domain:alethios.substack.com
PokerPirate
9hr ago
(Tenured CS prof here.)
One thing that you're missing is the teaching/research split among faculty. At all of the most prestigious schools, research is the priority and teaching only secondary. I've never heard of a faculty member denied tenure for poor teaching at one of these schools; it's always about their research not being good enough.
This research emphasis means that you won't find any faculty members who want to participate in a scheme like this (of any political persuasion). Your proposed classes would require a lot of extra effort to teach, and generate no career benefits.
As an aside, I suspect you are also wildly underestimating the amount of effort such a class would be to teach. Trying to teach anthropology to an econ major won't go well because the econ major won't know how to read a 300 page book in a week (a typical anthro major at a top-tier school like Harvard will be reading >20 300 page books/semester); conversely, teaching econ to an anthro major won't go well because the anthro major won't have any intuition for calculus (and you can't reasonably teach any micro/macro econ without math). Developing material that actually is engaging for both of these audiences is hard.
Oh, dear lord. You have my deep sympathies.
I've helped out from the tech side with some elder fraud victims that had a similarish pathway, though the marital relationship and legal side is going to be wildly different. That said, while the FBI really only categorizes 'elder fraud', there's a pretty wide variety of both subclinical mental health episodes and simple unfamiliarity that gets abused pretty heavily by the same scammers.
From the tech side, the most urgent thing is to figure out your security environment. Even if there ends up being no organic problem, people in this sort of mode are incredibly vulnerable to scams and grifters, and I would not be surprised to find that bitcoin bit is not the first of its kind, several types of attack make 10k USD liability the low end of risk (who wants to get banned by Chexsystems!), and some scam victims react to the perceived time pressure of a helper pulling them away from their scammers by going full-in. Keep and take a very good look at your recent transaction history. If either of you are using debit cards routinely, change that as soon as you can. Some banks or credit card processors will have options to reduce the credit limit on your cards, and most will have it for other transaction types. You may be able to request international transaction blocks, and some banks will have a Trusted Contact Designation (though this is intended for elder care situations, so may not be viable even if present). Check that your credit score is frozen. If possible, implement an ACH debit block and only whitelist services you absolutely need. Make and keep good records of financial transactions that is not dependent on continual access to the financial services in question. Ideally you'd want to separate finances, with automated transfers, but that's... a hard pull even for elder fraud cases; I wouldn't expect it to be possible here.
While rare, I have seen scammer trick people into installing keyloggers and/or RATs -- ideally you'd want to get her a clean machine, but checking running services, monitoring outbound network traffic, and the normal security checks are probably going to be more doable here. If you're willing (and your router supports it), it's a good time to move away from a default any any outbound firewall rule, but that's more to make you the more annoying target than to actually block attackers. If you're not doing a ton of LAN traffic, consider switching your wifi to a guest network and turning on guest network isolation, or implementing strict VLAN limits, for similar reasons. Keep an eye out for 'free' VPNs, if you've blocked websites; they can be amazingly sketchy.
Social side is harder, in a lot of ways.
If you can't get her to a therapist or a psychiatrist, at least try to evaluate what she's looking for. You're not going to be able to make an evaluation of depression vs bipolar disorder versus impulse control versus a thousand other options, so try to resist the urge to think in DSM terms. But you can probably find out if she's looking for a big payout, or political power, or recognition by the powerful, or something more esoteric (I've seen two cases where the victim had a One Weird Trick they really wanted to apply to bigger scales).
Genuinely believing clearly wrong things doesn't necessarily mean an organic cause and some (even some very smart!) people just get tricked, but if she can't be persuaded away from any of it or strongly resists checking or validating claims of the scammer, that does point that direction.
It's probably overly optimistic, but I think you've mentioned your wife is a full-time housemaker, and recently became a stay-at-home-mom after having a more conventional career. Rarely this sorta attraction toward scams can show up as a mirror to the typical breadwinner mid-life-crisis sorta behavior, where a housewife (or househusband) is looking for a ton of meaning in life. That's still not great, anymore than the 40-year-old in a bad toupee driving a convertible into a wall is! And sometimes it's combined with organic problems. But sometimes there's options to negotiate in this space: it's hard to get people in this sphere from wanting to do something, but you might be able to persuade on what that something is with stupid questions, or by suggesting that smaller-scale investments that require a lot of her efforts will be more renumerative.
