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Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1d ago
I recall being part of a student group at university (Computer Science) that aimed to explore the Apollo Moon Mission's onboard computer. My job was explaining orbital mechanics to everyone...and I completely overshot and took about an hour to do it in a 20-minute time-slot, giving far too much detail.
Somewhat later, I'd write my own (purely keplerian) orbital simulations, mostly in C#.
To some extent, nerds are all the same, no matter the time and place.
Men are more risk tolerant, novelty-seeking, and higher-earning, so it might sound counterintuitive to some that women travel more than men. Indeed, at least one article reports that 64% of worldwide travelers are women. The article mentions the male privilege of dying earlier as a possible source for the greater pool of female travelers.
Perhaps women have more free time from taking more time off between jobs, or having better work-life balance jobs where they can take long stretches of time off. Women also retire earlier, if they were working at all in the first place.
Women might also care less about splurging on travel from a lifetime of not needing money to attract/entertain men, and might have a reverse-endowment effect if they're spending money they didn't fully earn themselves. This would be consistent with women being the primary drivers of consumer spending.
There are further key differences in the female vs. male traveling experience, especially for young women and young men. Women's sexual market value is automatic and portable through their looks; men's not so much as male status is more situational and contextual. Women can just show-up and have FUN things happen to them.
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Traveling for women means having excuses to take thotty photos in exotic locations for social media; getting introduced to, invited out, taken out to cool places by local and tourist men; having a limitless selection of tour guides, monkey-dancers, and court-jesters from online dating upon arrival, the option to ride the carousel with local and/or tourist men to their heart's content. Language barriers are less of an issue because local and tourist men will make the effort to communicate with them, whether it be in the women's native language or patiently in the local language.
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Traveling for men means having to research any place you might want to go; having to figure out where the cool spots are; competing with both local and tourist men for the limited number of tourist women; figuring out how/where to meet local women and having to grind out approaches yourself; grinding hard for weeks on social media and online dating prior to the trip to hopefully have a non-zero number of dates. Language barriers are more of an issue because local and tourist women will usually not take the initiative to attempt communication in the men's native language, and have less patience for tourist men fumbling around in the local language.
HeimrArnadalr
English Supremacist
1d ago
some kind of incredible cognitohazardous superstimulus version of the real incident (which I had already stumbled upon, found evocative in a vacuum, and now find even more evocative given the context)
You can't just say that and not share it with the rest of us!
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
1d ago
I still think of that Developers Developers chant that went viral years ago and have a good chuckle. He was probably more but he'll always be a clown to me.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
No?
Yes? I don't know about you, but I never had to pay more for coffee because the espresso machine broke down earlier that week, or because the waiter they hiree recently is slower than average and can't cover as many tables as fast.
Nobody is really calling for this
Is there a reason why you keep moving to arguments that aren't relevant to the conversation?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1d ago
The appeal to me is that it's true. I haven't chosen my opinions based on which ideas I liked most.
Fortunately, it's not true and I have all the proof I need of that. However, if it were true I should just commit suicide and get it over with. Maybe that's extreme, the point is I would need to reevaluate quite a lot.
You really don't get it. Your question is, "What if I rip all the significance out of the world? Would you still call someone by their chosen name?" And the answer is, "Why on Earth do you think a name matters?"
\3. If morality doesn't inherently proceed from God, then God cannot possibly have a perfect understanding of morality
This is not the objection. The objection is, if morality is outside of God, then God is held to an outside standard. There is something outside God which is sovereign to God. In which case, cut out the middle man. Also, God can now be evil. If He can't then He's not free. If He can be evil, then following Him unreservedly is unwise.
Also, He could be lying to us about morality. A classical understanding of God provides the necessary background for something that "Cannot deceive nor be deceived." Take that away and we open up both doors.
Throwaway05
1d ago
Providers have to decide if they want to give a unified price to all their customers, or if they can predict which type of customer is associated with which kind of cost, and offer different prices based on that.
No?
Nobody is really calling for this and if given a list of priorities (like overall expensive, waiting room times) people will put price transparency at the bottom.
