292 karma · joined June 11, 2024
I'll simplify it for you: The government pays health care providers for providing healthcare. It is very easy to defraud the government by billing for fake work, so fraud is common and costly.
The actual details are irrelevant. There are some extra steps involved, but functionally it's the same as a nurse sending a bill that says "I treated patient X for condition Y" and the government going "Sounds good, here's some taxpayer money"
Covid causes brain damage. The common symptom of "loss of smell" was found to actually be due to covid infection of the neurons in brain & cranial nerves. Obviously "brain fog" (or memory issues, fatigue, lack of focus, however people articulated it) is due to damage to brain.
I wonder how society moves forward. We didn't get the movie-horror-story virus that turns people into zombies, but we did get a virus that leaves many people with diminished emotional regulation, attention span and ability to reason.
This reminds me of an old Simpsons episode, where Bart and Lisa both close their eyes and declare that they're going to punch and kick the air in their personal space, and it's the other person's fault if they get hit. Inevitably, they're hitting each other a moment later.
This 18th-century notion of "I can do whatever I want on my land" doesn't work, because we now understand that the impacts actually go outside of whatever boundary we've drawn. Pollution, water flow, noise, animals, insects, pollen, dust, etc don't magically stop and reset at arbitrary borders.
If what someone is doing on their patch of the Earth is harming their neighbors, of course their neighbors have a right to prevent (or mitigate, be compensated for, etc) that harm.
You'd be surprised. There are unfortunately many people who will aggressively attack anyone suggesting diet, exercise or weight management in any way to address obesity-related diseases. In their worldview, people have no agency to change their eating habits, and advising patients to do so is unhelpful, they exclusively want drugs, surgery or other accommodations to address issues.
Announce that you're opening a new factory to build useless trinkets that will also pollute the air with sulfur as a side-effect, and nobody cares other than a few dedicated clean-air activists and nearby neighbors.
If instead you announce you're intentionally putting the same amount of sulfur into the air for its positive impacts on climate, then a million people who barely passed 8th grade science will panic about how that's too scary and dangerous.
The double-standard is frustrating and hindering our collective ability to mitigate the ongoing climate crisis.
Norway's economy ever since discovery of offshore oil is similar to Saudi Arabia, Dubai or Qatar's. The difference is just that while Saudi wealth is concentrated among roughly 20,000 members of the extended royal family, Norway's is distributed across their 5 million citizens.
It would be weird if they didn't feel guilty about it. The know fossil fuels are harming the world and they know their comfortable lives are thanks to their share of the profits from extracting and selling massive amounts of fossil fuels.
The majority of gen Z people don't feel comfortable asking/being asked out in person because app-based dating is all they've ever known (https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/gen-z-yearns-pre-digital-160...)
Many posts on HN and other sites discuss the struggles people have meeting new people outside of school or work. People don't want to talk to strangers in bars, cafes or gyms. Everyone wears headphones and looks at their phone on buses and trains and waiting in lines, and socially it's increasingly considered rude, weird or scary to start a conversation with a stranger in these places.
Even going to meetups or social gatherings rarely leads to lasting relationships for most people. On rare occasion people will be genuinely passionate about a hobby and reach enough repeated interactions through that hobby to form adult friendships with peers, but most often people will be too busy with other things in their life and never progress beyond acquaintance seen a few times a year.
Also, our current system is already pretty terrible. Generally some recruiter who reports into HR is the first pass, and they generally don't know which skills are relevant, transferable, or important, nor do they have any real ability to assess how experience translates into ability to do the job.
My salary works out to roughly $120 per hour. I pay a $15 premium to insurance from each paycheck and a $20 fee to see a doctor. Even if I had some catastrophic car crash and spent months in the ICU, my maximum annual payment for all healthcare is capped at $5,000.
Healthcare costs can be a huge burden for low and middle-income Americans, but for a senior tech worker, healthcare is a tiny expense compared to income.
I know that private equity purchases of healthcare companies have decreased access to healthcare in rural areas and decreased quality of care at many hospitals. I know that PBMs (pharmacy benefit managers) have decreased access to medicines. I know that the AMA has restricted the number of OBGyn residency spots which keeps the number of doctors too small, and correspondingly overworked. I know that many experienced nurses left the field entirely during covid, due to hours/stress/pay/trauma leaving many hospitals and clinics understaffed and with inexperienced nurses barely out of school running wards.
