erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
8d ago
I work at a hotel which is open 24/7 365. That means we need someone in the front desk at all times. We have three 8-hour shifts, from 7 AM to 3 PM (morning), from 3 PM to 11 PM (afternoon), and from 11 PM to 7 AM (night). That's 3 x 7 = 21 shifts per week. We have a full-time worker for each shift doing 5 shifts a week, for a total of 3 x 5 = 15 shifts. The other 6 shifts get covered by other people as needed (I cover two afternoon shifts and two night shifts, and somebody else covers the remaining two morning shifts; it helps that our company owns two hotels, so the person with only two shifts at my hotel can work more shifts at the other hotel if they want a full workweek, but in principle you could cover this schedule by having four people working 5 shifts each and rotating the extra day among them unless somebody wants to volunteer for the overtime).
Why can't you do something like this? Sounds to me like the fundamental problem is simply that you need more doctors. Double the number of residents and see if anybody still needs to work 24 hours straight.
erwgv3g34
8d ago
Reminds me of "How to Do Health Care Right" by The Dreaded Jim:
My wife was advised to get a colonoscopy. We shopped around, got a reasonable price at a doctor with a good reputation, negotiated with the insurance company, did all the stuff one does in an environment which actually has prices. Then after the colonoscopy was done, the hospital pulled a huge list of stupendously expensive charges out of their ass, most of which were obviously ridiculous or completely made up out of thin air, just trying it on to see what they could get away with, and all of which were charges we had definitely not agreed to, nor consented to in any way, formal or informal, written or unwritten. They just were not used to doing stuff on the basis that one has a definite price, and that the price one charges affects demand for one’s services. The concept seemed alien and incomprehensible to them. Mentally, they were socialists.
In Singapore, they advertise prices.
Some years later, I had the following conversations with various US health care providers. I recorded the conversations:
Conversation with Stanford Hospital:
Me
My wife needs a colonoscopy: Could you give me a price on it?
Stanford Hospital: (businesslike tone)
Twenty five hundred to thirty five hundred.
Me
You do this all the time. Can’t you give me a specific price?
Stanford Hospital: (cooler tone)
Sorry
Me
Is $3500 the all up, all included price to both myself and my insurance?
Stanford Hospital: (businesslike tone)
It only includes the doctors fee, and does not include any additional services
Me
So after I have this done, any number of people could then charge me any fee they like in addition to the thirty five hundred?
Stanford Hospital: (distinctly chilly tone)
I am afraid so.
O’Connor Hospital
Me
My wife needs a colonoscopy: Could you give me a price on it.
O’Connor Hospital
Do you have a primary physician?
Me
Yes, my primary physician has advised this procedure, but it seems expensive. I am looking for a price.
O’Connor Hospital (outraged and indignant)
We don’t give out prices!
Mercy General Hospital
Me
I am looking for a price on a colonoscopy.
Mercy General Hospital hangs up without a word.
Saint Joseph’s medical center of Stockton:
I am transferred to financial counselling, who transferred me to “Estimates” The estimating lady appreciated my problem and made sympathetic noises.
She then asks me for a CPT code. I then research what CPT codes are, and discover that an operation can result in any CPT, and any number of CPTs. I discover that no matter what CPT I give, it is unlikely to be correct or sufficient, that additional CPTs can show up any time. A CPT would only be useful if it was possible to know in advance what CPTs would result from a colonoscopy, but the CPTs are only decided after the colonoscopy, usually long after the colonoscopy.
Oh shit, it's true. He goes by Senna Diaz now. God fucking damn it. Who is he trying to fool? The guy couldn't be more male-brained if he tried. Where have you ever seen a woman draw a webcomic about transhumanism and the singularity?
Removing the undergrad requirement would be nice for American doctors, who wouldn't have to spend an extra 4 years and $200,000 for literally no reason, but it wouldn't do anything to help patients. That's because the real bottleneck on the number of doctors is the residency requirement, not the medical degree. To increase the supply of doctors, need to either shorten residency or increase the number of residency slots.
erwgv3g34
11d ago
Huge tits look great when a woman is young, but they age horribly, becoming saggy and veiny.
One of the reasons Asian women age so well is that they are so flat.
teenage daughter becoming a party girl, a slut, or even a fornicator is bad, but I think figuring out how to ban it is a very difficult problem
Going nowhere without a chaperone was the traditional solution.