Additionally health system do not decide how much patients pay. Insurance companies do. If you would like more price transparency in how much people pay ask the people in charge of how much patients pay.
oats_son
1d ago
It surprises me that there were two of you who didn't get this impression. But here you go. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelgoldstein/2024/02/22/women-love-to-travel-men-not-so-much/
An estimate for your kitchen getting redone is not like this.
If you actually think that the error bars are secondary, than not only is getting your kitchen done exactly like that, every good and service is as well.
Providers have to decide if they want to give a unified price to all their customers, or if they can predict which type of customer is associated with which kind of cost, and offer different prices based on that. If there's anything that would set healthcare apart from other industries, it is the error bars, but since you're saying it's not them (and I agree, that only impacts the price level, not the possibility of giving a price) this is absolutely nothing new for any entrepreneur or manager.
You might be right that the customers won't want to get profiled based on their diet or whatever - that is a completely irrelevant argument to what we're discussing, and can be addressed by regulators if it bothers people too much.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
1d ago
Tipping isn't supposed to be gift giving it's supposed to be outsourcing the quality control of service provided to the lowest cost evaluator. That's why their base pay in the US is traditionally so low. Rather than having inconsistent service or having more management time/secret diners reviewing service and charging more for the higher wage/management cost.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
Sounds like my kind of humor.
Two recommendations in response:
Thunder Below, a WWII memoir of an America sub captain. Known for sinking a number of Japanese ships and one train. Alternating hilarious and awesome.
A Country Doctor’s Notebook, collected serials by Mikhaio Bulgakov. English translation here; no idea where to read the original.
roystgnr
1d ago
Thanks for letting me sperg out on the added detail! I suspected you might know it already, but it's surprising how counter-intuitive it is.
As a kid 30-something years ago I wrote an orbital dynamics simulator (in QBasic, with Explicit Euler time stepping, with nothing but circle sizes to indicate z-dimension position and nothing but animation to indicate velocity; I won a science contest award but I cringe to think back on it), and one of the features I added was user-controllable rockets. Keys to control orientation, another for acceleration, others for speeding/slowing/pausing time. I'd ask people to get from a lower circular orbit to a higher one, and basically everybody I asked would try the same strategy: turn the rocket vertical (perpendicular to its current direction of motion), thrust, then turn horizontal again on the theory that that's what they'd need to do after they'd accomplished "up".
To be fair, at the same time I was struggling to understand why porkchop plots all have those gaps in the middle, and I didn't finally get that until long long afterward, when I first had to make an interplanetary plane change in KSP.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
Doesn’t match my experience either. I’d like to see some stats before trying to read the tea leaves.
oats_son
1d ago
Did you ever play DayZ, either the Arma 2 mod or the standalone game? What did you think of that?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
Who makes the decisions for “radio edits”?
Inspired by Bang Bang Bang, a delightfully duff song from British band Sports Team. It sees regular play on a local station. While most lines are unchanged, this one merited two radio blanks:
he don’t get - unless he takes his - to bed
The first blank, “hard,” isn’t surprising. Can’t be corrupting the youth. Whatever. But the second? In a song about mass shootings, you won’t say the word “gun”?
I’m wondering if this is controlled by the artist, by the label, by a regulator like, or at some other step in the process. Surely it wasn’t my station that decided Texans wouldn’t stand for the g-word. It’s probably not the FCC, either, unless various radio classics are grandfathered in. So what gives?
Rov_Scam
1d ago
He probably knows people, but why would they give him special treatment? Google owns YouTube, and his entire professional reputation is tied to being CEO of their biggest competitor. The other weird thing is that there's no conceivable reason for Ballmer to even need to buy promotions. If the guy likes to hear himself talk, and there's no other explanation for why he's doing this, then he could probably target channels with existing subscriber bases and offer to make guest appearances where he plugs his channel. He's a big enough name that I doubt many people would say no to having him on.
Throwaway05
1d ago
It's yet to be demonstrated in ways relevant to the question of the difficulty of providing patient with the price information.
