14: The Beatles

Paul McCartney Says A.I. Helped Complete ‘Last’ Beatles Song The song was made using a demo with John Lennon’s voice and will be released later this year, McCartney said. ......... “We were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this A.I., so then we could mix the record, as you would normally do.” ......... Proponents of the technology say it has the power to disrupt the music business in the ways that synthesizers, sampling, and file-sharing services did. ......... Over McCartney’s career, he has been quick to engage with new creative technologies, whether talking about synthesizers or samplers .

Russian Forces Strike Back Against Ukraine’s Advancing Troops Russia attacked Ukrainian troops near villages in Ukraine’s south on the same day that Russian missiles killed at least 11 people and that President Vladimir V. Putin acknowledged some Russian losses. ......... President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, speaking to Russian war correspondents and military bloggers, acknowledged that his forces had suffered some losses in June, including 54 tanks. He denied Ukraine’s assertions of progress on the battlefield, though, insisting that its military had lost hundreds more tanks and vehicles than Russia with no gains to speak of. ......... “The opponent has had no success in any area,” he said. “They have had heavy losses.” ........... He said that he was aware of the hawkish calls for another major draft, but added that such a decision “depends on what we want” to do and that “there was no such need today.” ........... the Russian attack on Ukraine’s vanguard suggested Kyiv’s troops faced a dangerous problem ahead. As they emerge from their trenches, military analysts say, they move out of the range of their own army’s air defenses and electronic jamming systems, leaving them vulnerable to Russian air attacks like those on Tuesday. .......... Ukraine has yet to commit the bulk of its forces, including those trained by Western allies, to any one place to drive a wedge through Russian-occupied land in the southeast. ........... Russia’s defensive strategy of aerial counterstrikes could slow Ukraine's campaign, giving Russian troops more time to lay down even more defenses. Ukrainian forces have already faced minefields, trenches, anti-tank ditches, air assaults and artillery fire .............. “Our night counterattacks began,” Mr. Rogov wrote, adding that the Russian military was flying sorties with two models of attack helicopters. Both armies were firing artillery in the area .......... The United States has already sent 109 Bradleys and 90 Strykers to Ukraine, according to the Defense Department, and has committed $40 billion overall in arms, ammunition and equipment since Russia’s invasion last year. Some European countries have also sent dozens of armored fighting vehicles to Ukraine in the past months........... Ukraine’s General Staff said on its Facebook page that air defenses had destroyed 10 of 14 cruise missiles and shot down one of four Iranian-made Shahed drones used in Russia’s overnight strike. The attack was part of Russian efforts to “exhaust” Ukraine’s air defenses .

He’s No Jack Kennedy there is a case to make in appreciation of candidates who hail from families that take public service seriously and who are familiar with the weird world of politics. Exhibit A is Nancy Pelosi, the most formidable and effective House speaker in more than 60 years, who learned much about her craft growing up in a local Democratic dynasty in Baltimore.

Lock Him Up It is stunning to read the grand jury’s 37-count indictment, with its depictions of a former president treating the law with the contemptuous disdain of a Mafia don — but with none of a don’s concern for covering his tracks. It is even more stunning to hear what some of those in the legal community who have been defenders of Trump have to say about it. ....... As for the suggestion that Trump is the victim of a witch hunt, Barr noted that the Justice Department had “acted in a very patient way” in trying to obtain documents from Trump, only to be met with “very egregious obstruction.” ........ None of this will sway Trump’s base because nothing will sway them. .......... But what about more mainstream conservatives who know the 2020 election wasn’t stolen, that Jan. 6 was a disgrace for the ages, that Trump is a one-time-lucky serial loser whose bottomless narcissism keeps costing Republicans winnable Senate and gubernatorial races, that his entire presidency was a drunken joyride with a reckless driver careening around hairpin turns at high speed, that his renomination as the G.O.P. candidate would give President Biden his best shot at re-election and that another Trump presidency would be an orgy of petty political retribution and reckless policymaking that would make his first term seem, by comparison, responsible and tame? ................ They are, with few exceptions, supine. ......... It remains true that the federal prosecution of Trump, along with his potential conviction and incarceration, will be a fateful moment in American history. Far more fateful would have been the failure to prosecute. If Trump can be above the law, in a case of this kind, then we will have lost the rule of law.

C.I.A. Told Ukraine Last Summer It Should Not Attack Nord Stream Pipelines Dutch intelligence officials shared information with the C.I.A. in June 2022 that they had learned the Ukrainian military had been planning an operation using divers to blow up one of the pipelines.......... Explosions destroyed parts of the pipelines, which carry natural gas from Russia to Europe, in September. The Ukrainian government has repeatedly denied responsibility for the attack. .......... American intelligence agencies now believe the operation was carried out at least with the loose direction of the Ukrainian government, but they do not know who exactly planned the operation. .......... Some officials have worried that Ukrainian involvement would weaken support for the war among Germans, who have swallowed high energy prices during the conflict. While it is still possible that further revelations could shift public opinion in Germany, for now Berlin has continued to increase its military aid to Kyiv and had provided many of the tanks being used in the ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive.

