ebrso
5d ago
Hilarious. I was thinking that by the time I posted this, he might already have dropped out.
Still, the point was always moot in the sense of lacking practical significance / being purely academic - I wasn't seeking to sway his decision! So I guess I still have a similar question: what could have happened behind the scenes to convince Platner to abandon his campaign?
ebrso
5d ago
Democrats have plenty of comfortable sinecures that he'll have access to, if he plays nice. Media figure, think tank employee, a professor of feminist studies at the University of Maine. The world is his oyster; just not the Senate.
I guess I just don't see this - I don't see him doing much better than his old oyster farm job if he drops out now.
In any case, what are the mechanics here? Like, how do these conversations actually work? Is someone offering an explicit quid pro quo (Graham, if you drop out now, then next year we'll put you on the payroll at Colby college)? Is that even legal? Either way, how could Platner rely on any such assurance?
Democrats can run a write in campaign, like Mukowski a few years back. Platner's negotiating leverage isn't that great, and since Maine has ranked voting, Democrats can plausibly pull off a win.
It's possible, but it sure seems like a long shot to me. Murkowski was a known entity (she was the incumbent Senator, was reasonably popular, and came from a prominent family), and she hit the ground running (she already had her campaign infrastructure in place for the Republican primary, which she lost). For Maine, it's not even clear who the write-in candidate would be - and that person would only have 4 months to build the campaign. Admittedly, I never thought Murkowski had a chance at winning as a write-in candidate.
ebrso
5d ago
What are the Democrats’ carrots & sticks for pushing Graham Platner out of the campaign?
If you follow U.S. domestic politics (or if you’ve just read the thread below), then you’ll know who Graham Platner is. He’s the young-ish politician who won the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate from Maine, in the process attracting attention for combining liberal political positions with some elements of a blue collar background. In my view, he received a tremendous amount of scrutiny for being at the intersection of 3 significant stories: (1) the Democrats’ struggles to attract rural male voters; (2) the importance of Maine as a toss-up Senate seat in 2028 for deciding the balance of the U.S. senate; and (3) the adoption of certain leftist political positions by new politicians (broadly economic populism and antagonism towards Israel) that are seen as breaking from norms and potentially as a marker of future political currents.
More recently, Platner has also attracted attention for a series of scandals. First, some of his early, intended-to-be-anonymous internet postings were identified, and they were both unseemly and promoted ideas in conflict with his current public political positions. Then, it was revealed that he had a Nazi-symbol tattoo from his time in the military (Platner denies knowing that the tattoo was Nazi imagery when he got it; some people find this explanation believable and others don’t). Then, it was revealed that he’d recently pursued extra-marital relationships through some kind of seedy dating app. Then, some of his ex-girlfriends came together alleging that Platner was volatile and had been trouble towards them in various ways.
Through all this, the Democratic establishment had mostly defended Platner. Then, a few days ago, one of Platner’s exes came forward alleging treatment by Platner that would seem to satisfy the legal standard for rape (some disagree that the alleged conduct would constitute rape - see the discussion below for details).
Anyway, I’m not really interested in re-litigating any of these items. But what really fascinates me is that the Democratic establishment now seems to have arrived at a consensus that Platner’s campaign needs to end so that another candidate might be selected (Platner has essentially lost all prominent public-backing over the last 48 hours). But ultimately, it seems that procedure requires that Platner himself formally resign his campaign in for this to happen. My question is, how can Platner be influenced to abandon his campaign?
Normally, you influence with carrots (rewards for good behavior) and sticks (punishments for bad behavior). Democrats can appeal to Platner’s sense of dignity (such as it is), patriotism, and desire for the common good. But what other levers do they hold?
I doubt that Democrats would just concede Maine if Platner were to remain in the race. If he drops out now, he’ll always be remembered for this last week. But if he stays in the race, then I assume he'll benefit from 4 months of Democrats campaigning for him, seeking to rehabilitate his image. Even if he ends up losing the Senate race badly, that seems like a better outcome for Platner individually than the alternative of dropping out now.
What am I missing here?
ebrso
15d ago
[Contains mild spoilers for Lord of the Flies]
Can you expand on this criticism of To Kill a Mockingbird? I consider the novel as offering very powerful lessons about (e.g.) conformity and the nature of the legal system.
