domain:amphobian.info
MadMonzer
Pedo! Pedo! Pedo! Out! Out! Out!
1hr ago
Actual, formal criminal investigations of prominent political opponents announced by law enforcement agencies? Three - James Comey, John Brennan, and John Bolton, versus zero at this stage of the Biden administration. Part of the reason why I described the Biden administration's response to Trump's election antics as milquetoast was that Merrick Garland slow-walked things to the point where Trump could and did delay any trials until after the 2024 election.
Targetted investigations of prominent political opponents intended (based on public statements by the White House or Congressional leadership) to lead to formal criminal referrals in the future - lots (the exact number is unclear because I don't know how many of the investigations Trump announces on social media actually happen) , versus one federal investigation at this stage of the Biden administration (the House Jan 6th committee). There was also the NY State investigation into the Trump organisation.
Given how slowly the justice system works (and did work against Trump, and will work for him), the claim that Trump is doing less lawfare than Biden is a claim that he is incompetent or unserious and the lawfare he is announcing won't actually happen over the next three and a half years. I agree this is plausible.
Tiber727
1hr ago
Oh no, "encroachments" stage was decades before. The last 20 years was "the walls are breached, time to burn and pillage!" stage.
Must everything be so over-dramatic? Berlin is not burning. Hirohoto has not announced surrender. Trump is not the last hurrah of the right. Trump is one of the least popular presidents in history, but the Democrats are even less popular. Gen Z is shifting right. The pendulum swung too far, and is now swinging back. It will swing again and again, as it has the entirety of history.
Like what? Let's take the inventory. The mass culture is about 90%, it's not that right-coded entertainment doesn't come out, but it comes out maybe once a year or less, and is always a huge controversy...
Mass culture is 90% left? Sure, agreed. Right-coded entertainment causes controversy? Eh. Your usual leftists on Reddit and some websites, mostly many small ones, complain about it, but does that really amount to anything?
I work for a woke company you've heard of. What's it like day-to-day? The once a year HR training has some eye-rolling sections. I get some emails about whatever group's day or month it is that I delete. I don't talk politics at work, which is good advice always. That's about it. Completely anecdotal, but I've heard one guy say he reviews applications at a university, and the only attention he pays to the mandatory "what have you done to promote diversity?" question is judging their writing ability. Whether he was lying or all professors do, I can't tell you. I'm making the argument that life is often pretty banal. Supposedly the students are more woke than many of the professors.
With regards to big business, to some degree yes. A decent number of them are scaling it back. Disney is realizing that young men have stopped watching and that's a massive amount of money being left on the table. Billionaires tend towards the woke when it doesn't notably affect their bottom line. They aren't rushing to implement socialism or raise the minimum wage.
If we can't find any, or can't find a list as comprehensive and powerful, then demanding the right stops fighting back - without any history of prior consistent and prolonged demand to do the same from the left, at least - can not be read as anything but telling the right "why can't you just lose quietly so we all can stop this unpleasantness?". It is not hard to see why the right wouldn't look favorably on such approach.
I'm not asking the right to lose, or to stop fighting. I'm saying the left lost themselves to BLM and became a parody of themselves because everything was so awful they had to do this and that. I think the right is becoming the party of nothing but political grievances and emotional overreactions in much the same way. Political parties always fight. The fight over slavery would probably make today's fight over "wokeness" a joke even aside from the literal civil war era.
What I am saying is maybe get off the internet and step back a bit. Things aren't great but America isn't collapsing either. "Burn the institutions and salt the Earth!" is cringe and could possibly cost you the normie vote in future elections. A lot of wokeness is nothing more than people being sanctimonious on the internet and then individual actors being blown up on the national stage. In a country of 350 million, you can find no shortage of idiots even if they don't matter at the end of the day. You should fight it, but that doesn't mean you need to shape your personality to "REACT" to it.
And that's true. They were, when the right had institutional power and tried to shut down all kinds of leftist speech. And lost (mostly)...
Not everything is national. "Fire in a crowded theater" was a government decision and we're mostly talking about private organizations. As for private organizations, welcome to At-Will hiring. It's always been the case that you have no real job safety in America. You can be fired or refused a job because your boss woke up one morning and decided he didn't like you. And there are plenty of times this happens to left leaning people and you don't hear about it. Lots of America is red-coded rural areas.
Free Speech can mean both the willingness to tolerate opposing ideas and the freedom to choose not to deal with other people. The left was cheering for banks cutting off the right from oil pipeline funding, now they're complaining about Valve removing LGBT games because Visa went on a porn crusade. It's the same power in both cases, both sides just cheer when it gets the outcome they want and jeer when it cuts them. But unless you want government czars deciding how individuals relate to each other, what are you going to do about it?
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
How many political opponents has HE sicced the criminal apparatus of government on?
