2rafa
6d ago
The cherry on this cake is that she can get married to a fairly normal guy tomorrow because Riley Reid, another adult entertainer did this too.
Fairly high status men marry whores all the time. Nancy Reagan, Miranda Kerr, Meghan Markle. Even Melania was an Eastern European model in NYC in the late ‘90s lol, and that was a pretty sordid business. Men say they care, and in a vacuum they do, but in real life I think less than they’re willing to admit.
Untrue, especially in context of the 80:20 rule which means higher premiums directly equal higher profits because margins are effectively capped. Even beyond that, insurance cost control is highly limited to a few high profile cases. And again, much of the most expensive healthcare for chronic or long-standing conditions is funded directly by the state for the old and poor.
There’s no evidence that single payer nationalized systems are more generous. In fact, US private insurers are by far the most generous healthcare insurers when it comes to overspending on drugs and surgery in the entire world. Meanwhile, the most socialized systems like the NHS are often criticized for not paying for million-dollar treatments so that kids with incurable diseases can live in pain for an extra month and play hardball with big pharma even for very valuable drugs.
2rafa
6d ago
One thing I've heard (correct me if I'm wrong) is that European health systems like the NHS are more than capable of saying no to unnecessary treatment.
The worry is that we lack that ability in the U.S. As a result, we'd end up with all the monstrosities of our current system with even fewer checks on costs. That was certainly the system that Bernie Sanders was proposing during his campaigns.
In a way, this is part of the problem. A lot of conservative and libertarian criticism of nationalized healthcare is about people being “denied treatment” - almost always terminally ill children who have no hope of survival, brain dead people who will probably never come out of a coma or be non-vegetative, and other cases where the US spends millions of dollars on someone unnecessarily. See the furore about QALYs and death panels. With insurance, premiums can just go up next year, and employers and individuals will just have to pay. Insurers have no real incentive to even negotiate drug costs downward.
The British government is no less easily persuaded by public mawkishness about grandma needing care than the American government is. It is cost pressure and cost pressure alone that forces this kind of pragmatism on the NHS because managers know what the budget for next year is going to be for the entire healthcare system, and increases have to be directed approved by Parliament, the same way defense spending has to be approved by Congress. There’s limited obfuscation, if the industry needs 10% more money next year congressmen have to put their name to that increase. If they don’t, then the system has to cut costs whether it wants to or not.
2rafa
6d ago
why British style gun control wouldn't work in America
Debate on liberty aside, it wouldn’t work because there are several hundred million guns in America and only the most law-abiding, prosocial, rule-following people with the most to lose would hand them over during an amnesty before a ban, meaning that precisely the worst kind of people (criminals, violent, high time preference) would be least likely to be disarmed.
In Britain it worked because almost nobody owned a handgun or AK, most gun owners were farmers or hunters who were and are allowed to keep their shotguns and rifles.
2rafa
6d ago
One quirk of the UK system is that drugs prescribed by an NHS doctor cost like $12 per prescription to pick up at a pharmacy. This fee is mostly the same regardless of medication.
But the old, the poor, and children are exempted from this fee. Because these people consume almost all drugs, this means that 95% of all prescriptions are free. So all the fee amounts to is an extra tax for 18-60 year old functioning, gainfully employed adults when they need medication. The US system reminds me of this.
2rafa
6d ago
I strongly question the insurance-based model for healthcare expenses.
One of the things that makes insurance work is that most people never need to use it. Life insurance stops being a thing (in almost all cases) when people retire - and most people make it to retirement. Car and home insurance are things most people pay for every year and yet use maybe once in a lifetime. Many people go on vacation every year for almost their entire lives and yet never file a single travel insurance claim. One third of physicians have been sued according to malpractice claim firms, but this is across a 40-year career - perhaps one in every sixty or seventy years as a doctor will they be (on average) required to use their malpractice insurance, if that. Most ships never sink. Most buildings never burn down. Most planes never crash.
Health insurance is different.
