JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.
Unfortunately, certain modern things like social network tend to highlight and incentivize the evil side. I mean, for me it'd be weird to parade my evil side publicly, under my own name, for all to see. But it looks like for a real lot of people, it's something they would eagerly do. Let's not kid ourselves - everybody has this monster somewhere inside them. Though not everybody lets it roam in public.
Demand for car insurance is artificially inflated by it being literally illegal to drive a vehicle without it.
That's not true, at least in some states, like CA. You can post a self-insurance bond instead. Virtually nobody does that because for most people it doesn't make any financial sense.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
It culminates in a court scene where they read from the real secret manual that states their policy to initially deny every claim.
That's a movie though. No real world insurance company has such policy. Or any "secret manual" at all - how would they even keep it secret? Would they murder their ex-employees? Wipe their memories? Relocate them to the remote uninhabited islands? US Government can't keep secrets. US Army can't keep secrets. How can you expect that a "secret" policy which literally every adjuster should be familiar with - otherwise how could they deny every claim? - would be kept? Movies are fun, but they are also fiction.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
I think the more amazing thing is that we had this huge healthcare reform and if the insurance companies were regulated before, they are hyper-regulated now, and yet almost no people pay any attention to any role the regulators play in the system. I mean for all people eager to murder healthcare CEOs, at least some percent of them should direct equal hate to their local congress-critter whose stuff literally wrote most of the rules the CEOs play by (and whose campaign is financed by the same CEO, too). Yet nobody is even trying to think in that direction and link the huge achievement of Obamacare with the present state of healthcare market. It's like they brain run on KamalaOS 1.0 - "we made absolutely no mistakes and we need to fix everything urgently!".
Also, twitter haters probably occupy much smaller part of the real world that one might think when opening twitter.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
Trump said that Liz Cheney and others "should go to jail"
He's been saying Hillary Clinton should go to jail for a decade and she's not closer to jail than at any time before. Trump says a lot of things.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
There are various co-op and mutual insurance schemes, including in healthcare fields. Many of them rely on some kind of affiliation networks to lower the risks.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
So, 12 random people from the internet would decide whether I go bankrupt or suffer life-altering financial damage, or not? From everything I know about random people from the internet, I am not sure it's the thing I'd pay money for. For literal jury, there's a judge and several level of appeal courts to mitigate the damage, how would you deal with it here?
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
makes a claim there's an algorithm to decide whether it's legitimate
That's how somebody breaks in and drains the system. They figure how to produce plausible claims and clean you out.
The goal would be to remove the profit motive from insurance companies
So, you create the system where nobody (human) has an incentive to keep it running well (even if you're a subscriber, if the system collapses you could just move your monthly premium payment to another system, so your loss is microscopic) but a lot of humans have a big incentive to break it. How long do you think such system will stand?
This whole "profit motive is bad" thing is stupid. Profit motive is the only thing that makes people design resilient systems. Well, maybe some people have huge egos and want to design systems just to stroke it and become even more narcissistic. But there's not a lot of people which are both this way and actually smart, and most of them will run out of steam eventually. Usually it's some kind of material motive involved. It doesn't have to be cash - could be other benefits, such as fame, power, recognition, etc. But money has been invented for a reason - it's the easiest way to incentivize people. If you start with excluding it, you probably will lose to people who do not.
have some potential for corruption, and I'm wondering if a transparent and user-run blockchain thing would clear that.
What kind of corruption are you fighting? Failing to pay out valid claims? But somebody would have to code which claims are valid, how would you ensure that person (or sets of persons) are not playing the system? Syphoning funds out of insurance pool into different investments and losing it? IIRC this is already pretty illegal for an insurance business, and usually not the first worry if you're dealing with a respectable provider. Obstructing your claims with bad service and arcane rules? Not sure how making it automatic would make it easier - AI chat bot can give you a run-around no less than a human can. Misleading people about what the rules are coming it, and then it's too late to complain when they already paid? Blockchain is an ideal vehicle for this kind of fraud, see a myriad of rugpull schemes around, with new ones born (and die) every day.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
Cheney is obviously lying, and the reason for her lying is also obvious - she is one of the persons who actively engaged in such conduct. Her bloviations however do not carry much weight. Would Democrats want to prosecute their political enemies? Of course they would, they are already doing it. Would they have any success to make bar associations sacrifice their reputations and position as an institution of the society on the altar of short-term political gain? I somehow doubt so, though they managed to make many people and categories of people do just that, so it's not impossible.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
It's not about settings per se, it's just if you don't have an account, there's nothing on the system that is persistent that can store this information. What you probably could do relatively easily is to edit the cookie on your browser and extend its lifetime, so that it wouldn't be automatically deleted.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
Don't confuse people who exercise the power with people who are nominally this power exercise is benefitting. The Supreme Dictator of the People's Democratic Republic maybe nominally is ruling for the benefit of the people, but he has all the power and the people have none. You can be a lily-white man and still exercise power "on behalf of oppressed minorities" - if you're lucky of course.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
I'm sure that if you give up on flight - which as you correctly pointed out is likely medieval addition, at least as far as Eastern and Western folklore is concerned - there must be some historical reptiles that bear some passable resemblance to some of the dragon depictions. And some of them may even be venomous, why not. Reptiles are known for being venomous.
