domain:shapesinthefog.substack.com
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Texas is freedom land
5hr 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
5hr 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
5hr 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
5hr 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
5hr ago
Some important things to note here:
-
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:
-
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:
-
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.
5hr 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
5hr 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
5hr 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
5hr 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
5hr 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.)
Throwaway05
5hr ago
My only nitpick would be that I don't see it as a "vulnerability". I just see it as a constitutive part of being human.
I mean the more objective style we generally see here is extremely valuable most of the time and is usually "better," but it's important to remember that the average person doesn't really think or act like us and that has implications for explanatory power of most of our thinking.
Tenaz
6hr ago
If your conception of God is one that a sufficiently bored and long-lived alien species could imitate, then I really don't understand what the appeal of religion is to you.
The appeal to me is that it's true. I haven't chosen my opinions based on which ideas I liked most. There are other appeals (moral correctness, potential for growth, pretty much everything that typically goes along with religion) but first and foremost, I try to believe whatever's most true. Not that I actually believe aliens could imitate God.
But if Jesus were to show up to me, prove to me that he's Jesus, then say something like, "Actually, what you call "God" in the Bible isn't transcendental at all. We're pretty powerful, but don't actually have the ability to create matter out of nothing, we are not actively sustaining your being, the Ten Commandments were really our best guess at moral laws but we are not really the basis for goodness. The universe has always existed and we never figured out why. We're just playing around in it. I'm offering you a good afterlife, at great personal cost to myself, so you should do what I say..."
So, as I said earlier, this reeks of "if God says my theological framework is wrong, then under my theological framework I find God to be unsatisfying." No. In the hypothetical we've already established that your theological framework is wrong! You'd better be really careful about rebuilding actual correct axioms before deciding you're ready to judge God and find him wanting.
That's what this is, in the end. "If God doesn't conform to my definition then he's not enough for me."
I'd be happy to tackle any of the underlying assumptions, but ideally I'd like to stick to just one:
- If God cannot create matter, he isn't omnipotent
- If morality doesn't inherently proceed from God, and is rather an underlying fact of reality like math, then it is not authoritative
- If morality doesn't inherently proceed from God, then God cannot possibly have a perfect understanding of morality
- There is no satisfactory explanation for existence besides God
Totalitarianit
6hr ago
I, for one, will be devastated that you will be ridding everyone here of your Main Character Syndrome. Please don't go...
To your point, there is some clear frustration that we all share. Some people here are more hysterical about it than others, and I appreciate @magicalkittycat for starting shit (in a thought provoking way) here and challenging people to explain their positions. That being said, if you need a reminder of brain drain on a massive level, hop on over to reddit where as a collective they consistently call millions of people Nazis and ban a not-so-small percentage of them for the capital crime of having a dissenting opinion. The mods here don't do that.
According to mainstream reddit (which is the largest internet forum on the planet), I have been a Nazi from 2020 forward for stating the facts of the Kyle Rittenhouse case, not wanting certain sexual content in schools, disagreeing with certain aspects and goals of BLM, calling out the leftist creep in our institutions, etcetera, etcetera. So, take what you see here, flip the politics, lower the IQ by about 10 points, then multiply it by a couple hundred thousand users, and what you end up with is a gigantic brain drain, plus an ideological purge that's been allowed and encouraged for the better part of a decade.
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
6hr ago
That moment of dawning realization when you understand that your enemies are humans just like you, and you're a human just like them.
Not to pick on you specifically of course. It's a difficult truth to realize, and it's an easy truth to forget. We all need constant reminders.
My only nitpick would be that I don't see it as a "vulnerability". I just see it as a constitutive part of being human.
roystgnr
6hr ago
In practice there's no such thing as a completely stable orbit - we spend like 3 tons a year of propelllant reboosting the International Space Station, and if we ever stopped its orbit would just keep decaying, faster and faster, until it reentered the atmosphere a year and a half or so later.
But you want to release satellites either into their final orbit (which you want to be stable for years or decades) or into an initial "parking" orbit they can gradually raise themselves (so you want it to even initially be stable for weeks or months). So the upper stage of a spacecraft will enter this mostly-stable orbit to release its satellites. From there, ideally you do a deorbit burn to control where you reenter, but either way you tend to have a small light aluminum upper stage that just burns up on reentry.
All the Starship tests have targeted "suborbital, but just barely" orbits like the one in test 10, aimed to reenter the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean without any further maneuvering. From a performance perspective there's not much difference between this and a full orbit, but from a safety perspective the difference is huge, because the Starship is huge.
