self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
User ID: 454
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
10mo ago
I'm really not the right guy for in-depth political analysis in India, but in the absence of anyone better I'll step up to the plate:
NE India is largely divorced from the rest of the country, by geography and ethnicity to boot. The majority of the tribes that live in those parts resemble the denizens of Myanmar, Tibet or Nepal more than other parts of India, but even that's belying the ethnolinguistic diversity lurking there. The tribes have their own concerns, with them often being at each others throats over historical grievances, religion, or an effort to get gibs.
In this case, it's the latter, one of the Hindu tribes once successfully lobbied to be granted privileged status affirmative action-wise, causing an uproar in their Christian counterparts, who are afraid of being squeezed out, or more cynically, just as eager to get their stamp of disprivilege and run with it. After all, the coveted Scheduled Tribe status comes with economic and political benefits, and everyone wants a piece.
The extremely hilly terrain means that regional powers dominate the region more than the central government would like, especially given many decades of Maoist insurgency that only relatively recently calmed down. The border with Myanmar is porous, although the majority of Rohingya ended up in Bangladesh instead of NE India, that's still a major point of contention today.
So one tribe is taking the fuck you, got mine approach, and the other wants to join in the fun, prompting violence and rioting. The Indian government loves to cut off Internet access if someone looks at them funny, so there's an information blackout in those parts.
Frankly, most of India doesn't give a shit, violence there is unlikely to percolate to the rest of the country. None of the parties are particularly sympathetic, this is textbook sectarian strife in the arsehole of India, we've seen worse and will likely see more of the same for a while now.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
5mo ago
This graph should have everyone at Google shot, then shot again just to make sure they're dead.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
5mo ago
And to be fair reading isnt all that interesting as an adult, let alone a kid.
I wouldn't be surprised hearing this from a rando on the street, but you're a regular on The Motte, all we ever do is read and argue haha.
It's still a foreign notion to me, I read voraciously the moment letters ceased to be arcane scribbles, I actually did the whole reading labels on shampoo bottles thing well before it became a meme. If I show up late to my own funeral, it'll be because I was reading the obituary..
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
7mo ago
Call me old fashioned but I prefer innocent till proven guilty in a court of law when it comes to punitive actions like suspending someone's income
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
10mo ago
Unrelated observation, but I think Community Notes is one of the few good things that have been added to Twitter of late.
I find myself surprised at how they debunk lots of viral content I previously accepted uncritically, which I guess is sort of the point. For recent example, the thread about the richest billionaire in Africa being trolled by some random Brazilian, and a picture purporting to show that the Threads logo looked like Homer Simpson's ear.
I suspect that if a similar version was implemented on Threads, they'd be far more leery of "hate-facts", which would kill most of the utility.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
4mo ago
I wager it's more because he prizes staying in the good graces of his immediate social circle, if memory serves, the dude who happened to date (marry?) his non-binary ex Ozzy leaked private emails from Scott where he acknowledges his surreptitious belief in HBD, which is an unpopular stance to hold in the EA community (and partially taboo in Rat circles like LW). This would be obvious to anyone who read his OG blog, before SSC, covering his trip to provide medical aid to Haiti.
This isn't to deny that he probably didn't like the controversy from the NYT exposé, but from a more detached perspective, it didn't really do him any harm and a lot of good. He garnered a great deal of sympathy, even from his opponents, and his Substack made >250k annually shortly after he opened it. That is already median wage for a US doctor, and at this point I expect it's long eclipsed his regular income.
And he wasn't really susceptible to cancelation in the sense of being sacked and left unemployed, it takes quite a bit to do that to a doctor, and short of being struck off the register for gross malpractice, they have the option of doing private consultation or heading to places with good salaries but more flexible standards in who they hire.
Another reason I hold that opinion is because he still criticizes what might well be called essential elements of the PTB, such as calling for the FDA to be, if not delenda est, significantly reformed.
There are a horde of bots, most commonly plaguing Twitter and Reddit, that exist solely to note highly upvoted posts on certain topics, usually with an image attached, and then post listings of said image applied to merchandise.
