dear interweb,
a month ago i went to an ER. recognizably the hospital chain billed about $8000, which after insurance adjustments became $1100. i paid.
more than a month later, a random provider i’ve never heard of bills ~$1500, adjusted to ~$600 for the same ER visit. do i really have to pay this?
if you can circumvent all margin limits and financing constraints, investing at very high beta despite negative alpha will eventually make you very rich.
just don’t confuse a talent for generating hype to raise money and keep creditors at bay for industrial genius.
@noodlemaz words have many meanings, many connotations and denotations in actual usage. “woke[ness]” is an aggressively politicized term. yes it has its historical initial meaning, and other meanings, and proponents of various meanings are politically opposed to one another, rendering use in any sense inherently controversial, inherently offensive to one community or another. 1/
@noodlemaz but also, perhaps paradoxically, in some contexts the very controversy contributes to the clarity of what one is communicating. to refer, as i did, to “excess” wokeness as censorious invites the kind of controversy reflected in this exchange. i think that’s a feature, not a bug, because it communicates precisely what i am commenting on, a censoriousness both claimed and contested. 2/
@noodlemaz i myself am sympathetic to both the claim and the contestation. i identify more closely, politically and otherwise, with the community that would contest, but i view the claim has having a degree (an often exaggerated degree to be sure) of useful descriptiveness. i do think i’ve considered, no doubt imperfectly, the issues around my word choices. of course one can still take issue with them! /fin
@noodlemaz ( some meditation on this stuff — that one might definitely take issue with of course — here. https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/04/10/systemic-means-its-not-your-fault/index.html )
is this a lifestyle community?
for now we have achieved Artificial Colonel Intelligence.
@noodlemaz i don't have an overarching definition of wokeness. in this context i was using it to refer to the tendency of some activists and fellow travelers to put policing of language and commentary at the center of their practice, shunning and shaming people whose language or opinion are deemed regressive or bad.
i don't by any means think this fully characterizes the broad basket of tendencies (some i very much approve of) that are taken to constitute wokeness.
one way to overcome deflation without going "welfarist" in the way Xi (misguidedly) fears would be to fix this, and finance decent public health care. healthy people who need money for food are the best workers! subsidizing high quality medical care for all would make a sizable economic stimulus!
re @BeijingPalmer https://bsky.app/profile/beijingpalmer.bsky.social/post/3lfpwhp64422l
@light (i could syndicate whole posts to BlueSky with feedletter too, but for the 300 char limit. is WhiteWind an alternative hosting service built on top of atproto?)
history proves that while technological change does eliminate some traditional jobs, new, better, more productive jobs always emerge in the aftermath.
for example, for every job AI destroys, two new jobs will be created in the guard labor sector.
[tech notebook] Syndicating RSS to Mastodon and BlueSky with feedletter https://tech.interfluidity.com/2025/01/14/syndicating-rss-to-mastodon-and-bluesky-with-feedletter/index.html
ai will give us all perfect personalized tutors at the same time it eliminates any purpose or incentive to learn much.
traditionally we regulated free speech by eschewing prior restraint but using torts and the judicial system to impose some accountability ex post.
it was a good balance! lawsuits are risky and costly so you could speak pretty freely, but outrageous threat and defamation were deterred. 1/
but we now have a class for whom lawsuits are not risky and costly, for whom the expense — even if they lose and some anti-SLAPP law hits them — is negligible. and these people are difficult to sue, since a lawsuit can become an all-pay auction in legal expenses, and plutocrats can outbid. 2/
to some degree it was always thus — corporations have long had deep pockets. but the emergence of ideological, aggrieved billionaires who can speak without accountability but punish others for speech they dislike strikes me in practice as a sea change. 3/
i find when i write in places like this i worry much more about Elon Musk than i ever did about Goldman Sachs. (i said a lot of mean stuff about Goldman Sachs!) 4/
plutocrats championing the traditional free speech regime are championing a regime where no meaningful accountability binds them, but they can hold others painfully to account at will or on a whim. 5/
i dislike some of the censorious tendencies of the last decade, even the ones those very billionaires complain about. but “free speech unless you piss off a billionaire” strikes me as imposing a far worse chill than any excesses of wokeness or public health overcaution. /fin
“Self interest is the biggest impulse in politics. Never, ever doubt that. The second biggest is building an intellectual superstructure that justifies your self interest as truly being in the national interest. That's what's happening in much of Silicon Valley.” #KevinDrum https://jabberwocking.com/why-has-silicon-valley-turned-against-democrats/
@eyesquash no. they’ve just dramatically changed their position while pretending to be the sensible, sane, stable ones and accusing others of being counterproductive radicals, this year for one thing, next year for its opposite.
a bit odd if “Chinese officials” are not willing to have TikTok put up for sale in an open process, but prove willing specifically to sell to Elon Musk. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-14/china-discusses-sale-of-tiktok-us-to-musk-as-one-possible-option
@lordbowlich we're here to chat! you've nothing to apologize for. it's been a delightful exchange.
iOS has a great select-to-translate feature rendered frustrating by the ridiculously narrow range of languages it supports. an intelligent Apple would fix this kind of Apple Intelligence.
@lordbowlich Chesterton is a British writer of the early 20th C. I think the poor here refers to the proletariat. In Great Britain, land had been enclosed as capital and agricultural work formalized on contractual terms by this point, so to some degree proletarianized, I think.
You might make a similar critique with respect to the frontier farmer in the US, Jefferson's yeoman independent smallhold. They could be quite poor! I just don't think these are the classes Chesterton is referring to.
@phillmv capitalizing on anger at caricatures of "the left" or "the woke" seems like the most straightforward path to financial success as a public affairs writer, and there's a respectable niche that overtly new right writers cannot fill.
@phillmv it is a bit, well, almost Trumpish or Muskish that Matt is on a campaign, rather openly, to blame progressives — and to be seen to be blaming progressives because he claims it would be good for the prospects of Democrats! — after the campaign that was actually run. (i swear i saw a tweet where he explained this, but i can't find it now, so grains of salt.)
