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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

This is probably the best summary I've ever seen on this topic. Thank you.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

…hold on. Are you an American?

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

Going on ill-fated Antarctic expeditions is exactly the kind of long-lost British passtime that could reutite civic pride.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 24, 2025

I am very much not a survival game person, but I do appreciate the idea of a Minecraft for adults. I've seen a bit of gameplay, and it's clear to me that the game conveys 1% of the difficulty of bootstrapping even medieval civilization from scratch (which is a hundred times more than most offer). People seem ready to weep when they finally get copper tooling.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

Usually (and especially here) my angst is generated by people's frustration with physician salaries, as it's an easy target for frustration but is A (but not the) load bearing feature of the U.S. health system and angry people don't care.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

I’d say suicide-by-Antarctica is a lot more trouble than suicide-at-home…but this is the UK we’re talking about.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

I mean, the patient likely can get the treatment regardless (see also the main NYT article). Doing so with a not-yet-settled pre-auth battle is approximately equivalent to doing so without a pre-auth battle at all.

Also without pre-auth, the patient has more leverage; it's the provider who is on the hook if nothing is done

This isn't really true, though. If they get the treatment without the pre-auth completed and agreed (or none done at all), and the insurer ultimately denies it after-the-fact, the patient still owes the bill. There's still a whole range of things that can occur with the resulting cluster of a negotiation after-the-fact. The only thing that I see that has changed is that services have already been rendered, the patient is now potentially liable for a gigantic bill, and the negotiation for who actually pays what just hasn't happened yet. The patient has even less leverage, because they've already agreed to buy the thing. They almost certainly can't un-buy the thing. They're purely at the mercy of the other parties to decide how much they're going to get stuck paying.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

Hm, it wouldn't be that surprising, I suppose, if the materialist Mormon cosmos, and relatively creaturely God, lends itself to a very different type of science fiction story than the Catholic cosmos.

I might need to unpack that a bit further to myself, though, and since we've rolled over into the next week's thread, I'll leave that here for now.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

The US has a very peculiar arrangement where you don't buy healthcare. Your insurance provider buys healthcare on your behalf from healthcare providers, (except when they don't). But at least you buy health insurance, so if you get bad service from your insurance provider you can switch Your health insurance, in turn, is bought for you by your employer. Basically everyone in the system has terrible incentives.

  • Healthcare providers are incentivized to overtreat because it mitigates risk (less likely to get sued for malpractice), allows them to charge more, and the patient (usually) isn't footing most of the bill, so they're often price insensitive. (Also, the patients are clueless so they have no real ability to argue with the doctors about treatment plans)
  • Health Insurers are generally trying to sell the cheapest product possible to employers and pay out as little as possible to providers. They're not terribly worried about customer service quality beyond an absolute bare minimum, because their customers have limited ability to leave. So they stiff patients and deny coverage whenever they can get away with it.
  • Employers are generally trying to conform to their legal obligations and need to retain employees as cheaply as possible. Fortunately for them, your employees aren't sick most of the time, so you can actually get away with buying them fairly low quality health insurance.
  • The patient wants treatment, but lacks the information and expertise to make an informed decision. Almost as importantly, they want to avoid being left holding the bag. If the doctor recommends it and insurance approves it, they'll probably agree to it, because better safe than sorry. After all, it's (mostly) not their money (until it is).

The result is that the consumer (i.e. patient) is marooned in an incredibly capricious system which is only tenuously interested in his welfare and which may saddle him with a colossal bill as a result of processes completely opaque to him.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 17, 2025

A cult feels a lot like a "committed affectionate relationship" to people who are vulnerable to or already in a cult.

I'm reading Steve Hassan's Combating Cult Mind Control, that's not exactly how he describes his time with the Moonies.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

Better men than me have tried to grapple with cost-disease in the American healthcare system. From my perspective, it is a 'good' problem to have, if only because it proves you guys have so much fucking money that you can piss away such large sums of it without causing the system to go up in flames. Everyone gripes and kvetches, nobody seems happy, but happiness is a tall ask when lives and money are on the line.

For all the flaws of the system, it is clearly adequate, in the sense that the majority of the country is unwilling to set the rest of it on fire in a bid to fix it. I don't mean to damn with faint praise, it's not like medical systems elsewhere don't have their flaws. The "good/quick/cheap, pick two" problem has never been solved anywhere that I know of. America is like a whale, so huge that even the most aggressive cancer doesn't amount to more than a pimple.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

I think civil war is actually more likely.

Perfect! That’s how you get a constant supply of enthusiastic colonists to settle the wretched frontier.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

I can tell you that in my personal practice I try and be cost aware when possible but that a number of practical concerns come first. For one my job is to get people better, not spare their wallet, the threat of litigation makes it extremely hard to deviate from that even when both the patient and myself want to.

