You can see my responses below if you are interested in more details but I fundamentally don’t feel any moral obligation to a system where you have in network hospitals with out of network doctors.
Also it’s sort of stunning that americas credit bureaus appear to agree that the system is so exploitative that they simply ignore small
Amounts of medical debt when considering my probability of repaying other debt.
dukeleto
1yr ago
Does anyone have any non incel/pua advice/resources at getting better at flirting (or otherwise improving one’s “game”). I recently moved to a new city where I have been trying to meet someone on Hinge, and while I feel like I get a reasonable number of matches I just think I must be really bad at the whole “texting long enough to get her to actually go on a date” phase of these conversations.
I’m also not sure what to reasonably expect in terms of reply rates. In the last month I get about 3 matches a week with people I would like to go on dates with. Of these two people agreed to meet up (although one ultimately stood me up, I’ve never actually had that happen before although I’m guessing that just happens a lot with online dating).
dukeleto
1yr ago
I’m of the opinion that the overwhelming majority of tech startups are overvalued and only existed as a result of absurdly low interest rates that no longer exist. Many of them would have failed eventually as a result of their inability to raise money and if this pushes some of them out sooner that’s a good thing.
More fundamentally I hope that this pushes some of the intellectual capital currently wasted on basically pointless ventures into more productive parts of the economy.
China did this explicitly a couple of years ago by straight up banning tech startups and I believe it was good policy (https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-tech-giants-policy). I’m glad that interest normalization is having the same effect.
dukeleto
7mo ago
It makes me wonder what the governor’s motivations are. I don’t know anything about New Mexico politics (besides the fact the the state is inexplicably left wing). This seems like a totally bizarre thing to do in an off election year for a politician who can’t possibly aspire to an office outside of New Mexico. I wonder if she is trying to get ahead of a scandal or something.
dukeleto
4mo ago
Can anyone recommend any good books about the 1980’s and early 90s with a focus on what caused the Soviet Union to collapse ? I have just finished reading the Walter isacson Kissinger biography, and while Nixon/kissenger effectively curtailed Soviet influence in the 70s, I’m still amazed at how completely the Soviet Union collapsed by 1991. The usual story is that the ussr was unable to compete with the west and this somehow led to its collapse. I’m sure economic decline contributed to their decline, but would love to learn more about the other external and internal pressures which brought it about.
dukeleto
7mo ago
I had a similar experience when I was in grad school, I’m a white guy with middle/lower middle class parents. invariably the people whom were getting (I assume, i didn’t see their records) affirmative action benefits were overwhelmingly attractive women from more privileged backgrounds. It was one of the lived experiences which completely turned me off on the left and on academia more generally
I don’t really understand how his rationale holds any water and am convinced that this is probably the stupidest thing he could have done to preserve the longevity of the platform. I think he taking ambien again…
I was wondering if anyone can recommend a good abstract algebra book? It’s something I have been wanting to learn a bit of. I am a geophysicist so I have pretty strong linear algebra, calculus and general numerical
Methods background, but have never taken set theory or real/imaginary analysis.
dukeleto
1yr ago
I think your intuitions that most charitable organizations will rip you off are correct. I’m not really sure how rich you are, but if you can afford 20000$ checks why not get involved in local politics instead? Even slightly improving you’re local government would be a hugely consequential charitable act relative to almost anything else you could be spending on.
dukeleto
1yr ago
It was insurance, apparently the hospital is in network but the physicians assistant was not so they won’t pay any of it. Also the physicians bill didn’t come from the hospital but from some other entity which refused to negotiate.
dukeleto
4mo ago
The part where we station 2 aircraft carriers to prevent Iran or another Arab power from responding to Israel or the part where we are now going to give Israel another 15 billion
dukeleto
9mo ago
Thanks I enjoyed reading this but I think that you miss the real significance of the ruling: I agree that that elite institutions are not being egalitarian enough (I think this is what you are arguing by comparing harvards graduation rate to the seals?) and that this is resulting in too many incompetents running the countries institutions. They are also hard to change because they are mostly privately run an have huge endowments along with influential alumni networks. The ruling alone doesn’t rectify this (as trace points out university admins will try to circumvent it), but gives a future republican president enormous leverage to massively change elite universities simply by enforcing the law.
dukeleto
1yr ago
Oh I agreed with basically everything he’s done at twitter up to this point. Banning a lot of obnoxious journalists just seems like a huge self own.
dukeleto
1yr ago
I read a lot and find my self spending around 40$ a month buying books through Amazon for my kindle. It’s recently come to my attention that Amazon takes a whopping 70% cut for self published titles (https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200644210) ! Does anyone know what the range is for books that come from a real publisher? I may switch back to paper backs …
dukeleto
1yr ago
I’m shocked his/her could even get a clearance, typically marriage to a foreign National is disqualifying
I don’t really understand the judgmental tone. Few on this forum would have a problem with using adderall to enhance performance or Lipitor to reduce blood pressure. How is this different?
dukeleto
1yr ago
Would be interesting if this still holds for Caucasian students. I’m guessing it wouldn’t.
dukeleto
1yr ago
There is absolutely no way that they don’t work. All of the super powers invest in stock pile stewardship which is easier than you would think since The comprehensive test ban treaty only prohibits devices which achieves criticality, meaning that you can even test the devices with subcritical amounts of materials. If your interested you can read about the us efforts here https://www.llnl.gov/news/subcritical-experiment-captures-scientific-measurements-advance-stockpile-safety
There is no way that Russia, China Israel Pakistan etc don’t do the same
dukeleto
11d ago
I’m not really sure if this counts as small but it’s definitely been on my mind and id like some advice on whether or not I am thinking about this clearly. I have lived in the Las Vegas metro area for the past two years and plan to remain here for the foreseeable (at least 5 more years) future, im thinking of buying a small house in a nice part of town and can just barely afford to do it.
