing, was supposed to ignite its own engines to boost itself higher into orbit, where it would chase after the space station. But the engines didn’t start when they should have.

But the craft was flying just out of reach of communication, between two satellites. When engineers could finally contact Starliner, they made the spacecraft thrust itself higher, but it was too late. The confused capsule had been burning fuel to maintain its position, and didn’t have enough left to execute that crucial push toward the ISS.

to really understand the problem with Facebook we need to understand the structural roots of that problem, how much of it is baked into the core architecture of the site and its very business model

much of it is inherent in the core strategies of the post-2000, second wave Internet tech companies that now dominate our information space and economy.

Facebook is an ingenious engine for information and ideational manipulation.

This force is unresolved grief, and research suggests it costs companies billions of dollars a year in lost productivity and performance. Our own multiyear research effort finds that unresolved grief is a pervasive, overlooked leadership derailer that affects perhaps one-third of senior executives at one time or another.

The negative impact of unresolved grief is considerable. In addition to the well-known ways that stress from grief damages our physical health, 1 1. Eliana Crosina and Michael G. Pratt, “Understanding how grief weakens the body,” Atlantic, September 11, 2014, theatlantic.com. the financial cost of grief to organizations appears high: $75 billion a year for US companies, according to one study. 2

At its most basic, our experience of grief stems from our natural resistance to change. That’s why some definitions of grief usefully describe it as “the conflicting emotions brought by the change of a familiar pattern.”

“I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny — fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear,” she said. “I doubt if the Republican Party could — simply because I don’t believe the American people will uphold any political party that puts political exploitation above national interest. Surely, we Republicans aren’t that desperate for victory.”

sometimes the point is just to get people to look up.

The problem with politicians who abuse power isn’t that they don’t get results. It’s that the results come at a high cost to the Republic — and to the reputations of those who lack the courage or wisdom to resist.