dev
11hr ago
I did college debate as well. This is specifically a problem for prominent rightists doing open speeches or debate in front of leftists, in the last 10 or 15 years, where the rightists has a view that the left has decided is no longer in the realm of acceptable debate, ex: the current Republican presidential nominee/president is good; gay marriage is bad; 13 do 50 or anything race realist; ice deportations are actually good, etc. I can hardly think of any rightist other than Charlie who was still doing those kind of open-invite debates at colleges on those kind of topics. IIRC, Charles Murray basically stopped doing events after the attack at Middlebury.
This is a ludicrously hagiographic way of saying "he was a political commentator that did not actively advocate for violence". I suppose that, sadly, that last part is becoming an increasingly high bar these days.
Yes, this is it. Personally, I might have the talent for it, or been able to develop the talent, and perhaps once was on that path, but I don't have the guts to put myself out in public and go around debating leftists in person at venues across the country. In terms of virtue points, maybe I get 8 for honesty and he gets 5 points, but he gets 10 for courage, and I get like 2, so he beats me.
cynical apparatchik
Russell conjugation: I'm a team player, you are a PR spokesperson for the movement, he is a cynical apparatchik/propagandist.
He was a charismatic and courageous movement spokesperson. He was not a first-class intellectual; nor was he a paragon of truth-telling virtue/disagreeable autist.
If Kirk basically trusts Trump, there isn't anything necessarily cynical about changing his tune on Epstein when Trump did. I'm basically the same way, and I don't have anything to gain for changing my opinion. I assumed there was a deeper conspiracy behind the Epstein thing, like he was running a blackmail ring. But if the Trump people have looked into and not found anything, then that increases the probability that there wasn't actually a blackmail ring. I don't think Trump is hiding is own deep guilt, because if Trump was guilty of anything more than bad taste with regards to Epstein, I think the Biden administration would have revealed it. What Kirk and Trump are most guilty of is in promoting the idea that there were releasable "files" in the first place, and not just a lot of sealed grand jury testimony and raw interview transcripts full of known-to-be-false statements.
dev
3d ago
But lots of those dividends and asset sales are from retired people, so you are overestimating average income very substantially when you divide by the workforce.
Yeah, it would be better to divide by total people with taxable income, to include the retirees.
I think the Census and BLS surveys have problems, I'm not sure if they include dividend/asset income, and I've also heard they cap the income recorded for privacy issues (because high earners are rare enough that if they were reported, it would deanonymize the data)
You want to include dividend/corporate profit income as part of the average income calculation, because the whole idea is to put a floor on how much the owners of capital can push down wages using immigration.
dev
3d ago
Total personal income (including income from dividends and asset sales) divided by the workforce is something like $150k. But then you want to take out imputed rent from the Personal Income number, and also maybe include seniors earning income as well in the divisor. The best way to do the calculation would be total aggregate income as reported to the tax authorities, divided by number of people with taxable income.
dev
4d ago
Here is my compromise for the United States:
- Give up to 100,000 provisional green cards a year based on getting a three-year contract to work at an annual salary at least 2X the American average income (something like $250k) If more demand than that, the visas go to the highest bidder. Also, give no more than 10,000 to a single country of origin.
- Give up to 50,000 provisional green cards to youth under the age 20 who score the highest on an old-school SAT test, test to be taken in the United States or a consulate at a cheating proof facility.
- Give up to 100,000 provisional green cards to people of any age who score the highest on a battery of scientific, engineering, and mathematics tests.
This replaces all H1bs, student visas, OTPs, diversity visas, etc. If the worker brings their wife and children that comes out of the quota. They cannot bring their uncles and brothers and nephews.
Now I know, the general response is "because those jobs should go to the locals!" but the thing is, talented local people already have jobs. If they're hard working and capable, then they're mostly already doing their part in achieving Y (or doing something else in another industry) because companies want them.