I find myself hesitating on actually pulling the trigger because it would result in my current housing expense increasing from the 1.9K a month I currently pay to rent to 2.8-3.3K a month depending on what I actually end up buying.
I just can’t shake the sense that I would be buying at the top. This wouldn’t necessarily be an issue (I think its unlikely I would be laid off except in a case of extreme economic hardship) except that I am concerned that if the economy does dump I will be stuck in a high interest (looking at around 6.5%) loan which I wont be able to refinance if my home value drops enough.
The thing that’s annoying though is that this really is just a feeling and I cant find any actual evidence to suggest this area is actually about to undergo any kind of correction. Prices have increased a lot in recent years (up 40-50% since 2021) but this has happened in a lot of places, the regional unemployment is low and houses that get listed are selling.
Does anyone know what kind of metrics people who follow single-family real-estate sales actually follow? I appreciate that very competent people working at large financial institutions spend a lot of time and $ trying to price real estate accurately and I don’t expect to develop an institutional level understanding of these things. Im just trying to enter this with my eyes open and want to feel slightly less clueless, before making what will be my biggest financial decision to date.
Here are some metrics I have looked at:
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Regional unemployment https://www.bls.gov/eag/eag.nv_lasvegas_msa.htm (which is basically flat).
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Permits for new construction https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LASV832BP1FHSA
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Case Schiller index calculated for Las Vegas metro area https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LVXRNSA
dukeleto
5mo ago
As for # 6 there was a lot of speculation that Epstein had been employed by the mossad or some other intelligence agency (or agencies), specifically to get blackmail material. In which case he was killed to bury that connection.
dukeleto
8mo ago
Can anyone recommend a write up or presentation on the various kinds of cellular phone location information that gets collected and who collects it? For example a cellular company clearly collects some information about your location (since they know which towers you can connect to) but I have no idea how accurate this (does your phone share it’s gos location with your carrier or are they just inferring location based on the cells you are attached to) is and it isn’t clear to me what if they are allowed to sell this to marketers. Also wondering where private companies (such as those referred to but not actually named here https://www.wired.com/story/fbi-purchase-location-data-wray-senate/ ) even collect this kind of data. Is this a case of some game that someone installs on their phone hoovering this information up or are there some other bigger harder to opt out of sources (such as your cellular phone company).
They should have let it fail. A policy of insuring 100% of deposits is simply incompatible with the idea that private banks make loans. If all deposits are insured that effectively means that banks will be loaning the governments money instead which will either result in 1. The government deciding how and who to issue credit to or 2. Theft from the public.
They are all ready trying to walk this back (listen to Janet Yellen at 1 hour 30 minutes): https://youtube.com/watch?v=WVTmS4mM5zk&t=5718s
It’s going to get ugly when they do inevitably have to let some depositors take a loss, as they will basically be admitting that svb only got a bailout because the depositors are politically well connected.
Frankly I’ve also been kind of surprised with attitudes on the motte about this issue. I can only assume that most of the posters here are adjacent enough to venture capital and broader sv ecosystem to be benefiting from this too such a degree that the usual
Libertarian ideals expressed here can be ignored on this issue.
I had to visit the emergency room earlier this year for a nose bleed. At the time I was discharged (October 2022) I paid a 200$ bill to the hospital, foolishly believing that this was the entire cost of the visit. I subsequently received a 357$ physicians statement. This little episode in medical billing really irritated me since I felt that the hospital had hidden the actual cost of their services and because the amount was absurd for the services rendered (10 minutes for a physicians assistant to apply some topical TCX). As a result I have been thinking of not paying it and am trying to understand if recent changes to that the credit reporting agencies have made may allow me to get away with this without damaging my >800 credit score.
In particular it sounds like medical debts < 500$ will no longer impact a credit score starting in 2023 https://www.equifax.com/personal/education/credit/score/can-medical-debt-impact-credit-scores/ and I am trying to determine if this determination is made based on the date of the service(s) (october 2022) or the date that a bill is sold to a collections entity, which could occur in late January. I also discovered that paid medical debt collections haven't impacted a consumers credit score since 2022 (https://investor.equifax.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1222/equifax-experian-and-transunion-support-u-s-consumers), so its my understanding that even if they are able to sell this bill to a collections entity, the worst that could happen is that I would simply have to pay the amount at a later time.
Does anyone know if this analysis is basically correct? Its my understanding that their only other recourse would be to try and sue me which is unlikely to happen over a 357$ bill.
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