dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
No bio...
User ID: 583
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6mo ago
okay fine we do not yet live in a Cyberpunk dystopia, my claim is withdrawn
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6mo ago
mmm, got it, kamikazee quadcopters: when you want the enemy to know it was you
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6mo ago
Thinking about this for one minute: you can have an accomplice. One person watches for the target to show up and gives the signal. The other launches the drone from a hotel room window. Escape with nobody having any clue what either of you looks like.
Also if your intent is to cause terror you'd want to show that anybody could be a potential terrorist.
I think having the VIP's head blow up and the only advance warning was a buzzing sound for one second beforehand would cause a lot of terror. Every security detail is woefully unprepared for this.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6mo ago
Given that he's smart and tech savvy, I'm rather surprised he didn't use a kamikaze drone. Using a drone for a political assassination in the US would have been a lot more game changing.
much more questionable ability to actually decrease costs.
Funny, I was pretty gung-ho about M4A until I read that Elizabeth Warren's own research she linked which showed how meager the efficiency wins would be. Surely the system is super expensive because it's very weakly coordinated! but apparently single-payer's biggest crusader doesn't think so?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6mo ago
Thanks for the reply!
In general, reading about this is fascinating to me. It sounds like an arms race and like providers can get an edge if they have research and analytics firms (or departments) staying on top of this stuff and helping them route through each company's bureaucracy.
Another common thing that happens is that insurance companies will randomly deny things. If I bother to schedule an appeal they will usaully decide to cover, but they know we are busy so if they randomly deny a good number of things will be dropped. Especially cheap drugs - sometimes it's easier to send the patient to Walmart and cash pay than fight the insurance company. I have a limited amount of time. They abuse this. When they do decide to fight your "peer to peer" review is generally with someone in another specialty who retired 40 years ago and has no idea what the actual standard of care is.
This sounds like a class action lawsuit waiting to happen so I'm surprised they do it, but maybe I'm naive about the wheels of justice.
Now everybody does this stuff but somehow United is appreciably worse.
Are they better or worse than Medicaid?
Few providers in my area take Medicaid, and the ones that do have very long waits to see. I understand it's because they have pitifully low reimbursements but also have high claims denial rates.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6mo ago
The jury was 7 women and 5 men. I do wonder who the holdouts were at first.
I could see men being all about frontier justice while the women give into empathy, but I can also see a jury of women who have years of experience feeling vulnerable on the subways swooning over Penny.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6mo ago
Gains in life expectancy are not typically easy to buy. For all its spending, US life expectancy is on par with Costa Rica or Albania.
This is not for lack of an awesome medical care system. It's more nuanced.
Of people who reach 65 in the US, they can expect to have the highest longevity in the world. Our medical system is really good at this. (Whether or not they're quality years and you want to live them is a different debate).
The US has a lot of other factors that depress life expectancy at birth though
- high teen pregnancy rates
- high murder rates
- opiod epidemic
- deaths of despair
- auto deaths
- high obesity rates (arguably due to affluence)
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6mo ago
Permutation City
I really loved this book. Aside from being generally interesting it felt like the guy predicted AWS in 1994, at the least.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6mo ago
I am wholeheartedly convinced that the existence of insurance companies and their role in our society is uniquely responsible for healthcare prices in the U.S. Now, this isn't necessarily the fault of the CEOs, it's really the politicians who created this niche, but I definitely understand the anger people have for them.
That scans. Private insurance is actually aligned with medical care becoming an ever bigger proportion of GDP. They want premiums to go up, so long as they all go up at the same time.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6mo ago
I used to work on Wall Street and every time an article was written about something nefarious we were supposedly doing, it was so incredibly wrong and ill informed that it burned me out on investigative reporting. Doubly so if it's about an unpopular industry.
My knee jerk reaction in the situation, as someone who really doesn't understand the health care business, is to remain skeptical.
I'll probably have to wait six years for the court case to work itself out before I draw conclusions.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6mo ago
They are only allowed to make a specified margin between premiums and claims.
If they've already reached their statutory minimum of 85% of premiums collected paid out in claims, doesn't paying additional claims reduce profits? I can see how there's a global incentive for all insurers to pay more claims in general, so that they stimulate cost growth in health care and premiums have to go up overall, but at some point they have to try to stop paying claims to cover admin and shareholder returns.
Do you have a cite for the epilepsy thing? I'm not able to find anything.
AI/Algorithm ... deny claims
This sounds bad but the details are too short for me to judge with.