Any of the things I listed in the second paragraph seem far more impactful than changing how many weeks pregnant a person can be to have an elective abortion, in terms of maternal deaths.
Regulatory capture. The last thing they want is a new generation of hungry young entrepreneurs disrupting their businesses and displacing them from positions of power.
The key to maintaining power is to work closely with politicians to make sure that the regulations increase the protective moat around your business.
Historically, colonization included two very different types of societies- in America, it was primarily poor European peasants moving to undeveloped land and starting farms they worked themselves and pursued an independent future from their former country.
But it was also things like Belgian Congo where a relatively tiny number of Europeans set up governmental & social structures which were exploitative of the local population and extractive of the resources to go back to the colonizing country.
It's unfortunate that we conflate two very different things with one word. Most of the colonists/pilgrims/pioneers/settlers going from Europe->USA were essentially refugees fleeing poverty, persecution, war or starvation in their home countries who were making a new permanent life for themselves. This is in stark contrast to most of the colonization of Africa (whether from Europeans or Arabs) which was primarily military and governmental people who retained allegiance and connection to their home country and often intended to return home after serving some time in the extractive colony.
And of course, in modern usage, it gets used for everything ranging from white rappers to muslim communities in London, so you need a lot of context to assess the intended meaning.
Bill Clinton signed NAFTA into law in 1993, which was probably one of the most impactful neoliberal policies for average Americans.
Trump's America-first, high tariff, nationalistic/isolationist rhetoric is very anti-neoliberal.
We need to stop treating "millionaire" to mean "rich" like it did before decades of inflation. A two-earner household, that buys a house, uses their employer's 401k and just generally is financially prudent will have a net worth over a million well before retirement.
In fact, to encourage responsible retirement planning, we should probably start treating it as an expectation to be a millionaire at time of retirement. If you're not on track to be a millionaire at 65, you need to save more.
The type of brain damage that will make the participants more likely to commit acts of violence in the future due to impulse control issues (see the high incidence of prior concussion among violent offenders in prison, high incidence of domestic violence among people who've suffered head trauma previously, many known instances of people who became irritable, impulsive, violent after concussions/mtbi).
Even those who don't commit violent acts are likely to suffer depression, anxiety, mood swings, difficulty concentrating, etc.
Society at large bears the burden of the increased healthcare costs for these individuals later on in life. Every slap can be directly linked to future costs to medicare/hospitals, police/first-responders, judicial system, etc.
Sci-fi has long had various "cyborg" type things as a plot element, but if you walk down the street in NYC today you'll pass thousands of people with pacemakers, artificial hips, insulin pumps, colostomy bags, and prosthetics. People who've had laser surgery on their eyes to see better or transplanted organs. Plus people's usage of smart watches that measure heart rate, steps, sleep quality or continuous blood glucose monitors.
We don't marvel at the cyborgs among us, we just accept it as modern medicine. Similarly, while we've gotten used to internet search and GPS turn-by-turn navigation. Gen Z and younger will probably just accept the integration of genAI into their everyday life as seamlessly and casually as we accepted our cyborgification.
You can say that an AI model can only "be trained, not educated" in the same way you can argue that a submarine doesn't swim. But does that really matter to any of the people using it?
I'm a libertarian and an environmentalist. Pollution is harming other people just as clearly and directly as assault, rape or murder and so regulations against that harm still fit naturally and comfortably within even fairly extreme or hardline libertarian frameworks.
A law that says "You can't spray mace in someone's face" and a law that says "You can't spray <whatever other harmful chemical> in <the air that will eventually hit people's faces>" are ideologically the same.
Perhaps you meant it's a fascist, statist or autocratic dream? The people with power (economic, political, social) get to benefit while the people without power get harmed.
At this point, I think as a society we need to just say copyright as a concept and law has completely failed and scrap the whole thing.