At least two- Letitia James and also the federal reserve governor lady.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
My claim was that the price, charge, and cost are all highly different from each other, often have minimal relationship to each other, have little value to the patient, and are highly misleading and hard to understand.
The claim I was originally responding to:
Ultimately the problem is that it's hard to give numbers in general, it's harder to make them accurate, nothing the hospital can do can guarantee the numbers are accurate, they are therefore not very useful in the vast majority of situations and also have a very real cost to deliver to a patient.
The part I was questioning was about how hard it is to give the numbers, how hard it is to make them accurate, and how costly it would be. None of it was about how little value they have for the patient, or how difficult to understand they might be for them.
Well yes healthcare is different. That's important.
It's yet to be demonstrated in ways relevant to the question of the difficulty of providing patient with the price information.
Two posters in this thread neatly outlined the problem with what you are talking about.
If you charge people for what they use and only what they use and try and give them an answer in advance they get pissed when their hot dog costs 1 million dollars instead of 5.
You can argue that this is not what the average American wants, but you haven't shown that it's impossible to show them those numbers. I already told you that, and you never addressed it.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1hr ago
How old are you?
Middle aged. I remember all the way back to the world where normies had no internet, and then the later world when more cutting-edge weirdos had home dialup internet.
I love that I can pull out and read any book I want,
Physical books or kindle + libgen. I find reading on the phone to be terrible, and really, kindle isn't great either.
I love that I don't need a separate device for music
I recently bought an mp3 player again so I can run or hike with music without having my phone along. It's wonderful.
I love that I can research anything anytime instead of writing it down and searching through my encyclopedia at home.
This part is certainly convenient. I'm not sure I really learn more or retain more, though, compared to writing notes down and then internet searching at home.
Have you ever tried a long road trip with a physical map?
Yep, I moved across several states to a completely unknown city using physical maps. It was fine. My goal now on long road trips is to look up directions before I leave and then not look at maps again.
Tenaz
1hr ago
Let's say you have a wife who you love. Imagine saying, "I don't need to know more about her, I love her! Asking her questions about how her day went or what she's thinking right now would be getting in the way of the personal relationship I have with her." It doesn't work that way! Instead, love generates a desire to learn more about the beloved. Philosophy is one means of truth finding.
I absolutely agree, but I would never in a million years try to figure out how her day went from first principles. Philosophy can inform religion but in the end I think it's just harder and less easily falsifiable than most other methods. I wouldn't even try to identify her from first principles. My wife is my wife, not "the woman who I must have married, given that I am a married man and so must have married a woman."
You aren't sure about our ability to come up with satisfactory axioms. That's not uncommon. You are creating philosophical axioms in your comments that I do not believe hold water - but you are likely unaware that you are doing so. Rejection of philosophy does not mean you can get away from doing philosophy. Instead it just means you are doing bad philosophy.
Everything is "philosophy" in the sense that there are underlying truth claims and axioms, yes. When I say philosophy I'm referring to the most esoteric extreme of logic where you rely on first principles as much as possible. The cosmological argument is a towering edifice of logic constructed atop many sub-arguments, which again, most people (including philosophers) simply don't find convincing; whereas arguments like the one you've just made are more simple and can be addressed directly (as I'm doing now) without delving into unfathomable philosophical depths.
What do you define God to be? My definition of what God is is the Classical definition.
And this gets to the crux of the question. I consider my definition of God imperfect and incomplete, the same way that I can't wholly define my dad. At best I can identify him. If my dad (we'll call him John) were to tell me his name is actually Jake he would still be the same person. Even if he were to tell me he was an alien all along, not human, he would still be the same person I identify as John. If he were secretly evil he wouldn't actually cease to be John; I would just be wrong about who John was.
Saying "if the entity who sent Christ for me doesn't conform to my definition, it's not the same entity" is treating God like an idea rather than a real person. It's placing your definition of God above reality. My dad could be wholly different from the person who I think he is and still be the same person. He could even not be my actual father and still be the same person. "My dad," "John," etc. are all identifiers for the person, not definitions.
That's not to say I don't have a definition of God, but as I hope I've made clear, even if I'm wrong about the very most fundamental elements of that definition, he's still God; he just may not be worthy of worship.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Full disclosure I just hate the government and have no libertarian biases.
But this isn’t really ‘interfering’ in the economy. The government is specifically forbidding itself from being an activist investor.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
The Venn diagram between “thinks SJ is existentially dangerous” and “has given up on liberalism” is damn close to a circle. Killing some percentage of the population is not in the liberal Overton window. You can thank the Nazis and the Soviets and maybe the television for that cultural antibody.
No, game-theoretic excuses for genocide are limited to a really tiny subset of the conversation. The kind of subset that hangs around on Internet forums. I’d go as far as to suggest it’s mostly branding, signaling, a Molochian race to the bottom for viewers and clout. The Venn diagram between these people and actual capacity for violence is, thankfully, even smaller. Incentives work, and the liberal social order makes random violence deeply unappealing.