Also, what's the criticism of Lord of the Flies? I've always been partial to interpreting it as an anti-war novel - by having the boys rescued by a warship, Golding's emphasizing the parallels between modern and primeval expressions of savagery.
Does anyone have thoughts about the potential link between childhood fluoride exposure and lower IQ? Alternatively, links to reasonable discussion?
In particular, I'm narrowly interested in what the science says about (1) whether fluoride exposure at levels to which Americans were occasionally exposed causes IQ decreases and (2) if so, what kinds of threshold effects might exist.
For what it's worth, I (along with many of my friends) took daily 1 mg fluoride tablets (supplements) as a kid on the recommendation of our pediatrician, and I have mild dental fluorosis to show for it (although I've never had a cavity in my life). The idea that this may also have cost me a few IQ points is distressing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/08/health/fluoride-children-iq.html
ebrso
1yr ago
In 2010, the vibe (to me at least) was that self-driving cars had effectively been developed; by 2025, substantially all the cars on the roads of American cities would be fully autonomous (without requiring a human standing at-the-ready to take over in a crisis).
So what happened? Why, at least outside Silicon Valley, is my Uber cab still driven by a human? Do technical challenges remain in developing autonomous technologies? Is regulation / liability the major obstacle to adoption?
ebrso
1yr ago
Anyone have tips for combatting the green-eyed monster? I often find myself begrudging others’ successes and good fortune. My resentment applies to friends [1], but also extends to people whom I barely know in passing (or even public figures).
[1] Although am I really their friend if I react this way?
ebrso
1yr ago
In my experience (both second-hand and personal), getting pushed-out of a job you don't like is often a very positive thing - essentially a "blessing in disguise."
ebrso
1yr ago
One idea I've seen is having a multiplicity of status hierarchies . . . In practice, we could have that now, but we don't.
My instinct is that we absolutely have a multiplicity of status hierarchies operating today in a largely independent fashion. For example, there are plenty of American sub-groups in which status and money don't seem closely aligned. If you're a full professor of history at a large state university, then your status among colleagues will derive primarily from your research output and its reception. If you're a Hasidic Jew in Brooklyn, then your status in the synagogue will derive from your knowledge of Torah. If you're a Texas adolescent boy, then your status at school will derive from how many touchdowns you throw. These qualities are not closely related to earnings (if they're even related at all).
ebrso
1yr ago
ebrso
1yr ago
I lost my beloved younger brother a few years ago to drug addiction. He was 35. He struggled for years (and I mean really struggled) to stop using heroin, with some periods of success. When he was using drugs, he would lie and steal. But even during those times, he was always a very generous person when he could be. He was very sensitive (in some ways, I think this was actually a burden for him), and he made friends easily. He was funny and smart (which was perhaps another burden). He had very serious depression and anxiety his entire life. I'm sure my parents will never recover from the loss.
My point here is that many of the drug addicts you despise are actually struggling desperately. Most have had difficult lives. Some have loved ones that care deeply about them and want to see them get healthy. Others don't have anyone in the world who cares about them, either because they never had a family, or because their families died, or because they alienated them through their behaviors.
There are important conversations to be had about whether drug addiction is more of a choice or more of a disease. And there are conversations to be had about the balance between community interests and the interests of those with substance abuse disorders, and how community burdens should be fairly distributed. And there are conversations about which policies or actions actually help individuals with substance abuse disorders, versus which policies are counter-productive because they just enable or encourage these disorders.
But calling someone "dysfunctional scum" or "druggie" or "biowaste" isn't the way to start these conversations. That's the kind of language people use to dehumanize others. I think you should be ashamed of yourself.
ebrso
1yr ago
Kamala is not going to win. She's going to say things like "space is neat" and "who doesn't love a big yellow schoolbus" on the debate stage.
These pithy, assured pronouncements are tedious and call to mind the expression often wrong, but never in doubt. The betting market consensus now is that Harris has a nearly 40% chance of winning in November; it's moronic to declare that "Kamala is not going to win."
ebrso
2yr ago
but not really—the robots won’t play trivia and if they do, the questions will be a lot harder
Two robots can play chess with each other right now, but humans still do it because it's fun and challenging for us. I walk in the park even though jets can outpace me.
I think the implication - possibly tongue-in-cheek - was that robots will replace humans within 200 years.