Yeah, this. It's how Muslims solve the problem. It's how Christians solved the problem until very recently.
I was watching ¿Qué Pasa, USA?, a bilingual sitcom from the 70s, and one of the big conflicts between the Cuban immigrants and their American daughter is the need to have a chaperone on her dates, as in episode 7, "The Super Chaperone". That's because America had already gone through the sexual revolution, but Cuba hadn't.
There is only one thing a woman wants to be alone with her date for. Chaperones are how we kept girls from becoming sluts.
erwgv3g34
11d ago
Once you've got a 17-year-old on Life360 (Slogan: "Family-proof your family"), you've pretty much fouled up completely anyway. If you want your children to achieve independence, making lax rules for them is insufficient; you need to actually allow them some actual independence. Or at least enough that they don't know you're still watching.
This is good advice for a son. Not so much for a daughter.
Giving your daughter independence is how you ensure she gets her cherry popped by a fuckboy.
I'm profoundly sensitive to demoralization and trans propaganda in children's programming. We basically have a rule in our house that our daughter doesn't read or watch anything newer than 2000, with older generally being better. She's still little, I don't know how well this will hold up. She's starting to ask if we can get Paw Patrol like all the other kids at school. We've heard through the grapevine from other parents with concerns like ours that "the first few seasons" are fine. But we aren't interested in playing whack-a-mole with a franchise our daughter grows to love trying to sneak bullshit past us. We know this isn't sustainable forever, but god damn. The media put out there for children just keeps getting worse and worse.
A quick online search reveals that the Paw Patrol spinoff Rubble & Crew features a nonbinary character, River, in its first season. So, good call.
But I think your first mistake was sending your daughter to school. It's not going to stop at TV shows. Everything that your family does differently from the mainstream is going to be something that she learns is not normal from her peers, and become something she pushes back against. If you think it's bad now, wait until she hits 15 and she is yelling that she hates you and you are ruining her life because you won't let her go out to a date or party unchaperoned like her friends. You cannot send your children to Caesar for their education and then be surprised when they come back as Romans.
From "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out" by AntiDem:
First, as the leftists used to say, “Kill Your Television”. I am not one who generally thinks that machines are inherently evil. Television is an exception. It is no more and no less than a hypnotic mind control device. Don’t believe me? Sit a hyperactive toddler in front of a television and watch what happens. They freeze, turn away from everything they were doing, and stare at the screen. Gavin McInnes once noted that the “on” switch of his television was an “off” switch for his kids, and so it is. Do you think this device does not place ideas in the minds of those who fall into a trance in its presence? And what ideas do you think the Hollywood/New York axis wishes to place there? I recall reading one account of a father who, tired of his two under-10 daughters’ bratty attitudes, limited their television viewing to a DVD box set of Little House on The Prairie. The change in his daughters’ behavior was dramatic – within a couple of weeks, they were referring to him and his wife as “Ma” and “Pa”, and offering to help with chores. The lesson is obvious: people (and especially children) learn their social norms from television, far more even than from the people around them.
Ideally, one would cut oneself off from it totally. Many find this rather difficult (I must admit, myself included at times). Some keep a television set, but make sure it is disconnected from broadcast channels and use it only as a monitor for a carefully-selected library of DVDs. Others (myself included) don’t own a set, but download a few select programs from torrent sites and watch on laptops or tablets. My total viewership of television programs tops out at perhaps 3-4 hours per week during particularly good seasons. Any traditionalist should strive to do the same. In fact, traditionalists should reject – should “drop out” of – all popular culture (especially that produced after, say, 1966) to the greatest degree possible, and make sure their children are exposed to it as little as possible. Music, video games, even the web – either drop out of it completely, or, at very least, carefully limit the time and scope of it in your life and the lives of your children.
While we’re on the subject of children: DO NOT send your children to a public school. “Drop out” here too; by which I do not mean that your children should go uneducated, but that you should – you must – homeschool. To do otherwise is pure child abuse. Perhaps fifty years ago, this was not the case, but these times are not those times. The failures of the public schools need not be repeated here, but they are undeniable, and any reasonably smart ten-year-old whose attention span hasn’t been destroyed by television can learn more by being left alone all day with a stack of books than they can in any public school classroom anyway. As for the universities, there are not quite any suitable replacements for them yet, but some lurk just over the horizon and will appear before long.
To say that one should “drop out” of – not bother listening to and not ever trusting – the mainstream news media goes without saying.