Someone posts a popular webcomic? A dozen shifty online stores print it on a t-shirt. Piece of obscure fan art? It costs nothing to have an automated pipeline photoshop it onto shirts, mugs, patches and the like, many legitimate sellers use templates themselves. If the business is so kind as to deliver the goods when someone purchases them, they're usually putting out tiny print orders to third parties and don't have to worry about stock or depreciation, let alone intellectual property rights.
And these days, with AI image gen, it takes about all of a second to rustle up a picture of Current Thing, if one doesn't conveniently exist.
I think there's a decent chance that some bot came across the names of the kids in an online context and decided to spin up a few items that are nominally child-related, or maybe it misfired even worse and put them on furniture and pizza.
At the very least it's not going to be an online pedo ring, so everything else is much more likely.
After two months from my original application, and two weeks since they asked me for some rather absurd documents that I had to scramble to provide, including one I was supposed to have legally turned in to my government but still had a random scan lying around, the utter radio silence from the GMC had me mildly concerned.
I kept checking my inbox and their website for weeks hoping they'd at least inform me of my progress.
Imagine my surprise when I randomly checked today and it said I'm a fully licensed doctor with a license to practise. I feel both happy and underwhelmed, you'd think that was at least worth a congratulatory email!
But there it stands, proof that despite fucking up big time in my choice of med school, being incorrigibly lazy and depressed and then having to teach myself all the medicine I snoozed through, 6 months of working my ass off has provided proof that I meet the standards needed to be a respectable First World doctor. It's been a long time coming, and thank you to everyone who overwhelmed me with support along the way, even during the dark days when this all seemed a distant dream, a hallucination of a overworked and overwhelmed intern who felt that his white coat hung heavy as a shroud on an impostor's frame.
I did this. It was all me. Now onto greater things!
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
10mo ago
The median east African has a room temperature IQ.
The median east African is more intelligent than most posters here on TheMotte.org including myself.
I heartily disagree that the latter is true, with my argument being simply, just look at that cursed continent.
That being said, I once read something by a prolific HBD poster on Twitter or Substack who I can't recall, who made an argument about why black people, despite significantly lower IQs than average, still seem to function much better than that low value would suggest:
When most people benchmark mental retardation, they implicitly consider the case of retarded white people, the majority of who have some kind of developmental or neurological disorder that's dragging them down. They're not just stupid, they're non-functional in important regards.
Whereas an 70 IQ African is not sick, they're just dumb, but are much more capable of social interaction and productive endeavors than the former, though they can't hope to match 100 IQ people of any race.
I believe that person showed anecdotes from special needs tard wranglers who noticed how the black kids were better behaved and apparently smart than the white ones, because they simply were much better functioning overall despite their identically low IQ scores.
I contend that a healthy chimp can beat a bad case of Downs in almost everything, even if they're both terrible at IQ tests. One is an animal well honed to its niche, whereas the other is simply outright defective.
So, African society and culture evolved to be well adapted to lower IQs, and they're not as clearly dysfunctional as you'd expect.
Leaving that aside, in desperately poor countries, like most of Africa, people need to be able to hustle or starve, they don't have well trodden paths ahead of them that they can follow as long as they're competent and come out ahead. While hustling is certainly a laudable thing, I suspect that if the world went to shit and we had to start from scratch, the median Mottizen would spank their asses.
Indians speak 2 or 3 languages because that brings clear and massive utility to them, presumably the same case for Africans who need some more. On the other hand, most Americans can speak English from the cradle to the grave and do just fine, so it's by no means their failure that they don't bother to do so most of the time. In their place, I wouldn't either.
You don't judge Bill Gates by the standards of Stone Age persistence hunters and get all perplexed that he has wealth and high status despite his abysmal inability to run a marathon.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
7mo ago
My views on the whole affair can roughly be summed up with "Israel based, Palestine cringe", and since someone asked me if I was being ironic last time I said this, far from it.
