the way you bend the curve is make people too frightened and bitter to ever have any contact whatsoever with the health care system under any circumstances at all.
great job, technocrats!
dear interweb,
a month ago i went to an ER. recognizably the hospital chain billed about $8000, which after insurance adjustments became $1100. i paid.
more than a month later, a random provider i’ve never heard of bills ~$1500, adjusted to ~$600 for the same ER visit. do i really have to pay this?
if you can circumvent all margin limits and financing constraints, investing at very high beta despite negative alpha will eventually make you very rich.
just don’t confuse a talent for generating hype to raise money and keep creditors at bay for industrial genius.
is this a lifestyle community?
for now we have achieved Artificial Colonel Intelligence.
one way to overcome deflation without going "welfarist" in the way Xi (misguidedly) fears would be to fix this, and finance decent public health care. healthy people who need money for food are the best workers! subsidizing high quality medical care for all would make a sizable economic stimulus!
re @BeijingPalmer https://bsky.app/profile/beijingpalmer.bsky.social/post/3lfpwhp64422l
history proves that while technological change does eliminate some traditional jobs, new, better, more productive jobs always emerge in the aftermath.
for example, for every job AI destroys, two new jobs will be created in the guard labor sector.
[tech notebook] Syndicating RSS to Mastodon and BlueSky with feedletter https://tech.interfluidity.com/2025/01/14/syndicating-rss-to-mastodon-and-bluesky-with-feedletter/index.html
ai will give us all perfect personalized tutors at the same time it eliminates any purpose or incentive to learn much.
traditionally we regulated free speech by eschewing prior restraint but using torts and the judicial system to impose some accountability ex post.
it was a good balance! lawsuits are risky and costly so you could speak pretty freely, but outrageous threat and defamation were deterred. 1/
but we now have a class for whom lawsuits are not risky and costly, for whom the expense — even if they lose and some anti-SLAPP law hits them — is negligible. and these people are difficult to sue, since a lawsuit can become an all-pay auction in legal expenses, and plutocrats can outbid. 2/
to some degree it was always thus — corporations have long had deep pockets. but the emergence of ideological, aggrieved billionaires who can speak without accountability but punish others for speech they dislike strikes me in practice as a sea change. 3/
i find when i write in places like this i worry much more about Elon Musk than i ever did about Goldman Sachs. (i said a lot of mean stuff about Goldman Sachs!) 4/
plutocrats championing the traditional free speech regime are championing a regime where no meaningful accountability binds them, but they can hold others painfully to account at will or on a whim. 5/
i dislike some of the censorious tendencies of the last decade, even the ones those very billionaires complain about. but “free speech unless you piss off a billionaire” strikes me as imposing a far worse chill than any excesses of wokeness or public health overcaution. /fin
“Self interest is the biggest impulse in politics. Never, ever doubt that. The second biggest is building an intellectual superstructure that justifies your self interest as truly being in the national interest. That's what's happening in much of Silicon Valley.” #KevinDrum https://jabberwocking.com/why-has-silicon-valley-turned-against-democrats/
a bit odd if “Chinese officials” are not willing to have TikTok put up for sale in an open process, but prove willing specifically to sell to Elon Musk. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-14/china-discusses-sale-of-tiktok-us-to-musk-as-one-possible-option
@lordbowlich we're here to chat! you've nothing to apologize for. it's been a delightful exchange.
iOS has a great select-to-translate feature rendered frustrating by the ridiculously narrow range of languages it supports. an intelligent Apple would fix this kind of Apple Intelligence.
@lordbowlich Chesterton is a British writer of the early 20th C. I think the poor here refers to the proletariat. In Great Britain, land had been enclosed as capital and agricultural work formalized on contractual terms by this point, so to some degree proletarianized, I think.
You might make a similar critique with respect to the frontier farmer in the US, Jefferson's yeoman independent smallhold. They could be quite poor! I just don't think these are the classes Chesterton is referring to.
This by Paul Mason is worth a read. Its definition of "social democratic" is closer to mainstream US Dem / UK Labor than my own. I bristle at some of the characterizations of more "left" tendencies, and some technocratic tendencies. But taken as a view from the inside, it's clearsighted and insightful. https://htsf.substack.com/p/countering-right-wing-populism ht @williamcb.bsky.social
"This is the age-old challenge, how do you measure deterrence? …When we started, I heard a lot of doubt that we wouldn’t succeed. By the time I was done, I heard a lot of frustration that we did succeed." ~Jonathan Kanter, whome we were privileged to have serve us as DOJ head of antitrust. https://prospect.org/economy/2025-01-13-qa-taking-on-biggest-problems-companies-jonathan-kanter-interview/ via @ddayen
in 2016, i was a class reductionist, a Bernie bro, sensible moderate centrist Democrats kept telling me. "If we broke up the banks tomorrow, would that end racism? Would that end sexism?" 1/
now those same pundits disdain me as a progressive, a "leftist", whose failure to disavow with sufficient energy the identity politics of which i was skeptical back then now has lost the election to the fascists (who they won't call that, to whom they are now building sensible moderate bridges). 2/
i don't think it is my position that has changed. /fin
@kentwillard I don’t think people get just how much these people are “going for it”, trying to make changes that render rule by their coalition politically irreversible. Fractures in that coalition are our main hope for anything like a decent future, but we are bad at exploiting them because on understandable moral grounds, we resist forming coalitions with the warring factions, ultimately driving them back together.
@kentwillard I don’t want to impugn anyone in particular, but people who identify as centrists tend to triangulate, and a combination of Trump’s election and Musk’s takeover of the media and politics (his threats to primary people have a strong effect i think) have moved the pole against which they triangulate and the positions of prominent centrists. 1/
@kentwillard Some of them you could see the shift during the campaign, they offered guarded praise of Trump’s economic plans when Biden was flailing, becoming more critical of Trump when Harris entered and was leading in the polls, now going hard towards Trump and tech. /fin