If they do not know the problems of the black underclass, then how do they know what to censor? Like the man inventing excuses for the dragon in his garage, they must have a model of black dysfunction hidden somewhere in their brains; otherwise, would not know which thoughts are dangerous. Hence "the woke are more correct than the mainstream"; when a progressive complains that coming down on crime will affect black people the hardest, it is because he realizes on some level that blacks are much more criminal than whites.
From 1984 by George Orwell:
Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his lungs with air. His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word "doublethink" involved the use of doublethink.
It's so insane. It's like the European elites looked at all the problems America has with its black underclass and thought to themselves "I gotta get one of those".
erwgv3g34
16d ago
His point is that the college already got the money, so they don't care if the loan is dischargeable or not. The one on the hook if the student is allowed to default is the government, not the university.
Most student loans are from the government, not from private banks. And the government doesn't make a risk/profit calculation before lending you the money.
erwgv3g34
18d ago
Part of it is that, yes, replacing the rich mythology of Micras and Pelagia with literally "a wizard did it" robbed the piece of much of its pathos and gravitas, but the other part is that deleting all mentions of Mencius Moldbug and Patchwork was an act of cowardice unbecoming of a scholar.
erwgv3g34
18d ago
It's first of December so of course I am listening to Once upon December.
Excellent taste; Don Bluth is my favorite Western animator.
Classical animations are so eternal and age so gracefully or even at all. I really miss that they don't make them anymore
Have you tried anime? Great 2D-animated movies are still being made, just not in America.
Say it with me: The best way to reduce crime is to keep criminals in prison where they can't commit crime.
The best way to reduce crime is to hang criminals, which is no only much cheaper than prison (or at least it would be if progressives hadn't deliberately made the process as expensive as possible) but also prevents a future administration from releasing the criminals.
erwgv3g34
20d ago
Please, please link to the original version of "Archipelago", not the (horrible) revised edition.
Scott has literally donated money to sterilize drug users.
People who are not logged into Twitter can only see the linked Tweet, not the context.
Here's the whole thread:
Crémieux Recueil: I just saw a cost-benefit analysis of prisons where prisons save society money until you factor out $50,000 per prisoner per year for "suffering", then they cost society "money".
Scott Alexander: I think this is an inaccurate description of the study.
It costs society money if you take the author's mainline beliefs, if you adjust for current incarceration costs (I didn't do this adjustment because then you'd have to inflate crime costs as well, and I didn't know how to do this, but plausibly cost disease has driven up incarceration costs faster than inflation), or if you're thinking about blue states (which have higher incarceration costs than red states). I described it as saving society a small amount of money under the most generous possible assumptions, but being net negative otherwise.
But also, it does seem like low-key torturing hundreds of thousands of people, ~5% of whom are innocent, is a "social welfare cost". The process used to value that cost at $50,000 is no sillier than the process used to value a murder at -$9.4MM, or any of the other crime numbers in the paper.
Crémieux Recueil: I think it is sillier, since a point of prison for many is to punish, whereas there's no justification for murder.
One commenter posited a reductio that should probably be addressed: by this logic is everything you can buy free after accounting for "joy" or "forgone suffering"?
Scott Alexander: Not just free, but positive sum! If we didn't count the value of joy in buying things, we would have to model all trades as exploitative - stupid people getting tricked into giving companies money for no reason.
If we discount the suffering involved in prison because prisoners are bad people, we should also discount the suffering involved in murder insofar as murder victims may also be bad people (eg drug dealers, gang members, etc). I think a virtue-weighted utilitarianism would be fun to think about, but I've never heard anyone seriously propose it.
Crémieux Recueil: A voluntary purchase should be positive-sum to an individual, but if I buy an expensive truck, I may strain the family budget enough to turn it negative at the household level regardless of my personal enjoyment of the truck.
If I'm involuntarily committing someone to prison and generating enormous surplus for society, throwing in suffering for them, that relatively few outside of prison care about, messes up the whole equation by mixing up costs and benefits across levels of aggregation and treating all the numbers alike when they aren't. If the weight for suffering was adjusted to reflect that, that might make things fine, but no one can reasonably stand on a high estimated cost of prisoner suffering if they're doing cost-benefit analyses for the society we live in.