Israel is an oasis in a hostile desert, about as glaring evidence of HBD as could be desired, not that there's a lack if you have eyes to see and a mind not blind to inconvenient truths. Arabs have and do much worse to each other than the Israelis ever have, and the average Palestinian is better off completely desisting from violent resistance, since I expect they would have a much better life as integrated citizens, even if they're of a tier below the Israelis, without voting rights and such. I can't see how they'd be accepted otherwise, since they outnumber them.
While I have no particular hatred of Palestinians, even if I view the whole Middle-Eastern memeplex with disdain, given how far it lies from my preferences, it's certainly obvious to me that their best bet for a peaceful existence would be to avoid poking at the lion that could swat them out of existence were it not for the optics.
Oh dear. You just gave them a reason to fuck optics, or at least the kind of optics that aren't thermal sights on F-16s and drones.
I guess massacring civilians and gangraping dual citizens who post on social media about supporting Palestine has that effect.
I like Israel, and the Jews as a whole when they aren't self-sabotaging by supporting ideologues who would end them. They're smarter than average, and the Ashkenazi (despite the Nazi in the name, which I always found mildly amusing) have more Nobels to them than most of the world put together.
What most civilizations would find unbearable and deserving of an outright war of eradication, such as regular bombardment of population centers by rockets, the Israelis make tolerable through technology, even if it involves sending missiles a hundred times the expense to blow them up.
They desalinate enough water to thrive in a desert that hasn't had far better days since the Bronze Age, when human-caused desertification ruined most of it.
They have chip fabs, and while I didn't bother to look it up, I doubt that even the Gulf States with their trillions have the technical capacity to build the same, at least not while having locals in charge. I emphasize it because they're close to the pinnacle of human technology, as complex as any supercollider, but profit and power generating in themselves. We build cathedrals these days, but to turn sand into thinking rock.
You don't forge a technocratic marvel like Israel in the midst of hostile territory without much in the way of natural resources without human stock that are several cuts above the average. I respect that enough to ignore the whole religious ethno-state deal, or even the occasional human rights violation.
And if there's a way to end this whole mess without human rights getting wedgied and worked over by Mossad, the Palestinians certainly burnt that bridge yesterday.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
9mo ago
The funniest bit is they just used the Middle East localization files, which didn't have the rainbow flags in the first place.
Rolls up sleeves
Aight, I'm here to pitch. I might not be a psychiatrist, yet, but it's that or die trying so I'll try and defend the much maligned field.
On an object level. You're mostly right. Psychiatry is largely pre-paradigmatic. We only have very vague ideas about the underlying underpinnings of many of the most common diseases.
We can find pretty reliable correlates in some cases, such as subtle differences in neuronal wiring or the activity of larger regions that associate with mental illnesses like depression, autism, OCD and so on. Unfortunately, much like the discovery of Tau proteins in Alzheimers, just because we have a marker for the illness does not mean that reversing the marker will reliably reverse the disease. All the drugs that claimed to reduce neurofibrillary plaques did jack-shit for actually curing Alzheimers.
However, being a part of modern scientific medicine, it cannot but assert that mental disorders can be explained by studying the body, the contradiction being that the day psychiatry discovers the bodily cause of mental disorders will be the day that it ceases to exist as a specialization of medicine, for said cause would fall under the jurisdiction of another specialization: If it’s in the brain then it would be neurology, if it’s in the genes it would be medical genetics, and if we were to discover a new organ in the body then a new specialization will be born to study it, leaving psychiatry in the past.
Oh boy.
For example, autism
Now, we’re going to get a little technical. Grey matter ripples into peaks and troughs called gyri and sulci, respectively. According to researchers from San Diego State University, these deep folds and wrinkles may develop differently in ASD. Specifically, in autistic brains there is significantly more folding in the left parietal and temporal lobes as well as in the right frontal and temporal regions.
“These alterations are often correlated with modifications in neuronal network connectivity,” Culotta says. “In fact, it has been proposed that strongly connected cortical regions are pulled together during development, with gyri forming in between. In the autistic brain, the brain reduced connectivity, known as hypoconnectivity, allows weakly connected regions to drift apart, with sulci forming between them.” Research has shown the deeper theses sulcal pits are, the more language production is affected.