And isn’t Russian mythology supposedly all about rendering the territory fit for human settlement by killing a dragon?
"All" is a massive overstatement, but there are certain mentions of hostile reptiles, often three-headed. It usually controls communication ways (roads, bridges, etc.) rather than territories. So one would be very tempted to write it down as a metaphoric depiction of nomadic tribes terrorizing their settled neighbors by attacking their trade routes, but of course that suggestion makes one a dull person.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
While he clearly isn't as sharp as he used to be, nothing he's done publicly has shown any indication he has dementia.
Or, alternatively, Democrats lived in denial for years and dismissed every evidence, until the mountain of evidence got so large it was impossible to ignore anymore, and then they decided this is the moment from which credibility is counted. Very convenient for them, except some people still have memory and can notice that there was plenty of indications and plenty of evidence.
Bigger point is it doesn't matter at which point the medical diagnosis of "dementia" is supported. Maybe he will never be medically diagnosed with it. The point is he was mentally unfit for the rigors of President's job when he was elected, and he only got worse since. And that's exactly what Republicans were saying and Democrats were denying. Pretending like Republicans just got a bit of blind luck because perfectly fit Biden suddenly became unfit in some random freak accident is just bizarre cope by this point. It is absolutely clear Republicans were right from the start and Democrats were lying from the start (those - and there were many - who knew) or were deceived by the former category and willingly accepted the deception despite the evidence in front of their own eyes.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
It's a fascinating setup:
R: Biden is senile!
D: How dare you to say such things without any evidence!
R: Here's evidence Biden is senile
D: Bullshit, this is just stutter.
R: Here's more evidence that Biden is senile, also he never had any stutter before
D: Bullshit, he's perfect and anybody can make a mistake. Trump said "covfefe" once!
R: Here's more evidence that Biden is senile beyond anything that anybody who is not senile have experienced
D: Well, maybe he occasionally looks imperfect, but it's just shallow looks, on the substance he's great, the best president ever
R: His every public appearance is a disaster, he can not be effective President.
D: Sure he can, and he will be for the second term too, and anyone who says otherwise is a crazy Qanon!
R: Here's more disasters from Biden
DNC+Obama: Biden, GTFO
Biden: OK, I decided to GTFO
R: Told ya so.
D: You had no credibility on the issue since when you first told us so, we did not agree with you.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
Does anybody have a good background on what is happening in South Korea? Why did the president there decide to declare martial law? What is the problem between him and the parliament? Is it related to the North or is the president using the North as in the US they are using Russia - as a cheap way to smear internal political opponents? Would appreciate some informed insight into it.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
I suspect it might have something to do with privacy settings. Wikipedia probably uses pretty short-lived cookies to store your preferences if you don't have an account. I think the cookie lifetime is 1 week. And traditionally Wikipedia is very reluctant to track people that don't have accounts so once the cookie is gone, the info is lost.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
The quality has been extremely bad and it's getting worse. I keep seeing lots of videos of butts, boobs, and black people fighting
Seriously, how do you do that? I also follow Elon and a bunch of other accounts, and I don't get any butts or boobs. Don't get me wrong, I know where the sites with butts, boobs and much more are, just my experience there is so different... My feed is suitable for the most judgmental grandma on the most prudish family gathering (well, maybe some coarse language will be there, I admit). I am not complaining, I am just confused why the outcome is so different. I just follow a bunch of people that post stuff (mostly political stuff but not exclusively). I don't do anything special.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
It's enough that the contents of the group not be shown to people who aren't members even if the name of the group is obvious to people who are aware of the terminology / slang.
Yes, about all forum software I know about supports this option. Private mailing lists of course predate this by another couple of decades.
