JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
2d ago
These publications are generally reliable.
I do not know about rest of the world, but as it concerns Middle East, and especially Israel, BBC and Aljazeera is about as reliable as Keith Olbermann is reliable when talking about Trump.
Same goes for Reuters and AP for anything that relates in any way to US partisan politics or culture wars topics. Maybe they are super-reliable in other dimensions, but I suspect Gell-Mann amnesia may be playing a role there.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
Uzbek man kills
I would like to urge a healthy dose of skepticism towards taking the claims of Russian security services about who did it at face value. While it is very highly likely that Ukrainians organized the hit, and they may have used a local or hired asset to do it, Russian security services are known for a habit of rounding up a closest plausibly looking target (preferably somebody from migrant population having no support system to intervene on their behalf, like an Uzbek) and beating them up until they confess everything. The goal there is to "solve" the case as fast as possible, not to find a real culprit, and in general nobody cares too much whether this particular guy actually did it or not.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
Was normal for me so far. I did get some light cold, but that often happens to me when I travel, and I have been traveling more than usual for the last couple of months. If anything, the last cold was lighter than I usually get. Haven't noticed also any inordinate amount of people being sick at work (I'm working in highly remote company so a person taking sick time off usually publishes a note on the common slack channel) though with a lot of people being out for holidays anyway it may be harder to notice. So another data point here towards null.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
So what? What would it accomplish?
Hopefully, reframing the conversation from "greedy capitalists kill grandmas" to "healthcare policy matters and we must pay a lot of attention to it and demand much better from The Experts (TM) and relentlessly shame those who dared to lie to us and lead us to the mess we have, and demand from the future ones to be candid with us and provide solutions that look better".
that would still be true
I hope that if by some miracle we found in ourselves, as a society, a way to move conversation from murdering CEOs to discussing policies, then we could also find a way to improve those policies or at least have people en masse understand what those policies are and what are their consequences, so it won't be as easy for the next Gruber to deceive people. I don't exactly expect it, but I hope.
And Congress, like most institutions these days, cannot be fixed, only replaced.
Replaced with what? How? The founders of the current government have done a lot of work to lay the philosophical and practical foundations of the system now in place. It is true that it has diverged from the original intent significantly, but at least if we proclaim as a goal to return to that, we may rely on that work to understand what has to be done and why. What is your foundations and where you want to move, beyond destroying the US government?
JarJarJedi
3d ago
There's a way to do it, it's the sausage principle - don't look how the sausage is made. You redefine "cheap" as "no payment at the point of consumption" (or a nominal payment) and you hide the real costs. The best way to do it is through taxation since nobody reads the budgets and nobody is able to figure out how much exactly money is spent on what, and even if somebody does that, it's no longer your money, it's some abstract tax money and you can always demand that the billionaires pay more - it has nothing to do with you. If for some reason the obvious way is not available, you can at least separate payment and consumption by calling a pre-paid subscription scheme "insurance" and by deducting the payments in a way that you never get to touch the money before payment (e.g. payroll deductions) so you don't feel it's your money - it's just your employer provides you the service for free, how generous of them.
You can redefine "fast" as "you can talk very fast to somebody who is in no position to help you". Many healthcare organizations do that - e.g. to get an appointment to a specialist, you need a "referral" from your primary care doctor, and maybe the primary doctor will see you next week, and then the appointment to the real specialist will be in another couple of weeks, and so you waited almost a month or so without even noticing it. And there's no guarantee that specialist can do anything for you either - maybe they will refer you to some tests, then to another one and so on - and you can spend many months in this without even getting as much as initial diagnosis. Of course, added value of this is each interaction must be paid for (sometimes several times over - you can't just put lab technician pay, lab materials pay and visit pay on the same bill, we're not some kind of savages!) but "insurance" covers it so you never actually know how much does it cost, not that it'd help you since you can't elect to use another lab technician anyway if you thought this one charges too much, and in fact nobody is going to tell you how much it costs anyway - because that's exactly what was asked for from the start.