Yay! We have a neurological, albeit still rough, understanding of what's going on here.
And yet, pray tell what a neurologist is going to do about it? Take an autistic child to a neurologist or neurosurgeon and ask for them to be cured. I'm sure they're too kind (for all their ego), to laugh you out of the room, but all they can offer is pity and a referral to a shrink or SALT.
Similarly, depression is primarily a disease of the brain (leaving aside conjectures about the gut brain axis, general inflammation and so on). Can a neurologist do anything about it?
Well, nothing a psychiatrist doesn't already do. In other words, therapy, meds and more aggressive interventions like electroconvulsive therapy (and ketamine, LSD and so on).
What have you achieved, barring a rebranding?
Even as we begin to understand some of the underlying processes of pathophysiology in depression, such as why rebooting the brain with induced seizures works when meds fail, it does not change the fact that ECT works beyond reasonable doubt.
In a world where we suddenly discovered, with perfect accuracy, the exact neurological underpinnings of mental illnesses (and didn't just cure them in the womb or immediately developed miraculous treatments), you know what would happen?
Specialization of labor. In other words "neurologists" doing the same shit as psychiatrists do today.
You're falling prey to semantics and fuzziness of definitions.
Geriatrics is a perfectly respectable specialization in medicine despite, last time I checked, there being no "old age organ" (well, maybe the thymus). Huh. Why hasn't their lunch been taken by all the cardiologists, oncologists, neurologists and other people with well-defined magisteria?
Specialization.
It is convenient.
It works.
On the other hand there are the encyclopedists, who will argue that the fact that we haven’t discovered the bodily sources of mental disorders does not mean that we won’t succeed in the future. We have certainly made discoveries in this direction: Not only do we know now that it is impossible to be sad or mad without a brain, but we also know what specific brain part or substance is required. But even after all the advances in neurology, still no neurologic exam is indicated for the diagnoses of mental disorders, and for good reason. Because ultimately, what decides if someone has a mental disorder or not are arbitrary criteria. The fact that homosexuality is no longer a mental illness is only because of the fact that society has shifted its values towards the acceptance of diverse sexual orientations, were it not for that fact we would speak about the “homosexual brain” just as we know speak about “the depressed brain”. We could also speak about “the carpenter brain” or “the the writer’s brain”, and treat all of those conditions as illnesses.
You poor man. You've been beaten to the punch by Dr. Scott Alexander Sisskind on several occasions, though I'm too lazy to link more than one, but which handily contains links to yet more ink spilled on the topic. Worry not, it happens to the best of us.
So are mental disorders real? Of course they are. Whether they are mental or disorders, that’s another question. They are real because they are a set of behaviors that have been observed to occur together: Feelings of sadness, self-harming ideas or behaviors, inability to feel pleasure, these are all things that are real, observable, measurable, and treatable. But are these symptoms a mental problem? Are they a medical problem, or a problem at all? This is highly debatable, and in any case, not a solid foundation for a science.
My answer is a resounding mu that brings all the local cattle to the yard.
None of this matters. Not that I really see any reason to call it "highly debatable".
You mistake medicine as practised as "science" whereas what doctors outside research settings do is closer to engineering.
I don't particular care that we don't know the exact cause of depression. I know of multiple batteries of tests that, with reasonable accuracy, tells me whether or not a given patient will benefit from counseling, medication, and other interventions, and which, when measured serially over time, tells me if it's working. And vice versa, if you take someone who doesn't have the markers of depression and feed them SSRIs, it doesn't make them happier. So what if it isn't actually a deficiency of serotonin that causes depression? The drugs, while less effective than desirable, are not useless.
I really don't see any reason to twist yourself into knots about whether depression is "mental", as opposed to what, neurological? Biochemical? All of the above in same capacity, depending on your appetite for abstraction?
"Medical"? Come on dude.