At the other side of things... don't fixate on it, but seriously evaluate how prepared you are for a potential divorce, and evaluate if she's making preparations. I don't know enough of that class of problems from the parents side, but I do know it's one plausible motivation for very poor risk assessment for investments.
I can't speak on the radicalization side without more information, and you've got a million valid reasons to not want to go into that publicly.
SSCReader
9hr ago
If you expect actual advice, my ability to help is rather limited
Oh not so much advice, just tagging you in on a kind of NHS related post. Colonoscopy is both as you said to stage the disease and because she worried about colon cancer, as UC increases the risk and I'm in my 50's and a meat eater.
Luckily while I am partially retired, I am reasonably well off so a few thousand dollars will not break my bank. Mainly I just dislike how up in the air everything is, as to what something will cost at least ballpark.
I'd say some of the burden the NHS takes off patients compared to the US it puts onto medical staff. And my brethren in Scotland are not exactly renowned for their physical or mental health so I am sure you have your hands full as it is.
AvocadoPanic
9hr ago
I'll know in a bit. She's out at the moment.
She's been very resistant to any sort of help. She's refused to speak to our pastor either alone or with me and has refused all suggestions of counseling, therapy or psychiatry. I've been speaking with our pastor regularly in person in addition to frequent texts and emails.
Speaking to her nurse practitioner today, the NP recommended taking her to the walk in psychiatric service at our hospital. I anticipate she'll refuse.
If she persists in the delusion that she's been speaking to Elon Musk after being advised of the scam, I thought I'd see if our local PD would assist in having her sectioned. I've already left a message with the detective regarding the scam.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
9hr ago
Firstly, my condolences, UC is a shitty disease (the pun is not entirely intended).
If you expect actual advice, my ability to help is rather limited. Maybe a year or so back, when this was a topic I'd been branding into my brain, I could have told you something useful. As it is, some of the drugs you've mentioned are brand new, and unheard of in UK practice. I have very little reason to look at biologics, and trust me, the names are just as abstruse to me as they are to you.
Given what you've told me, it seems your doctor thinks the cheap/easy options like aminosalicylates or corticosteroids are no longer effective. I don't know how much of the impetus behind the additional colonoscopy's was to stage the disease and how much was to screen for or exclude colon cancer.
The NHS probably would have been simpler and easier. If I'm being thankful for the few benefits the system has, wrangling insurance is something I'm mercifully reprieved from worrying about. You would have had a harder time getting the specific biologic you're on, but I'm not sure how significant the differences are between them. We're not so backward that you wouldn't have had an equivalent at hand.
Have you considered the feasibility of going to Mexico for treatment? I'm talking out of my ass here, and I can't imagine it would be easy to go there on a regular basis. It may or may not be cheaper.
ABigGuy4U
9hr ago
Those are a lot of good questions. Unfortunately we don’t know the answers to them because the guards all fell asleep and the investigators forgot to ask. :^)
FtSoA
9hr ago
People do lie about the reasons for things happening.
The fact that the P320 has the issues it does makes it easy for anyone to just blame it on the gun.
FtSoA
9hr ago
why military people I know who are issued the M17/M18 don't actually use it
Yeah, ok, sure. Wait until you find out about the M9. Ironically, the M11 (a Sig hammer pistol) did not have a manual safety, just a decocker. (It was not fielded at scale.)
Also, the Glock submission competing with the P320 did have a manual thumb safety, because that was an Army requirement.
https://www.military.com/kitup/2018/01/02/glock-unveils-new-pistol-inspired-army-mhs-program.html
And if they do accept your offer and successfully kill Epstein, then what?
I admittedly don't know the logistics of killing a man, but enough people get killed by accident in stupid brawls that I have to ask - come on how hard is it to strange someone and wrap some cloth around him afterwards. Are you going to say that it would leave evidence of murder? The evidence was literally already examined by a pathologist claiming it's more indicative of murder, and summarily ignored. Your assumption that any indication of foul play would trigger a proper investigation is completely unfounded.
Given that they've never killed anyone before, there's a good chance that they get prosecuted for his murder. Do you really think that someone under indictment for a capital crime is going to keep his mouth shut for your benefit?
