FruitfulLemonyLemons
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User ID: 370
FruitfulLemonyLemons
3d ago
In terms of raw, personal, I'm-not-going-to-get-this-because-it's-just-my-own-idiosyncrasy preference, I want standard time with an 8-4 work schedule. Like let's let noon be noon, but let the workday be from 8 to 4, let the schoolday be similarly DST equivalent, etc.
Never liked that we pretend to have the power to mess with Time Itself rather than admit what's actually happening is we're changing our schedules.
Second best option, let's switch to perma-DST but call 1:00 noon and midnight, and rotate any newly made analog clocks.
Third best option, ugh I guess we can just do perma DST and explain to our grandkids the history of why the twelves have a special name while the sun is at its highest/lowest point at 1.
(I like the DST schedule but I don't like the time nonsense.)
FruitfulLemonyLemons
4d ago
I've never seen this when actually talking about God, it's usually for figures of speech that nonseriously invoke God, so as to avoid using the name of God "in vain", which violates one of the Ten Commandments
FruitfulLemonyLemons
4d ago
I don't have enough insight into their inner workings to be able to answer this. But my guess is they are targeting some positive profit margin (since they would have to) and creating actuarial rules to target this number. Then claims etc are mostly following an algorithm. But then again given as I have alleged the "non-insurable" nature of health, they are probably having to constantly tweak this.
I doubt they're frequently making individual case-by-case decisions to deny somebody for the sake of let's-get-rich-and-do-coke, but maybe I inappropriately assume people aren't monsters.
In any case I'd want to see evidence of such backroom decisions because it's quite an allegation. But that would be hard because I'd also want to see that it's not just "this guy is trying to spend infinite money to eke out another month and unfortunately we don't have that" sort of thing. Like my point is it's actually really hard to prove actual malice here.
Being in charge of a health insurance company is like being a world leader: you are going to be making decisions that result in some people living and other people dying. There's no way around it. Your whole job is allocating scarce healthcare resources.
The scarcity is the real problem. But we'd rather murder a scapegoat, in cold blood, than face reality.
And scarcity is not going away. Not when it's possible to pour a near-infinite amount of money into eking out another year or two at end of life. Stop and think about what that means. I honestly question whether health is "insurable" even in principle.
Healthcare in America has problems but we cannot even begin as a society to discuss those problems with anything resembling sanity until we as a society learn to memento mori.
So if you're gonna murder a guy you might wanna have a better reason than some people get their claims denied.
FruitfulLemonyLemons
1mo ago
On further thought I take that back, a good college try at devising a "system" that prevents (reads: delays as long as possible) the inevitable corruption is a noble endeavor and I'm sorry for discouraging it.
FruitfulLemonyLemons
1mo ago
As much as the whole doge thing warms my millennial heart, DOGE just seems like a clone of Inspector General offices, no? And the main reason those have no balls is they're staffed by people who go to the same house parties as everybody else, right? (I am just assuming, here, this seems like a likely Schelling point over time)
So the most effective DOGE will be the Musk one since he's a true outsider, then they will be less effective over time until DOGE exists just to get paid to rubber stamp things.
More and more I think this stuff is really about the people and not the positions. You can create a "Department of Screw the ATF" whose whole job is to obstruct the ATF but if you populate it with people who are drinking buddies with the ATF people they'll coordinate on one or two "hard hitting" investigations (maybe to get rid of somebody the ATF wanted to fire anyway) to make the public happy and otherwise will be in lockstep.
Checks and balances are a cool idea but it's rare to get people who are true enemies. When that happened in the beginning it was such a crisis that we got the 12th Amendment. Not to mention a literal gunfight. Later we got Brooks/Sumner. It's ugly.
Speaking personally (and as somebody who has had libertarian leanings since the age of 16) I wish Musk the best and I think there is a unique window of opportunity here but I kinda hope DOGE just dissolves itself after he's done, there is no real need for a redundant Inspector General, in fact it would be the sort of redundant bloat that DOGE exists to remove.
