NeutralCrane

Even in non-capitalist systems people aren’t working for free

With an individual tendency towards betting? No. But I think Capitalism absolutely is a huge part of the fanatical drive to financialize everything, and the broader regulatory environment that enables the creation of entities like Polymarket and Kalshi.

Yes, and their business model has been selling books about non-falsifiable predictions far out into the future. “Futurists” like Kurzweil are as reliable as astrologists, and should be taken just as seriously.

I think it’s learned sociopathy. People who start out knowing that a particular behavior is wrong, but over time are conditioned to feel like it’s fine, at least in certain situations (the corporate world being a prime example).

More recently that doesn’t seem to be the case. Atheists are still largely disliked, but the most uniformly disliked are Mormons. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2023/03/15/americans-fe...

Their Xbox consoles have also uniquely terrible naming:

“Xbox” / “Xbox 360” / “Xbox One” / “Xbox One X” / “Xbox Series S” / “Xbox Series X”

Is there? At the end of the day both boil down to breaking the law. It’s not better to break the law because someone paid you to do so.

Isn’t that just usage based charges?

Long wall of text incoming, but please read if you want to know why drug pricing works like it does:

It’s because of the way insurance works in the US. Insurance companies have formularies, which are essentially menus of what products they cover. They also will label certain medications as “preferred” and actively steer consumers to them. Pharma companies fight to get preferred coverage from insurers.

Because of this, pharmaceutical companies go through complex negotiations with insurance companies. In theory, this is to get pharma companies to compete on price and offer discounts (called “rebates”). An industry of middlemen called pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) has arisen who negotiate with pharma companies on behalf of the insurers and create the formularies. The problem is, these guys take a percentage cut of the discount they secure for the insurers. This creates a perverse incentive to give preferred status to more expensive drugs. Take this hypothetical example of two competing drugs:

- Drug A costs $150, but gets negotiated down to $100 - Drug B costs $200, but gets negotiated down to $100 - The PBM gets a fee of 10% of the secured discount, meaning they make twice as much for creating a formulary with B rather than A

To no one’s surprise, drug B gets given preferred status over A.

Pharma companies figured this out a long time ago, and began to jack up their prices each year, only to immediately negotiate them back down to where they were previously, in the form of rebates, because this increased the likelihood of getting out ahead on the formulary by the PBM. The best example of this might be insulin, which has skyrocketed in list price, but profit for the insulin companies has actually remained much more stable. This is because each year the sticker price is raised, and then immediately slashed in the “negotiations” with the insurers.

After a while, the pure sticker shock began causing a lot of justified outrage among patients and the public. Pharma companies saw they were taking the blame for skyrocketing prices even though at the end of the day they were negotiating these prices down and weren’t actually making that money due to rebates. So they began to offer alternatives for customers not on insurance, in the form of “coupons”, “savings cards”, etc. These often get you prices close to what the actual cost of the medicine is before the “jack up the price then rebate it down” dog and pony show. But insurers/PBMs reacted poorly to these, and began punishing pharma companies through the formularies. This is why these have become shadowy “backdoor” programs.

It’s also important to note that the PBM’s aren’t even independent middlemen. 80% of the PBM industry is dominated by 3 companies, all of whom are owned by insurers: Express Scripts (Cigna), CVS Caremark (CVS/Aetna), and OptumRx (UnitedHealthcare)

So why even go through all this?

- Pharma companies don’t really have a choice, they have to to get on the formulary

- PBMs make their money entirely through this scheme

- Costs for insurers aren’t ultimately changing much from year to year. However, higher sticker prices means the public is ever more dependent on insurance for medical bills. It also provide justification for increasing premiums more than their costs might otherwise. And pharma ultimately takes the brunt of the blame.

Lastly, if you are wondering why this doesn’t exist in other countries, it’s an unsurprising reason: government subsidized health insurance. Unlike insurers and PBMs, there are no perverse incentives or profit motive, so cheaper prices are an actual benefit. Medicare/medicaid doesn’t have to go through these shenanigans, but they aren’t available widely in the US. You don’t even need healthcare for all. You just need a public healthcare option for everyone. That introduces an actor whose motives actually align with consumers, invalidates this entire charade, and forces insurers and PBMs to actually compete on merit and price.

TLDR: The lack of public healthcare options in the US has created an insurance cartel that has both consumers and pharmaceutical companies by the balls.

It’s hard to understand what criticism you are making, or what alternative this criticism doesn’t apply to, in contrast. Would you care to elaborate?

