pigeonburger
5d ago
But can those alcoholics down a hundred bottles in a night?
A hundred bottles in a night, and a hundred men in a day, are extremes for both. But apparently André the Giant could drink that much yes.
pigeonburger
5d ago
Indeed, at object level they tend to just be unfalsifiable claims against the other side, but I think at least it offers a credible rebuttal to the idea that conspiracies cannot exist past a certain scale.
What would distinguish a distributed conspiracy from a political coalition for me is methods and goals that the conspirants would not willingly disclose in the open. Without secret communications, coordination on those would be based on ideas that emerge naturally, that are downstream of memes shared by the distributed conspiracy. In a way this is like encryption, people with the correct key (sequence of memes) will decode the coordination instructions correctly. The left often accuses the right of this in the form of dogwhistles. If you want, for instance, to get widespread cheating in an election but don't want to say it out loud because that has consequences, you push very loudly memes that would justify cheating ("the other side will end democracy", for instance), so that without having to organize (at least not in large conspiracies), susceptible people will naturally wink, nod and act in support when they see hints that another person might be cheating in the direction they support.
pigeonburger
6d ago
So glad to hear your little bun buns is doing well!
Thanks, we're glad too. She's back to being her usual sassy self.
The great part about the price system is that this is never true, but it's totally fine. Consumers are not aware of what is efficient use of food resources. Or resources in automotive services. Or... or... or... In fact, believe it or not, many people even disagree as to whether something is an efficient use of resources!
That is true as as for allocation of ressources "to" healthcare; many of my friends seem to think we're crazy for the amount we did pay to have our bunny cared for, but to us it was worth it. But I think the issue is that allocation of ressources "within" healthcare is the issue. We had a certain amount of care we could pay for in our bunny's case. It was difficult to get from the veterinary what was the best use of that amount.
That's what I fear with human medicine; imagine how doctors could guilt trip people into paying way more by implying they're heartless cheakskates for not being willing to pay for low-likelihood tests and interventions. I do think in that case I would really like the service of someone knowledgeable who could argue on my behalf with the doctor.
pigeonburger
6d ago
A bit less than 2 months ago, our beloved pet bunny got life-threateningly sick. We took her to the veterinary hospital where she had to stay for 2 days. There is no insurance for bunnies here (we checked), so all the costs were paid out of pocket. The vets gave us an idea of the costs of specific tests, hospitalization, etc... so that was good.
The "ideal" of how to care for our bunny could have been ruinously expensive; surgeries, x-rays, etc... But one part of the process I did not enjoy is that the vet seemed reluctant to give advice as to what would be the best use of the money we could put aside for this. We could have easily blown over 5000$ or more on care if we had left her in their care as long as they thought was necessary, if we had done every test they wanted. Once it was clear to them that we were budget limited they were talking about how much it would cost to have her discharged and brought back if euthanasia becomes necessary, etc... Thankfully, our bunny is doing fine now, and I do think they did a good job taking care of her. And I don't think it's necessarily from a desire to extract money from us they were recommending expensive care, but because they don't like animals dying either.
Taking this experience of dealing with (veterinary) medical costs and bringing it to human care, what I feel would cause issues letting people take on the costs of medical care directly is that they are not aware of what is efficient use of ressources and doctors tend by their position to prefer to use unlimited ressources. And administrators are either detached from costs concerns (government administrators) or incentivised to minimise costs (insurance). What we'd need is hireable healthcare negociators who work solely for the patients, to maximise utility for ressources.
pigeonburger
6d ago
Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument.
This is the part that sticks out as what's broken in this otherwise reasonable and smart-enough sounding person. "This is a complicated problem that I can't say I fully understand but the answer is obviously violence." He keeps using adverbs like "simply, frankly, clearly", to try and drag violence within the realm of reasonable answers to a problem that is resistant to any other solutions. Violence is a reasonable answer when you are absolutely certain that it is the only way to resolve an issue with more severe consequences than the damage caused by the violence itself, which is why it's such a bad answer to complicated societal problems. But by his admission it IS a complicated societal problem that he doesn't feel like he has a good enough grasp on to explain himself.
pigeonburger
7d ago
We're getting close to it though. In a couple of years, when military kamikaze drones have become ubiquitous in all military armories (and thus can disappear from military armories), when the people with the knowledge to make them at home, from places like Ukraine and the ME, have spread everywhere, then I think we'll have a whole new thing to worry about.
pigeonburger
7d ago
Yeah, the victim surviving and appearing on TV with injuries won't garner the assassin much sympathy.
pigeonburger
7d ago
Yeah, but grenades are not as easy for civilians to acquire as guns, don't have that big a range and you'd need quite a bit of testing to get the sequence right for pulling the pin, cooking them and dropping them from a specific height. And in war you can usually iterate on failures, but an assassin doesn't have that luxury, one failure means the target goes into hiding or goes around with beefed up security and if you tried to use drones, that security will have jammers and will be looking for any drones that tries to get close.
pigeonburger
8d ago
On top of worries about the drone itself others have expressed, an explosive payload that's stable enough to be loaded on a drone, but reliable enough that you can plan on being able to trigger it, that's powerful enough to guarantee a kill but that's also light enough to fit on a small drone, that's not the kind of thing that you can get anywhere, and trying to acquire it is likely to attract more attention from the authorities than acquiring a gun.
pigeonburger
13d ago
"Competence" was not one of them.