FruitfulLemonyLemons
1mo ago
Murder is not a federal crime (with some special-case exceptions)
FruitfulLemonyLemons
1mo ago
I think this change would make its availability feel less precarious than it does now.
FruitfulLemonyLemons
1mo ago
The incoming administration has promised to punt the issue of abortion to the States and I hope they go one step further and enshrine this punt with a Constitutional amendment that would keep the federal government out of the business altogether, including encouraging or discouraging States or individuals via funding, services, etc. And probably also prohibiting States from punishing abortion tourists in any way.
There are so many important issues of geopolitics and energy and trade and I'm so fucking tired of this issue being at the top of mind every single national election (for literally my entire life and I'm over 40!!!), and half the electorate being one-issue voters about it so you can't even have a real conversation with them about anything else.
It might also help heal relations between the sexes but I won't bet on that, let's not get too greedy now.
FruitfulLemonyLemons
1mo ago
I don't know, this one seems more subdued than 2016. IIRC people were on the streets pretty much the day after 2016, and there doesn't seem to be too much of that this time around. People seem... exhausted? Defeated? I wonder if the popular vote result has something to do with it. Or how sure everybody seemed on both sides of the aisle that Hillary had it in the bag—complete with prepared victory theatrics about breaking a glass ceiling etc—making 2016 an almost traumatic shock, which we don't have this time around.
FruitfulLemonyLemons
2mo ago
I'm not sure if anybody asked this yet but why does the mechazilla need to catch it? Instead of just landing like the Falcon 9? Is it the size?
FruitfulLemonyLemons
2mo ago
I know this is more of a "small scale question" and not exactly "fun" but it's also relatively time-sensitive and I want to pick this community's brain in particular (EA people might have thought this stuff through, etc): does anybody know the most bang-for-your-buck way to donate to relief efforts from Hurricane Helene? Any efficient charities that are trustworthy and have good scale and minimal grift/overhead?
FruitfulLemonyLemons
2mo ago
I don't have a take. I have issues and I'm tired of them.
I'll say this. Jung tends to be misunderstood IMO in the sense that he gets lumped in with mystics, and while he is something of a mystic he's actually really big on living in the external world, and the whole inner journey thing is only a thing you do when you have no choice and it's dangerous because you can get "stuck down there", i.e. so in love with your introversion that you get separated from reality and become increasingly useless even as you become so captivated and bedazzled by "insights" and imagine yourself to be specially favored by the higher powers.
Jung seems to be a proponent of "getting over yourself" and taking the slings and arrows of living as a person among the other people. When you do find yourself on the journey, he seems to be a proponent of caution, of a skeptical attitude toward the stuff you're being "blessed" with, of staying at all times connected with anything that keeps you connected to the real world (elsewhere, I think in his autobiography, he mentions that when he had his famous "encounter with the unconscious" he used his duties to his practice and to his children to keep him grounded in the external world), and of getting the fuck out of there once you find the thing you're looking for.
"Mommy issues" is not a term he uses in this book per se, but he talks extensively about the regressive longing for the warmth and protection of the womb and how dangerous this can be for an adult, and it made me think of my own cowardice, my tendency to want to be some sort of exception, my unwillingness to face the simple facts of my own external life such as my isolation and near-friendlessness and my unwillingness to do basic common sense things about these like taking up a hobby (Jung is big on common sense solutions and like being a normal fucking functional person in society, again very misunderstood guy). It's been a surprisingly effective wake-up call for me since there are few voices these days I'm actually willing to listen to but his is one of them for some reason.
Here's a fun quotation I just read from the book:
In reality the neurosis is manufactured anew every day, with the help of a false attitude that consists in the neurotic’s thinking and feeling as he does and justifying it by his theory of neurosis.