To draw an analogy, let's say you have a malfunctioning PC, or maybe a server rack in an AI datacenter. A vascular surgeon notices the water cooling is leaking and bills you $70000. A cardiologist checks the PSU. The neurologist makes sure the RAM is seated tightly or otherwise asks their neurosurgery buddies to bend some socket pins and reapply the thermal paste.
Whereas what psychiatrists are doing is both a combination of relatively simple things like giving drugs dusting the fans, as well as the equivalent of prompt-engineering an LLM. The brain, despite operating according to the same physical laws as an H100 loaded with GPT-4, is just as nigh impossible to understand from first principles, and some higher order discrepancies difficult to treat by looking at bare meat/metal. That does not mean we exist in utter epistemic helplessness. What we do works. It is not perfect. It is not complete. It is, however, not useless or a waste of time. What is is semantic arguments and forcing allied specialists to do jobs that they're no better equipped to do than we are, simply because that sounds neater and more scientific. Categories and doctors were both made for Man, and not the other way around.
Complex systems that aren't amenable to direct analysis at the elementary level are still amenable to modification and control. That is what psychiatrists do. If we were folded into neurology, then congratulations, all you would achieve is neurologists performing the same tasks a psychiatrist does, and likely end up creating a new subspeciality which is all but psychiatry in name (and we already have the opposite approach with some of the nerdier shrinks becoming neuropsychiatrists) .
This is the same line of thinking that would assume that, if one day we replaced the Standard Model with a Grand Unified Theory of Everything, then we no longer need those overly abstracted biologists, and those fussy chemists. Why, just model everything at the level of fundamental quantum mechanics? What do you mean the computer caught fire when I tried to diagnose ADHD using Feynman path integrals?
None of what you say is forbidden knowledge tacitly swept under the rug by psychiatrists, the witch doctors. The typical reaction, from anyone who has acquaintance with a textbook written after that fraud, Freud, would be the same long-suffering sigh as if you accosted an economist and told them that their models are flawed because they assume rational actors acting in enlightened self interest. They know that's not how it works. They're more than happy to fudge their idealized calculations or look for deeper trends. It's not an easy task, and in many ways, the interaction of many minds operating under relatively well-defined incentives is easier to model than a single one which is a fractal, sweltering, wet and buzzing ball of noise on the verge of criticality .
It's all rather moot at that point.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
6mo ago
Right, that poem in hexameter with the constraints of half the vowels forbidden was Scott flexing on the rest of us wordcels, I'm in awe.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
10mo ago
I can't see how SpaceX is anything but an unqualified success in every single way.
As soon as Starship is flying, Musk will have achieved every single goal he had short of the Mars colony, which is likely to happen when the reduced launch costs make it cheap enough for governments beginning to wake up to a space race.
Tesla could be run better, but it's still highly successful and has absolutely achieved Musk's vision of democratizing electric cars, and even if other companies overtake it, they're doing so by adopting the technology themselves.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
1yr ago
In case you're still in doubt, the Taliban PR account is satirical.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
3mo ago
There's an interesting Atlantic article here. I don't particularly believe or disbelieve its central thrust -- that ice cream has a variety of possible health benefits -- for reasons I'll get into later, but one particular quote is rather startling if considered in any serious depth:
Ever since I learned of that fact (and it seems likely to be true), I made it a point to ask the nurses to sneak ice cream to the palliative/cachexic cancer patients on the ward. A bit hard to get away with writing it on the diet chart, but it certainly beats the hospital yogurt, which is about the worst excuse for a dessert I have had the misfortune to consume. Far from being a probiotic, I can feel my intestinal flora die on contact.
As for my patients, they're almost certainly going to die anyway, and at that point their longterm cardiovascular risks are a bit moot, in the face of needing palatable calories in a manner more dignified than a NG/PEG tube.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
3mo ago
From memory:
Rimworld mod that made all pawns generate with white skin tones.
Spiderman mod that replaced Pride Flags with US flags (all it did was use the official Middle Eastern localization files)
Baldur's Gate 3 mod that made characters straight
These were all deplatformed due to public outcry. None of them used AI generation as far as I'm aware, but it certainly has gotten much easier to modify games without as much in the way of technical knowledge.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
5mo ago
Why is the line squiggly? Where the fuck are they getting intermediate data points to warrant that??
