OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
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User ID: 359
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
3d ago
Blood vitamin d is usually on the lower end, I've taken supplements (Ritual multivitamin) for years without seeing a change. I don't get sick in the summer but am sick all winter long.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
3d ago
Is there an easy way to make vitamin d indoors? Something like a lizard lamp? I don't think vitamin d supplements are doing the job.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
4d ago
I wouldn't discount that possibility. If people are violating Federal laws in hysteria then maybe something needs to be done.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
4d ago
When people start pointing green lasers at commercial airplanes then maybe there is something worthy of a briefing.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
6d ago
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
6d ago
You are welcome to do a big write up. I'm interested but too feverish right now to do original research.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
6d ago
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
6d ago
What's the deal with the drones?
Are there even any drones?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
8d ago
I'm not SSCReader, but for a different example:
I have the low-deductible buy-up plan. Deductible is 1500 per person or 4500 over the whole family, for in-network providers. This is not the same as an Out of Pocket Maximum. When the deductible is hit, insurance starts paying 50% of the costs until the Out of Pocket Maximum is hit. Individual Out of Pocket maximum is $6,850, over the whole family it is 12,000.
I had the ill fortune of reaching my family's Out of Pocket Maximum a couple years back. Three young kids hospitalized with complications from a bad combo of RSV and Parainfluenza. Two of the kids spend 2 days in the ICU, the third spent 9 days in the ICU. Each day in the ICU was $8,140.00 charged to insurance, and that is leaving out all other services that were provided while they were in the ICU. In the end, about $300,000 was billed to insurance and I paid only $12,000 of that. (That doesn't count the hundreds of dollars we spent on the Starbucks in the hospital over the three weeks we were swapping kids in and out, but you can only expect so much from insurance.)
Naturally, when I was sitting in the Emergency room with an unresponsive kid I had no way of knowing how much would get charged to insurance. I think by the time I was bringing my second child we assumed we were hitting our Maximum.
Also, my husband has annual colonoscopies and SSCReader's experience is also our own.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
9d ago
Why isn't a vent cheap? Do they involve rare minerals?
To be on high flow requires an ICU and constant observation, I guess most of the cost is in personnel?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
9d ago
If you get hit by a car and end up in the ICU for three weeks
I think this is something that would be covered under "insurance" as I said above. Insurance works for cases where only a fraction of the people who pay into it every year have an event that requires it. Random trauma like car crashes only happen to a small percentage of people every year, and so it's the kind of thing that insurance is good for.
rehab for five months
This is the point where someone might be able to shop around and find rehab center with less frills for less money.
Even if you are awake and say "take me to the cheaper hospital" the ambulance is going to take you to the place you are triaged to, because if you die your family will sue the shit out of them and win.
This is a choice we are making. We could just as easily dismiss such cases as frivolous and instead have people sue ambulances for taking them to an undesired hospital.
Furthermore how do you want handle cost overruns.
Lots of industries have a way to handle this. One way to handle it is the quote for the service can have the expected price (5k in your example), and then a Not To Exceed amount (15k, or whatever the most likely highest number is), and authorization (from a spouse, someone who will agree to be on the hook for the money) needs to authorize exceeding the NTE. Another way is to just have a single price for the surgery that averages out complications. No, that is not general insurance. Most industries provide services for a set price that allows for some one-off situations and it isn't called insurance.
It's not quite clear to me that we should be spending millions of dollars to save a single person's life. Unless it's really simple/easy to do, in which case why does it cost millions of dollars?
Also, do not discount how much money each person would have in their HSA, if they put as much into it as they pay insurance. Average premium for family coverage is 25k a year. Stash all that away into a HSA, accumulate interest, and there would be lots of ready money for emergencies.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10d ago
I think the ultimate US health system would be: Medicaid for those who need it, Medicare for purely palliative care, HSAs as common as 401ks, and insurance that only covers emergencies where the patient is unconscious or at risk of life and limb if a quick decision isn't made. Otherwise full price transparency and an easy way to look up prices for comparable services across all nearby providers.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10d ago
Do you have studies to back that up?
Yes, the large body of work on how Permissive Parenting produces kids who have decreased emotional intelligence. Baumrind followed a group of white kids from preschool to adulthood with an average IQ of 125, studying them in their homes, assessing the parenting styles and then checking back on the kids later to see what their outcomes are.
