NewCharlesInCharge
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User ID: 89
NewCharlesInCharge
3d ago
Interesting. I guess if I didn't mind the risk of financial ruin I could test my idea that operating a proxy is protected speech.
NewCharlesInCharge
3d ago
My state legislators don't even kayfabe it, they not-my-job it. When they were considering, and eventually passed, bills that clearly violated the stipulations of Bruen, I wrote them cathartic letters expressing as such, not expecting to get more than a form letter response.
I did end up getting a substantial response from a staffer. After some back and forth, I found the position was essentially this: It would be inappropriate for the legislator, not being a constitutional scholar or a member of the Supreme Court herself, to even entertain the question of whether the bills she votes on are constitutional.
Here's one of the responses, obfuscated slightly by ChatGPT to make it difficult to link me to this exact text:
Senator X, who is not an attorney and does not serve within the judicial system, operates in the legislative branch and is unlikely to participate in any cases before state or federal supreme courts. Therefore, it would be inappropriate to expect them to form an opinion on constitutional matters or to provide historical examples for judicial proceedings.
If clarification is needed, I can share a document outlining the separation of powers and the distinct roles of each branch concerning the creation, execution, and interpretation of laws.
NewCharlesInCharge
4d ago
If you run with the lower classes good odds you know of someone who is collecting disability but could easily work some non-back-breaking job. I know a few. One guy I know collects veterans disability but could easily do even heavy labor. His claimed disability is PTSD from an event that happened off-base in an allied country and outside the line of duty. The guy just parties all the time.
There are 8.9 million SSDI recipients in the US. The average monthly payment is $1,483.
Say you paid investigators to go out and spy on one person each working day. There are 240 working days in a year.
If you paid the investigator $70,000, they'd need to catch four people to break even on their salary.
If more than 1.7% of people are committing such obvious fraud that you'll catch them with one day of observation, then it's worth it to hire the investigator.
NewCharlesInCharge
10d ago
At least for engineering, the bar was never raised or lowered to actually get hired, they just fucked with the top of the pipeline. So for what they called under-represented minorities the standards were lowered to get a call back on your resume and to get to the first set of screening interviews performed by engineers. But once you reached that point the pipeline didn't differentiate.
I'm sure given the size of the company and how so many are outwardly ideological on these issues that there was some very concious bias being applied by interviewers, but that won't change because we're done with the company officially endorsing DEI.
NewCharlesInCharge
13d ago
I’m open to arguments that Maidan was going to happen regardless of western involvement. I think the evidence points to the west being heavily involved, but I can have epistemic humility here.
But how can you argue that it wasn’t deposing a man who won a fair election, and that his supporters, who happen to be geographically concentrated, are right to be angry to the point of secession?
NewCharlesInCharge
15d ago
I think we agree.
NewCharlesInCharge
17d ago
Roughly $5,000, dog had another surgery later on to remove a bunch of tumors.
Got the dog in 2018, at about $60 per month since then, I'm still ahead, but that's very luck of the draw. I'd prefer not to have some other incident that would make the insurance pay out and deliver more value for my premiums, I'd rather he just die in his sleep when the time comes.
These products are regulated and competetive, I expect the rates to be actuarily fair and the median customer to have been better of self insured.
NewCharlesInCharge
17d ago
The good ones have no trouble filling their schedules, there's no incentive for them to join such a system.
If someone advertises you can treat it as signal that they're not good enough to book clients via word of mouth only.
NewCharlesInCharge
17d ago
I've expressed before that veterinary care has a lot of medicine, especially the business side, figured out better than humans.
Insurance, for the most part, really is for the big stuff that can't be anticipated, and is priced as such. It's $60 a month to insure my 14 year old beagle with 50% coinsurance. It doesn't cover the cost of exams or checkups. It does cover things like surgeries and cancer treatment.
I once used it for a spine surgery. The total cost was about $7,000, quoted upfront. I paid about $3,500 and the insurance covered the other half. This would have been well into hundreds of thousands of dollars if performed on a human.
I was able to have conversations via email, not through some dumb HIPAA compliant portal.
That most dogs are uninsured probably keeps costs down, as does that typically pet insurance has a higher coinsurance figure than human insurance. There's an unavoidable principal-agent problem that we exacerbate with regulations that practically remove all incentive for people to price shop.
NewCharlesInCharge
17d ago
That assumes that you need to smash particles together at higher and higher energies to test your hypotheses.
If you're on the hunt for gravitons and antigravitons, would that even be part of the research? Can gravitons even collide?
If you're starting fresh with an unexplored branch of physics you'll not have gotten to the point where testing hypotheses is so far along the curve of diminishing returns that the next advancement requires billions of dollars of capital. The first particle accelerator had a diameter of 4.5 inches. The first one that managed to split an atom was about 2 meters wide.