I thought Nvidia had misleading graphs in the bag, this one's been raytraced better than they can.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
5mo ago
Accursed Americans, even your metaphors don't work in metric!
"One of my points was a widow of a dead dude, people will support; a man who failed, people will tell him to suck it up and figure it out."
Inflation has hit the once post-scarcity market for punctuation hard.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
7mo ago
And y'know? If they are mentally unwell, they aren't able to fully and properly consent. So are the accusations false? They're in that fuzzy area of "not quite false, not quite true".
What a questionable assertion to make.
Do you want to take that line of thought to the conclusion that if a married woman develops, say, a bout of mild depression, it's the job of the police and her psychiatrist to stick on a chastity belt against the wishes of her and her husband?
A mild case of OCD? BPD like the women Brand was probably fucking?
In medicine and law, it's not just a matter of having "a" mental illness, unless the person is a ward of the state or their family, then it's incredibly dumb to refer to them as incapable of extending sufficient consent for sex, an incredibly common and fundamental activity, when they're not disbarred from doing a great deal more they can't weasel out of on grounds of mental incompetence.
Not that I think that even the grossly retarded, like a person with Downs, should be stopped from having sex, but even broader society doesn't hold the insane assertion you make as true, de facto or de jure.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
10mo ago
If anyone knows a vacant DEI role, feel free to nominate me. My pronouns are pay/me, and I promise to do a strictly better job than the incumbents by simply not showing up for work. I even look diverse!
I read an excellent review dissecting the rather bankrupt worldview underpinning The Good Place somewhere, but can't really recall where that was. It might even have been the Motte.
is that in the end, after uncounted millennia of perfect happiness, the characters finally choose non-existence because they've had it all. The writers seem to have presented that as the most desirable end, and not true eternity. But I think it's interesting that even there, the same message is in the water: without the supernatural, purely natural felicity will eventually pall and satiate.
It absolutely makes me seethe when I imagine people being given the gift of immortality (or merely a very long and indefinite lifespan, like we're talking astronomical figures here) be such utter nonces about it, and succumb so quickly to boredom and ennui.
A modern human living say, 80 years or so is nowhere near done trawling the vast expanse of interesting environments, ideas, people or concepts that even our limited baseline human minds can experience. The reason most people today might possibly lose the will to live is their bodies failing them, such that they can't actually get out there and do more of it without it being infeasibly difficult or painful.
I fully support the right of any sane sapient entity to self-terminate for any reason it chooses (without classifying the desire for suicide as insanity itself), but even then I can only groan at the sheer lack of vision or imagination that involves.
Mere millennia are grossly insufficient to do or feel all the things worth sticking around for, and humans consistently expand that space faster than we can consume it already. As evidence, go find the last person who read every book worth reading, it's certainly centuries ago, and maybe half a millennia.
To them I say:
How dare you get bored when you have everything you need, when billions of your ancestors fought hard against the cold to bring Utopia to you? You ungrateful fucks, if you haven't outlived a few stars, what makes you so old and world-weary that you'd rather end it all?
And even if you have, and after about 20 billion years your brain has cycled through every possible interesting thought and emotion available to grey matter (or a simulation of it) constrained to 20 watts and the volume of a cranium, have you even considered expanding your horizons and augmenting your consciousness so you can find new and amazing exercises to do?
A human being has exponentially more pleasant (or at least interesting) experiences and thoughts at their disposal compared to a chimp, and the larger your brain equivalent, the faster the combinatorial equations explode.
Try upping a couple hundred IQ points or petaflops of computational power and then try again you weakling.
Fine, your computational substrate has exceeded the size and mass limits that make it inevitably collapse into a blackhole? And your cumulative lifespan needs to be expressed in Knut Arrow notation? You get a hall pass to off yourself knowing you've known everything to know and seen it all. Don't talk to me till you're there, because I'd kill to be.
