DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
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User ID: 460
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
6mo ago
Us Americans, who also spell catsup "Ketchup": Lettuce leaves, Mayonnaise and Mustard spreads, and slices of Nightshade, Onion, and Pickle.
A Buddhist walks up to a food truck and says, "Make me one with everything."
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
6mo ago
If tomatoes were called nightshades, the standard hamburger toppings would be abbreviable as KLMMNOP.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
6mo ago
I wrote that as a list of individual things the ACA did, not a causal sequence. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
I get the 29 hr/wk thing, assuming it's basically a variation on the minimum wage leads to less jobs argument.
Sorry you read too much into this. The main effect of 29 hr workweeks for low income labor was to shift their healthcare from partial plans (now illegal) to Medicaid, being meta-insured by taxpayers in higher brackets.
Why does skyrocketing healthcare costs drive doctors and nurses to quit?
Again, a list of things the ACA did, not a causal sequence. Medical professionals leave the field for a variety of reasons. One of the big ones is the bureaucracies both public and private (their own business insurance, for one) which turn their days into endless paperwork, and turn the brightest and kindest of humanity into overburdened cogwheels.
How does Big Pharma specifically benefit?
Per Google’s search AI: “the ACA mandates that all health plans cover essential health benefits, including prescription drugs, which means more people can afford to purchase their medications.” It wasn't specifically caused by the lack of personnel.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
6mo ago
The ACA was designed to make private health insurance so onerous a hassle and so hideous an expense that the public would overwhelmingly approve Hillary’s single-payer she’d been working on since the 90’s.
Then Trump won, tried to kill the ACA, and was stopped by McCain’s spiteful deathbed vote. So it endures.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
6mo ago
TriWest was a southwestern US insurer for veterans and their families. Valid claims just sailed through with minimal administrative overhead because their claims system was well automated and optimized.
They were good and not-scummy.
UnitedHealth bid a lower cost for the contract, won it, and promptly started denying most claims on the first pass. Only clinics which sent appeals would get paid, and almost always did.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
6mo ago
Yes to the latter.
Reddit’s “There Was An Attempt” subreddit is for failed attempts at doing simple or easy things. This news article was posted there as “To stay alive as a PoS who made millions off the suffering of others.” As of now, approx 8000 upvotes and 1000+ comments, most of them cheering on the assassin.
It’s culture war because the Democrats forced the country’s insurers via the ACA to stop offering all healthcare except “Cadillac plans,” and to cover all pre-existing conditions, and reduced the employer-provided requirement down to 30 hours.
Then they successfully blamed Republicans and the profit motive for increasing the percentage of 29 hr/wk jobs with no healthcare, making all healthcare costs skyrocket, making doctors and nurses quit and new people not want to go into the field, and making Big Pharma rich.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
6mo ago
Human nostrils take turns being easy and hard to breathe through every 25 minutes to four hours.
The nasal cycle should not be confused with pathological nasal congestion: individuals with normal nasal breathing usually do not realize their breathing is asymmetric unless there is underlying nasal obstruction. In pathological conditions, however, the nasal cycle may influence the symptoms. - the cited Wikipedia article
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
6mo ago
CS Lewis mentions the paradox of how Christianity is not only more spiritual than any Greek philosophy, it’s more carnal than any pagan religion: blood, perfectly pure God in farting, belching human flesh, a real human sacrifice to trade for your life, insistence that certain bodily acts stain the soul, and so on.
The Gnostics lose sight of the carnality of Christianity because of the ick factor, or as Lewis put it, “repellent doctrines.”
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
6mo ago
· Edited 6mo ago
My ancestors tried to escape organized religion and live a holy life with no private property in a commune on the New World. Their ship, the Mayflower, nearly sank but for a great metal screw, possibly part of a printing press. Half of them died that winter, but they were saved by an Indian who walked into town and asked them for beer. This man negotiated an alliance for agricultural knowledge and trade with the local tribe. Once they got back on their feet, the Pilgrims had a great harvest feast with the Wampanoag before the next winter set in.
Although there was a clash of these civilizations several generations later which set the groundwork for many ethnic conflicts and genocides, what we celebrate is that fragile peace and brief cultural understanding that gave us the harvest we needed to survive.
Whatever your family’s story, I encourage you to celebrate my family’s holiday, giving thanks to your gods and/or economic systems for providing your daily meals and your full bellies through the coming winter. Happy Thanksgiving.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
6mo ago
Thanks! That's a high compliment on a sensemaking forum.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
7mo ago
Rules for magic give us an interface for magic.
It’s like teaching arithmetic to the youngest kids, then gradually explaining over the next fifteen years of Masters-track schooling how it works under the hood. Eventually you get top math-wizards inventing new types of numbers and functions named after them, because they need them to make X go widdershins into Y through a tensor, but only if it’s not imaginary otherwise you get a strange attractor set and that’s not ideal at all.
Rowling’s system is about this deeply connected energy flowing through most living things, and where other magical sapients get instinctive and powerful ways to use it, humans have to use tools like wands and words to reach an instinctive level beyond wild flailing. (Like mundane animals having fangs and claws and venom, but mundane humans have to make tools.) But once humans can do wandless wordless magic, they’re basically instinctively programming flows of raw magic and can just blow past boundaries the first year students think are immutable.
Then, some magics were modeled by geniuses after the instinctive magics of beasts and beings and so the restrictions don’t apply for those spells, and other magics are basically like having admin access so certain artificial restrictions interact differently with them, like the Hallows.