> Bipedalism is something which varies very rarely and is especially not accessibly mutable.

This would apply to sex chromosomes as well

I don’t believe it is an enterprise feature. I did some testing on Bifrost just last month on a free open source instance and was able to set up virtual keys.

The exact opposite is true. Virtually everyone’s intuition is aligned with the Bayesian model. That intuition has to be hammered out of people in their stats classes because for decades frequentist approaches were computationally more feasible, even if they don’t align with how most humans interpret probability.

I live in an area that has been declared among the safest in America. Two months ago a 17 year old girl from our city disappeared. Turns out she had been being groomed for a year over Discord and in Roblox by a 39 year old the next state over. He eventually convinced her to let him pick her up, after which he filmed himself having sex with her, killed her, and then dismembered her body. He apparently was grooming other underaged girls in a similar way as well.

The digital age presents with it novel forms of danger for children, and for adults for that matter, and there is absolutely no way to effectively address these risks without some amount of reduction in privacy. And before someone inevitably says “where were the parents?” and wash their hands of the situation, a healthy society should care for and protect all children, especially those whose parents do not.

It’s one thing to hold the opinion “I am willing to sacrifice some number of lives, in order to preserve privacy”. That is an honest and potentially justifiable opinion someone may hold. But declaring the situation to simply be a facade to harvest people’s data seems to me like a reflexive response to avoid uncomfortable truths regarding the situation.

Poor in the US and around the world often don’t have access to the healthcare they need. If you get cancer, are you turning down chemotherapy so you don’t seem soft? Are you turning down your next raise because some teacher somewhere is getting underpaid?

If you want substantive rebuttals you should make a substantive argument first.

You are not making a good faith argument when you refute this person by saying this “doesn’t fit your narrative” two comments removed from you telling another person that you have no interest in their statistics because of how you feel.

Idk, I’m in the minority here it seems, but Claude Code has been working pretty well for me. Honestly, it puts out code that is at least as solid as a lot of my coworkers, and in many cases it’s better.

“Someone has it worse than you” is always a stupid argument.

It’s the exact opposite, managers are employed to make employees job easier. Employees get the jobs done, managers are there to coordinate that work, remove blockers, and enable workers.

There is absolutely no way The Game Awards got more viewers than the Super Bowl. I’d love to see a source because I have serious doubts.

Yes, but likely in the exact inverse than what is implied here. Carmack has generational wealth, he is likely fine financially regardless of how AI pans out. The many individuals who feel they should be financially compensated for code they open sourced are likely far more invested financially in that particular outcome.

Because whether there is a conflict of interest or not, the argument can and should be examined on its own merits.

IP as a concept has always been equal parts dystopian and farcical, and efforts to enforce it have become increasingly strained over time. Property requires scarcity. Ideas aren’t scarce. My consumption of an idea is affected by your consumption of an idea.

AI has simply increased the intensity of this friction between IP and reality to a degree that it can’t be ignored or patched over any longer.

The cheapest part of the research is publicly funded. The extreme costs come from taking the outputs of public research and trialing and developing it into a viable drug.

Pharma profits also aren’t particularly noteworthy. Their revenues are, because of the ubiquity of their need, but profit margins for Pharma is pretty middle of the road compared to other industries.

My ex-Twitter employee coworkers beg to differ. They made plenty of money before Elon came around. Once he was in the company, one of them actually hired a personal attorney to confirm that he wasn’t going to be burned by the things Musk was asking him to do, before he finally decided it wasn’t worth it to work there anymore and left.

Conservatives in America have dismantled their party platform plank by plank to build a monument to Trump.

Vibe coding as we know it has only been a thing for the last 12-18 months. So by definition the vibe-coded games you have seen are the ones being rushed.

I think the point is a significant number of human beings were not participating in democracy at the time because their forced labor was critical to propping up the tobacco (and other) industries.

It’s hard to claim it’s actually democracy when it only exists after stripping the rights from a large section of people who would disagree with you, if they had the power to do so.

Also seems a bit hypocritical given the screed about how such a list is necessary because the AI content might output hallucinations or damaging content without review.

But if it’s the author’s blocklist that is wrong, unverified, and causing harm to others? Cry about it.

My (possibly dated) understanding is that OpenAI/Anthropic are charging less than it costs right now to run inference. They are losing money while they build the market.

Assuming that is still true, then they absolutely have an incentive to keep your tokens/requests to the absolute minimum required to solve your problem and wow you.