"Despite the unconditional acceptance, lenient practices, and equalitarian values of their parents, adolescents from permissive fami- lies were almost 1 SD less autonomous (individuation and self-efficacy) than their peers "
You're other question:
So beating is optional? That is a bizarre position to take. It’s either necessary, as people used to believe, or it should be avoided, for obvious reasons.
Beating is optional, setting and enforcing limits is not. Beating is one of several ways to enforce limits, but there are other ways to enforce limits that are equally good.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
11d ago
The language example is something that has happened several times in highly abusive situations, and has been studied in detail, for example, see Genie. Not enforcing any rules at all may be a similar form of neglect, lesser in severity, but still with consequences.
Yes, people used to beat their kids. As far as I can tell, that is ok, as long as the parent shows love at other times.
The experts have not turned the wheel, the experts have always said "Strictness and love," it's just interpreted through the popular self-help books differently through the generations.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
11d ago
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
11d ago
I think you should look at this comment, but I thought it was pretty clear that I meant Liberalism as the political philosophy tradition begun by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
11d ago
Think of it less as a parenting style, and more as a complete neglect of acculturating a child into society. If a kid never learns a word is spoken before sometime between 6 and 12, they will never understand language syntax. Never ever, no matter how smart their parents were or how dedicated their speech therapist is.
If a kid never has a single rule enforced by a grown up and is shielded from the consequences of their actions, are they capable of learning executive function and how to behave in a society which has authority over them? I'm really surprised if you think it doesn't matter, when it is clear from several fields that there are "critical periods" of brain development, and if certain stimuli are not provided during those periods that the window to learn certain skills closes.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
11d ago
More than 50 years ago, Johns Hopkins sociologist James Coleman asked American teenagers this question: "Let's say that you had always wanted to belong to a particular club in school, and then finally you were asked to join. But then you found out that your parents didn't approve of the group. " Would you still join? In that era, the majority of American teenagers responded No. They would not join the club if their parents did not approve.
These figures are provided in Edwin Artmann's doctoral dissertation, "A comparison of selected attitudes and values of the adolescent society in 1957 and 1972," North Texas State University, 1973.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
11d ago
Genetics provide a high water mark that a human can aspire to, but there are obvious ways a bad parent could cut that short. Concussing the kid, starving the kid, locking up the kid so they never learn language before that critical period is passed.
There is a large body of work suggesting that not setting rules and limits for kids is one of these blunders that prevents a kid from reaching their full potential.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
12d ago
Getting the girl to sleep more is the first choice. It is the only way to improve her concentration and the path to health.
They did ask why she wanted to stay up that late. The answer was that she was scared to miss a message and that any delays in responding to messages might decrease her social status.
How to address this? It is unusual for kids to be more attached to peers than parents. You might scoff, but in the sixties a survey of high schoolers found that, if all their friends wanted them to join a club but one of their parents said no, most would not join the club. Most said that they would respect their parents' decisions over peer pressure. Now most kids don't even understand the concept of their parents having a say at all. Kids need security in an unconditional relationship, and that relationship is with their parents, not with the teenage totem pole.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
12d ago
Liberal societies are perfectly fine banning things
Liberal societies are perfectly fine banning things if they still have illiberal understandings of a common good that can supersede any single individual's will.
I am criticizing the idea that liberalism can stand on its own. The event that prompted this post was the Lindsay hoax, in which he re-wrote a section of the Communist Mannifesto criticizing Liberalism. I'm not going to dive into that specific criticism of Marx, but I am surprised at Lindsay calling all criticisms of Liberalism "Woke Right." There is a lot to criticize and debate about liberalism as an intellectual tradition.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
12d ago
Explain like I am not a NY lawyer: why would everyone in the jury find him not guilty of Criminal Negligence but be split on Manslaughter?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
12d ago
Liberalism's Failures in Family Matters
Last week there was some discussion on the recent Lindsay Hoax. I would like to bring up some criticisms of liberalism, and why I think societies that follow it as a singular goal will inevitably suffer from the problems we see (birth rate collapse, sex wars, etc.)
