domain:web.law.duke.edu
Tenaz
1d ago
Don't they?
Not per capita, as far as I can tell.
I see the idea of God "by definition" as an artifact of Gnosticism. He can't just be God, he has to be, not only the greatest possible being, but the greatest conceivable being, or he's not God.
If you disagree, let me ask you:
Say everything in the Old Testament and New happened pretty much exactly as described. God is perfectly good and loving, he is omnipotent, he is eternal, etc. BUT say he's not the un-caused cause. Say that instead, there was some proto-cause that created God and then blipped out of existence, because that's just how reality happened to happen. Would you, upon learning this from God himself, continue to be Christian, or object that, essentially, your definition of God is greater than God himself, and the God who stands before you is not worthy of your worship because he falls short of your definition?
In the past when I have asked Catholics this question, they have answered that no, that omnipotent being would not be God. It astounds me. It tells me that Catholics, at least the type likely to frequent places like this, are more concerned with Platonism and heady intellectual arguments than with reality.
I call this Gnosticism but it's probably more accurately called Platonism. But I hope you can see where the confusion comes from:
As one of the Gnostic texts, the Secret Book of John, describes him, God is
illimitable, since there is nothing before it to limit it, unfathomable, since there is nothing before it to fathom it, immeasurable, since there was nothing before it to measure it, invisible, since nothing has seen it, eternal, since it exists eternally, unutterable, since nothing could comprehend it to utter it, unnamable, since there is nothing before it to give it a name.[5]
Since Gnosticism’s God was too perfect to ever have any reason to do anything, he didn’t create anything – not even Heaven.
What drives me insane is how many of these multi-thousand-dollar fuck-ups are the result of someone not on the hook for the bill (sometimes the doctor, sometimes the patient) choosing the vastly more expensive option just because it’s slightly more convenient. This guy gets told to take his infant to the emergency room for a UTI because hey, why not? Insurance will pay for it.
You can see why insurance companies turn into money-grubbing assholes.
This is a fake example because I'm not a doctor but very easy to imagine something similar playing out.
Oh no, you're bang on target. I'd know, both because I'm a doctor and because my dad has a heart condition that behaves more or less exactly like this. It would likely be cheaper to get a brand new heart (secondhand) than attempt to cure it with medication.
Some people think it's absurd, but I would argue that by not covering preventative and maintenance types of treatments early on, they're creating much more serious problems down the road.
Depends a great deal on the costs and benefits of the prevention and maintenance! Screening not only costs money, but if it involves, say, ionizing radiation, you will cause new cancers once you scale to hundreds of thousands of people. NICE in the UK does painstaking evaluations, and insurance companies definitely have their own systems, if not nearly as open to scrutiny. It is difficult to make a blanket statement, in some cases, it genuinely is better to wait for a disease to manifest before acting on it.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
I think I recall reading something about how the "we have always beem at war with Eastasia" bit was inspired by his experience of the infighting between the Republican factions in the Spanish Civil War.
Throwaway05
1d ago
"Good surgeons know how to operate, better ones when to operate, and the best when not to operate."
Alternatively one of the rules of The House of God - "The delivery of good medical care is to do as much nothing as possible."
Both are far harder than they sound.
anon_
1d ago
Concorde wasn't transformative because it never scaled.
My claim is that merely achieving "equal to Concorde but consistently adds at least a handful of new routes every year" is transformative, even if it's not any better or cheaper. And they are already notionally aiming for $7000 tickets, which is 1/2 the inflation-adjusted price of Concorde.
Or maybe the other way around: Concorde wasn't transformative because they only built 14 of them and only served 3 airports, which was downstream of the fact that the thing could barely fly and bled[1] money.
HereAndGone
1d ago
All that is very true, but they managed to also appeal to a female audience with baby Yoda and the Mandalorian being the protective figure there. I mean, there's a decent and simple plot that was difficult to mess up (until they managed to do so).
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
Man, fascism used to be hip and happening.
Where can I read more about this? None of the related articles have anything to say on the subject.
HereAndGone
1d ago
I'm old enough to have been there when the first Star Wars movie was released (mid-teens), and I honestly never thought Lucas would get the second and third sets of trilogies made.
Now it's almost a shame that happened.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
History? They're still doing it, just the other way around. Plenty of undesirables coming to the bitter dampness of Albion, including me.
roystgnr
1d ago
Some people would say you should go out and watch all of SG-1 now, but don't listen to them; it's fine to stop after season 8.
