This post is bonus content.
sometimes i find myself saying “thank you” to claude.ai then i wonder whether my politeness is burning down the rainforest.
dystopia is not salutary.
@John but rents whose recipients would not have them displaced.
crypto begins as, its entire architecture is shaped and constrained in order to be, a form of money or commodity independent of states. it is an experimental alternative to state coordination of finance and even contracts.
now it’s surging, solely as a function of expected endorsement of the state.
i hate to link over there, but #MattBruenig is so good on this stuff. https://x.com/mattbruenig/status/1866915041154568279
this #MattBruenig piece on health care economics is a work of art.
1) administrative costs associated with health insurance are HUGE, not a rounding error next to inflated provider costs;
2) the only justification for those costs would be to rein in provider rents, but not only do private insurers fail to, they have structural incentives to let them grow.
read this one.
@peter for not entirely unrelated reasons, they’ve taken the same approach to suicide. there’s no acceptable attribution of cause or motive beyond “struggling with mental illness”. why the person themself thought they did it is apparently as unworthy of examination as a schizophrenic’s hallucination.
Text: The politics of stupid is believing that the way to deal with Farage or Trump type populism is to do what Farage or Trump happens to be shouting about at the time. Concern about immigration is real enough, but it is important to ask why there is concern about immigration. To put it very simply, there are probably two types of reasons why voters find populists going on about immigration attractive. The first is that these voters don’t like foreigners. Immigration numbers don’t matter to these people when there are already plenty of foreign looking people already here. The second type are voters who mistakenly think that problems like finding it difficult to see a doctor or buy a house are because of immigration. Cutting immigration is only likely to make those problems worse, by stopping doctors or construction workers coming to the UK
“Where are all the bureaucrats?” a useful chart by #KevinDrum https://jabberwocking.com/where-are-all-the-bureaucrats/
have any of you tried out Huawei HarmonyOS? how is it? what do you think?
“We acknowledge road users may be faced with socioeconomic challenges” ht @inertiate https://frontrange.co/@apnewsbot/113629830175123772
you know you’ve encountered a higher class of revolutionary when at least a pinky toe, if not several of the more vigorous toes, is latent.
the last time around we had robber barons. this time we have toddler tyrants.
is syria an isolated event or some kind of domino?
“The average cost of a three-day hospital stay is $30,000.” #HelenOuyang https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/08/opinion/health-care-anger.html
“Or, as the Northwestern University political-science professor Jeffrey Winters put it…this feels like a moment of ‘in-your-face oligarchy.’”
// “feels like” is too soft. this is what oligarchy looks like, laughing proud. https://universeodon.com/@memeorandum/113624917149665952
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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.
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 see things as 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