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Notes -
Some quick hits:
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. Combine high spending with effective weight loss drugs, and the U.S. is on track to significantly narrow its life expectancy gap with Europe.
Self-driving cars will close the gap further.
B) Drug overdose deaths are down in King County (Seattle area) this year after more the tripling between 2019–2023. This is probably because fentanyl has already killed a significant percentage of the junky population. There has also been some modest progress in cracking down on open air drug markets. In the last 2 years, about 1 in 1000 King County residents died of a drug overdose.
C) Health insurance companies have a terrible reputation. But it's hard to fix. It's a viscious cycle which goes something like this:
Company has bad reputation
Due to bad reputation, the company has trouble getting talent, so they compensate by paying a lot
This selects for people who care more about money than reputation
Money-grubbing behavior leads to bad reputation
If you were next in line at United Health, how would you fix the problem?
Note: Many societies in the past (India, Japan) created special undercastes to do necessary but unsavory work such as working with dead bodies. Should we do likewise and create a special caste of health insurance workers that are not allowed to work in other fields and we can treat like shit with impunity? Reddit probably thinks so.
D) Epistemic status: uncertain.
Many people in the China tariff post said that China is "not expansionist".
But what is today China was, 2500 years ago, just a small collection of states along the Yellow River. Gradually, over the millenia, they absorbed more and more territory into their country.
It's as if the Roman Empire still existed today and controlled all of Europe.
Genetically speaking, the Han people seem to have done much better than Rome. The Romans, the people who lived in the city of Rome circa 500 BC, essentially all died out. For centuries, Rome's population could only be sustained from continual influxes of people from the countryside, and later, far flung areas of the Roman sphere. This doesn't seem to be the case in China. Even today, there are people who can trace direct male lineage to Confucius who lived around 500 BC.
I saw one of these guys in Qufu when I was a student. He was writing and selling calligraphic scrolls on the side of the road. He had a sign with his portrait on it and some official-looking, diploma-like certificate stapled to his sign. "Wow, is he really an actual descendent of Confucius?" I asked my professor, who was born and raised not far away. "Probably, I don't know. There are a lot of them." she replied. She seemed completely unimpressed. And that was when I began to wonder if I was a bit naïve.
Westerners often credulously believe claims like this because (1) Chinese have a radically different view of "lying" that Westerners don't have natural defenses against unless they've lived in China or a similar third world country, (2) Chinese (individuals too, not just the government) find it in their interest to promote stories that prove China's equality or superiority to the West, (3) all the sources that would debunk nonsense claims like this are written in Chinese and this unable to diffuse into the Western consciousness.
"China" does not have 5,000 years of history any more than "France" has 3,000 years of history.
Chinese did not invent soccer, or sashimi, or beer, or the seismograph.
Chinese cannot trace descent from antiquity with a level of confidence that would be taken seriously in the West.
"Truth" in China is not the same as "Truth" in the West.
I'm not sure the guy you saw was real, but it's a real thing, and it's been traced for thousands of years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_tree_of_Confucius_in_the_main_line_of_descent
The current head of the Kong family lives in Taiwan.
Yeah, real in that people make the claim. As @hydroacetylene pointed out, tons of people also claim descent from Muhammad. This lineage also has a wiki page, does that prove that it's "real?"
In China, it's real enough that the guy who was head of the Kong family in the 1930's was offered the chance to become Japan's puppet Chinese emperor (he wisely refused and fled) and later got to help draft the constitution for the Republic of China and was officially a senior advisor to the president of the ROC/Taiwan from 1948-2000.
I mean it was real enough that an occupation government thought it would be politically useful. I mean there are living descendants of Tsar Nicholas II who might be plausible heads of the Russian Empire. Whether or not they’re actually related is not nearly as important as that they’d be acceptable to the people of Russia and whatever power decides to put them on the throne. Claims to royal lineage are political claims and are thus vetted less through factual evidence than through the lens of acceptable political reality. If the Kong family were not seen as reliably pliant, the line would have been publicly discredited even if true.
A correction to point out, Nicholas II certainly has no legitimate living descendants, the communists killed all his family and the remains for all children were identified in and around the mine shaft (Anastasia's spurious survival is disproven). Current pretenders I think are descendants of Alexander III (father of Nicholas II) or Nicholas I (grandfather of Nicholas II).
Happy St. Nicholas (the bishop of Myra) Day all!
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