Yes, I absolutely 100% believe that, and I would like to know what empirical evidence is your belief that this is in any way unlikely based on. From child castration fetishists joining professional medical associations in order to normalize their fetish, to the Community Relations Service twisting people's arms to say that the murder of their children is not about race, I've seen enough brazen conspiracies that have only come out by accident, that the rationalist default idea of "someone would have squealed" looks patently absurd.
Or take something that you might find less controversial: do you think Prigozhin's airplane just so happened to suffer a completely innocent accident? Or do you think these kind of assassinations only happen in countries like Russia? I think both are absurd, but the latter is the more absurd of the two.
If I'm the guy ordering the hit, how to I get this money to him? Write him a check? How easy do you think it is to transfer that kind of dough without raising any red flags among the banking community?
You really think that the CIA or the Mossad would have any trouble delivering someone a suitcase full of cash? You think either of them would be questioned by the banking community, of all people?
Or maybe you think it would be easier to show up with a suitcase full of cash to a bugged hotel room with Federal agents waiting for you in the parking garage. Or maybe NYPD if he happens to go to them instead.
Step me through why the FBI or NYPD would dare to get in the way of intelligence services. And before you get to that, tell me how would they evem know there's anything to get ij the way of.
Consider the probabilities here, just for fun. Let's generously assume that 5% of the extremely law-abiding-background-check-passing population would commit such a murder for the right price.
I did, it does not come out the way you want.
Keep in mind that the official explanation is that the prison was an absolute clownshow where the cameras were falling apart so frequently that both of the ones aimed at Epstein's cell just so happened to be not working, and both of the guards on duty fell asleep at the same time. Let's generously assume that 95% of guards like that would refuse a suitcase full of money to strangle a pedophile with guaranteed impunity, how many of them do you think would refuse a suitcase full of money for "hey, why don't you lend me your keycard and uniform, and take a day off"?
Your entire argument works on the assumption that the American system would immediately trigger an alarm if any irregularity was found. That assumption is not backed by anything in this reality.
SSCReader
9hr ago
I'm an academic (well part time) and my current experience is this: the kids are already "woker" and leftier than most of my colleagues even before we get our hands on them. They are mostly kids of Blue Tribe progressives, so they have already inherited a great deal of their world view.
They don't want viewpoint diversity and neither do their parents (generalizing of course).
What incentive does a university currently have to go against that in any concrete way?
FtSoA
9hr ago
That screw is representing a hell of a lot more than "slight pressure" from the holster. It's moving 1mm past the pretravel as measured from the top of the shoe. That's a lot.
Having the sear engaged that much and then jostling the gun is not going to go well on a variety of firearms.
SSCReader
9hr ago
I'm sorry this is happening for a start. I'm sure this must be very stressful for you. I suppose the main question is whether if you explain it to her does she recognize she is being scammed? Or is this a delusion and she really believes that she is talking to Elon even when you point out it is a scam?
If she's depressed then she might fall for a scam easier, but it's still different than if it is a full blown delusion. Is there perhaps a trusted pastor or faith leader (as you mention bible school) that you might be able to call upon? If she doesn't want to engage with conventional medical/therapy perhaps that is an alternative? Either through faith-based marriage counselling or even just them coming round for a cup of tea for a chat in a more informal way?
FtSoA
9hr ago
For the P365 in particular, the WC grip is a affordable replacement with ergonomics (thickness) that many people prefer. Weights can be added as well, for those who want them, for recoil management.
There's a huge aftermarket parts industry for both the P365 and P320 because of their modularity.
FtSoA
9hr ago
Are you talking about the M7 replacing the M4? Because that is being fielded now.
https://www.twz.com/land/sig-sauers-m7-rifle-gets-official-army-seal-of-approval-despite-controversy
Is it a great idea? Probably not at scale, for the same reasons that 5.56 is easier to employ than 7.62 for the average troop--a lighter rifle with 50% more ammo. The Army should have fielded the AR10 over the M14 in terms of modernity/ergonomics, but the AR15/M16 with the lighter round sure is nice. Classic assault rifle vs. battle rifle tradeoffs argument.
I think for the M4/5.56 replacement they should have stuck with something with at least an easy 25-round mag, like 6.8 SPC or 6mm ARC.