BSG, on the other hand ... "The humans haven't figured out what the Cylons are doing" is a compelling premise, right up until you add "the BSG writers are humans" and complete the syllogism.
I'd think LotR was the least nerdy thing you've mentioned, though. Pre-Peter-Jackson, sure, knowing the name "Frodo" marked you as an ubergeek, but today they're still top-100-lifetime-gross movies; when The Return of the King came out it was like top 10.
I remember liking Star Trek 1 and I was surprised when I got older and found out everyone hates it. But I also was obsessed with the Voyager probes as a child, so I guess it hit the spot for me.
You're not mixing up 1 and 4, are you? Everybody thought 1 was dull but loved 4.
I don't know what the Xer and Millennial parents of my cohort raised their kids on.
I tried to suggest to them at least a little of everything I knew was decent as soon as it was mostly age-appropriate; sometimes sooner if the writing was clever enough to slip by ("Under a blacklight this place looks like a Jackson Pollock painting!" - Guardians of the Galaxy) or pointless enough to edit out ("What if we reuse the same joke but don't understand subtext?" - Taika Waititi). I try to tell them which yet-unwatched options are better or worse or scarier or slower or whatever than others.
And they take turns getting to pick what we watch together, which is sometimes the hard part (Gravity Falls was good, Owl House less so, and was Amphibia really worth three seasons?) but is still the important part, because their preferences often surprise me. They've all soured on the MCU and Star Wars (except that we're planning to watch Andor). My oldest loved TNG and likes DS9 but dislikes Kirk too much to watch more TOS. My younger two just tolerated Trek (and won't watch any more scary Borg episodes) but they really like Babylon 5. Everybody loved The Martian, though not as much as the book.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
This is even funnier if you ignore the context of the blurb and assume that "Australia's claim to sovereignty" refers to the actual continent/country of Australia.
17 million people and twice that in kangaroos? Do we have to recognize that as an independent nation-state? I've lived in larger cities! Also, it seems very unfair to give an entire continent to a single country, not Westphalian in the least.
HereAndGone
1d ago
Hello! I have just rewritten the Kzinti, where the males are smart and the females are dumb breeding machines!
Ah well, you gave me a laugh at least.
anon_
1d ago
Oh, I have. The interesting thing is that they are pissed they get insurance consults on patients they want to send to surgery, but they freely admit that there are some of their colleagues (and it's a "everyone knows who it is" kind of thing) that propose surgery for literally anyone that comes through the door.
Can't have nice things ...
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Hang on, don't tar all the West with that brush. The US actually behaves like an agentic superpower, even if it can be a senile one. The rest of the Anglosphere or Europe? You have a point.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
I am happy to award you Bayes points for (likely) being right in our discussion. I could have sworn that we had a monetary bet myself, but I had looked for it a while back and didn't find anything. If even my 90% CI is unmet, can I interest you in a $10 giftcard from Amazon or equivalent? That would be from me to you, no need to pay if I'm right.
I hope that SpaceX finally figures out a single solid Starship configuration and flies it, but to their credit, they're consistently pushing the envelope and have the money to burn/blow up. I don't think anyone else would be crazy enough to imagine catching skyscrapers with chopsticks, and pull that off too.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1d ago
atheists to be outperforming the LDS by far.
Don't they? (Stephen King, JK Rowling, etc)
Otherwise it sounds like we're in agreement here... until you used the term "gnostic theology." Catholicism is pretty anti-gnostic. Bodies are great, Jesus has a glorified body, we'll have one in the resurrection of the dead in the world to come.
Throwaway05
1d ago
Are we talking high co-insurance costs here? I've never been on or been offered a health plan with a significant co-insurance burden although I'm aware they could hypothetically exist.
Interestingly, google-gpt says about 20% of plans have co-insurance.
So they certainly exist but aren't common.
If you are paying co-insurance charges would matter more but that dovetails into the rest of the discussion on this topic.