There is a vicious cycle here where we encourage native born Americans to enter the college->fake job pipeline, then we bring in immigrants to do the real work. This suppresses the wages for the real work, which creates all the more incentive for a native born American to get some kind of fake patronage job, and so forth. Of course, then the immigrants have children and we tell them they need to go to college and get a fake job, and thus we need even more immigrants and the entire thing becomes a ponzi scheme.
dev
19d ago
The hospital negotiates with the insurance by saying X and the insurance says 1/4X and then the hospital says 1/2X and that's what the insurance decides to pay.
In this case, there is a pre-negotiated master charge list with a million cells in by code and by insurer. There must have been negotiation in agreeing to that list, but what we paid was the list price, the insurer did not do any negotiation to lower the chargers. I think this is a newer development, I remember ten years ago or so getting bills where it would say one charge, and then have a lower "this is what your insurer negotiated." But that is not how it worked for this bill. At this point, it looks like the cash pay rates are generally lower than the insurance negotiated rates.
The ED is for if you are dying, if you are not dying you are not supposed to be there, and it is expensive in the way that you'd expect for "this is the place where you are dying."
One of the crazy things is that for a 3mo infant this is not actually how it works. We went to our PCP first, in fact, spent almost 5 hours there before finally getting diagnosed with a UTI...and then they sent us to the ER because our PCP wanted a catheter sample and she did not feel comfortable doing that, so she said we had to go to the ER, that was the only option. Our child did not have a fever, but did have a UTI that needed antibiotics, but the only way to get those antibiotics was an ER visit. From what I have read since then, the type of antibiotics they will prescribe depends on if the UTI is deep in the kidneys, which is why they want to do an ultrasound. We could have easily gone to an urgent care facility during business hours if that was an option, but that was not an option, so instead we spent 6 hours in a packed waiting room which was a hot-box of germy kids.
In the ED nurses have few patients, numerous types of staff you might not even think about are running around constantly (like the lady whose only job is to get people's insurance), people are in and out of your room, labs come back stat, people are constantly checking if you are dying or not. Most patients in the ED are on telemetry, most patients admitted to the hospital aren't. All these things are extremely expensive and a lot of them happen outside of patient understanding and line of sight.
If our child was on telemetry and had people checking in on him constantly that may have justified and expensive level 4 or level 5 charge, but he was not. He was clearly fine and low priority. We were just waiting hours for admission and then after that many hours for for the ultrasound so we could get the antibiotics prescription.
dev
19d ago
I'm not objecting to base charge for a level 2 emergency room visit ($700) which should have covered the facilities and the nurse time (which was very little). I'm objecting that they upcoded that to a $2400 charge while then itemizing and also charging for the things that supposedly triggered the upcoding (the doctor's time and the ultrasound).
dev
19d ago
Just looked over my bills. We got itemized $600 for the radiologist, $800 for the emergency room doc. Then on top of that was the $3,300 for the ultrasound itself. Then on top of that was the up-coding of the ER visit from level 2 (which would have been $700) to level 4 which was $2,400. And then there was also another $900 for catheter insertion and $940 for labs. Everything feels over charged ($900 for a two minute catheter insertion..?) but it particularly galls me that they up-coded me from 2 to 4 because of the ultrasound and decision making and then charged us separately for those things.
I didn't see anything the insurance denied. Altogether, our insurance and ourselves paid $8,500 $9k for an ER visit that involved a six hour wait in a crowded waiting room, then a brief consultation with the doctor, a catheter insertion and lab tests, and an ultrasound. The bill seems totally unreasonable to me, there is no way I can get that amount by calculating their costs from first principles. They had to be overcharging me above costs in order to pad their overall revenue.
dev
19d ago
An issue that made be angry recently was that my kid's emergency room stay was upcoded from level 2 to level 4 because they wanted to take an ultrasound, which meant an extra $2k in charge, but then they charged be separately $3k for the ultrasound and $1k for the doctor's time. I asked, why is it level 4 when we weren't urgent, it took us 6 hours to be admitted? The answer is that the guidelines say that level 4 is when "more complex decision making is required" or a diagnostic test like an ultrasound is required, which is what they did. OK, but then you charged us separately for the ultrasound and the doctor's time, so you are essentially double-counting. The bot-like tier 1 billing support person did not understand this argument though, and since I already had paid the bill I had no leverage.
dev
19d ago
Consider code 97161, "pt eval low complex 20 min." That is, a healthcare provider spent between 0 and 20 minutes in the room with the patient, providing an evaluation of a low complexity issue.