There is a much larger constituency which wouldn’t piss on their enemies if they were on fire. That’s not a response suited to an existential threat. It’s bog-standard tribalism, the sort that liberalism kind of sort of suborned.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
State ownership of enterprise, specifically? Nothing in particular. The trumpian process of punishing and crippling thé democrats and deep state? Very much so.
Throwaway05
2hr ago
I'd really rather stay focused, because you made a very specific claim, and whether or not healthcare "functions as a market" is not even relevant to it.
My claim was that the price, charge, and cost are all highly different from each other, often have minimal relationship to each other, have little value to the patient, and are highly misleading and hard to understand.
You noted "but I don't see how this is any different from any other industry that faces uncertainty (which is all of them)."
Well yes healthcare is different. That's important. It's inherently obvious in many ways. One of those is that "price, charge, and cost are all highly different..." the other is the problem with the supply and demand curves, the level of governmental intervention...... I provided several examples.
Furthermore -
Two posters in this thread neatly outlined the problem with what you are talking about.
If you charge people for what they use and only what they use and try and give them an answer in advance they get pissed when their hot dog costs 1 million dollars instead of 5.
If you add up the total costs of the ED and do some math to throw out the people who won't or can't pay and then charge people something that more resembles the true cost of the service on a per capita basis they then come on the motte and complain that they sat in a busy ED for 6 hours and got an ultrasound and it costs them how many thousands of dollars? (Sorry dev, but it's a good example).
Ugh we are back to healthcare doesn't function like anything else.
Few if any other lines of business are required by law to provide services to someone who walks in and says they will refuse to pay. Add on the fact that sometimes but not always you can get it covered by the government and the accounting is ferociously hard.
Obviously you can generate numbers like total revenue but turning that into useful information at the patient level is an ethical and political problem long before it becomes a practical one.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
Reuse is; recovery they could definitely do.
Poor choice of words on my part, but I don't think anyone suspected I meant that it's the fishing out of the melted slab of metal that's going to be a challenge.
In terms of Artemis, though, what's most likely to do them in is the schedule. They're not going to make 2027 for Artemis 3,
I'm rather bemused at the idea of giving so much shit to Bezos for being "glacial" while blaming SpaceX issues on "the schedule" that they were free to pick up, leave, or negotiate. It's not even that they're making steady progress and the fickle Congress will be cutting them off, just as they were reach the final milestone. Starship wasn't in orbit yet, it's going to be a long way to even demonstrate ship-to-ship refueling, let alone doing it over a dozen time in order to get it to the moon.
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
2hr ago
The distinction starts to get blurry very quickly.
We can reasonably assume that there is a fact of the matter regarding which HBD claims are true. But the reason people take such strong stances on HBD, even in the face of inconclusive or insufficient empirical evidence, is because of their values. It’s hard to cleanly separate questions of value and questions of fact because our values influence what we think about the facts.
Throwaway05
2hr ago
It's worth noting that specific market segments in the U.S. can and do do things like this but while that stuff can be a large fraction of the profit it isn't a large percentage of the overall activity.
A large part of the problem is that insurance companies will deliberately provide poor service because their clients are usually unrelated institutions and not the individual patient or anyone on the healthcare side (remember we mostly get our insurance from our employer).
When they do fuckery like the examples I'll provide below nobody has any recourse unless they randomly manage to fuck up the CEO's healthcare or something.
Right now one of the world's most prestigious health systems (Johns Hopkins) is threatening to punt United from their health system. One of the two will blink but the service insurance provides to everybody is awful as hell.
A few classic examples: -My patient has been stable on an inhaler for 20 years. They get new insurance company which is one of the ones that has some kinda of complicated kickback program where they rotate the covered inhaler every year. My patient might die if they change inhalers and switch to one that doesn't work for them, so I can spend 5-10 hours on the phone fighting insurance or just cross my fingers and switch. FUCK THIS.
-Patient is sitting in the hospital and needs rehab placement after discharge. The insurance company refuses to approve rehab. The patient sits in the hospital getting hospital level care for an extra 3-5 days before going to rehab. The insurance company pays for that care. Why did they do this? WE DON'T KNOW.
-Psych patient in the ED, clearly needs involuntary care. Insurance refuses to approve, likely hoping that the patient calms down enough to be sent home with suboptimal care or the ED gets frustrated enough to roll the dice on sending the guy home and hope he doesnt kill anybody. THIS WORKS DAMNIT.
Also the "Hawaii" example: You provide a service, you are the only one on your island who does it. Insurance offers you a deal that's barely over cost for your services. You say no. The insurance company spends the next five years flying patients to one of the other islands for their care until you break or go out of business.