Well, in absolute terms sure. But in relative term he only had to be more competent than the secret service. Something that in the wake of his attempt does not seem nearly as high a bar as it seemed prior.
pigeonburger
13d ago
more than cancelled out by not being able to say "first President to do X"
In normal times I would have agreed, but I think they overplayed that card in recent years and I think the american public just don't care anymore about hearing Democrats and the media self-servingly calling everything Trump does "unprecedented" and then doing the same shit but defending it as different. If they can the appearance of having at least a little integrity in the public eye then maybe their objections won't seem as partisan when they raise them later.
pigeonburger
13d ago
Another possibility: Joe Biden is doing his party a big service right now by letting himself become a sacrifice.
He's on his way out so there's no downside for anyone on his side to condemn and criticize him for the pardon. It gives them all a stage they can grandstand on to claim that they are the principled ones. It also increases the pressure on Trump if he wants to use his pardon on friends or family.
If you have to claim it never happened I think it does demonstrate that on some level you're either aware it's morally indefensible and do feel guilty over it, or you at least know it would look really bad if you tried to defend it as justified.
As long as they're not firmly on the other side of the friend-enemy divide to the West they do need a fig leaf, as flimsy as it is, so that it doesn't become untenable for the West to be on friendly term with them, especially since it was sold to the western public after WW2 that a country committing a genocide or other atrocities is all you need to justify war with them. (I mean, there were complex reasons for WW2, but if you asked the average person, they'll say it's because of the genocide, even if it doesn't make sense chronologically).
You'd get close to equal crime rates from irrational actors. Rational actors you just need to be sure to not let the benefit of crime outweigh the penalty, but that's a relatively low bar to clear. I think there's likely very few criminals in prison who believe whatever benefit they got from their crime is worth the time spent in prison (and the criminal record). Piling on more punishment after that has very little if any effect. Increasing the catch and conviction rate, however... It would hit the behavioral conditioning that irrational actors need to get.
As an interesting anecdote, I grew up firmly believing the mantra that "crime doesn't pay" and "criminals always get caught". I mean that I believed them literally, that the police had an almost 100% rate of solving crimes. Of course as I grew up I realized it's not really the case. But it still shaped me to be a person who is almost obsessively rule-abiding. Like I have a hard time jaywalking at night when there's absolutely no one watching, I feel dumb not doing it, but when I force myself to do it, it feels like I'm going against a deeply programmed instinct. I wonder what kind of person I would have grown up to be if I had the current perception that criminals almost always get away with crime, and get caught when they're unlucky or sloppy. There's a lot of kids who probably believe that nowadays, from seeing friends and family get away with crime.
pigeonburger
16d ago
I mean, the thought experiment is comparing two extremes' effect on irrational actors, but any sane policy would adjust punishments so that it doesn't at the same time create unfortunate incentives for rational actors.
It depends what kind of criminals you're thinking about, but most of them don't do any kind of reasonned risk/reward analysis. They simply believe punishment doesn't matter because they won't get caught. It's like reckless driving; a likely result is death, the harshest punishment, but it's infrequent enough that the people doing it discount its possibility to zero. Or teens and unwanted pregnancies, even when there wasn't an easy way out, it still happened all the time because the punishment was infrequent enough as to seem unlikely to happen.
pigeonburger
17d ago
The point is that criminals are not deterred by the length and severeness of the punishment but by the likelihood and immediacy of the punishment.
pigeonburger
18d ago
The people they are selling themselves to share the same self-delusion
Or, alternatively, are judging them on their ability to not go off-message on a public podcast.
pigeonburger
18d ago
If that's true these people must all be filthy rich now, from the prediction markets.
pigeonburger
22d ago
The universal root of horror is not death or pain, it's powerlessness. For women it tends to be loss of social power. For instance, desperately pleading to someone for help only to be ignored or dismissed, or being unable to exert any influence on others. That second one is what a lot of this "suburban 50s" genre is playing to.
pigeonburger
23d ago
My friends and I were speculating the other day how this could be improved within the current constraints of our public health system, we landed on a mix of telehealth and licensed practitionners (could be NPs) who specialise in making observations (and auscultations, etc...) for doctors to extend the amount of ailments that can diagnosed by a remote doctor.
My work insurance has as one of its perks free access to a telehealth service and it's shocking how convenient it is compared to going through the public health pipeline, when it is able to help. I'm sure it's convenient to the doctors who work through that system too.
There are not official gradations of lawyers, but it's widely understood that there are (specialties aside) bad, okay, good and fantastic lawyers, and the public has a good idea where specific levels of quality are found. They know that is all you can get is a mall lawyer, your chances are much lower (for the same quality of case) than if you could hire a prestigious law firm. Doctors associations cling to the idea that (specialties aside) doctors are essentially fungible, and this is even more explicit in countries where a public system assigns doctors to the public. Of course, this is preposterous to the public, you don't have to be a doctor yourself to spot when one is particularly good or not. Anyone with a bit of life experience has seen lazy doctors, doctors who don't listen to them and give them an obviously bad diagnosis because of it, and on the other side doctors who spotted something from hard to read symptoms. My wife recently got assigned by our healthcare system to a shifty clinic in a bad neighborhood where the clinic also advertises "natural remedy treatments" alongside having actual licensed doctors, and to our system that's good enough: to them she needed to be assigned to a clinic, any clinic, they're all as good as one another, and if she wants to switch she gets shoved to the back of the line and likely will be without an assigned clinic for 5 years. And on the opposite side, an optometrist going above and beyond speculating about the reason for me having an uveitis led to me having an auto-immune disease diagnosed and my quality of life improved dramatically.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Damn, those recommended requirements! I treated myself to what was a decently high end gaming computer at the start of 2021, with an RTX 3070 (non Ti), thinking I'll be good for a 5-6 years, and now it's already starting to fall outside of recommended requirements for new games.
Have you read The Toxoplasma Of Rage? Things everyone agree on don't get much attention, it's just the way our societies are wired.
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