On a newsletter warning of the dangers of sports gambling, Oren Cass wrote:
Careful readers, like all of you, will surely have noted that The Economist asserts not that the gambling frenzy is about people enjoying themselves, merely that it is about their being free to enjoy themselves. And in the distance between those two concepts is the gaping maw into which our society has plunged itself with this and many similar missteps.
The liberal ideal relies on many huge assumptions. Two of those assumptions are that people will choose things that bring themselves happiness and that externalities (or times when an individuals choices impact others) will be easy to detect and foreseeable. In reality, people will choose things that bring them temporary pleasure or help them avoid temporary discomfort over things that will bring them greater happiness and peace. And maybe the executives of the sports gambling company and the 19 year old with a phone can consent to enter into a relationship where the 19 year old gives the executives all his money, but the 17 year old girlfriend did not consent to being beaten more often. (After the legalization of sports betting, home team losses increase domestic violence by 10%.)
Another assumption of liberalism is that we enter into the world as individuals, without owing or being owed anything. Marc Barnes of New Polity wrote:
It is the basic thesis of liberalism—that philosophy embodied in all our modern technologies and institutions—that we are not social by nature, but individuals, and that anything that looks “social” is in fact some amalgamation of individual things and persons. The most famous one (repeated by weird people who talk about “marriage markets,” Redditors, and evolutionary psychologists to this day) is the Hobbesian argument that society itself is “really just” individuals making contracts with each other in order to pursue their own self-interest...
Rousseau posits that man, in his original state, was an individual, a silliness that necessitates that he imagine babies as proto-individuals, kept for self-interested reasons and then abandoned:
The mother gave suck to her children at first for her own sake; and afterwards, when habit had made them dear, for theirs: but as soon as they were strong enough to go in search of their own food, they forsook her of their own accord; and, as they had hardly any other method of not losing one another than that of remaining continually within sight, they soon became quite incapable of recognising one another when they happened to meet again.
Now, Rousseau gave all five of his kids up to an orphanage, so I concede that some may be nearer to his “state of nature” than others. But, for babies, it is quite literally a joke. Losing the mother is a game they love to play, precisely because it affirms the non-individual status of both: “peek-a-boo” makes known, by way of contrast, that the two belong to each other; that they are members of one body; that the mother is made mother by the child even as the child is made child by the mother, and that this is an enduring metaphysical relationship and a social reality; that, in short, they cannot lose each other, even if, God forbid, they do. Imagining this social reality as actually being a mere individual contract—that the mother might walk away, that she might disappear, that she might hide her face, that the so-called bond is just her choice—all of this is hilarious to the kiddos.
It's hard to believe, but the Enlightenment thinkers really thought that pre-historic humans didn't band together in family or social units. And this complete falsehood is somewhat required to make liberalism work.
The word "atomization" is thrown around as a negative. No one has friends to help them, we have apps that facilitate economic contracts with others to help us move houses or buy groceries if we're sick. Children move thousands of miles from their parents to pursue economic opportunity, leaving behind free family babysitting for the kids they'll never have. Men and women are supposed to be equal, but we're obviously not the same kind of human at all. Atomization is the founding assumption of Liberalism though.
Saying atomization is negative is accepted. But to say that Liberalism has negatives is still very unpopular. The only alternative to Liberalism is Authoritarianism, and Authoritarianism is always Bad.
But there are places where Authoritarianism is needed, particularly in family life. Parents have authority over their children. More than that, there is a pre-existing bond between parent and child to which neither consented. A child cannot consent to their parents before they are born. A parent has no idea what their child will be like before they are born. And yet, by virtue of biological reality, they are committed to a shared project of helping the child become a good adult. The child cannot grow into a good adult without this relationship.
In the latest edition of Dr. Leonard Sax's The Collapse of Parenting, Sax describes a family that comes to him for help. The 12 year old daughter has suddenly shown signs of ADHD. Her teacher filled out a form indicating that the 12-year-old's concentration levels are off the charts in a bad way. The girl's family doctor prescribed her ADHD medication to help alleviate her symptoms. They worked, but also left her jittery with heart palpitations and anxiety symptoms.
Sax's first question to the girl's family is how well she slept. Confused, the parents said the girl slept ok, but when Dr. Sax drilled into the details the girl nonchalantly said she was on her phone until 1-2 AM most nights. "Of course, doesn't everyone?"