The 0.01% of powerful copyright cartel publishers get rich while harming 99.99% of people, because we've seen further erosion of fair use rights, absurdly lengthy expansions of copyright to prop up Disney's profits and expansive interpretation of how much control copyright olders have and zero punishment for abuse of DMCA and other things.
Students should be able to learn from books, music, film. So should AI training models.
If there is any ambiguity about this, we should immediately write laws making it clear that training and education of all forms is explicitly allowed under fair use. Ideally, we also send anyone trying to prevent this to the guillotines.
Maybe your company, region or industry were the starting point and it just became widespread recently.
There completely is though, just build more housing. The restrictions are completely arbitrary. Jackson could build a dozen 5-story high apartment complexes to house thousands of people, and it'd be fine.
Yellowstone National Park gets 5 million tourist visitors per year, so if anyone claims the environmental impact of a few hundred or thousand permanent residents would matter, they're mistaken or lying.
Working class Americans now have flat screen TVs and smartphones because of massive deflation in the prices of consumer technology. Technological advancements have also been deflationary in lots of less-obvious ways like energy efficient appliances, zero-commission stock trading or medical imaging machinery.
A million dollar super-computer of a couple decades ago now rivals the power of a smartphone. It's largely a regulatory and cultural failure that's prevented us from driving down the cost of housing through technology.
All that said, it's hilarious that he'd call someone else untrustworthy. Peak "pot calling the kettle black" moment here. Sam probably refused to pay him some massive fee or partner with him in a lucrative (for him) way, so now we'll get months of attack pieces.
"Doesn't work out at all" is a problem. That's unhealthy and decreases their quality of life and shortens their lifespan. Our concept of "normal" in Western countries today is so far removed from what humans evolved to do and is good for us.
The most basic physical activity (whether playing sports, doing manual labor or any exercise program) should be enough to do a bodyweight benchpress.
2x bodyweight is an accomplishment that requires dedicated weight lifting. 1x bodyweight is something that basically every man 100 years ago could have done.
I've spent some of my life working in undeveloped, tropical areas. Because of this, I'm vaccinated against a bunch of diseases the average Western citizen doesn't worry about- Yellow Fever, Japanese Encephalitis, Tuburculosis and have seen first-hand the afflictions of the local populations who weren't vaccinated.
Working in a clinic with sick and dying people, while being safe because I myself am vaccinated against the disease is kind of a surreal experience.
While obviously the ideal would be a single dose providing lifelong protection, an annual booster still would make me incredibly grateful that I get to live in this modern, almost futuristic world of preventative medicine superpowers.
I quit reading here. Absolute beginner starts exercising and immediately starts preaching as an expert.
A bodyweight bench press isn't "really strong", that's like a baseline for a healthy adult man. To not be able to do that is a sign of being overweight, frail, or both.
Regulatory capture is a central problem in America today. The big powerful entities- major corporations, large unions, special interest groups, etc have the time, resources and incentives to lobby for laws (regulations) to be written in their favor.
The result is the American public is very heavily regulated, but in ways that are beneficial primarily to the powerful incumbents. This spans everything from copyright law favoring big hollywood studios to USDA regulations favoring the handful of major meat producer corporations to medicine, manufacturing, retail, real estate, etc.
Regulatory capture is also why the divide between leftists saying more regulation and rightists saying less regulation are both often missing the real problem. The US already has millions of lines of text for regulation, the problem is that so much of the regulation is bad and written to favor whoever donated or could sway votes to whichever representative crafted the language.
The people who want to reduce pollution most likely just want to reduce the harms associated with that pollution, not your wacky accusation of their motives. And even if someone's motives were some weird bad thing, if their actions are good (eg, helping us all live better lives in a lower-pollution world) that would still be a good thing.
They made up two new coins, which were algorithmically tied together so that coin A's value was variable and coin B's value was equal to 1 dollar, and the mechanism to maintain this was that users could convert between A and B coins at whatever ratio maintained the "stable" value for B.
This means that as soon as the hype around the speculative A coin waned, it instantly went into a death-spiral of hyperinflation to maintain B's value.
The "stable coin" was never backed by actual dollars or gold or bonds or equity in a business or anything real. It was an algorithmic peg between two different useless coins made up by the same people.