Outside of co-insurance - am I brain farting on anything other than: premium, deductible, co-insurance, co-pay? I guess uncovered nonsense.*
*Out of network costs are a separate problem that I forgot to mention in the other line of questioning (which is why my point is that shit is stupidly complicated!). Health systems don't really control who is and is not in network, it's usually a insurance fucking the consumer and hospital mechanism since canceling a scheduled surgery because Phil is the only anesthesia provider networked and he's off today or because the thing is emergency. This is one of the reasons why the hospital "know" they usually know what they charge, rarely know what the price is, and have zero ability to control and generally predict what the insurance company will pass along to the patient especially in uncontrolled situations like a hospital stay.
But yes thank you for reminding me of some of the other insurance related expense elements that I don't think about as they aren't in my plan, I dont think this alters the thrust of my argument though which is that the insurance is in charge of how much a patient pays and they have lots of ways to change that number away from the "price" and "charge."
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
1d ago
Cialdini's Influence is about why people don't listen to advice. Hickman on Twitter wrote:
Many times, "advice-giving" has little to do with advice, and more to do with posing thought experiments that expose weakness in men.
The guys with energy, who got "the juice" say OK, you're right, go try it. The low-energy types just get madder than hell, seethe over the advice, say it's "bad advice" but can't say why -- and the guys who don't need the advice are perfectly secure, well-aware they don't need it.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
Much like Moldbug’s “demotism,” that model sounds dramatic, but doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. The bits which resemble each other are not the ones with explanatory power.
If nothing else, the U.S. comes out way ahead on body count. We have a distinct lack of Holocaust or Holodomor or Great Leap Forward. Surely that reflects a difference in methodology.
Tenaz
1d ago
These difference might help explain why the rest of modern society likes the fictional contributions of the LDS more than devout Catholics in the past 20 years.
It's not just "the rest" of modern society though; Meyer has sold more works to Catholics than any living Catholic author.
It's got to be more complex than just that LDS theology is more materialist than Catholic. If this were the case you'd expect atheists to be outperforming the LDS by far.
I do think there are theological second-order effect. In some ways LDS theology may speak to materialists more than Catholic theology. We have totally different answers to the most fundamental questions in religion--the problem of evil, the nature of God, the nature of sin, etc. This trickles down to inform author worldviews and sprouts in new and interesting ways from the gnostic theology that has dominated Western philosophy over the past couple thousand years. Maybe that's all it is--we're saying new, interesting things.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1d ago
FDR’s USA
Interesting how the wiki entry for the National Industrial Recovery Act makes no reference to fascism despite it being part of FDR and the brain trust's inspiration for the act.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1d ago
Do you mean Out of Pocket Maximum when you say deductible?
After reaching deductible the patient still pays more money the more money is spent. It is possible to reach the Out of Pocket Maximum (I did one unfortunate year). At that point they can't take any more money.
Most of the time I give birth I reach the deductible, but other considerations can make the amount I pay in addition to insurance anywhere from 2k to 6k. And these other considerations don't have much to do with how hard the birth was to manage - I always have a natural birth, 1 day hospital stay, pretty much the same experience every time. The things that change are things like an out-of-network admitting OB.
Out of Pocket maximums are going to be pretty high, like 12k even on a good plan.
She got everything handed to her on a plate (and, um, if she's Lil' Ms Genius, how come she's not back in Wakanda doing high high high level super science?) and still complained. Disparu went a bit too hard on the series, but he's not wrong: she bitches about what good is a degree, it'll only get her (a really good high-paying doing science) job, then she's all shocked Pikachu face! when they go "okay then, you don't want a second chance, you're expelled".
She's aware right from the start that the Hood and gang are a bunch of criminals, there's no "oh well maybe they're just misunderstood, maybe they're actual urban revolutionaries". Nope, she jumped straight at "violence? crime? murder? for money? gimme gimme gimme!"
That "am I supposed to know who you are?" line to Mephistopheles isn't as smart as she thinks, because now if she's messing around with magic, she better know who is who in that world. But of course this is Riri Williams, Know-It-All Brat, and she can't be bothered to learn anything because she already knows it all. Tony Stark, when faced with the fallout of what he's been building all along, decides to go the hero route. Riri goes straight to "I don't wanna work, I want free stuff, I want money, if I have to commit crime and sell my soul to the Devil, no problem".
Tony Stark was Tony Stark from the start, he was being shown around as a kid genius from the age of four. That's not the family weapons industry at work there. And yeah, box of scraps in a cave, as against Riri being handed the tech from the start and then stealing it because she's incapable of producing her own.
That's not "more interesting" as character arc, that's straight up "she's dumb and evil".
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