Many Americans, especially in old age, file health insurance claims most or all years. This is not what the classic insurance model is designed for, especially given the cost of some healthcare, which is why the US has created so many ‘workarounds’ that twist the provision of insurance to ameliorate the fundamental fact that health insurance makes no sense. These include Medicare (for a certain vast class of people no insurer could afford to insure) and Medicaid (for another vast class of people no insurer could afford to insure, just for a different reason). It’s why employers have to contribute to health insurance as a stealth tax, because otherwise many people would not be able to afford it. What is the difference between a system in which the government taxes companies by forcing them to pay for employees’ healthcare and then directly pays for the unemployed’s healthcare, and a classic single payer system? Multiple providers which are never really competitive because of an opaque pricing structure.
As with college tuition, the state has created a monster with no cost control, because the government backstops the most expensive treatment for a growing percentage of the population with unlimited “free” money. In a way, the US already has nationalized healthcare, just like it nationalized college education, it’s merely been nationalized in an extremely inefficient way.
I live in a country with a mediocre public healthcare system, in which almost every doctor and nurse is directly employed by the government in a full time capacity. But the NHS isn’t bad because it’s the NHS. It’s comparatively much cheaper than almost any other first-world healthcare system in a country populated primary by Europeans (can’t compare to eg. Singapore or Japan where people are much healthier and the culture is different). The NHS sucks because everything is done for the cheapest price possible, there’s been no economic growth in 20 years, and British GDP / capita is half of that in the USA, because Britain is poor. Its mediocrity is for the most part a consequence of the British economy, which is poor for largely unrelated reasons.
But I increasingly think the model, or maybe at least the Australian or Swiss semi-public models, could be successfully exported to the US. The usual criticisms of universal healthcare are already rendered bullshit by the American system. Homeless psycho scumbags already get millions of dollars in free healthcare in the US subsidized by the middle class taxpayer that they never pay back, it just gets taken from them in a slightly different way. The NHS isn’t really more “socialist” than the US system at all, because working people are still paying for everyone else in the same way. Old people (by far the most expensive demographic) already get free single payer in America. In fact, the US system is arguably even more unfair, since it costs much more as a percentage of GDP than the British system, which given usage statistics means middle class Americans are relatively redistributing more of their wealth to the old and poor in healthcare costs than many Europeans are.
2rafa
6d ago
You wouldn’t wear black tie during the daytime, obviously, but was the rule really that no bow ties were allowed during the day at all? Interesting.
I think this has a lot to do with the widespread availability of information on the internet and much more efficient markets than people realize. We think about this in the context of trading and arbitrage, but it increasingly applies to everything.
A few hundred years ago, basic information about the market in the next village was enough for a profitable career as a middleman. Today, when I can look up week-over-week sales estimates for Chipotle outlets nationwide derived from a cross validated combination of bluetooth beacon and credit card data on Bloomberg in 20 seconds, a few large hedge funds go to extreme lengths for tiny slivers of additional data to drive alpha.
The same thing happened in employment markets, and is responsible for a lot of the extreme neuroticism of the upper-middle class. 50 years ago, third-world strivers and domestic peasants wouldn’t even have any idea how to guide their children to become doctors and investment bankers, wouldn’t even know how you apply (many barely knew many PMC jobs even existed). Today they can Google it in 5 minutes, which is why medical school and Goldman Sachs application numbers keep going up even as the number of places remain the same, making it ever harder for the established PMC to guarantee their children the same quality of life.
Online dating kind of did the same thing, opened markets, made things more efficient. Instead of being limited to their own circle, people were now in competition with everyone for everyone. A more efficient market creates more losers, not more winners. Inefficiency is what creates a large middle class - in sex, in income, perhaps even in fitness. This was Marx’s big mistake, there is no tendency for the rate of profit to fall toward zero, just for all the profit to become increasingly concentrated among the very most intelligent, as market friction evaporates.
2rafa
6d ago
Yes, even if someone escapes, reversion to population mean will affect the children. The parentage of your partner is one of the most critical factors in who you marry, since you’re saddling your descendants with their genes, forever (or at least as long as you have any descendants).
2rafa
6d ago
Yeah, you see even older people refer to “their partner” rather than wife or husband, even though HR doesn’t care (at least for us) and they’re talking about themselves, not assuming the sex of somebody else’s spouse.