The “anything can happen” feel is meant to retain the wonder of high fantasy, while the “you can’t do that spell that way” is meant to retain the utility manipulation of low fantasy. I think she did a great job at letting both levels work together, at least for the genre-redefining work of urban fantasy/Roald Dahl pastiche/bildungsroman/YA fascism dystopia it evolved into.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
7mo ago
Malfoy’s mates Crabbe and Goyle - lower class or lower middle class? Servants of House Malfoy? As an American, all I can tell is they’re somewhere between soccer hooligans and Alfred Pennyworth.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
7mo ago
The Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya and rereading From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler for the first time. I was too young to pick up on it the first time, but the pre-incident life experiences of the latter’s protagonist is described from the start in upper middle class terms. It feels like she’d easily become fast friends with Rudy Huxtable from the Cosby Show.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
7mo ago
#Procrastination thoughts:
(As always with Wellness Wednesdays, if you have never suffered from this problem, please don’t proclaim How Easy This Has Always Been For Me, You Just Need To Buckle Down And Do It.)
On ADHD-style time-blindness: Some moments are a destination, others a path to other moments. Learn to differentiate these, not mistaking a path-moment for a destination-moment… or vice versa. Playing with your sister’s kids is a destination moment, not something just to get through. Playing games on your phone with as little depth as Cookie Clicker out of boredom is a path-moment; don’t build a life around it.
On the states of mind of procrastination: I find my personality shifts depending on the state of my distractions, not the state of my work:
- I don’t want this Now to end, because I’m harvesting Fun, even of the worst and most boring sort. Or maybe the best sort, because I’ve got a schedule but yeah, I’ve got time. I am “Not Done” playing. I am in Freud’s id mode, and my name is Not Done.
- I don’t want people to stop me from completing my procrastination activity, because it cost me too much hassle to get to this point and I’ll be damned if I give up the progress, but time is summoning me out of Now-mode, and I know I have responsibilities to get to, and I am “Almost Done” with my distractions. I’m in Freud’s ego mode, and my name is Almost Done.
- I am doing the needful and my distractions are outside the warp bubble of flow mode. Time and I are partners here, I am digesting time as fuel. Whatever I was distracted with, it’s in the past and “I’m Done” with it whether I finished it or not. I’m in Freud’s superego mode, and my name is I’m Done.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
7mo ago
I didn’t bat an eye at the “bloody altar” or “evil [god]” comments, misunderstandings of my faith I expect from unbelievers, but it’s fascinating how much I bristled at the “gnostic” comment.
I’ll return to this thread later, just wanted to post first thoughts.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
7mo ago
He then nailed me to the wall by saying, “Surely a man of your diverse intellectual interests and wide-ranging curiosity must have tried to find God?”
(Eureka! I had it! The very nails had given me my opening!) I said, smiling pleasantly, “God is much more intelligent than I am — let him try to find me.”
This answer from Asimov pleases me immensely. To be a humanist Jew, a top-notch scientist, and world-famous author, and to taunt the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in this way, pretty much guarantees a response.
I’ve been trying on a bit of theology recently, the idea that YHWH is the “God of the lost,” in the way other people call Thor the god of thunder and Hera the goddess of marriage. My dad has always instructed my siblings and me to pray as soon as we notice something is missing, because God knows where it went. It only makes sense to start any search by asking the One who knows literally everything and has a O(0) search time complexity, and can have prearranged everything in the universe since the beginning of causality to decrease my own search time.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
7mo ago
My personal definition of GenX:
- if you remember the Kennedy assassination, you’re too old.
- if you don’t remember the Challenger explosion, you’re too young.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
7mo ago
I’ve been on the IT side of healthcare, helpdesk with a few admin duties, and I do not envy you one bit.
Here are some of Ronald Reagan’s predictions from the 60’s about government-run healthcare:
‘The doctor begins to lose freedoms; it’s like telling a lie, and one leads to another. First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They're equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then the doctors aren’t equally divided geographically, so a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him, "You can’t live in that town. They already have enough doctors." You have to go someplace else. And from here it's only a short step to dictating where he will go.’
These concerns seem almost quaint next to the never-ending grind of being at the intersection of public regulation, private underwriting, and technical debt.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
+18
7mo ago
We are living in an Ayn Rand fanfiction, and I am 100% down for this.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
7mo ago
The true black pill is that, somehow, they will claw this back. Court case, rent a mob, assassination attempt number three, something.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
7mo ago
Each quadrant of the political compass has Jewish representation. They tend toward lib-left because social justice is a big part of the Jewish identity, and unlike David Mamet, they haven't noticed they're being used by the failed versions of socialism. To me it's that simple.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
7mo ago
Let's look at the moral math on that: "If the state kills/jails/bankrupts me and takes my kids, my courage has no protective effect. Only if I survive/am free/am financially capable can I continue to protect my kids. Therefore I will appear to acquiesce but plan to renew the fight."
Never underestimate the lengths a parent will go to. Thousands of years of evolution in societies has ensured that humans will fight every arm of the state in every way possible to ensure that their kids are safe.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
7mo ago
How to fix the Ivy Leagues: require every student to have held a non-intern job earning no more than 2x minimum wage for their locale for no less than six months.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
7mo ago
The term “white trash” is a fascinating insult in this day and age. Trash or garbage is something discarded after its usefulness has ended.
The “Rust Belt” is full of towns which were thriving industrial concerns until unions inflated the cost of their labor, companies offshored production, and the towns were reduced to service economies. Discarded after being used up.
Sounds like the system wanted to make an example of P'Nut.
Like Bill Foster's wife's divorce lawyer made an example of him in "Falling Down".
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