domain:alexepstein.substack.com?page=6?page=4?page=0?page=2
ABigGuy4U
3m ago
-Ron Brown the Secretary of Commerce who was killed in a plane crash in Croatia. The medical examiner found a execution-style bullet hole in his head that was explained away as a flying rivet.
-Mark Middleton, who hung himself from a tree, and then after that shot himself with a shotgun.
The real suspicious thing is just the sheer volume. How many politicians have a double digit number of associates die violently or commit suicide?
Folamh3
5m ago
Everyone knows about Epstein, I'm interested in the people who aren't famous and whose deaths were page 4 stories.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
7m ago
Children who have grown up in a WEIRDÂą society that teaches them barking-mad ideas like "When you're hiring someone with Other People's Money, you should pick the best person for the job, rather than the applicant who gave you a wad of cash." or "It matters whether someone did something wrong, not just whether they are related to you."
Âącf. The WEIRDest People in the World (Joseph Henrich).
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
11m ago
The Democrat rank and file seem to have have largely convinced themselves that the Democratic party message is Just Being A Decent Human Being. It's hard to pivot from that to the message being a problem.
I'm a former management consultant and I'm not aware of anyone being mad about SWE salaries. The job paths are broadly comparable with broad salary scales, competition, risk, limited career length, compensation broadly tracking to productivity (usually more unequivocally so for SWEs), etc.
I feel like people complain about doctors roughly in the same way people complain about longshoremen or garbage men. A guild (or the literal mafia) capturing part of the economy, limiting access and extracting extreme rent, with doctors union arguably being even worse since they not only cost a lot of money but drain top talent from the more productive parts of economy (even within their own sector of the economy!).
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
17m ago
The strongest argument for it, actually. If the only proposition made by Sklavenmoral were that 'the weak ought to be protected from the strong', and the only proposition made by Herrenmoral were that 'the strong ought to be able to do to the weak whatever they feel like', the former would be called 'morality' and the latter by various words frowned upon by Unitedstatesian television broadcasters.
The strongest argument in the other direction, on the other hand, is their respective attitudes towards those who Accomplish things, such as ending the almost-nine-year gap during which America Could Not Into Space.
(cf. Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman, Astral Codex Ten, July 2024).
Lewis2
20m ago
Hamas is (still?) the governing power in Gaza, having been voted into power by the population in as fair and free an election as it is probably possible to get in Gaza. Despite all their corruption, authoritarianism, and just plain bad decision making, that still gives them an edge over the other competing gangs. Plus, being bigger and stronger than the rest counts for something on its own.
anti_dan
28m ago
If something is happening at your hospital like once a year, that seems inevitable.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
33m ago
Various marital aids, I presume.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
36m ago
It would be easier and better for your psyche if, instead of getting upset at the idea of PAs having less status than doctors, you just dropped the stigma you currently associate with the working class.
The anonymity of the internet equalises the doctor, the cashier and the executive - online all their opinions are considered equally merited. And this has mostly wonderful effects imo, but one negative is that the wealthy express their opinions on working class jobs the way they think about them - calling them worthless jobs or saying the only people fit to push a broom or work at a supermarket are 70 iq or they're jobs for drug addicts - and they're right to an extent, they aren't as skilled as professional work, and don't require as much discipline or intelligence, and can indeed be performed by drug addicts (just like medicine and corpo blah blah blah).
But this has given the zeitgeist the impression that these jobs are worthless and as a result nobody wants to do them any more. They don't take pride in doing them and resent them. And so you get passive aggression at the deli and half missing fast food delivered cold, and people getting ticked off when their respectable friends are labelled working class. But there is plenty of pride in doing any job well and more importantly there is no shame in it. A janitor who takes pride in doing his job well is infinitely more respectable than a doctor who reads webmd at people in between smoke breaks.
Who cares if Rafa or I think your sister in law isn't in the same league as a doctor? You know her, is she the kind of person to fuck over someone's life through ignorance or is she going to do her best at all times? It's that spirit that is admirable, not her position in the pecking order.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
43m ago
I got myself an air fryer. Now that the share of low-fat oven-baked fries in my diet is going to rise, I need some kind of sauce to enjoy them with. What are your go-to homemade low-calorie dipping sauces?
zeke5123a
54m ago
It’s interesting the Dems have been focusing on “we have to figure out a way to get our message out” and not on “maybe the problem is the message.”
EdgeCityRed
55m ago
If Muslims were making laws aimed at me, I'd care more about what they do.