Dr. Sax told her parents to take her off the Amphetamines and instead keep the kid's phone in the parents' bedroom at night, starting 9 PM. The parents' response was, "Oh, no, we couldn't do that! She'd be so angry at us."
The parents found it easier to give their 12 year old daughter a schedule II drug than to set a simple limit that would have made her healthier. And Dr. Sax says that this is a very common example that he sees often at his practice.
In The Collapse of Parenting, Dr. Sax theorizes that American parents, especially Liberal/Leftist parents, are uncomfortable with the idea of wielding authority over their children. Longitudinal studies show that kids who have strict but unloving parents grow up without knowing how to form loving relationships of their own. Kids that grow up with permissive parents are incapable of balancing a checkbook and make poor decisions due to a high time preference. The best kind of parenting is both loving and strict - a combination the Literature refers to as "Authoritative Parenting." Authoritative Parenting used to be the default, but among left-leaning families there has been a surge of parents fearing that they are overriding their kids innate preferences. Proper parenting is illiberal, and therefore immoral.
One young child arrived to the practice with a sore throat and fever for three days. When Dr. Sax asked the child to open her mouth, she refused. Dr. Sax looked to the mother, and said, "I need your help to examine your daughter, could you help encourage her to open wide?" The mother responded, "Her body, her choice."
The liberal order worked when it was founded on an illiberal order. When humans acted like humans most of the time, raised their children like humans, formed natural hierarchies like humans, liberalism worked fine. I think it falls apart when the government tries to impose liberal presuppositions on every-day human interactions. It falls apart when people think they are supposed to act perfectly liberal in every social interaction. A society based around consent instead of love (willing the good of one another) will fall apart.
I love liberalism, in a way. I love how it shaped American culture for hundreds of years. But I think the evidence points to a need for a safeguard somewhere, similar to the separation of Church and State. A separation of State and Hearth? Americans need to parent better than Rousseau.
Tocqueville famously believed that religion, particularly Christianity, was necessary in America to create and sustain our Democracy. It provided shared values. People had shared common ground beyond their mere desires which which they could identify what is good for all. There is a benefit to having an ultimate Authority, in Heaven, who everyone agrees to serve but who seldom gives specific commands.
Maybe the problem will resolve itself, as atheists fail to reproduce and the deeply religious take over again. Or maybe the cat's all the way out of the bag. But the evidence seems to point towards Liberalism being good but insufficient, and the next best thing needs to be figured out before we lose the goods of Liberalism as well.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
16d ago
Is the controversy:
Lindsay seems to think that Conservatives are the Liberal party and therefore should be embarrassed at publishing a famous criticism of Liberalism (by someone most Conservatives don't like, but many who read Marx agree with him on this point.)
OR
The Christian rag should be sorry for publishing something clearly plagiarized.
From Lindsay's response to criticism, it seems like he thinks #1. I don't get it. Growing up in a Conservative household, "liberal" was an insult, synonymous with excess and licentiousness. There are some Conservatives where the thing they are trying to conserve is the Liberal order, and they lean Libertarian and vote Conservative. But I wouldn't expect every Conservative publication to be Libertarian.
Michael Oakeshott wrote:
To be conservative is to be disposed to think and behave in certain manners; it is to prefer certain kinds of conduct and certain conditions of human circumstances to others; it is to be disposed to make certain kinds of choices…. In short, it is a disposition appropriate to a man who is acutely aware of having something to lose which he has learned to care for; a man in some degree rich in opportunities for enjoyment, but not so rich that he can afford to be indifferent to loss. It will appear more naturally in the old than in the young, not because the old are more sensitive to loss but because they are apt to be more fully aware of the resources of their world and therefore less likely to find them inadequate. In some people this disposition is weak merely because they are ignorant of what their world has to offer them: the present appears to them only as a residue of inopportunities...
To be conservative … is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments; to acquire and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate and to enjoy; the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise.
None of this really requires the philosophy of Liberalism. Many writers are trying to ponder what the next best thing could be. If Liberalism has problems, lets do a Retrospective and figure out how to learn from it and find the next best thing from a Conservative stance. How can we use the lessons of History to preserve and bring back things we love? Catholics use the name Postliberalism for this, but I hope it doesn't stay a Catholic thing.
The Ritual multivitamin only has 50mcgs so maybe that is it.
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