And there's no "rationing" - it's just the doctors are very busy. And for some reason there's never enough of them. As for the quality, if you have to wait several months to see a specialist, and there's no other one in 500-mile radius of you, how much are you in the mood to refuse to visit one because you think they're not world-class enough? How do you even know what's world-class - how many ENT specialists or podiatrists have you seen in other countries to be able to know the difference? It certainly costs a lot, and it seems to be a lot of demand, so it must be very good, right?
So the system is actually going out of it's way to provide exactly what is being asked for. It's just since, as you noted, it's not possible to actually provide it, it works very hard at making it appear as if it's doing it. Because that's exactly what we're pushing it to do. And it is delivering that to us as much as it can. People think it's a hostile system - but very often it's not, it's just reacts to our demands of it within the limitations placed on t and tries to deliver what it can.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
The problem with green investment seems to me to be that is it is so polluted with political money that you can't use market as a signal for anything. I.e. everybody invests in, I don't know, solar panels (just random example) and then it turns out the model is not viable, and all the political money is burned, which nobody (among politicians) cares about, and your money is burned with them. Sure, if US were a dictatorship like China, you could follow the political money just relying on inertia, but in the US the agenda could change every 4 years, and some investments may be so stupid that they don't survive even if the government wants them to. There will be viable projects too, the question is how you separate viable from unviable ones in a distorted market?
JarJarJedi
5d ago
when fighting pollution is more doable, easier to gather support for, actually fosters innovation and chances of reducing it
Real pollution-fighting activists exist. But they are usually much less visible than the climate gasbags. And, gives as fighting pollution is pretty much normalized now, it doesn't gain more attention than any other case of malfeasance like fraud or theft. I mean, you need to do a real lot of it to be noticed, and usually it will be dealt with before it becomes big.
There also could be a possibility that having a big problem which is somebody else's fault but you can protest it and whine about it as much as you want, and blame literally everything on it - is actually much more attractive than solving small-scale, practical and solve-able problems? I mean, if you can just fix the emission of a local factory by upgrading its air filters and that's it - where's the moral superiority in that? Where's the damnation of soul-less capitalism? Where's the potential for annual lavish festivals where you can shmooze with Hollywood celebrities and vane billionaires? Most people want to be Warriors of Light, not utility inspectors.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
I think it's hair-splitting. Yes, the empires evolved, but they always evolve. USA of 1776 is not the same as USA of 2024, and USA in 100 years will probably be different still (if it survives). But late empire Romans considered themselves the continuation of the tradition and culture and the nation of the early Romans (even though their politics was probably very different than one 500 years ago). I would grant Byzantium it probably different empire from Rome (even though it kinda spinned off it) but I think splitting the Roman or Bizantine history further does not make too much sense when we talk about "how long the empire survives before it falls". Sure, moving from democracy to the emperors' monarchy was a fall of democracy in Rome - but I don't think it was a fall of Rome as the empire. Otherwise we'd have to say things like "Rome fell and became Rome" which IMHO is just weird.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
300 years seems to be too low. Romans need to be given at least 500 if we don't count the republican times, and if we do, then we need to add another 100-150 years. And that's not counting Eastern Roman empire which survived till the Renaissance times.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
The really scary part is we only know about "replication crisis" because there are still old-timers left around who remember how science should have been done. Once they retire, the academia - at least the western one, I have no idea what is happening in China or India - will have bullshitters occupy all the levels and there would be nobody to teach any other way or to object to what is going on. And the public will be under the impression this is how it's done, there's no other way, you have to just trust the experts and if they are wrong sometimes (like almost all the times) it's just how the life is. And even if you feel like something wrong is going on, you won't have any means to express it or formulate it as a consistent critique, unless you go back 150 years and start recovering the science from there (provided the pre-woke sources won't be destroyed or bowdlerized to avoid offense by then).
JarJarJedi
5d ago
For example, nobody is angry at this guy: https://x.com/OcrazioCornPop/status/1868084582425170121 - who openly admits at passing healthcare policy by deception, and now we are witnessing the fruits of his labors. Nobody even remembers he existed - and he will be writing the next "healthcare reform", whatever it is, and one after that - or somebody who is exactly like him. Did you ever hear discussing anything about that anywhere in MSM or among those internet people that this week are all healthcare experts?
JarJarJedi
10d ago
-You are forced to buy eggs from us from your employer.