Is this "20 min" just the time the doctor is in the room with the patient, or does it include total doctor time for the appointment (including time spent looking at readings, time spent consulting with the nurses or their assistants, time spent writing up notes and doing paper work)? I've seen bills where it comes across as "30 minute appointment" even when the doctor spent 5 minutes with me, but then I do see the doctor wrote up a bunch of notes and so there clearly was time spent outside of the room with me.
dev
1mo ago
A Tesla Model 3 is superior in every respect to a 1970 model year muscle car, but seeing a 1970 muscle car in the background of a beach photo creates a vibe of "this was a rich society" whereas a Tesla Model 3 in the background doesn't.
The other thing is that the muscle car was designed and built in America, and represented the top technology in its price rare. The Tesla Model 3 being an exception, most of the things that make us richer in 2025 aren't actually made in America. And if they are, they are often worse than versions made elsewhere (even if they are better than the 1970 version).
dev
1mo ago
Putting aside tattoos specifically, obviously any sort of appearance choice is some kind of reflection of the person's personality, sense of self, sense of who they want to be, role they are presenting to society, etc. etc. And obviously it is a very old and natural human activity to make judgments based on this. "Is this person signalling affiliation with my in group?" "Does this person have good taste?" "Is this person conscientious?" "Does this person respect group norms?" If we did not expect people to judge us based on appearance choices, we all would just be wearing gray sweatsuits everywhere.
dev
3mo ago
I don't understand the laws that say that "left lanes on highways are for passing only." So it is just illegal to be in the left lane (since anyone passing in the left lane would be breaking the speed limit laws)? Why have the left lane at all? If you have a fairly busy highway, is everyone supposed to be crowded into only two lanes? Is the idea that once traffic becomes so congested on the middle lanes that the speed is below the limit, then people can move into the left-lane to "pass" at a higher speed? But then are cars supposed to be weaving back into the middle lane after they overtake a car, then back into the left lane to pass, then back into the middle lane, etc, so they are not "cruising" in the left lane? Or is the whole thing just a way of saying, " yeah we know the speed limit is fake and we don't want slow pokes driving the speed limit in the left lane"?
dev
3mo ago
- Yes
- Yes
- To the letter or lower in the city. On country roads, OK to go 5MPH to 10MPH over and up to 85MPH on open highways
- No, on highways the left lane should be going 5MPH to 10MPH faster than the lane to the right of it. Riding someone's bumper is never ok. On stroads, the left lane is for through traffic or people who need to make a left turn.
- Not sure what you mean by cut off. If you need to get in that lane and can safely do so, then you have to do what you have to do. But you shouldn't play chicken and force them to put on their brakes, better to miss your exit than to hope the other person can avoid a crash.
- No.
dev
3mo ago
It's a little counter-intuitive how cars are far more likely to kill us, but we get more angry at cyclists.
I think it is because most cars are relatively well-behaved and they respect my right-of-way at crosswalks and don't try to buzz me. It's just the 0.1% that is going to blow a stop sign or not yield that might kill me.
While with bikers it is a far greater number that don't respect the rules and will buzz dangerously close to myself and my kids on the sidewalk. They probably won't kill me, but they give me a sense of rule-breaking and fear.
dev
4mo ago
It's still exclusive to the group that actual owns it. Someone from a neighboring tribe can't bring all their cattle and graze it without permission (or there would be war).
dev
4mo ago
This is not how land title works in traditional livestock-grazing societies. Multiple cow-owners' cattle can graze the same land as long as the total number of cattle does not exceed the capacity of the land.
