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
2yr 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
2yr 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
1yr 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.
Thank you that was interesting. Quick question on NPs, I thought they typically made pretty good money (google claims around 120k a year in Las Vegas). This is pretty reasonable compensation and is similar to what you can earn as an early career software person.
dukeleto
1yr 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.
My late grandmothers position on tattoos was that the only respectable people who had them were concentration camp survivors.
I feel like people are giving institutions like Harvard the benefit of the doubt in a way that they do not deserve. If we where talking about MIT or caltech (and maybe even Stanford) I believe that most of these arguments about having the best international students would be correct, and while Harvard is very good, it’s not as if their institutions primary purpose is supporting ground breaking work in the physical sciences, it’s there to provide the most privileged children in the world a place to mingle and make connections.
I suspect the elite truly see themselves as post national “global citizens” and removing that from Harvard will hurt their image.
More broadly I don’t think that people have really thought through how corrosive having tons of international students is to the us university system (this comment applies to state schools as well as elite institutions). Put succinctly, academics advance their careers by getting grants, and publishing papers. This means paying talented post docs and graduate students. Having an essentially open boarders system for this means that academics can access foreign labor at a fraction of what it would cost to hire us students, so instead of having one or two students who are paid slightly more, you end up with academics who have 8-10 students, 2 of whom are domestic and the rest are international.
This leads to worse mentorship and the situation we have now where the us tax payers is funding efforts to educate a bunch of foreign nationals who then leave.
I have worked with plenty of brilliant people with PhDs, it may just be my particular background but it seems to me that the main trait shared by the best ones was that they had received good mentorship from their advisors. You’re less likely to get that when the advisor is able to recruit an army.
Finally I would add that giving them all green cards would just make the system even worse since it would give academics even more power over their international students than they have now and would make these positions even more attractive.
So while I don’t have a problem with some international students, I think it’s important to reco
dukeleto
1yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
1yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr ago
I’m shocked his/her could even get a clearance, typically marriage to a foreign National is disqualifying
dukeleto
10mo ago
If you are going to use nicotine why not just use losanges? I not really endorsing it but surely is cheaper than zyn..,
dukeleto
1yr ago
I made the same “mistake” on novo nordisk and passed it up for the same reasons
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
2yr ago
Would be interesting if this still holds for Caucasian students. I’m guessing it wouldn’t.
dukeleto
2yr 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
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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