In fact, Facebook is about the worst platform for this - if you want to coordinate a genocide, on FB it's enough to have one snitch in the group who would alert the moderators and your group is gone. If you do it on a forum, and the admins of the forum either friendly to your cause or neutral, you'd have to resort to heavy artillery like pressuring their provider or cloudflare or similar providers and you'd have to have much more proof, and likely by the time you pull it off their deed will be done. And even if you succeed they'd just find a more sympathetic provider - see the story of kiwifarms, for example.
The thing about web forums is that nobody uses those outside nerds / people with some specialty interest while, well, pretty much everyone is on social media
That may be true today, because FB is easier, but before FB existed a ton of non-nerd people used forums. If FB becomes less convenient, they can move back. Using forums is not hard at all, it's just a bit less convenient, but if you're planning a secret genocide, you can tolerate a little inconvenience as a price of not being discovered and executed, I think.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
That country didn't have access to the web before? Because web forums have been offering that - basically at any scale a country with population less than the US, making 100M+ member forum probably would require some work - since forever.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
I don't think it's about 2016 specifically or only. Any valuable resource that is not under the control of The Party must be either brought under control or destroyed. It doesn't matter if it's being used by The Enemy currently or not, and what for - anything that is not under control is a threat, and must be dealt with. That of course is true for Facebook too. One of the basic tenets of socialism is centralized control (for the good of the masses, of course!) and in modern informational society, obviously, this means control over the flows of information.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
has easy to find groups
keeps those groups mostly out of the sight of unwanted people
Aren't those two contradictory? If it's easy to find (and, I assume, participate, otherwise what's the point in finding them?) then "unwanted people" could easily pretend to be wanted people and find and participate too?
For the rest of it I don't see any limiting factors. Web forum can do any of these and more very easily, and I've been using web forums over 2 decades ago.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
Wouldn't any communication platform work the same way? I mean, you can coordinate on Twitter or good old webforum or even call-in BBS for that matter (yes, I am old enough to have used one). What's so special in Facebook? Yes, maybe this particular group used Facebook. But they could have used any other means with the same result.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
The other day my account was limited, then suspended out of the blue, then reinstated without comment after I sent an email asking why.
OK so that at least disproves the theory moderation doesn't exist anymore ;) I remember pre-Musk I once created a secondary twitter account for some silly project of mine, made a hello world tweet and it was promptly permanently suspended. I didn't even bother to research why, I just dropped the twitter part of the project and forgot about it.
The prioritisation of blue check replies has made replies on any post that becomes popular totally worthless, since it's mostly bots/meaningless garbage.
Haven't noticed that but I must be reading different parts of it, and I usually don't read the replies beyond the first dozen or so. Even that is mostly frivolous...
Checking back now having been away for a few weeks I've been followed by 50+ scam bots.
I feel a major FMO case here, I've had my twitter acct for years and still have 2 followers (that's how it should be, it's a strictly r/o account).
Elon's own account is really the embodiment of the kind of place twitter has become
I must miss the point here - what's wrong with Elon's account? I mean except the fact that miltibillionaire and owner of several huge enterprises spends so much time on stupid tweets, but it's his time not mine, why would I tell him how to spend it? Otherwise, I think his content is exactly what this format is for, or at least what I have always thought it's for. I know some people put longreads and effortposts into twitter, which is imho insane - just get a substack, dude! - but I never thought it should or ever would be the norm.
I think it's a cautionary tale against tech bro 'disruptors' and the 'move fast and break things' philosophy.
Not sure what it's supposed to caution us against though. Did you really imagine twitter would be some kind of philosopher's kingdom if not Musk? To me, it always have been a mess since the inception and that's the whole point. If "influential people", whoever they are, can't find a better place to gather and talk about serious stuff than twitter I think it's not Musk's problem. They are just doing it wrong (ah, if that were the only thing they are doing wrong...) - and also imagining that you would do politics, policy or journalism with pre-Musk moderation in place makes me deeply sad. Though as "deeply sad" is my default setting now thinking about anything related to UK politics, it's not much change, admittedly.
I find numbers from 4% to 6% profitability for insurance companies. Why are those numbers "absurd"? It looks to me as comparatively modest profit margin. Wikipedia shows 371b revenue, 23b net income on 273b assets for United in 2023 - I would want to hear an explanation why those numbers should be considered "absurdly profitable"? How much would be reasonably profitable, given that some zero-risk savings accounts paid out around 5% at the same time?
Pharma does seem to be much more profitable, with 25-30% profit margins being common for companies like Pfizer and Merck.
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