Sure, I don't doubt that many of the people you think about in consulting / finance / tech at even 2nd-rate places like Accenture / Deloitte / Oracle will make six figures as starting salaries.
Still, statistics show that the average American working in the consulting, finance, or tech industries will never make six figures - even if we restrict attention to the college educated. I think you're just really out-of-touch to not recognize that. This is wrong. Maybe I'm the one who's out of touch. The median American salaries in tech and finance are both around $100k, suggesting that most people will attain them at some point. The median consulting salary is still lower than $100k.
ebrso
2yr ago
Re-reading what you wrote, I agree - I quoted your remark about humility in an abbreviated form that misrepresented the point you were making. I apologize for that. It genuinely wasn't intentional.
ebrso
2yr ago
Yes undergraduate it's fundamentally more or less the same classes, with the caveat that you have to get pretty much only get As (average GPA is somewhere in the 3.7 to 3.8 range)
The average GPA at a school like Brown is about 3.8. This is hardly exclusive tier. It reminds me of Mr. Evil (one milllllion dollars).
you have a ton of demands on your time outside of class work (shadowing, volunteering, MCAT prep).
Many students have, like, actual jobs outside of classes. And grad schools have grad school admissions test (LSAT, GRE, MBA, etc.) - test prep is hardly unique to medicine.
You know any other jobs where you'll be sewing up a corpse on hour 36 of being at work and awake while your attending shouts at you "hurry up you useless fuckhead he's dead already anyway, we've got to move on" until you finish?
Bullies exist in all professions. If someone said that to me in a professional environment, I'd look him in the eye and calmly explain why it was inappropriate, and why he couldn't treat me that way going forward. And then he wouldn't treat me that way going forward.
ebrso
2yr ago
Every physician I know who doesn't have a financial stake in midlevels (and isn't in admin) tells their friends and family to only see doctors whenever possible. That's for a reason.
Every acupuncturist I know tells me to see an acupuncturist. It's funny how that works.
Physicians spend years being abused and called idiots in order to develop caution, intellectual humility.
I don't consider American doctors as a model for intellectual humility. Do you?
ebrso
2yr ago
Do the math. When do similar high education fields start cracking a million? I'm not talking about a partner at McKinsey or a top level google engineer. I'm talking an average person in consulting, finance, or tech making low six figures.
It's interesting you ask this. Of course, the average person working in consulting, finance, or tech will never make six figures.
4.5% is a lot of money in real dollar terms but it is a drop in the bucket in terms of percentage and you know it.
There are more than 22 drops in a normal bucket (100%/4.5%). I agree that 4.5% isn't a silver bullet for solving American health care costs, but it's a start, and American physicians would still make twice as much as their European counterparts under this new regime.
If you halved salaries then a lot of specialties would die on the spot. Nobody is going to procedural work or surgeries of any kind in the U.S. under that model.
I think this is simply detached from reality. The average American orthopedic surgeon makes $573k / year per here. Are you really suggesting that nobody would do it for just $286k / year? I assume people would still be falling over each other to compete for the spots.
And we don't need to theorize what would happen if you just increased the supply. We already did that with mid levels. They made the problem worse.
You seem to be suggesting that the law of supply and demand doesn't apply to health care, i.e., that there's some bank shot argument whereby we should expect increasing the number of doctors to increase the costs of the services they provide. Can you make this case more explicitly?
ebrso
2yr ago
If you sacrificed your college experience and didn't have any fun of any kind in your 20s and took on a half a million dollars in debt in order to become a surgeon then yes, obviously.
I guess I just don't understand this mentality. I don't see why you can't have fun in your 20s and also become a doctor. You seem to maintain that American medical training is uniquely hard and awful, and I'm just not convinced. I appreciate that many pre-meds think their training is hard, but I took orgo and biochem in college, and I can tell you, it wasn't any harder than the classes for my math major.
I also think there's some distortion in the choice of comparison group. If anything, it sounds like a lot more fun to spend your 20s in medical school and residency than to spend this period in a cubical farm. Sure, it's probably more fun to spend your 20s relaxing on a beach somewhere in Mexico than either of these options, but this plan faces its own challenges.
Separately, this $500k debt figure seems like misdirection. It seems manageable for a normal doctor. More manageable, certainly, than a $100k debt figure for an MFA.