I Studied Five Countries’ Health Care Systems. We Need to Get More Creative With Ours. Despite just experiencing a pandemic in which over one million Americans died, health care reform doesn’t seem to be a top political issue in the United States right now. That’s a mistake. The American health care system is broken. We are one of the few developed countries that does not have universal coverage. We spend an extraordinary amount on health care, far more than anyone else. And our broad outcomes are middling at best.......... When we do pay attention to this issue, our debates are profoundly unproductive. Discussions of reform here in the United States seem to focus on two options: Either we maintain the status quo of what we consider a “private” system, or we move toward a single-payer system like Canada’s. That’s always been an odd choice to me because true single-payer systems like that one are relatively rare in the world, and Canada performs almost as poorly as we do in many international rankings. ..........

no one has a system quite as complicated as ours.

............. They think that our system is somehow part of America’s DNA, something that grew from the Constitution or the founding fathers. Others believe that the health care systems in different countries couldn’t work here because of our system’s size. .......... Our employer-based insurance system is the way it is because of World War II wage freezes and I.R.S. tax policy, not the will of the founders. And much of health care is regulated at the state level, so our size isn’t really an outlier. We could change things if we wanted to............ Australia and New Zealand are two other countries with single-payer systems out there, although their systems differ greatly from that of Canada and from each other’s. Unlike our neighbor to the north, they allow private insurance for most care, which can be applied to pay for faster access with more bells and whistles. In addition, Australia’s system has fairly high out-of-pocket payments, in the form of deductibles and co-pays. .............. France’s system is close to a single-payer one because almost everyone gets insurance from one of a few collective funds, mostly determined by employment or life situations. They also have out-of-pocket payments and expect most people to pay upfront for outpatient care, to be reimbursed later by insurance. ......... Britain, on the other hand, has no out-of-pocket payments for almost all care. Private insurance is optional, as it is in other countries, to pay for care that may come faster and with more amenities. Relatively few people purchase it, though. ........... Singapore has a completely different model. It relies on individuals’ personal spending more than almost any other developed country in the world, with insurance only really available for catastrophic coverage, or for access to a private system that, again, relatively few use. .............

It’s outrageous that the health care system hasn’t been a significant issue in the 2024 presidential race so far.

........... Even if we did have that national conversation, I fear we’d be arguing about the wrong things. We have spent the last several decades fighting about health insurance coverage. It’s what animated the discussions of reform in the 1990s. It’s what led to the Affordable Care Act more than a decade ago. It’s what we are still arguing about. The only thing we seem able to focus on concerns insurance — who provides it, and who gets it. ............. Insurance is really just about moving money around. It’s the least important part of the health care system. .......... Universal coverage matters. What doesn’t is how you provide that coverage, whether it’s a fully socialized National Health Service, modified single-payer schemes, regulated nonprofit insurance or private health savings accounts. All of the countries I visited have some sort of mechanism that provides everyone coverage in an easily explained and uniform way. That allows them to focus on other, more important aspects of health care. ................. We have all types of coverage schemes, from veteran’s affairs to Medicare, the Obamacare exchanges and employer-based health insurance, and when put together they don’t work well. They’re all too complicated, too inefficient and fail to achieve the goal of universal coverage. Our complexity, and the administrative inefficiency that comes with it, is holding us back. ........... More recently, I favored the tightly regulated, entirely private insurance system of Switzerland because it performs exceptionally well using a private scheme I thought would be more palatable to many Americans. ............ If we could agree on a simpler scheme — any one of them — we could start to focus on what matters: the delivery of health services. ............ In the United States, on the other hand, most care is provided by private hospitals, either for-profit or nonprofit. Even nonprofit systems compete for revenue, and they do so by providing more amenity-laden care. This competition for more patient volume leads to higher prices, and while we don’t explicitly ration care, we do so indirectly by requiring deductibles and co-pays, forcing many to avoid care because of cost. Our focus on what pays — acute care — also leads us to ignore primary care and prevention to a larger extent. ............. allowing people to choose whether to accept cheaper care delivered by a public system or to pay more for care in a private system might make this much more palatable. By doing so, we could make sure that good care is available to all, even if better care is available to some. ............. More than 80 percent of Singaporeans live in public housing, which involves more than one million flats that were built and subsidized by the government. Almost all Singaporeans own their own homes, too, even publicly subsidized ones; only about 10 percent of them rent. ............ Because of government subsidies, most people spend less than 25 percent of their income on housing and can choose between buying new flats at highly subsidized prices or flats available for resale on an open market. ......... the government is only spending about 5 percent of G.D.P. on health care. This leaves a fair amount available for other social policies, such as housing. .......... As part of New Zealand’s reforms, its Public Health Agency, which was established less than a year ago, specifically puts a “greater emphasis on equity and the wider determinants of health such as income, education and housing.” It also specifically seeks to address racism in health care, especially that which affects the Maori population.............. Addressing these issues in the United States would require significant investment, to the tune of hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars a year. That seems impossible until you remember that we spent more than $4.4 trillion on health care in 2022. We just don’t think of social policies like housing, food and education as health care. .................. Our narrow view too often defines health care as what you get when you’re sick, not what you might need to remain well. .............. When other countries choose to spend less on their health care systems (and it is a choice), they take the money they save and invest it in programs that benefit their citizens by improving social determinants of health. In the United States, conversely, we argue that the much less resourced programs we already have need to be cut further. The recent debt limit compromise reduces discretionary spending and makes it harder for people to access government programs like food stamps. As Mr. Elshaug noted, doing the opposite would lead to better outcomes. ............... We currently spend about 18 percent of G.D.P. on health care. That’s almost $12,000 per American. It’s about twice what other countries currently spend...........

We cannot seem to do what other countries think is easy, while we’ve happily decided to do what other countries think is impossible.

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