Even the latter belongs to the unlikely scenario where humanity solves everything, including infinite energy and resources. You're not going to get there in practice with merely all the matter and energy in the observable universe.
And mere boredom has technological solutions, I'd happily undergo a procedure that could erase it if I was convinced that it was outright counterproductive. Or I'd erase my memories and start again, anything but consigning to oblivion this infinitely lucky instance of sapience that was fished out from the endless ocean of All Possible Minds to enjoy its day in the sun.
The writers of The Good Place are small minded scum crying sour grapes at a prospect they'd be far too lucky to actually experience. I'd even deny it to them on principal if I was feeling mean.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
1yr ago
As far as I'm concerned, as are most actual Economists, the true price of something is simply what people are willing to pay for it.
Unless people are literally unable to find any place to live, I can only offer my condolences if they're priced out of living where they simply want to live.
It seems to me that much of the housing "crisis" in the West arises from attempts to intentionally distort the dynamics of a free market. It might be done with noble aims, or naked NIMBYism, but barring the arrival of effective post-scarcity, we simply can't just give everyone their ideal mansion in the middle of the hottest part of the city.
(This coming from a guy who's girlfriend wants to buy a house in London. My bank account already groans under that demand, but I hold no illusions regarding whether we deserve such accomodation.)
Every few hours, when I get tired of sneaking a cheeky vape in the millions of bathrooms and liminal stairwells that litter my hospital, I'll head over to the back of the building, in a secluded, roped off area that's the de-facto smoker's haunt of the place.
An ankle height chain dangles at the approach, as do signs for, among other things, no parking, and an enjoinder against loitering because there's construction ongoing up above.
It might say something about the nature of the universe that the tripping hazard produced by that chain far outweighs that of the falling debris, when it exists. Not the prohibition on smoking, of course, but since you can't quite see the signs from there, everyone pretends they don't exist.
There's a quiet camaraderie at play, doctors huddling together for a chemical pick-me-up after a grueling day at work, a good chunk of which was spent admonishing their patients for the same indulgence they're engaging in.
Did I mention this is an oncology hospital, or at least department big enough to be a standalone one? I suppose that's relevant too.
You can see a combination of quiet guilt, resignation and combativeness in their eyes. Yes. We know this is bad for us. We know you know. What are you going to do about it? Not smoke? Perish the thought, and pass me another. How's that patient with COPD doing? Yeah, he won't quit, even if it kills him, and given that he's got end stage lung cancer with brain mets, we're half a mind to wheel him out, nebulizer in tow, for a couple to greet the last dawn of his life, and just the start of another for us.
I stand there puffing on my vape, experiencing an exceedingly mild, almost homeopathic sense of smugness and superiority. Look at them, burning out their lungs, huffing and puffing when I pass them on the stairwells, and for what, the same nicotine I get, without the stink and almost all of the drawbacks beyond a nicotine dependency?
The vape ban in India has been a disaster, and these are the consequences. I muse on the black comedy that is existence with a black coffee in hand, that the tobacco lobbyists in here got a final swing in by banning the cheaper, healthier alternative.
I ignore the occasional curious glance at my little electing facsimile, the incongruity of a cigarette with an usb port. I'm probably the only one. In turn, I ignore the shifty consultants who don't meet my eye, still harboring in their heart of hearts the feeling they need to do better and set an example for us all. I hear the promises, the whispered pacts to cut down together. They're still they're next week.
There's a bimodal distribution there, you can tell seniority both by how quick, hurried and clandestine their puffs are, all flash and smoke blown into dark corners, and then the blatant ones, the big shots without who the hospital would grind to a halt of PGs, Associate Consultants and RMOs left rudderless when the buck stops with them. They challenge each cig and any mildly curious passersby. Fuck you, even cancer thinks twice about taking me on, at least on the hospital premises.
And then the phones ring, cigarettes burn out, the last dregs of chai and coffee are downed. Paper cups laden with ashes find more corners to marinate in, and stubs are crushed by shoes beneath scrubs and we all go our merry ways. If there's hell to pay, at least we can afford it.
More options
Context Copy link