Sounds like the community is an organization that owns the land, and has rules about how each person can use it. Nothing you said contradicts anything that I wrote. Customary rights to graze a certain amount at a certain time is still a form of property right, same as an easment is a form of property right. Not all property rights are "you have 100% total control to do whatever you want."
Is your argument against "ownership" in general? Or is your argument that ownership by a single person is bad, ownership by a family is bad, ownership by a joint-stock corporation is bad, but ownership by a cooperative is OK?
dev
4mo ago
But what is ownership? I have my own ideas, but I asked ChatGPT and was surprised that it pretty much hit the nail on the head: the definition characteristic of ownership is the legal right to deprive others.
The a definition that has stuck with me is: "property is peace." Land, houses, real goods, etc, all have the fundamental attribute that they are at least partially or wholly rivalorous. This is a law from nature or nature's God, not from man. Either my cattle can graze the land or your cattle can. Either I can eat the cattle or you can. Either my family can live in a certain house or your family can. A property right, ie ownership, therefore, is a public declaration that a certain person or organization has the right to determine how that property is used (subject to certain restrictions of course). They may of course choose to share it. It may even be assigned to an organization that has a charter and rules about how to share the property. It's ironic that you say capitalism doesn't understand "sharing" when one of the fundamental inventions that separated capitalism from fuedalism was the idea of a joint-stock corporation and the idea of splitting up "shares" in a company. A corporation is highly structured sharing. The alternative to assigning a public property right, is friction and squabbling and overuse at best, and war at the worst. The origin of all property rights are either squatters rights, adverse possession, or most commonly, a peace treaty after a war. To say that someone's property right is illegitimate is to say, I no longer accept the terms of the peace, I am trying to rile people up for extra-legal action and/or war.
dev
4mo ago
Here is a paper on the problem but it is very academic and too understated: http://inforumweb.inforumecon.com/papers/conferences/2006/RealValueAdded.pdf
It does deserve a more publicly accessible write-up. Here is a more accessible article writing a somewhat different critique: https://americancompass.org/no-us-manufacturing-is-not-at-an-all-time-high/
dev
5mo ago
write what you think that means, before reading Scott's critique,
Some years back I wrote a post related to this on Conspiracy Theories, Meme Theories, and Bureaucracy Theories. A lot of this hinges on what we mean by "intent" and the realization that an institution or a system can have an "intent" that is essentially different from both its stated intent, the intent of its designers, and even the intent of the people running it:
At issue, is what we mean by “intent.” When we say that a university schemes to take as much money as possible to further its own interests, the actual scheming or intent can occur at several different levels:
Conscious intention. What the people involved actually think about and reason about. What are they say to each other behind closed doors.
Subconscious intent. Much mental calculation happens in the subconscious. Motivated reasoning seems to be the default human thought process....
Empathy and social network self-interest. Social networks exist. People are more likely to have empathy for people within their own Dunbar number. People are more likely to helpful to members of their own network. So even if there is no overt conspiracy, if all your friends are bankers, then obviously you are going to be more attuned to the problems of bankers than the problems of the common man. When you design policy or advocate policy, the design of the policy will be guided by the advice of bankers.
Institutional intention. Let us say some members of an institution believe that the institution has outlived its purpose and that their jobs are wasteful. Other members have the sincere but delusional belief that the institution is carrying out a grand mission. The deluded believe that acquiring more resources and growing the institution is of vital importance for the good of the world. The disillusioned members end up quitting or finding some quiet niche. The true believers fill the leadership ranks and end up doing whatever it takes to expand the institution. Furthermore, the people and departments that are good at getting funding and good at promoting the brand, expand and get more leadership, regardless of whether that funding was actually good for society. Thus even while the all members of the institution believe they are doing good, due to selection effects, the institution as a whole acts a self-aggrandizing organism.
This last dynamic was defined as Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy:
Some government bureaucracies have the very nasty dynamic that when they screw up, they create bigger problems, and thus get more funding to solve the bigger problem. Often, no one gets fired. The leaders of the problem-creating department now have more employees and thus more status and authority. Thus the system actively rewards those who work against the stated goals of the institution (again, they are not intentionally subverting the institution, they are often deluded).
