Where does the $60 come from? The riddle doesn’t say, and therefore must be key to the riddle.
He sells the horse for $70. The man does not love this horse. He loves $70 more than the horse. This is the part of the riddle where the reader is to feel sad for the man.
Buying the horse for $80 is as well impossible to digest because there was no information about how many dollars or horses this man has available to him. What job does this man have? What expenses are involved in horse ownership?
Selling the second horse for $90 is the part of the riddle that informs the reader that this man is a capitalist, and may be trading horses simply to make money. Horse maintenance expenses are now considered as operational expenses within the scope of the riddle.
Therefore, the answer is not a number, but another question: how many horses did the man start with?
Respectfully disagree, this goes quite a bit deeper when you look closer -
60 - the number of rams and goats sacrificed to the Abrahamic God in the temporary wilderness tabernacle as the Israelites wandered the desert (Book of Numbers). Perhaps a reference to the impermanence of this first transaction.
70 - Possibly also a reference to the book of Numbers, in which Moses appointed 70 elders to commune with God. More likely though, it is a reference to Jesus telling peter that he must forgive “70 times 7” times. Forgiveness will likely be needed when the original owner gets wise to this horse flipping going on behind his back and that he could have sold it for much more to begin with.
80 - This perhaps gives the most powerful clue to the answer. Luke 16:7 (NKJV):
7 Then he said to another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ So he said, ‘A hundred [a]measures of wheat.’ And he said to him, ‘Take your bill, and write eighty.’
There you have it. 100 - 80 = 20. You see, our Father could have given us the answer the entire time, but had the wisdom to know we needed more, so he included the other numbers as well.
One issue that is a US thing and may also be a Canada thing is that docs are not compensated (with rare exceptions) for their time on the phone. So if they call you up to discuss your results (because even though you might be able to see them online, you may not understand them or what you should do about them) and you have a bunch of questions such that it turns into a 30 min phone conversation, they get nothing for that. However, if they have the exact same conversation in person, then they (often) can bill for it. So they are incentivized to not call you and make you come in for an appointment to talk to you, whenever that happens to be.
With more telemedicine available these days, booking a telemedicine appointment is one way to get around the problem to some extent. That can be billed for in a lot of cases. Of course, in that case the patient and/or their insurance will bear some cost.
So, I suspect in Canada a doc can get some money from your insurance plan (i.e. the government) if they make you come in in person. But they won’t get paid anything if they talk to you on the phone. Assuming making you wait for an appointment will cause you no harm, which do you think they will choose to do?
I think the reason that Canadian doctors are bad at patient relationships is that they spend all their time trying to find someone to fix the fax machine that they depend on to keep people alive. I wish this was a joke.
I guarantee anyone who used to read 2p2 politics circa like 2007 knows more about libertarianism than any of these rich assholes that claim to be libertarian
