“The average cost of a three-day hospital stay is $30,000.” @helenouyang.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2024/12/08/o...
Opinion | What Doctors Like Me Know About Americans’ Health Care Anger
Link Preview: Opinion | What Doctors Like Me Know About Americans’ Health Care Anger: As a doctor, I’ve been on both sides of frustrating health care debacles.
pretends not to notice but it has some egg on its face.
(thanks!)
i might have a less tolerant (perhaps unreasonably) standard of not dark. i consider intentional manufacture of inconveniences to get a user to do what’s in a site owner’s interest or discourage them from what’s not, even if it’s not deceptive, to be pretty dark. and i still see a lot of that.
my wife right now is yelling at a robot on the telephone “I want to talk to a representative!” she’s yelled 3 times. she has no idea how to get through all the high-tech chaff, she’s thrashing in frustration. discouraged customers don’t cost. is that a dark pattern? i say yes, hell yes. but YMMV!
just a random moment. i can’t look in any direction, via any digital modality, without seeing a hell of a lot of darkness.
a lot still seems pretty prevalent… link suppression on x / threads, difficult cancelations, pop-ups demanding email addresses, etc. the FTC was working on banning junk fees, but they’re still all over my hotel bookings and rent. i saw incipient hope in the Khan FTC, but very far from vanquishment.
and an abiding faith—based on a tendentious misreading either of the Christian religion or Adam Smith, pick your poison—that ruthlessly seeking “what’s in it for me?” can only yield a brilliant, sustainable future so there’s nothing to have misgivings about, regardless of what eggs must be broken.
there was the moment they decided dark patterns are really bright patterns because they are profitable patterns, and what is profitable is efficient and good, progressive in the only way that is ultimately meaningful. that was the moment they left us, became something apart. they continue to diverge
perhaps a pony would be more practical.
a value i’ve always strived to uphold is intellectual charity. people i disagree with are good people like me. try to understand the circumstances and beliefs under which a good person might come to believe what they do. 1/
with age my eyesight has changed, my focal range has grown narrower and more brittle. something similar has happened to my capacity for intellectual charity. 2/
i do my best, of course, in arguments and conversations to behave charitably. but beyond the confines of a live conversation — in which the presence of a real human does encourage stretching toward mutual comprehension — i find myself more and more just quietly writing off political adversaries. 3/
these are just bad fucking people, i find myself thinking. 4/
i don’t take this as a positive development. i wonder how much of it is my increasing age, my decaying soul, and how much reflects the changing times. /fin
a cosmopolitan Constitution, if you can keep it.
I agree we should do absolutely everything we can to insist upon no widening of the exclusion based on jurisdiction. The Court already has come up with justifications like the sky isn’t blue, several times now. US v Trump and Trump v Anderson both qualify. We collectively shrugged.
i don’t disagree. but i think this Supreme Court might. it might separate the obligations of jurisdiction (which come automatically as you say) from benefits thereof, which require some affirmative submission. i think this is bad! that suggests this Court might well do it. 1/
to get even more dystopian, the Court could claim people here on the sly lack other benefits of ordinary jurisdiction, have weaker due process rights in criminal cases, etc. this Court might find this an appealing frontier of law to explore. /fin
maybe! but these are arguable questions, malleable definitions. we have a Supreme Court that’s very capable of finding ways to justify the conclusions it prefers, and this question of jurisdiction which has already admitted exceptions is quite a wedge for them to play upon.
i mean, i hope you are right. i just think it’s no more of a stretch than other things this Court has done to read those who have concealed themselves from the US as not meeting the bar of being subject to jurisdiction in this sense. again, what the court did with 14A sec 3 was at least as farcical.
i agree this is absolutely horrifying.
that’s the status quo interpretation, i agree. 1/
the Court could revise it, and say that if you are in the US on the sly, you have rendered yourself not subject to US law by evading it. even though you would be so subject if discovered, you have withheld yourself from the obligations of jurisdiction, so are not entitled to its benefits. /fin
we really want black-letter Constitutional support. the more invocation of legislation+precedent are required to make our case, the bigger an invitation to a Supreme Court which has given massive middle fingers to stare decisis when they think they know better (even though they are the very worst).
it’s a good question, but it’s already interpreted as excluding children of diplomats from automatic citizenship. the parents have diplomatic immunity, so the child is deemed not subject to the jurisdiction.
i hope you are right + something would be a bridge too far here. but a Supreme Court that inverted the plain meaning of Section 3 of the 14th A (requiring Congressional action to disable, when the text requires Congressional action to remove the disability) strikes me as willing to make new history.
The Constitution is a stronger bulwark than Congress’ laws. If you think Congress can end birthright citizenship, because the Constitution leaves to Congress the right to define the jurisdiction of the United States, then birthright citizenship can be narrowed anytime by an act of Congress. 1/
I think most commentators believe the Constitution protects birthright citizenship *from* Congress, though. (I think so as well. I just think it doesn’t protect it from our rogue Supreme Court, who has done much worse to the plain meaning of the Constitution already.) /fin