scottLobster

Uh, that chart shows they source a greater percentage of their power from renewables than we do with the exception of nuclear and biofuels. Their wind, solar and hydropower bars are all wider, and they're building more nuclear.

They just don't have our easy-access shale fields. If it wasn't for fracking our coal percentage would likely be just as high

That is flat-earther levels of physics denial. AC moves the heat, it creates relatively little.

Portable AC units are widely available, and some even work with the notorious European windows. Even cooling a single room could make a big difference.

And the world is getting warmer. More than 90 private jets flew into Italy for Jeff Bezos's wedding, and collectively emitted more carbon for that one wedding than either of us will in our lifetimes. Europe is going to get more deadly heat waves regardless of what any of us here on the ground floor would like. So mass install AC or let the death toll rise further, those are your options.

The hardliners might want to cause a nuclear incident to keep the strait closed longer.

And even among the non-hardliners mistakes are rampant in war. It's not about what they're likely to rationally do, it's about what some local, demoralized missile officer who graduated in the bottom 20% of his class does when he's cut off from command and drinking too much.

No, but a lack of AC doesn't solve it either.

I love the theory, but the security concerns around nuclear anything are a big deal when we're talking ships that sail around the world.

Imagine if even one of the tankers hit in the strait of Hormuz was nuclear.

If climate change is indeed an existential threat, then by definition nuclear is cost-effective.

And at any rate, why not both?

You sure about that?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn4d2vv935lo

> In a post on X, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said more than 1,300 excess deaths had been recorded since 21 June "linked to high temperatures in Europe".

> On Sunday morning, France's national health ministry said there had been around 1,000 more deaths than expected in the country since Wednesday.

https://www.dw.com/en/heat-wave-european-countries-report-37...

> At least 3,700 excess deaths have been recorded in France, Belgium and the Netherlands alone as a result of the June heat wave that sent temperatures soaring above 40°C (104°F).

Just stop. A lack of European AC is making a negligible difference at best in the fight against climate change and it's killing your people. The models aren't that wrong.

The genius idea is not dying of heat stroke. Also AC can be powered by clean energy, like the vaunted French nuclear plants.

But I guess that's for right-wingers. Enjoy losing more people to heat than the US does to gun violence

That's what the words say, how much of it is authentic is still a mystery to me.

Basically a bunch of sales, business consultants and HR people developed their own language and took over LinkedIn. They know it's bullshit, we know it's bullshit, but apparently there's enough money to be made doing this that it's worth the time. A couple of people I went to high school with dropped regular corporate jobs to do this stuff, and I know they're too smart to take it all literally.

I can only imagine it's like the famous Mackenzie interview, where they ask you to explain something you can't possibly know and judge you on how persuasive your bullshit is. They're all just showing off their sleazy salesmanship/thought leadership/persuasive abilities and through that conveying some sort of value, and presumably more productive conversations happen offline as a result.

You want to talk perception vs reality and then post that?

Yes, merely owning a gun does make you statistically more likely to die of a gun shot, but only in the same sense that owning alcohol mean you're more likely to drive drunk, owning a car means you're more likely to die in a car crash, and having a house wired for electricity means you're more likely to die of electrocution.

For instance, that article says that the risk of suicide is 5x higher with a gun in the house. Well my risk of suicide is presently zero, and 5 x 0 = 0.

There's a great deal of individual control over the risk when it comes to personal ownership. Compare that to a cop who is professionally obligated to pull over a large sample of people they don't get to select, and this sample is disproportionately violent or otherwise untrustworthy.

Uh, if you had a 30% chance of encountering an armed individual as a cop, you'd damn well assume they were armed every time. That's one in three traffic stops, and you probably do a lot more than three as a cop. Keep in mind that number will be a lot higher depending on your locality.

If I'm ever elected God Emperor of the United States I'm going to make beating XCOM 2 a high school graduation requirement just to impart some basic statistical intuition into the population. Everyone needs the experience of having a 99% chance to hit and missing the shot, let alone 70%.

One can be both malicious and naive. Regardless, more information isn't going to solve the issue. The information was presented; they ignored it for whatever reason.

Getting them to stop ignoring information they don't like is the problem.

I'm not sure that more information will help those people. I saw an interview with a Haitian-American restaurant chain owner who voted for Trump and was dismayed that he might have to close a couple of locations due the removal of Temporary Protective Status for Haiti causing him to lose employees. He said that Trump sold him on the idea that "he was a businessman, and would act like a businessman", and that he now regrets his vote.