Many medical trainees will refuse to practice in that environment and will drop out or just choose to make less money practicing in a bigger city with a worse patient population or job.
I'm extremely skeptical that medical trainees leave the profession at rates higher than any other profession. And this complaint that doctors are forced to make financial tradeoffs in choosing where to practice seems bizarrely out-of-touch to me - who among us doesn't face financial considerations in choosing where to live?
ebrso
2yr ago
Great outcomes are gone yes, as are the good and okay.
Just to be clear, is your position that a life making $200k/year practicing internal medicine in a small town 50 miles outside Philadelphia is not an okay outcome? Why not?
ebrso
2yr ago
I think if you'd framed it in these terms originally, then I wouldn't have objected.
I agree. Failing your medical licensing exam (as 2% of test takers do) limits your ability to earn $1M/year as an LA plastic surgeon.
ebrso
2yr ago
you have yet to acknowledge that American doctors don't make what you think they do. The average American doctor probably has a lower net worth than the average Australian doctor . . . Doctors have relatively low net worths into their 50s, here's a citation. https://www.bfadvisors.com/net-worth-by-age-for-doctors/
This is grossly misleading. The first line of the article is literally, "When it comes to wealth-generating occupations, physicians usually make the top of the list." The graph shows that 50% of doctors ages 45-49 have a net worth of at least $1M, and that average physician comp is $350k/year. I appreciate that American doctors choose partners at Goldman Sachs as their peer cohort for compensation comparisons, but this is not based in reality.
Decreasing doctor salaries also does nothing substantial to decrease U.S. health care costs.
Physician compensation is roughly 9% of U.S. health care costs per here. If you slashed physician comp 50% (so that physicians were "only" averaging $175K/year), U.S health care costs would be reduced by 4.5%, or about $250B across the U.S. per year (4.5% of $5T total annual health care spend). A few $250B here, a few $250B there . . . pretty soon we're talking about real money.
And your solution [of importing physicians from other countries in order to drive down physician costs] seems to me to be wildly immoral and you make no effort to defend it.
Again, Is that your true rejection? If so, would you be satisfied with importing international physicians if those physicians pledged to remit some of their American comp to their countries of origin? Because I'm sure they'd be happy to do so.
ebrso
2yr ago
I mean what I say quite literally, you can be a top of your class science student at a reasonably good institution, study for two years specifically for the test (including a multi-month "dedicated" period where your only job is to study for this test), spend thousands of dollars on incredibly well designed test prep material and that still might not be enough.
That might qualifier is doing an awful lot of work here. The same student might also get crushed by a falling piano on the way to the test center. The point of statistics is to evaluate likelihoods, not possibilities.
and while the [USMLE Step 1] fail rate is low, failing it fucks you over incredibly
This seems hysterical (marked by hysteria). The same data set showed that re-takers had an almost 70% chance of passing. Substantially anyone who manages to drag himself across the finish line will be able to make $200k/year as a GP in a high status profession (more if they're willing to live outside a major city, where the money will go further). I don't know in what universe this qualifies as being fucked over incredibly. Even the small minority of medical students who can't gain licensure to practice will still have fine life outcomes, by and large.
ebrso
2yr ago
NPs have 500 hours of training and doctors have 10k-20k. That gap is enormous and even if each hour of training is mostly worthless....it's a lot.
This seems to refer to clinical hours. Per wikipedia: During their studies, nurse practitioners are required to receive a minimum of 500 hours of clinical training in addition to the clinical hours required to obtain their RN. Let's leave aside the RN component. If clinical hours are the focus, then a typical NP who's been practicing professionally for 10 years has more than a physician who's been practicing professionally for 5 years.
This conversation brings to mind Yud's Is That Your True Rejection. Doctors are better than NPs, they have more clinical experience. No? Well then doctors are better, they have better outcomes. No? Well then doctors are better, they cost the system less money. No? Well then, doctors are better, their training is more rigorous. No? Well then, doctors must be better for some other reason.
I really thought he was just going to stay in, try to rehabilitate his image while still in the public eye, and then just lose by 5-10 points. He didn't have to actually beat Colins - he just needed to survive another news cycle, so that the very last thing anyone ever heard about him wasn't calling him a rapist. To me, that seemed like his least-bad option.
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