The more charitable explanation for what is going on is that when the private insurance is functionally the whole system (Medicare/Medicaid aside) it has to work for all parts of the system not just the ones where you can make things simple and offer a boutique product like your UK elective stuff.
Atian_1
2hr ago
Not to mention a lot of apps suck on the phone when compared to their desktop or browser versions. Wunderground app for example. I like to click on local weather stations and view their temperature history and some other stats, the app doesn't let you do as much of this and not very easily.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
2hr ago
Did you perhaps miss the disclaimer right at the start that none of those are my true feelings? My no-bullshit personal strategy is "lay low, turtle up, wait for Armageddon - most forms of which will mortally wound SJ due to urban/rural demographic divides - and then, with the room to breathe thus granted, dismantle SJ's levers of power (most notably, its ability to gatekeep careers via tertiary education and HR; Scott's solution here and Hanania's here are some of the more obvious), but leave the adherents alive and mostly unmolested". A Leninist purge to strip people of power, not a Stalinist one to strip them of life. In point of fact, I would expect a great deal of my advocacy in the aftermath to be expended on begging people not to enact another White Terror.
(To address the elephant in the room: I will grudgingly grant that KillAllMen is not something most SJers currently believe nor, for various reasons, something they're likely to be able to implement. I wasn't especially happy at the whole "it's just a joke, find me a single person who takes it seriously" thing, though; while this was slightly before SJ's heyday, I did have a single mother who told me the Y chromosome's a genetic defect and literally starved me as a teen after I started registering to her as a "man" rather than a "child".)
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
2hr ago
I take the opposite view that most disagreements are value disagreements that ultimately map to aesthetic disagreements about the nature of a good life.
What led you to think this? Can you take some central disagreements and drill them down to the object level?
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2hr ago
Just no one has even tried to explain how exactly government buying up and owning private enterprise is a smart idea (something that we've been saying isn't good for decades) and why it's a solid goal towards improving the nation's economy and wealth.
Plenty of people have explained it. The race for AI is seen as existential between the U.S. and China. If Intel is owned and operated by a Chinese CEO, that's a major security risk. Therefore Trump and his team took extreme measures to make sure Intel was loyal to the U.S.
I'm not saying it will work or won't have other knock-on effects, but that was the straightforward justification.
magicalkittycat
2hr ago
That probably has something to do with the fact that, while you have provided examples that you call "principled", you've largely handwaved the "revenge" assertions you've made.
I did provide examples of non traditionally conservative ideas. It includes things like government nationalizing various companies (something they are apparently considering doing more), and protectionism.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
2hr ago
I'll agree that effectiveness can be objectively measured. But "principles are for suckers" isn't a statement on effectiveness, it's a value judgement of what a person should do. Thus, it is not (and can't be) objective.
magicalkittycat
2hr ago
Is your modeling of Trump so poor that you attribute it to deliberately wanting to wreck the US economy, during his own term, because fuck the Democrats?
Trump has never been much of a fiscal conservative, so I don't expect him to hold much fiscal conservative views. He seems to truly believe in the power of the state over private enterprise, and mercantilist thought.
This in regards to people who have actually claimed to be small government hands off capitalists joining in without an argument towards merit. They don't seem to have "changed their mind" (if that was the case, they would try to make an argument for central planning) as much as never having a strong belief in their prior claims to begin with.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2hr ago
Pointed but fair, even the heated rhetoric at the end. I’ll clarify that blue/red tribalism changes the perception of the cooperative value lost in each defection, inflating the out-group’s tats and deflating the in-group’s tits.
If the average red-tribe American (citizens since their grandfathers’ time at least) have the perception that they’re being prevented as a class from getting jobs by blue-tribe HR choosing naturalized immigrants, H1B workers, or unnaturalized migrants, tit-for-tat looks like mass deportations. The blue-triber sees this as a massive escalation of defection against their in-group or favored far-group.
If the average red-triber sees their wages stagnant vs inflation since 2008, yet the lowest rung of blue-tribe government worker can buy a suburban house and pay “our” taxes for their kids’ soccer practice, tit-for-tat looks like mass firings of government regulators. The blue-triber sees this as a massive escalation of defection against the people keeping them safe from capitalist overreach.
And so on, and so on. Sure it’ll make the Whigs (the blue-tribe and grey-tribe Republicans who disproportionately make up the GOP’s donor class and elected representatives) take pause, but the red tribe can finally smile at the perception of having shaken off, or at least told off, their oppressors.
This is also what it looks like when the red tribe no longer sees the blue tribe as a far group but its outgroup.
magicalkittycat
2hr ago
Communists and Nazis alike engaged in violent purges.
The government is neither owning intel, nor directing policy there. The government is owning ten percent of intel’s stock and voting with the board of directors.
That’s perfectly reasonable as a condition of government grants(which were already going). This way the government at least gets dividend revenue.
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