Like, the "eating the cats and dogs" line, specifically targeted at Haitians, wasn't enough for you to think that maybe this guy didn't have your best interest at heart? Also Trump's history as a "businessman" is anything but wildly successful or something to envy.

These people will see whatever they want to see until they get hit, so unless you're in a position to provide the hit, or somehow impart discernment that most elementary school kids have, they can only be contained and we should be happy if they pay their taxes and don't vote.

Lol, Sam Altman has had an ethics team this whole time?

Her typical day: "No Sam, you can't just publicly screw over everyone and get rid of all the jobs, the peasants care about that sort of thing and if they get angry enough we'll have real problems. No we can't just kill them all, why would you suggest that?"

The TACOs have never been unilateral, you need some sort of pain they care about. The bond market spiking interest rates contained the worst of the tariffs, SCOTUS rulings have curtailed some of his more egregious abuses, protests and their fallout (innocent people getting killed) helped to contain ICE.

Denmark and/or Greenland needs to seize those containers, keep them under armed guard, and then give Greenland Energy a reasonable deadline to come and retrieve them or else they'll be destroyed.

If anyone doubts that popular media has at least somewhat taken the place of religion, here you go

As an American, we've had to watch this administration almost directly defy our own Supreme Court. A "warning" from Greenland or Denmark that doesn't include ordnance pointed at those shipping containers isn't going to mean anything.

The tagline of the Trump administration is "who's going to stop me?"

That's a nice theory. The stock prices of many of these companies seems to disagree.

They aren't performing some tragic triage in the service of preventing the healthcare system from total collapse, they're making money. Lots of it. Directly from vulnerable peoples' needless deaths.

Raising taxes to pay for the public welfare isn't stealing.

Rationing and wait-lists are a problem in some countries, and they're preferable problems to the ones existing in our current system.

You don't want to help, and you need a fairy tale to reframe your selfishness so you can lie to yourself in the mirror. Many such people, you aren't insightful.

They don't have to believe the insured, they can believe the doctors, plural. Also, their "errors", even when innocent, are on you to solve.

I'm currently working to get my 2nd autistic child covered for ABA services, been fighting insurance for 2 months now with 4 qualified professionals, 2 MDs, a PhD Nurse and an ABA Supervisor, from multiple providers saying she qualifies. Insurance's own in-house doctor agreed that they followed state recommendations, up until another internal doctor just some days ago contradicted them and said there's one part that they don't, which just so happens to invalidate her entire diagnosis (which took 3 separate appointments over the course of a month and was more thorough than most). The doctors who diagnosed here are livid, as they have a major insurer essentially telling them that their entire program and every diagnosis from it is invalid, while other programs are not held to the same scrutiny. I know first hand, because her older sister is also autistic and she got approved by this same insurer on a much less stringent examination from a different provider.

We'll get it solved, in the worst case we're fortunate enough to be able to hire lawyers. Not everyone has that kind of savings. Oh, and in the meantime this is 2 months my kid is going without therapy, and a bunch of wasted time for all involved.

You want more? Earlier this year my father in law died in part because his private medicare advantage plan denied him coverage for in-patient rehab after brain surgery, which the surgeon, doctor and every medical professional who looked at him said he needed. We appealed, they denied the appeal. Later that week he tried to get up at night to use the bathroom, couldn't support his own weight and fell, suffering a skull fracture that necessitated a second brain surgery. That second surgery was fully covered, but they still refused to cover in-patient rehab. He died some weeks later, have never received more than rehab 2 days a week and whatever improvised rehab the family could cobble together between our work schedules.

And that's just my personal experience in the last year. I have stories from previous years and more still from relatives. Anyone who's had to make extensive use of the medical system will have many such stories of various severity, it's just a given that when you file a claim you must be ready to fight and hope you don't have to. These are not innocent mistakes, and if they are than the insurers making them should be shut down for negligence and those in charge held responsible for resulting damages.

Excessive is knowingly denying someone necessary medical coverage solely for financial gain. If private insurers want to play that game then they can register as a non-profit organization or be an optional layer on top of a public backstop, such as medicare-for-all, an arrangement they've lobbied against for deacdes.