Now, whose fault is that? Certainly UH CEO didn't put a geis on America to make it impossible to shop insurance providers, and yet... Whose fault is that and who could change that? Somehow nobody is interested in talking about it.
-You pay a yearly fee for eggs.
But why? Why you can't just go to the store and buy eggs, why you have to pre-pay them via some kind of ridiculous complex arrangement? Imagine you buy your bacon, orange juice and english muffins in a normal way, but have to go through this weird arrangement for eggs - aren't you going to ask what the heck is going on, why I can't just buy eggs like any other normal grocery item?
The CEO's job at most companies is to reduce the cost of eggs, or provide lower quality eggs. The CEO at a health insurance company is finding new ways to not give people the egg they paid for
That's not true. Insurance CEOs also can reduce costs and provide lower quality service (e.g. generics vs. brand medications), denial of coverage is by far not the only tool in their arsenal.
JarJarJedi
10d ago
Around 2020-2021, it looked like DEI is the way to win (or, at least, not get a mob setting your building on fire). So, a lot of people were scared into going with the flow. As the flow turns now, we may discover much less people are willing to stick their necks out to fight for DEI when it may mean not only being praised and promoted.
JarJarJedi
10d ago
if their boss tells them to lie or to ignore a tax the company should pay, they do it without fuss.
Sure, that can happen. However, if the boss had a manual, given to every single employee that joins the company, that instructs, black on white, to not pay taxes and lie to the IRS - wouldn't you expect at least one disgruntled employee over the years to send it to the IRS (or, alternatively, the local anti-corporate crusader) and the boss get in trouble? Unethical orders are often given verbally exactly because it leaves no proof and provides plausible deniability - "I didn't mean that, he just misunderstood me!".
JarJarJedi
10d ago
They are absurd because any amount of profit or excess spending involves making healthcare more expensive
Again, this is true for every commercial company. Maybe in a glorious socialist paradise nobody makes any profit and still everything works just fine, too bad America is not a glorious socialist paradise and no country on Earth is or ever will be, because it is all an ignorant fantasy. In real world if you want shit to be done, you better pay people for doing shit, and yes, that means profit over replacement costs, otherwise they'd just go do something profitable instead. Healthcare is not some magic thing - any service you want you'd have to either pay for it or force people to do it by some other means. Experience shows people being threatened don't work that well. People having no motive to work better also work not that well - which you kinda sorta start to realize right here:
It is regulated, but given the constant unmanaged fraud and all kinds of malfeasance it is either regulated ineffectively
Welcome to the Real Government, as opposed to the Unicorn Farts Land Imaginary Ideal Government, which people somehow imagine could exist and take care of us all. The real government is humongously inefficient and corrupt, always has been so and always will be. So the obvious solution, of course, is to give it even more powers? Because if they have even more power, they surely stop being inefficient, corrupt and stupid - just because... of what exactly?
Certain industries shouldn't be profitable because that leads to cost-cutting and therefore death
It is entirely possible to operate more efficiently and not cause death - in virtually any industry, including health care industry. Any seasoned professional would be able to point out dozens of ways.
I want things like CEOs getting paid a few million max, because maybe then you'll get CEOs who are less efficient and finding legal ways to commit fraud.
I'm not sure how making the CEOs paid less is going to motivate them to commit less fraud. Let's say you are a worker on a puppy feeding factory (ignore the question why such factory exists), and you have a decision - if you choose one random puppy, and let it go hungry for a day, you can save some money, at the cost of a puppy suffering. Obviously, you have an ethical choice to make here. Now I come in and cut your salary in half. How exactly did it make you more motivated to make a more ethical choice? I mean, I understand the basic desire to stick it to those filthy rich assholes, but I am not sure how you get from there to incentivizing them to behave in ways you like them to behave.
JarJarJedi
10d ago
Why? To what end?
So that sometime, somewhere, somehow we could eventually learn to associate the problems we have with the people we appoint to solve those problems who instead cause even worse problems, and then maybe, just maybe, we start trying to realize maybe there's a better way to do things than just giving all the power to whoever looks most slick on TV and then murdering random rich people because it feels good. They way to solving the problem must go through at least seeing the problem, and I am observing just the opposite - a giant effort to avoid any hint of looking in the general direction of the problem.
