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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26075 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

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Yeah, OP has bit (and I cannot blame him given the amount of poor reporting and understanding out there) on a lot of the popular misconceptions about U.S. healthcare.

Your mention of EMTALA and how the ED works is super instructive. Supposedly during the recent strikes in South Korea hospitals would just post up guards outside the ED and not let people in and they would wander off to another hospital, get better on their own, or just die on the street. Not an option here and EMTALA violations are one of the few ways a physician can get truly screwed.

But yes the U.S. isn't really a private system, it's not really for-profit (or non-profit - it's a mix of both in surprising ways). It is super complicated but is part of where the confusion comes from a lot of time.

Things in the U.S. are more expensive than the rest of the world but part of that is cost of living part of that is poor health of the population part of that is the fact that the U.S. can actually afford it and subsidizes everyone else...

Usually expensive cancer treatments in the U.S. end up discounted, or insurance will cover them (but not fast enough), and they might not be available at all in other countries or it takes too long to get an appointment to get delivered them.

You know, now that I think about it, I think 50% of this was going off the memory of an AAQC of yours. Had to be you.

I suppose that means I remembered enough of it not to bring dishonor upon your name. And thank you for being polite enough not to point that out first.

Lol, well "no actually it is quite a bit more complicated than that and the popular presentation and imagining is grossly inadequate" is like the central lesson of The Motte. Internalizing that and putting it to use is YOUR credit.

For the issue at hand - it's worth noting that most Americans can be signed up for Medicare or Medicaid and hospitals will do that in an attempt to deal with some of the cost of mandatory care.

Illegals become more problematic and can easily end up sucking up hospital level resources for a year and a half while waiting for a charity care dialysis placement or something like that.

Incidentally I write with - transitions all the time. Is that materially different than that em-dash thing all the kids are complaining about? Do I look like an AI??????

You write far fewer long-form essays than I do, thought they are almost always a treat to read. I'm sure if you keep it up, someone will come get your ass too.

Incidentally I write with - transitions all the time. Is that materially different than that em-dash thing all the kids are complaining about? Do I look like an AI??????

See, it's a if she floats/if she sinks situation. If it sits still, it's probably an AI. If you see 'em make a dash for it, then it's definitely an AI. Or so the logic goes.

(People think that someone who can come up with that pun, while dying of heatstroke and quasi-manic from sleep deprivation on a bus, needs AI? Hardly. The AI is lucky to have me. This post is only 90% a joke)

The most cynical will, like in my case, assume that - transitions are a search-and-replace. That is despite me swearing on Scout's honor that I never put one em-dashes put in, or had to take one out at any point (and I actually was a Scout). It is trivially easy to launder AI written content. If I was making an intentional effort to disguise entire tracts of the stuff, I promise nobody would ever tell.

On a more general note, em-dashes are noteworthy because very few people used them before ChatGPT did. Think journalists, researchers (or their editor), pretentious literary types etc. They were often difficult to type on most devices, leaving aside most people didn't really conceptualize them as a separate thing from normal dashes, let alone finer considerations like the en-dash vs en-dash.

Think journalists, researchers (or their editor), pretentious literary types etc.

Yes! Destroy, the, grammatical, patriarchy.

I write with " - " transitions all the time. Is that materially different from that em-dash thing all the kids are complaining about? Do I look like an AI??????

  • Human or LLM: Yes—no—maybe (em dashes)

  • Lazy human: Yes--no--maybe (pairs of hyphens as ersatz em dashes)

  • Idiosyncratic human: Yes – no – maybe (en dashes plus spaces)

  • Lazy and idiosyncratic human: Yes - no - maybe (hyphens as ersatz en dashes, plus spaces)

  • Insane human: Yes- no- maybe

  • Insane human: Yes — no — maybe (em dashes plus spaces)

squints

nods

Em dash big? En dash small?

Small brain human use small dash?

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