Sadly, they want to retain the ability to deny you coverage for any reason. Their maximum profit happens when they pay out as few claims as possible. The only reason they don't already operate that way is legal enforcement, so let's take that to it's logical conclusion

Where do you think all criminal codes come from? Are they mined out of the earth already written? It's a constantly evolving set of rules based on a society's collective moralities.

There are many crimes today that did not exist 100 years ago and vice versa. Yes, there are crimes that should be punished that are not yet present in the criminal code, and you don't need to be a legal scholar to propose new ones.

I think most people agree deriving financial profit by knowingly denying people necessary medical treatment is immoral.

Depends on your employer/occupation. You can purchase insurance directly as an individual but it's usually the most expensive way to go as you have no group bargaining power. Small businesses are also hit by this, as they're only trying to cover a small group of people.

For this reason many small businesses don't offer insurance directly, but provide a tax-free health insurance stipend to their employees who then source their own insurance, effectively subsidizing the more expensive premiums as a benefit.

Larger employers have more bargaining power due to the number of employees they bring with them and can get better rates/plans from the insurance companies, and these better rates/plans are typically passed along to employees as a benefit for working there. An employer might cheap out, but that's the same as offering a bad salary.

Very large employers (Fortune 500s and such) are often self-insured, where they contract all the bureaucracy out to a private insurer but the company is actually doing all the payouts. The quality of this coverage naturally varies from employer to employer. I once had a co-worker have a claim denied for an expensive psychiatric facility he sent his son to, but because he had the claim pre-approved he had grounds for a lawsuit. He had to sue both the insurance company and the company we worked for while working there.

The elderly have medicare, and the poor have medicaid, which are taxpayer funded but not always 100% coverage, and there's a bunch of private plans you can buy to fill in the gaps if you do desire with various pros/cons.

Our system is a complete fucking mess, although it's arguably still better than it was pre-Obamacare

I was presenting an extreme hypothetical to a make a point that the insurers are motivated by selfishness.

In the real world, not a hypothetical, your market driven approach ensures they approve the minimum necessary to prevent customers from leaving. They require patients to to fight them for coverage while they're undergoing cancer treatment, because a dead patient they didn't pay out for is more profitable. Paying for insurance in a for-profit marketplace isn't paying for health coverage, it's paying for a CHANCE at health coverage, and you better be willing and able to fight for that chance while you're undergoing cancer treatment/surgery, or be willing to go bankrupt, or not get the treatment and die. That's the choice the insurance marketplace presents to you.

Not hyperbole, many such stories. My own father in law died in part because his private medicare advantage plan refused to approve in-patient rehab after a brain surgery that every MD working on him said he needed, but would have cost 6 figures out of pocket that nobody could front. The grim irony is he later tried to get out of bed to use the bathroom, couldn't support his own weight and suffered a skull fracture that resulted in a second brain surgery inside of a week, and that was fully covered.

I'll take the bureaucrats. The real world shows they're simply better at this, and Ayn Rand is simply wrong.

The moral crime of excessive claims denials that resulted in many needless death for no better reason than he wanted a to boost UHC's stock price to get a bigger bonus.

He deserved death, but the manner in which that death is administered matters. Vigilante justice corrodes the very foundations of the justice system, if we allow it the end result will be far more dead innocent people than guilty ones. I don't want more innocents to die just to kill those who deserve it.

As a mid-career software dev I'm just sick of most of my job being a highly paid technical janitor mopping a floor that never gets clean.

I've had maybe 2-3 years combined where I actually got to build something I could be proud of, and made all the red tape worth it. The rest has been navigating/paying down other peoples' technical debt and being forced to add some of my own when there's no budget for maintenance and the band-aid becomes permanent.

At the start of my career I wondered why anyone retired early when there was so much cool stuff to work on... now I get it. The cool stuff is the extreme minority of available work, and the odds of you getting to work on any of it are down to being in the right place at the right time. As for the rest of the job, I'd sooner step on a nail if it didn't come with the pay and benefits.

He murdered a guilty man, not an innocent one. Still murder, and murder is wrong, but let's not get things twisted

Anyone who's lost a loved one over a denied claim can sympathize with Luigi even if they disapprove of his methods. Sounds like you haven't gone through that experience, but a lot of Americans have.

If Mangione was the CEO's health insurer and knowingly denied him cancer treatment the CEO's doctor said he needed, all to boost his quarterly earnings, resulting in his death, would you have this same level of outrage?

For-profit claim denials should be abolished unless there's a public backstop.