The word “intent” breaks down because we do not have a handy English word to describe subconscious, institutional, or evolutionary intent. Many low-status outsiders observe the institution acting like a vampire, but they do not understand the internal dynamic, so they assume that the selfishness is conscious, when it is not. Their mistaken analysis of the internal dynamic makes them look like cranks, even though the overall observation is correct.
Because intent is so complicated, it hardly makes sense to even analyze it. To judge an institution, watch what it does. Look at the pressure that shapes its decisions.
The "system is what it does" is a pithy condensation of this idea. It's true and useful rhetoric in a few ways:
- Leaders and activists like to use "intent" as an exonerating excuse. When a system over-and-over produces bad results, "good intentions" should not be an excuse and leaders should not expect it to be an excuse and they should feel a moral responsibility to treat recurring bad outcomes as being their fault. In fact, the ignorance of the leader with "good intent" is often crucial to the system producing bad results, so simply popping this bubble of ignorance and blamelessness is itself a useful function of the rhetoric.
- It encourages reformers not to think just about a simple leadership change or policy fix, but to look at the system at the whole to see what needs to be fixed at a higher level. It encourages people to solve the problem of why every policy from this system seems to have bad results.
UPDATE NOW THAT I'VE READ SCOTT:
The "system is what it is does" is most truthful and useful when you have a particular institution or complex that over-and-over gets results that are at odds with its stated goals. It's not an observation that is useful in all circumstances. For example, for the question of "what is the purpose of the Ukrainian army" we don't have enough repeated observations to really know if there is an underlying dynamic that is at odds with its stated goals.
But then what was it meant to apply to?
Here is a good example: the purpose of the homelessness activist complex in SF is too maximize jobs for activists (not its stated goal of ending homelessenss)
Another: the purpose of academia is to convert grants into papers (not its stated goal of producing high-quality science)
Another: the purpose of police in big cities is to maintain the monopoly on violence. (Hence, why it seems that vigilantism by citizens is treated far more harshly than random assaults by randoms. Crime is only suppressed to prevent it from getting so bad that citizens might choose vigilantism despite the risks. Note, this thesis is not completely true, but it is more true than a naive "police only exist to reduce crime and any failure to do so is just due to normal human imperfection")
dev
5mo ago
Then, when I got home, I read Alex Tabarrok's latest on Marginal Revolution. They both pointed out something that I had not realized. America still manufactures a lot of value. More value than ever before in history. In real terms.
The manufacturing "real value added" number is simply a terrible statistic that no one who cites it actually understands. For instance, U.S. has lost its competitive advantage in microprocessors to Taiwan, and basically doesn't manufacture motherboards, memory, LCD panels, etc, but because overall computer quality has made such incredible leaps and bounds a "quality adjustment" is applied to overall nominal dollar value added of whatever US manufacturing remains and that quality adjustment is basically responsible for the entire increase in manufacturing. Worse, they don't even apply the same quality adjustment to the inputs (value added is output minus inputs) so the entire number is just FUBAR. And the same thing applies to other categories -- automobiles, clothes. The number is just a train wreck.
dev
5mo ago
A career bureaucrat has one primary job: follow bureaucratic process, so yeah, of course they would be fired for that. Top-level officials by nature must have a lot more flexibility in their jobs and they can't be sitting at a SCIF all day long and following processes is not their primary job requirement or part of their life-long training. (This is among the reasons why I didn't think Hillary should have been charged for a crime). And this goes five-fold for officials who were specifically selected by the American people for being outsiders.
Also, the phenomena of the right-wing grifter, who is trying to patch together a living from begging for subscriptions and doing ad reads for supplements, is entirely because the right does not have the patronage ecosystem that the establishment left has. IIRC, journalists at Pro-Publica are making salaries well into the six figures thanks to support from foundations. So they don't have to sound like grifters when they speak to the public, because they have that support behind the scenes. And then there is the entire university system, which is what left-wing patronage really looks like.
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