FWIW the case is still pending but UHC argues that it was not used for coverage decisions. The Stat News article which describes it in detail is paywalled, but here's Ars for a teaser
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6mo ago
I'm still not sure what makes socialized or single-payer systems inherently less cruel. They are rationing care too? Not only do they have longer waits, but from what I can tell the providers often follow the government's story: you have abdominal cancer? So sorry. It's fatal. Consider assisted suicide.
At no point is the patient informed that you can actually do a long shot treatment for this, and it's very expensive. And it's only available in the US.
Canada performs 14,000 assisted suicides a year. Are we really sure all of those persons have terminal illnesses? Or is the same cold hearted private health care denial of payment still there, but translated into denial of all hope as well?
I'm not even sure it's wrong! If a patient has a cancer with a very bad prognosis and the treatments are expensive and kind of grim, it might actually be better to lie to them and say they're fucked instead of telling them to try to raise $200,000 in a few months and maybe you have a small chance at surviving.
But I hardly ever see socialism enjoyers acknowledging that this is the system they plan to build. They just smugly declare that in our system all receive treatment regardless of means.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6mo ago
But due to the high revenues, a health insurer can have large profits with a small profit margin.
don't they have high capital requirements and aren't they also required to rebate excess premiums if they spend less than 85% of it on benefits?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6mo ago
Re: United Health CEO, I feel that I'm among the extreme minority of the population that thinks it's bad to celebrate political assassinations and also that it is a social good for companies to offer insurance in the US. I am astounded by how relatively unprofitable being an insurance company is and also why anyone would go into this industry and put up with the abuse and general scorn.
Imagine being at a party and saying you work at a health insurance company. Total hatred from almost everyone.
It's amazing that people do this at all?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6mo ago
It's possible that self-driving cars are already safer than humans
I don't think we're there yet. Some days are great but I often have to intervene and stop it from doing moving violations. One time I had to stop it from turning into a cyclist. It rattled me enough that I stopped using it and I wasn't even using it that much.
Now, I don't always follow the speed limit or am 100% attentive, but I don't make mistakes like that. I wouldn't even say I'm an especially attentive driver. Tesla's FSD is both the most amazing AI driving system ever built but still not yet good enough.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6mo ago
I think it's because we see quick progress from "hey this ride didn't cause an immediate horrific car wreck" to "90% of the time the car arrives at the end of the obstacle course. amazing" and believe getting to 100% is in the bag.. But in truth the reliability rate has to be something absurdly high. Even if a Tesla on FSD only needs a few interventions a week, this is still a very, very long way from full autonomy. We need something that requires no safety interventions per approx 500 years, not just something that requires less than around 1 intervention a day.
As we know in reliability engineering, every 9 you add next to "99% reliability" adds an order of magnitude of complexity or cost. Full self-drive might fall under similar development burdens.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6mo ago
The Beginning of Infinity, by David Deutsch.
About halfway through it. I'm not really sure what to make of it. It feels like a book very loosely in the spirit of Godel Escher Bach, playing around with how awesome the age of science and enlightenment is.
I'm reading it because Sam Altman said it inspired him more than anything else he's read.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6mo ago
Yes, Bitcoin has basically failed to become a currency. Though a lot of it is due to regulators frowning on it and issuing veiled threats to jail you for financing terrorists if you try to make it useful.
Since Chevron deference was shot down by SCOTUS and Trump seems bullish on Bitcoin, it could be a good time to be a Bitcoin maxi again.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6mo ago
A) Cremieux argues that much of the gap in life expectancy between America and Europe is due to obesity. But America is good at one thing at least – spending money on health care.
Random Critical Analysis argued similarly back in the day https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-wisdom-on-health-care-is-wrong-a-primer/
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6mo ago
Surprisingly, or perhaps unsurprisingly, this has not dented the stock of United Healthcare Group.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6mo ago
sure, we can shoot murderers into the sun for all I care
but last time I visited the county jail, the primary offense was for driving with a suspended license
not saying driving with a suspended license is fine, just clearly a thing where people are being needlessly tortured because the way society is arranged doesn't suit their level of intelligence
Am I reading this wrong, or does Scott think that putting people in prison is the moral equivalent of torturing children?
Maybe not all people, but if you create rules that some people are too stupid/impulsive to ever follow and you severely punish them for it, what do you consider this morally equivalent to?
Being an IQ realist means you see these people as not much different from the losers in a hypothetical society where failing a test in college level Differential Equations dooms you to a life of misery.
yes, if you completely disavow your work you can salvage it
still not an appealing call to join the industry!
More options
Context Copy link