In some situations it appropriate (or required, most often with homeless people) to be more careful about this but I can't always do so. A classic example is inhalers, insurance change what they cover all the time, if I don't know your specific insurance plan well....it's just going to be wrong some of the time, even if I do know the insurance. Hospitals have invested in tools like e-prescribing which help with this.....but all kinds of negative effects of those things have also been generated.

One of those is that I am highly limited in what I can do. The hospital owns most physicians right now because of increased costs like EMRs we do what they say. Some times that involves practicing on our license essentially. It also frequently means things like me signing away my right to bill the hospital just does it for me based off of what I charted.

When it comes to inpatient medicine ultimately I'm going to be like "I'm sorry you are going to get a fuck off huge bill and I have no control over it and depending on your insurance that may or may not be a problem." I am also incentivized to not think about it too much to avoid burn out.

For outpatient medicine usually it's a stripped down professional fee that I have no influence over and a medication bill that I can try and save you money on.

I don't really know what percent of patients have co-insurance, and as you demonstrated and like I said I don't think about co-insurance at all most of the time. This is because legally and practically it has nothing to do with me, that's what the regulatory and legal environment have decided.

Usually when this kind of thing comes up it's "put the doctors on it" but the hospital and insurance company are in charge!

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

I thought thr idea is absurd, and would have walked right into taking the "not gonna happen" side

I thought Musk was making a joke. If I fight the Absurdity Heuristic hard enough I can see how much sense it makes, but until they started mounting the tower arms I still thought maybe it was a joke.

They're not even doing it for the Falcon 9, Starship is probably exponentoally more difficult.

Counterintuitively, no. You'd think that "bigger is harder" in engineering as a general rule, but there are exceptions. The control problem that lets Falcon 9 land within meters and Starship get caught within centimeters is one. Surviving atmospheric entry is another - it helps to be as big and "fluffy" (high surface area to mass ratio) as possible, so you start decelerating sooner and slow down higher and peak at a lower heat flux. Size also lets Starship get away with using steel - previous steel rocket stages needed to be "balloon tanks", pressure-stabilized because of their thinness, but Starship is so huge that even "thin" relative to that is thick enough to worry less about buckling, and they get far more thermal resilience "for free".

But that aside, it's the recovery of the second stage that is more likely to do them in.

Reuse is; recovery they could definitely do. They've already managed to bring three ships to a soft powered splashdown (albeit just barely, that first time) after atmospheric entry, despite one of the three being a "let's try stripping the heat shield way down and see what breaks first" test. I can't imagine any of those were in shape to launch again (or would have been even if they were caught rather than splashed down), but being able to do even a brief short main engine relight right on cue for the splashdown is a pretty good step in the right direction.

The biggest catch is that, even if they technically manage upper stage reuse, they need cheap reuse, with at least a few flights per ship, to make this worth all the effort. Space-Shuttle-style "if we go over everything with a microscope then we can launch this again next year" won't cut it.

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, and if they don't even get an unmanned lunar landing test by then, Congress is fickle enough to put HLS Starship (or the whole Artemis program) in the waste bin next to Constellation.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

And they are already notionally aiming for $7000 tickets, which is 1/2 the inflation-adjusted price of Concorde.

That is what I mean by a 2x improvement. Slightly less than half the inflation-adjusted price, for a marginally worse product (Mach 1.7 vs Mach 2.0). Still a niche product for rich people - the marketing spin is that the fare is competitive with business class, but airlines don't sell many full-fare business class tickets at the moment* - the average fare actually paid needs to go up a lot relative to subsonic business class for the economics to work out.

* As well as the usual discounted fares, the big volume business travel customers (mostly banks and consultancies) all have negotiated rebate schemes which means that the revenue to the airline is less than the face value of the ticket.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

You know, the American edge of this kinda stuff runs into a few issues. One is our legitimate exceptionalism, we are the superpower, we don't usually need to make compromises. That's not a completely terrible approach and for long enough that most of the people alive in the country have only experienced that....it worked.

It limits our facility with actually going through this process however.

Part of it is that people know that something can be shaved off without impairing patient care. This is probably right but nobody knows (or agrees) what it is.

Then you have American specific attributes - we are pussies when it comes to pain for instance, we are more willing to seek and use care, we are too independent, and so on.

Low societal temperament to say "yeah let some mee-maws go down if it saves a few hundred million dollars."

But yes you are right that this conversation is happening just less transparently, and at the same time if you came over here I think you'd be shocked at how much we through at things.

Is it good that we'll code a clearly dead kid for 90 minutes? Is it good that we will give homeless crack cocaine Fred the standard of care 12 times a month when he presents with psychiatric issues caused by his recreational polypharmacy?

I don't know.

I am however at times horrified and at times proud.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

Too easy to game by making predictions about things that no one cares about, and are easier to gauge.

You know, this is a valid point. "my calibration is perfect when it comes to predicting coin flips, dice rolls, and card turns!"

That's the benefit to a somewhat adversarial system, you're forced to actually pick something that someone reasonably disagrees with you about and cares enough about to take on some risk. so it must be more meaningful.

but I think one can learn not to take it thay way.