A simple ED visit can cost <5k, 50 thousand dollars, 1 million dollars, or 5 million dollars.
An estimate for your kitchen getting redone is not like this.
The error bars around those are secondary to the fact that when people want an estimate in their mind that estimate is a commitment and being told a range from 500 dollars to 5 million is worthless information.
Yes plenty of healthcare interactions are simpler than that but if you are going to demand estimates for everything you have to capture this problem, if you are going to demand estimates when feasible we already do that.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Scotland (well, urban progressive Scotland, not the Highlands) is the Canada of Britain - their modern identity is deeply wrapped up in not being their richer, more famous, comparatively more conservative neighbour. As such, Scottish nationalism has taken on a distinctively left-wing, almost third-worldist character. Devolution hasn't helped, in that it's given Scotland a sort of toy government where SNP politicians can play around knowing they'll be bailed out of any serious consequences for bad decisions by the British taxpayer.
Throwaway05
1d ago
Some important things to note here:
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The majority of the average patient's interaction with healthcare are the type of thing where this has some element of technical feasibility. You are likely thinking "okay what's the cash price for a relatively constrained activity like an allergy shot, elective MRI, even a basic procedure like a colonoscopy" the whole system (I'll come back to this) has some possibility of delivering this to you. However the system is designed around the more important and more complicated activities like a hospital stay. If you show up the ED with diverticulitis you could be seen in the ED and sent home with conservative management. You could be put in obs for a day and started on Zosyn and fluids and kept NPO, you could have a perf leading to surgical management, necrosis, and a 3 month hospital stay. Nobody knows any of the numbers associated with this visit until it's done. It's extremely hard to legislate for one but not capture the other, so it's easy to end up with meaningless bullshit numbers if you put a law down. In a healthy system the people involved will try and give you numbers when it's possible. Your doctor will usually be able to estimate what the professional fee for his visit with you will be, but:
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Physicians aren't in control of this. Usually when this comes up people demand the burden be on the doctor. I have other shit to do....like clinical work? Keeping up with the changes in billing is a full-time job for sometimes something like hundreds of staff. Elsewhere in this thread we have someone who used to work in insurance passing around misinformation - it's hard to keep track of this stuff and estimates are usually considered binding if not legally then in someone's mind. We can't feasible deliver this. Often the billing department can't deliver this until after we do our job because they aren't clinical. You'd need to have a meeting with your insurance, the billing department, and the physician in advance to have something with any accuracy for anything remotely complicated (and again we can get in a spitball distance but people get pissed at healthcare if you are wrong at all it'd be worse than not trying). On a more micro level it's worth keeping in mind that working for a health system these days usually involves surrendering lots of control, including often over billing. I can't control the billing department and what they put down, but:
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Health systems aren't in control of this. Most importantly we can't control insurance. Insurance decides how much you get stuck with. Usually we get a feel for what common plans and what common charges will end up resulting in but an insurance company can essentially decide to randomly say "no I'm not paying for that" which may or may not get addressed. While I've been rightly smacked on the nose for forgetting about coinsurance and other things like that, ultimately the person who decides what to do with the bill is not me or my hospital and I have no control over them and they are famously awful.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1d ago
Given that I have a million hours in Kerbal Space Program (ESA hire me already!), I already knew all this and then some, but I wanted to keep it as simple as possible while still getting across what a stable orbit even is and how it relates to getting spaceships back down to Earth.
Still, thanks for the added detail!
phailyoor
1d ago
I thought chatgpt's newest model was awesomesauce when it first came out, but after seeing midwits spam brown image after brown image I've come to despise it.
like seriously can you put in 2 minutes of effort tweaking your prompt to make it not a dull brown mess?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d 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.
roystgnr
1d ago
accelerate until they reach their desired altitude, which should be well outside the atmosphere, then accelerate again to stabilize their orbit
Ooh, we just talked about this, kinda!
It would be correct to say "hefting its payload, the rocket accelerated to orbit", because the "gain altitude" part and the "gain horizontal speed" part of a launch trajectory aren't two separate parts. A launch vehicle generally starts angling a little bit away from vertical almost immediately as it leaves the pad, and a launch to low orbit usually doesn't reach its final altitude until at or after the point it turns off its engines. There's a slight break earlier, in between the acceleration phases from different rocket stages, but not much of a break and not much change in direction before vs after.