Given that criminals are generally disliked, suffering is being given a value above prisoners' incomes outside of prison (before and after imprisonment), and false-positive rates are low (especially for long-term prisoners), suffering probably adds value to society anyway. That's part of the now academically neglected retributive function of prison.
Scott Alexander: I think this is a good place to apply Thatcher's Law ("there's no such thing as Society"). Benefits go to individuals - people who don't get robbed, people who don't get stabbed, etc. Even indirect benefits go to individuals - people who live in nicer communities. It's perfectly valid to count costs to other people against the benefits to these people.
But also, aren't you supposed to be based and IQ-pilled? Have you met the average prisoner? They've got the IQ and self-restraint of like a ten-year old child. I don't really know who it benefits to keep creating people without the skills necessary to live in modern society and then, when they fail to live in modern society, say "Yeah, they deserve to be tortured for that".
I'm totally fine with the consequentialist position of weighing their suffering against the suffering of their victims, I could even potentially be convinced that this suggests incarceration at or above current margins. I just don't see why we have to add "desert" into it, which I think implies some kind of failure to exercise a self-restraint that these people never had in the first place. You wouldn't say that a kid deserves to suffer super hard for some arbitrary number of years because they hit their sibling. You'd give them whatever punishment you expected, through deterrence and/or incapacitation, to either make them a better person or protect their sibling in the future. Why hold criminals to a higher standard?
Crémieux Recueil: Making the analysis entirely individual-level is consistent with what I've said. But I don't think the analysis as it was done actually does that adequately, and it ends up extremely overweighting the suffering of criminals beyond all reason. If you're being "based and IQ-pilled" this stands up: those people average far lower incomes before imprisonment than even $50k/yr.
Now regarding desert, having it as a guiding principle in criminal justice doesn't mean to engage in exorbitant punishment, but it does mean to punish people fairly and equally. If you kill a stranger in cold blood and Bob with a 75 IQ kills a stranger in cold blood, you should both receive the same punishment even if Bob didn't really know any better. If you remove desert from the equation, you necessarily move towards illiberal justice, and I have a strong preference for liberalism and find it hard to imagine rational and workable criminal justice without it.
erwgv3g34
21d ago
IQ realist here. When those rules are things like "thou shalt not murder" and "thou shalt not steal", I consider enforcing them by severely punishing the ones who break them to be basic human decency. If they are too impulsive and stupid to abide by such elementary moral standards, then they are not fit to live in civilized society.
erwgv3g34
22d ago
Old women do not like age gaps. Young women and older men are happy enough with them. And nobody cares what young men want.
Yes, I've always found it disingenuous the way some people act like their only problem with immigrants is that they are coming in illegally and jumping the queue instead of waiting their turn. The implication is that there is some kind of workable immigration process everyone can apply for and that the only reason not to do so is because you are too impatient to wait a few years or too dismissive of law and authority to bother going through the proper channels.
This is totally false. There is no path to immigration for the vast majority of people. If you support enforcing current immigration law, you support denying millions the chance to live and work in the U.S. for no other reason than they were born outside of it, condemning them to a much worse quality of life in countries full of poverty and violence, and you need to own that.
I support it, because allowing unlimited immigration combined with a welfare state and single-family zoning is unsustainable, but I'm not missing the proper mood; I feel bad about it, but it has to be done.
(Caplan would chime in with the keyhole solution of denying the immigrants welfare, but he's delusional)
It is, of course, hobbled by severe retrograde amnesia, and being stuck to text behind a screen, but those are solvable problems.
Anterograde, not retrograde. It didn't forget something it knew from its life before; it's unable to permanently remember new things. LLMs are like Clive Wearing or Hermione Granger.
Agreed. Governments hate cash for the same reason they hate crypto; it enables people to escape their control. The state can't get of the cash yet, but they are sure as fuck not going to make it more convenient to use by printing bigger bills. Instead, it will watch as inflation slowly makes the $100 bill as irrelevant as the penny.
From "In Praise of Cash" by Brett Scott:
The frontlines, though, are now creeping to poorer countries. India’s recent so-called ‘demonetisation’ was a brutal overnight retraction of rupee notes by the prime minister Narendra Modi to bring discipline to the ‘black economy’. It was an exercise that necessitated choking the poorest Indians, who depend on cash and who often lack access to bank accounts. Originally cast in popular terms as an attempt to stem corruption, the message was later ironically altered to cast cashlessness as a way to create economic progress for India’s poor.
We warned them to stop calling us Latinx.
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