What of all the secretive Space Force X-37B missions? If you're looking for graviton signals it would be helpful to be in an environment where there are fewer of them.
NewCharlesInCharge
18d ago
But the basic research needed just isn't there, and it would seem pretty hard to hide a facility better-equipped for fundamental physics experiments than the civilian ones.
This is the core claim, that the USG has sequestered an elite cadre of physicists and kept their discoveries under wraps. One observation in favor of this claim: the dearth of fundamental breakthroughs in physics for the past fifty years.
NewCharlesInCharge
19d ago
Did the police not perceive this as a threat to their own daughters? Are any of them on record?
NewCharlesInCharge
19d ago
No one originally wanted to invade Afghanistan or reshape it into a modern western ally.
16 year old me had been exposed to what the Taliban was all about and thought the world would be better off without it. A just punishment for the Taliban for cooperating with the group that struck at America, and a nice side effect of liberating the people of Afghanistan.
40 year old me sees this as a fool’s errand. To think this would work requires an ignorance of how the Taliban gained power in the first place. The documentaries I’d consumed at sixteen weren’t at all concerned with that question.
NewCharlesInCharge
24d ago
At my get-married-in-a-hurry-to-secure-immigration-status wedding we had about this many.
At my wedding about a year later in China it was about 400. This is a typical size.
NewCharlesInCharge
30d ago
Had it been universal it would have been very Catholic of him, which isn’t something you can often say.
Awhile back I learned from The Pillar that his marriage isn’t even canonically valid. He and Jill were married in some random non-Catholic chapel, and never obtained a convalidation.
Jill also has a still living husband from a previous marriage that was never annulled.
So forget the politically charged question of whether he ought to be denied communion for his many public statements that conflict with church teaching. He ought to be denied for the plain reason that many others are: he’s publicly living in sin.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
This seems aligned with the position that conciousness somehow arises out of information processing.
I maintain that conciousness is divine and immaterial. While the inputs can be material - a rock striking me on the knee is going to trigger messages in my nervous system that arrive in my brain - the experience of pain is not composed of atoms and not locatable in space. I can tell you about the pain, I can gauge it on a scale of 1-10, you can even see those pain centers light up on an FMRI. But I can't capture the experience in a bottle for direct comparison to others.
Both of these positions are untestable. But at least my position predicts the untestability of the first.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
A sufficient speed differential between Earth and a kilometer wide object would literally destroy the Earth, flipping it inside out and melting it.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
Seattle doesn't have hot summers. Midday typically has ideal temperatures.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
Maybe this is part of a template I’m not familiar with, but doesn’t seem to be pro assassin, just making light of a guy named Luigi being in jail.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
Oh wow randos are sending him mana. Tipping a guy with fake money for doing a murder.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
The ACA mandates that insurers have to spend at least 80% or 85% (based on size of market) of premiums on actual provision of healthcare.
Cost cutting is of little use to them. If they take in $100M, currently spend $85M on medical, but are able to cut medical costs by 30% to about $60M, then they'd also have to cut that $15M allocated to other stuff down to about $10.5M. And give up about $30M in premiums.
With this regulation becoming more efficient hurts your bottom line.
But if they can grow the amount spent total, then the 15% or 20% they're allowed to use on other things also grows.
It's basically cost plus contracting, which is apparently popular when you're spending other people's money.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
I don’t think you can. One of the most “institutions are untrustworthy” moments was public health telling us that gathering in the thousands to protest for racial justice was okay because racism was more pernicious to public health than COVID.
But if we weren’t protesting for racial justice then we had to stay home, not visit our dying relatives or attend their funerals, and certainly not gather for mere socialization.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
"Overrepresented" is not enough. The claim is that woke politics is overwhelmingly dominant to the point where there're no antiwoke studios. Trans devs would have to be overwhelmingly dominant to match that claim or something else is going on to give even an overrepresented minority this outsized say.
I think politeness and not wanting to get in trouble with HR plays a big role.
I work with some trans engineers. Luckily there's no intersection between their identity and what we work on. It wouldn't make sense to inject the concept of gender identity into storage drivers.
But if I worked in some area that involved storytelling, and the trans engineers wanted to insert their identity into the stories, I'd be incentivized not to speak my mind. I'd want to say things like this is a vanishingly small portion of the population, it's harmful to children to encourage gender identity navel gazing, etc. But then I'd certainly be upsetting all but the most extreme high-decoupling autists among them, and I'd end up being told by HR not to say those things.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
Bloodletting was ahead of its time?
This makes more sense than "they can use it to spy our citizens."
There are data brokers that operate in the open that will sell you nearly everything TikTok could collect about you. Having access to an app would give you a bit more, like real-time geolocation data rather than stale geolocation data. But for targets where that matters you'd be better off having your intelligence agencies compromise the target's phone. Anyone with reason to be paranoid about the Chinese government spying on them would not have TikTok installed anyway.
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