It's mostly just geosynchronous satellites that have a distinct separate "now we're high enough and we start accelerating again horizontally" phase, but even geosynchronous transfer orbits are stable (and faster than low earth orbits, all horizontally, at perigee) so the final phase is called "circularizing" the orbit, not stabilizing it.
TournamentFishing
1d ago
For what it's worth appending to this old conversation:
- I know what insurance is.
- I am well aware of all the shenanigans behind the scenes with negotiations between insurance companies and medical providers and billing.
- I am aware that some consumers do not understand the financial products they purchase.
- I am aware that the medical providers say the price info they can provide is useless.
- Nonetheless, it is not.
(Pinging @ControlsFreak again since they're the only other person that might still be interested in this comment chain.)
I want to register my prediction that the story of this video is far, far more complicated than what is being presented by agitprop Twitter accounts. (A bold prediction, I know.)
Is there at least a decent possibility that this girl and her sister are helpless victims of harassment by scummy Pakistani men and neglect by a heartless police bureaucracy? Sure! But we have plenty of teenagers here in America who carry weapons to use on each other, or occasionally on bystanders from outside their social class.
I have personally been harassed and threatened by roving gangs of feral kids in this country, and in many cases they were certainly no older than this girl. Now, those kids were pretty much exclusively from demographics which many people here (myself included) instinctively sort into “outgroup”, and therefore right-wingers have no difficulty taking seriously accusations against them. Like the girl in the video, those teenagers, if and when confronted by adults, effortlessly shifted from brash aggression to the performance of fear and vulnerability. (“We’re just kids! Stay away from us, you weirdo!”) It is trivially easy to see through this tactic when imagining a gang of, say, black teenage carjackers.
What Americans in particular seem not to grasp about Britain is just how terribly dysfunctional its white underclass is. American right-wingers love to smirk knowingly about stories of the rampant “knife crime” in the U.K., safe in the assumption that this is overwhelmingly a non-white phenomenon. However, Scotland and the North of England have had an entirely native class of dissolute criminal youths for a very long time. Drug abuse and broken homes have gutted these communities long before brown immigrants started showing up in any significant numbers. Yes, the mass immigration is obviously bad; it has both compounded existing problems, and introduced a slew of new ones. But trying to sort this altercation into a clear tribalist frame — “I see a white British girl and a subcontinental man, so I know everything there is to know about who’s in the right” — is widely irresponsible given the total dearth of solid information.
What I see as the likely explanation here is that these two girls, possibly as part of a larger group, were acting disorderly and aggressive in this park. The man filming and another woman (apparently his sister) either confronted the girl, or were approached by her, and began filming. He did so because he believed that, if this escalated, he would be served by having video evidence of her wielding weapons. (That way if she tried to ditch them somewhere and deny having them, he’d have counter-evidence.)
These girls are likely from a very broken family environment and may well have suffered abuse in the past — either from brown immigrants, or from their own white family members, their gangster boyfriends, etc. — and their fear in that moment could be genuine. (As could their fear of being caught.) That doesn’t make this guy wrong for filming them or approaching them. If these girls are old enough to roam around unaccompanied, carrying bladed weapons, they are also old enough to be filmed. That can be true even if their reasons for carrying the weapons end up being totally innocent/justified! Multiple people involved in this altercation can all have legitimate motivations and be acting rationally according to their perceived interests.
If the agitprop narrative ends up being fully corroborated, I won’t find it especially surprising. Obviously there have been massive negative consequences resulting from mass immigration to the U.K., including rape gangs targeting precisely this sort of dissolute underclass girl. This city, Dundee, has a foreign-born population of 9%, including apparently roughly 4,000 Asian residents. It wouldn’t be surprising if some of those guys have been caught harassing/propositioning white girls! Still, at this time we lack anything remotely close to enough evidence to confidently assume that’s what happened here.
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