My theory of neurosis has been bad for me nooooo 😭😭😭
FruitfulLemonyLemons
3mo ago
Symbols of Transformation by Carl Jung
If you like to read pages upon pages of "And in this culture they have..." to prove an archetype exists (I don't) then this is the book for you.
Nevertheless I have been trudging through it because interspersed throughout there are tidbits of information essentially about mommy issues (which I would say I and a significant portion of modern men have) so it feels like this weird job of like panning for gold or finding a needle in a haystack or whatever.
Worth it but it's been a slog. Can't wait to be finished.
FruitfulLemonyLemons
3mo ago
Wow. Kudos to SS
FruitfulLemonyLemons
3mo ago
FruitfulLemonyLemons
3mo ago
Alternatively, tweets can represent a person's tribal knee-jerk sympathies while their long thought-out works represent having done the hard work to transcend these. In which case there would be a sort of veritas in both, but a different type of veritas in each and arguably a higher quality one in the effort work.
FruitfulLemonyLemons
3mo ago
Yeah I get more Kantian by the day if only because it takes too many freakin clock cycles to manage all the noble lies
FruitfulLemonyLemons
3mo ago
Suppose communism is bad (if you think it's good this isn't addressed to you but sure feel free to chime in). How do you teach normies this?
I mean the kind of normie who lives in a world where powers far beyond them do incomprehensible things like set the prices of stuff in the store, so that some of the stuff they really want is too expensive for them, but look, the store is full of that stuff, so somebody has all this stuff but they're not letting them have it except for way too high a price, those greedy assholes.
And then you try to explain to them how markets work and how prices come to be and it all just comes across to them as some weird bootlicking apologism because they're simply not on that level.
Is there a more "down to earth" approach that is needed? Normies who have deeply internalized rules of decency and ideas of "thou shalt not steal" (often normies with religious backgrounds) seem to naturally be anti-communist.
Now I'm sure some of y'all here (you know who you are) will say these people basically just need to be oppressed because if they have their way civilization is destroyed and everything is shitty for everybody, but if you oppress them then they complain but otherwise you have a civilization that hums along. But I hate this, I feel like there has to be a way to make society work that doesn't require telling a huge segment of the population "stfu and get in line or we're putting you in a cage". And I mean obviously violent (as needed) enforcement of civilized norms is necessary, but I notice there are a lot more people who are sympathetic to communist ideas than are actual active criminals. My point is more about these people, not the active criminals (who I support putting in cages)
Is there really no way to get through to people other than to just tell them shut up and take it because we're trying to run a civilization here
FruitfulLemonyLemons
3mo ago
The answer is apparently as simple as the fact that she's 60 and lucid rather than 80 and comatose
and she's not Trump. Don't forget who this election's really about. This is the elation of "oh shit we can win" that followed the desperation after Biden's debate performance. I honestly think this is explained by fairly standard human emotional dynamics.
Of course the emotions get narrativized, but that's just what humans do unless (and often still when) they have uncommonly large amounts of self-honesty
FruitfulLemonyLemons
3mo ago
Yes, thank you for the detailed reply
FruitfulLemonyLemons
3mo ago
Do you know anything about healthcare systems in other parts of the world? Would you recommend medical tourism to anywhere?
FruitfulLemonyLemons
3mo ago
If it's any consolation, I'm sure right-leaning students handle this the way we always have: go through the motions, then make fun of it all behind their backs when we're hanging out on our own time.
But it is worrying. What separated us from the Soviets during the Cold War was you didn't have to be an activist to do things like medicine.
FruitfulLemonyLemons
4mo ago
You also wouldn't want to acknowledge views that are actually something a reasonable person might think if you are invested in believing your opponents are dangerous extremists (or I guess just weirdos is the talking point now).
Theft of Fire by Devon Eriksen. Kind of neat so far, feels like Niven but updated for a 2020 view of the future instead of a 1970 view.
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