JarJarJedi
10d ago
Well, there's an obvious solution to this conundrum - scrap the whole scheme :)
JarJarJedi
10d ago
"stuff" was a typo or autocorrupt
yes
Taking out a congressman
I'm not calling to murder congresscritters, Heavens forbid (neither their staff of course). But at least we may want to discuss their part of the responsibility for the problem, if we perceive it to be the problem? Given that I would define it as "very large" - they have the means to form the system, and they formed the current system as it is now, and they have the power to change it. A single healthcare CEO could probably hire marginally better customer support, and make the rules marginally less strict, but within given regulations and 4% average profit margins, they don't have much space for a radical change.
You've got to demolish the entire institution
You mean the glorious proletarian revolution? If past experiments teach us anything, it's that proletarian healthcare is not going to be better. As somebody who experienced both, I'd like to personally confirm this.
JarJarJedi
11d ago
Sure, I don't claim every secret will be promptly revealed. I claim a secret of this magnitude - existence of a secret manual which is given to every claim adjuster in the insurance company, and plainly states every claim must be denied - is very unlikely to survive for long. I'm sure there are secrets - probably very dirty secrets - that do survive, but they are probably not as widely known and as easy to reveal.
JarJarJedi
11d ago
but 4-6 percent of hundred of billions of dollars is a lot of money that could be spent elsewhere.
Sure, I could always explain how I would better spend somebody else's money. My point here was however that these profits have been characterized as "absurd". I don't see how it is appropriate.
the insurance companies are only bringing value by fucking over American citizens
I don't think you could seriously defend the premise that this is the only thing they are doing.
destabilizing an already fragile healthcare system.
I though it was properly fixed in 2010? Or at least a lot of people told us it would be. I wonder why nobody asks those people any questions about why our system has become so fragile after they fixed it so well? Why nobody even mentions that happened at all? Health insurance industry is one of the most thoroughly regulated industries of all, yet literally nobody discusses why no responsibility belongs on that side.
they are profitable in the sense that they help some people get rich at the expense of Americans
That's pretty much describes any American company, doesn't it? Now I think it's up to you to point our why existence of profitable businesses in America is a bad thing. I have lived in a country where there were no profitable businesses (at least not legal ones) and I tell you, I wouldn't advise anybody to get sick there. Not an experience I'd ever want to repeat.
JarJarJedi
11d ago
If your only tool is a hammer, everything is a nail...
JarJarJedi
11d ago
Pharma and insurance are absurdly profitable
I find numbers from 4% to 6% profitability for insurance companies. Why are those numbers "absurd"? It looks to me as comparatively modest profit margin. Wikipedia shows 371b revenue, 23b net income on 273b assets for United in 2023 - I would want to hear an explanation why those numbers should be considered "absurdly profitable"? How much would be reasonably profitable, given that some zero-risk savings accounts paid out around 5% at the same time?
Pharma does seem to be much more profitable, with 25-30% profit margins being common for companies like Pfizer and Merck.
JarJarJedi
11d ago
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.
Unfortunately, certain modern things like social network tend to highlight and incentivize the evil side. I mean, for me it'd be weird to parade my evil side publicly, under my own name, for all to see. But it looks like for a real lot of people, it's something they would eagerly do. Let's not kid ourselves - everybody has this monster somewhere inside them. Though not everybody lets it roam in public.
Demand for car insurance is artificially inflated by it being literally illegal to drive a vehicle without it.
That's not true, at least in some states, like CA. You can post a self-insurance bond instead. Virtually nobody does that because for most people it doesn't make any financial sense.
I was going to present some evidence about AP, but sadly I instead saw this:
https://apnews.com/article/germany-magdeburg-christmas-market-6b2bcf305eb9f60f8d7273949dbba4c8
Just in case it changes later, the headline says: "At least 2 dead and 60 hurt after a car drives into a German Christmas market in a suspected attack". Yes, "a car drives". I think we can close the case about "little to no spin" now.
P.S. before you say "maybe they didn't know who was driving it", a) that's not a good excuse and b) they did - it's a 50 year old man from Saudi Arabia. He's in police custody.
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