Most people don't care about others' personal beliefs, as long as they don't affect people who don't believe the same things.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
1hr ago
Ah, thanks. My district actually IS worse than that, close to 4:1... but still, there's a lot less than 20% Trump support visible.
Gaashk
1hr ago
I don't know, and am starting to understand how my older working class relatives ended up giving each other lame things like jeans, socks, and toothpaste. Anything desirable enough to be excited about must be discussed at length (we're currently considering a three day trip to a nearby city). We're low enough SES that this includes things like an $80 espresso machine. We're both picky about personal items, and it's very obvious when someone isn't using the thing you got them. I will be missed if I leave or get home early/late by even 10 minutes.
At least 5 year olds are fun to buy gifts for. They are the best gift recipients. We got ours pajamas, after previously not having any, and she was so happy about it, and wondered out loud if Santa had placed the pajamas on the store rack for us to see, since it's so great having princess pajamas.
Throwaway05
1hr ago
Sounds like a design problem.
It's designed well, people just refuse to use it correctly and we can't force them. No amount of civil engineering is going to make up for disaffected young males who insist on driving around at 40 miles over the speed limit.
Society has mostly decided we can't force patients to use the systems correctly or take care of themselves. And I'm okay with that. Although this was a big part of what the ACA was about - health insurance only really works if everyone has it so you needed to force people to get.
I'm not saying all the regulations are good, many are emphatically not - physician salaries have been dropping for forever, so what's causing increased costs? Well a bunch of it is admin and other horseshit like that.
Think about how complex some of this system is, a huge percentage of costs, maybe even worth as much of 50% of doctors salaries, is healthcare workers and systems protecting themselves from getting sued. You want to drop healthcare costs and make access easier? Great make it so we can't get sued. I promise you that you will mostly get better quality care faster and for cheaper. But no, people don't want that, they want to be able to sue.
So healthcare is more expensive.
So much of what goes on is like that.
AlexanderTurok
1hr ago
Republicans are winning over tech bros and unions, and bleeding college-educated voters.
Unions sure, but I'd be surprised if Republicans were winning more tech workers than they did in 2012.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
1hr ago
“SomethingIsWrong2024” displays a shockingly bad grasp of data analysis, because “all my neighbors had Kamala signs!!” and the like.
All my neighbors had Kamala signs. I mean, not all, but there were a lot of them. In my neighborhood of several hundred households, I counted exactly one Trump sign. My county went about 3:1 for Kamala, and since it includes Newark I would be very surprised if my particular neighborhood was worse than that (I don't know where to find precinct-level results, unfortunately). So there's likely lots of Trump supporters keeping a low profile.
Bleep
1hr ago
As a general rule, the right time to do or start something is always now. Looking back on my life (about to broach mid 30s), everything would have been better if I had just started it earlier instead of trying to time it right. Whenever I thought "I want to do this, but now isn't the right time," I was wrong and I should have just started. From school, relationships, moves, investments, starting my business, etc.
zeke5123a
1hr ago
You are in Pittsburgh, right?
It’s different in NYC in that my social circle is much more lawyer heavy. With that said, a lot of them don’t look down on other professions as much complain about the lawyer profession.
Templexious
1hr ago
Social media is an interesting case-study in "This is a thing everyone knows is bad, its structures are bad, and yet we do it anyway". A perfect example of a coordination problem, where due to competing interests no one actually exits the game, because there's just too much social consequence to exiting.
While most readers of my comment would assume I ascribe the detachment from reality that X is to Elon, it's not entirely true. Having watched Twitter's degradation from the early days, it was a blue-coded firehose of shit that went from being able to traverse in a sensible way to randomly interspersing bullshit regardless of how recent it is, to get you to click and spend more time on it.
So yeah, your ability to stay away from Twitter/X is to be lauded, and I make no excuse for my own bad social media habits, even if they amount mostly to browsing various hobby groups.
MotteAnon12345
1hr ago
The Gen IV designs that don't rely on water as the heat carrier/moderator (I think molten salt or liquid sodium based ones) operate at ~700C so are quite suitable for process heat. Of course, good luck getting the NRC to approve any of them.
"Governing" here is a very murky term. Sure, they are the biggest and the meanest of the gangs, but so what? Among any set of gangs, there would be one that is the biggest and the meanest. They didn't have any process that resembles free election even remotely - they had a gang war with FATAH in which they emerged victorious, and slaughtered or exiled anybody who was affiliated with the competing gang. Being the strongest gang counts for something, sure, but that something shouldn't earn them any legitimacy in the eyes of people who should know better.
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