2rafa
7d ago
“Woke right” seems like a vague term. I thought it was more about criticizing the third-worldist tendencies of Fuentes, Hinkle and so on, but FbF does just that and is now arguing against it. All this stuff is very online niche infighting.
It’s not a quote from Kisin, to be clear, it’s either a strawman or a succinct (and accurate) caricature depending on whether you agree with FbF.
The entire Jewish faith is premised on the idea that being amongst the chosen of god is predicated on who your mother was, rather than whether you actually believe in god and do his will.
The Jewish faith is based on pre-universal, even pre-monotheist (arguably monolatrous, barely-past-henotheistic) religion in which tribes had their own gods or gods that were part of a broader cosmos, which gradually developed into Abrahamic monotheism. Jewishness always had converts (the most likely origin story for modern Ashkenazim is that we are descended from Italian women who converted to Judaism to marry Jewish traders in the late Roman Empire), but one converts to the tribe, not merely to the faith.
2rafa
7d ago
What are the marriage prospects for a divorced woman like this like in India? What motivation would she have for her alleged actions according to this guy?
2rafa
8d ago
This guy worked for an insurance corporation that had like an 8-9% net margin. That’s not exploitative. That’s not greed on a grand scale. The US public consistently rejected single payer at the ballot box. They are frustrated with the current system, but cannot propose an alternative upon which most can agree.
2rafa
8d ago
I think if you shot someone where he did you’d 95% expect to be caught within 20 minutes. Nevertheless, he had some kind of vague plan in case he could escape, and once he committed the murder, instinct kicked in and he successfully fled Manhattan.
2rafa
8d ago
He seems to be an adherent of a very mild form of tech alt-centrism, with some memes (of the kind of software engineer young man who spends a lot of time on the internet would certainly have been exposed to). He doesn’t appear, so far, to have been a radical in any major clear ideological way (perhaps this action aside), but it’s always possible his secret groyper or chapo shitposting account will show up sooner or later.
2rafa
8d ago
That is exactly the problem, though. If healthcare is going to be a paid service provided by the market, pricing for the end user should be clear and telegraphed. If it’s going to be some kind of nebulously complex system where many people pay different things for the same product, then we may as well just have single payer, if only for clarity’s sake.
Thoughts on both your post and @gorge’s reply.
My parents were (and are) ex flower power hippies who fucked, drank and smoked their way through the late 70s before becoming respectable yuppies. They’re the parents from Easy A. The most they told their three children about sex was to use protection, don’t do anything you don’t want to do, and have fun. If I had brought home an older boyfriend (or girlfriend) at 15, they’d have made him coffee in the morning and asked him if he wanted to come back for dinner the next day. My mother opposed ‘MeToo’ because she thought that new sexual harassment policies would ‘take the fun out of’ the workplace. My dad got stoned with my brother and I in our late teens and reminisced about doing business with a women he was 85% sure he’d hooked up with in a bar bathroom as a student, then asked us if kids these days still do that kind of thing or if the whole AIDS crisis really did ruin sex.
Both my siblings and myself are huge prudes. My younger sister was the only person who brought home a partner at high school, and that was her long term boyfriend when she was 17. There was some light experimentation with drugs, and I got (not very) drunk a few times in high school, but that was it. I don’t think any of us have ever been promiscuous by any modern colloquial standard.
At the same time, this is far from a perfect strategy, since I knew at least a few people with similarly small-l liberal parents who became complete degenerates (some still are). Likewise, there were children of more conservative families who stayed true to that belief system, and those who rejected, subverted and rebelled against it at every turn. My guess, though, is some part of us saw casual sex and hedonism as inherently uncool because our parents were so open about it (and were, and are, openly flirty with each other, which on balance is a good thing). But I’m not really sure.
(I do think a big part of Gen Z’s alleged prudishness is the result of lib Gen X parents, though).
2rafa
8d ago
He was to the right of the Dem establishment on crime well before he got elected. That was in fact why he got elected.
I think the US system allows the public to dump blame for high costs on insurance executives who are (as we see now) pressured into approving treatments. The UK system seems healthier, in that there’s less anger around healthcare and most people support stuff like QALY-based decisions because the fact that it’s “our” money is more obvious, such that even the median person understands it.
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