If they're on a suborbital trajectory that's going to hit atmosphere over the middle of nowhere, then at that point even if the vehicle isn't controllable (which happened on the 3rd and 9th tests) or the engines can't relight in space (which hasn't happened, but they've only tested that twice now) it's still not a danger - even if it can't reenter safely, it'll still break up where nobody can be hurt. If they're on an orbital trajectory, they're not an immediate danger to anybody, but there's no such thing as a completely stable orbit, and the instability of an orbit depends on "space weather" that expands and contracts the upper atmosphere somewhat unpredictably, and so basically anywhere with a latitude as close to the equator as Boca Chica or closer would become a possible target.
China has at least one large rocket stage that basically plays Russian Roulette this way, but an untargeted Starship reentry would be even worse - the Long March 5B stage has at least been designed to use lighter materials that won't survive reentry very well, but Starship is steel and heat shield tiles designed for just the opposite, and it's 100 tons of them instead of 20. So they're not going to even try to get into orbit until they're very confident they can get out of it again.
Quantumfreakonomics
6hr ago
It feels like it’s actually Americans who have the hang-up about underage girls, and that this cultural disconnect is what is driving a lot of the “WTF is going on in the UK” discourse from American commentators.
I've had several conversations with medical staff which go something like this:
"What would be the price for X?"
"I can't possibly say. It depends on your insurance."
"Can you just tell me how much you'll charge?"
"Impossible. It depends on your insurance."
"You have my insurance info. Can you check how much you'll charge them?"
"No, still impossible."
"Okay, pretend I'm uninsured. How much would you charge?"
And then SURPRISE SURPRISE their quote turns out to be useful for making decisions and estimating how much I will pay.
And I'll further grant that you (the individual) probably aren't personally empowered to give meaningful price estimates. But @ControlsFreak is right that you (as synecdoche for your employer and the supply chain behind you) do have access to information on what you will ask from insurance, and that has a connection to what insurance will pay, which will in turn be connected to the cost born by the consumer.
And yes, costs aren't always perfectly predictable. The same is true for mechanics and contractors. But we don't have to play a game of make-believe for them to give me a estimate.
This information matters to people. You (synecdoche) should give it to them.
Botond173
6hr ago
Feminist accusations widely mocked by right-wingers online and reports of migrant/Muslim/black etc. underclass sexual violation of native teenage girls and young women tend to concern widely different forms of male behavior though.
gattsuru
6hr ago
And NXP is definitely not even close to a tier-one fab these days; I think they've capped out in the >50nm range. Thanks for the catch, not sure why I thought they still had a telecom branch.
... there's not really any good 'if you squints' left, then. TI have got the process tech to leave 'guy in shed' fully in the dust, but their ARM stuff is more at the embedded systems level from my understanding, in addition to the TI tax. BAE is heavily focused on defense sector, unsurprisingly, which good for them but not helpful for the rest of us. Tower, I guess? I dunno much about their production outputs beyond some cmos stuff.
Botond173
6hr ago
What is not real is this AI-generated image of a young girl emblazened with Scottish garb and Celtic war paint defending her home and honor with sabre and battleaxe.
At this point it's warranted to ask the tangentially related question as to why Scotland altogether is apparently not one bit less cucked than England.
Soteriologian
6hr ago
It’s uncouth to say, but given how these Boudicca memes are blazing across the netscape, it’s hard to contend this is a false assessment.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
6hr ago
I recently gave Metal Garden (https://store.steampowered.com/app/3539440/Metal_Garden/) a look, because I happen to have a thing for megastructures and this game is set in one.
Within five minutes of playtime, what struck me was
- depression grey all over
- anthropomorphic animals
- featureless protagonist
- extremely unsatisfying gameplay
So I quit playing and decided to just get a lore dump via TV Tropes. Where it said that Metal Garden was
developed by Tinerasoft, a Croatian one-woman company
Alright. That's more than enough evidence says I, and off to check out the company page, which lead to some kind of social network, where lo and behold I see what I expected:
🏳️⚧️ (she/her)
And good night.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6hr ago
I am not sure if the UK has any other demographics that some significant part of the population won't feel comfortable, or even compelled by their position, publicly expressing disdain for.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
6hr ago
Rockets (that fly up to deploy satellites) tend to accelerate until they reach their desired altitude, which should be well outside the atmosphere, then accelerate again to stabilize their orbit. Stable usually means that no point of their orbital trajectory is low enough to be subject to significant atmospheric drag, so that the spaceship in question can remain on its (ciruclar or elliptic) trajectory indefinitely. Then they deploy their payload, which will continue on that orbital path. Reusable spaceships then accelerate again, this time in reverse, to deliberately reduce their orbital velocity and cause their trajectory to dip back into the atmosphere, where drag will slow them down so they can land safely.
Let me know if that made any sense.
Did you ever play DayZ, either the Arma 2 mod or the standalone game? What did you think of that?
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