I'm pretty close to that. I'm actually getting a little flippant about tossing out bets, even if I'm not too interested in the topic.

I actually made 50 bucks on Kalshi yesterday betting that Starship wouldn't launch, on the logic that if it didn't launch, I would be sad, and money would cheer me up some.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

I try and keep in mind that (in the U.S. for sure) the PUBLIC HEALTH apparatus absolutely did some shady business and doctors were complicit. This killed a ton of trust.

MRNA vaccines had legit concerns when they were being forced on everyone and I knew plenty of docs (including liberals) who had concerns initially for politics came into it.

Vaccines have always been a tough topic as far back as the Salk/Sabin days lol.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

I would count the Line in Saudi Arabia. Many people write it off as another prince’s embarrassing vanity project, but I think it’s the first serious attempt to construct an arcology. A type of semi self contained megastructure that you will probably be hearing a lot about in the near future.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 24, 2025

Wikipedia says it was inspired by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, but I’d believe that too.

I really need to read Homage to Catalonia.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

I also agree with JTarrou - a superordinate political identity like "Christendom" or "Western Civilisation" doesn't need near-universal adherence to matter, just broad popular or broad elite support in the nations it seeks to unite. And political Islam is a functioning superordinate identity group, and the factional splits within it are the main drivers of political violence globally. (Contra Huntington in Clash of Civilisations, the borders of the Islamic world are a lot less bloody than the interior). "Western Civilisation"/"The Free World" remains an important superordinate identity, with globohomo a faction within it. So far we handle our factional conflicts at the ballot box, and everyone except the nuttier fringes of MAGA want to keep it that way.

None of the various religious groups you mention have any desire to be a superordinate identity in this sense. Orthodoxy is in practice a bunch of ethnic churches that hate each other more than they hate outsiders, with the Orthobros being irrelevant. Rad Trads are happy being themselves, and religious Jews explicitly see themselves as a nation state that isn't part of a superordinate group.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

Interesting bets. 100 tons to LEO is aggressive, do you know where we're at now?

Also for the one with @TheDag, hasn't Starship already reached orbit like, earlier this year?

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

Interestingly, google-gpt says about 20% of plans have co-insurance.

I think this is a mistake on GPT's part. The majority of plans have 20% co-insurance, meaning the patient pays 20% after the deductible is met. See https://www.healthcare.gov/choose-a-plan/plans-categories/ or even just try to look for an example of a plan without co-insurance.

I asked Gemini, "Is it possible to get a Health Insurance plan without co-insurance?" and the response was:

"Yes, it is possible to find a health insurance plan without co-insurance, but they are not as common."

I followed up with, "What percentage of Americans have a health care policy without co-insurance?" and got:

The available data does not provide a specific percentage of Americans who have a health insurance policy without co-insurance. However, we can infer some information from the general landscape of U.S. health insurance.

Most health insurance plans, particularly those obtained through employers or the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace, include some form of co-insurance as a cost-sharing mechanism.

The types of plans most likely to have little to no co-insurance are:

Medicaid: This is a public program for low-income individuals and families. 1 While cost-sharing can vary by state, many services are covered with a very small copay or no out-of-pocket costs, effectively making it a no-coinsurance plan for most enrollees.

The Uninsured Population and Health Coverage - KFF Source icon www.kff.org

High-Tier ACA Marketplace Plans (Gold and Platinum): These plans have higher premiums but lower deductibles and out-of-pocket costs, and sometimes have a copay structure for a wider range of services, which can reduce or eliminate the need for co-insurance.

Some Medicare Plans: Traditional Medicare has a coinsurance for many services (e.g., 20% for Part B services). However, many beneficiaries enroll in Medicare Advantage or Medigap plans, which can reduce or eliminate this cost-sharing.

While we can't provide a precise number, it's safe to say that a vast majority of Americans with health insurance are enrolled in plans that include co-insurance. Plans without it are available but are less common and typically come with higher monthly premiums.

I think it does matter, because it's not solely insurance deciding how much the patient pays. How the hospital codes and the choices the doctor makes regarding patient care has a direct, visible consequence on how much the patient pays. It is interesting to see that doctors might not realize that.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

Britain should settle Antarctica

I think civil war is actually more likely.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

I am regularly dismayed by the Motte's average epistemics when it comes to things like vaccination. Some of the takes I've seen post-covid had me pulling at my hair.

The mRNA vaccines? The ongoing moratorium on government funds for the same? Where does the stupidity end?

The rest of the world is not devoid of competent doctors or statisticians, the COVID vaccines are highly imperfect and not that important for young, healthy adults or children. There is no concerted effort to suppress a spree of cardiac myopathies or weird clotting/autoimmune disorders that needs buy-in from the governments of the other 7.5 billion people on this globe. When promising cures for things like aggressive pancreatic cancers are caught in the cross-fire, I am tempted to order a gun, or, in this country, a sharp gardening implement.