The .277 Fury is legitimately a cool round though.
https://old.reddit.com/r/army/comments/1csuwkh/a_three_day_review_of_the_m7_spear/ https://old.reddit.com/r/army/comments/1cry8oq/a_review_of_the_277_fury_training_and_combat/
No_one
9hr ago
I understand they're fucked because initial design had a Glock-style trigger insert safety that would have prevented firing unless it was depressed.
Sig claims some potential customer was against it, so they removed it, and then went on to produce guns which will fire at the slighest shock if a certain combinations of part sizes is involved.
Seems like an incredible management oversight, because the gun designers must have been aware of this, and if the management did not test out how a gun with maximally bad part tolerances would behave, they basically fucked themselves.
That's the least what you should do - the people who engineered the trigger mechanism should have been able to figure out how to avoid this and what's the most dangerous combination of sizes.
SSCReader
9hr ago
Time for an Ulcerative Colitis and medical billing update! Paging @Throwaway05 and @self_made_human.
I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I have been diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis, a couple of years back, but that finding out in advance how much treatment was going to cost was nearly impossible. My colonoscopy to diagnose the disease cost me about 1500 dollars out of pocket. My doctor then put me on Velsipity, which was not covered by my insurance, but did have 2 years supply covered free by the drug company. My drug company did in fact approve the drug and add it to their formulary list, a couple of months ago. Just in time for my doctor to decide it wasn’t actually really stopping the progression of my disease, so we had to look for another drug to try. So it goes.
But before that I needed another colonoscopy! Again, no one could tell me how much it was going to cost me. It ended up costing me about 2,900 dollars out of pocket this time. Why the difference? Well because the first one was coded to my insurance company as routine, while this one is diagnostic. Nothing was different about the procedure at all. Diagnosis? My Ulcerative Colitis has progressed from mild to moderate to moderate to severe. So, my doctor decided we were going to try Tremfya, a biologic medication.
If you anticipated my next question was “How much is this going to cost me?” Then have a cookie or three! And if you correctly anticipated the answer was “I don’t know” then take the whole box. I can’t eat them now anyway. Tremfya is on my insurance companies list, but it has a whole bunch of caveats attached to it. They only cover so many doses; they only cover it from certain pharmacies they only cover it after you’ve tried other medications.
The drug manufacturer has a payment program, which may help people cover the out-of-pocket costs. Up to 20,000 dollars a year. Which sounds pretty helpful! But there is a twist. For Tremfya, your first 3 loading doses need to be delivered by slow infusion, which means you either need to go to a medical facility, or have a nurse come out and hook you up to a drip. Once again this will have a cost attached to it separate from the cost of the drug itself. I’m told having a nurse come out is by far the cheaper option. So, I pick that and see the Tremfya program may also cover up to 2,000 dollars for infusion costs per annum as well.
Note the important words there, however. May. It is not guaranteed, and the drug company can stop it at any point for any reason. So, I talked to the specialist pharmacy that is contracted to come out and do my infusion. How much will I have to pay? If you guessed the answer was “I don’t know” then you are to my shock, wrong for once. They said 40 dollars per infusion. Which sounds downright reasonable!
So, I go ahead and book the first treatment. The nurse comes, she is very nice, gets a vein on the first try and we spend 2 hours filling out multitudes of forms. I don’t immediately die or go into anaphylactic shock as some of the dire warnings on the medication indicate so I’ll count that as a victory. But now the time has come to pay the piper. I log into my insurance portal a couple of days later and I see the charges for the drug and infusion costs are pending. I wait a few more days with bated breath and then I am both unhappy and happy. For my cost for the drug itself was 0 dollars!
Let’s go back and look at the breakdown. A single dose of the drug was billed to my insurance company for 17,000 dollars. Normally I’d have to pay 20%. But my insurance company very kindly registered me for the Tremfya manufacturer program and that reduced my OOP to zero. Great. But that is 3400 dollars from that 20,000 dollar pot, for one dose. So let's put a pin in that.
Now let’s revisit the infusion cost. This is not for the drug, this is for the cost of having a nurse come out and administer it (and I was told it is much cheaper than having to go to a medical facility). Just close your eyes for a moment and guess how much the initial bill is. Got it?
Well, it is 35,000 dollars. My insurance company negotiated a discount to only 15,000 dollars. So I am billed around 3000 dollars out of pocket. Except the pharmacy had said after checking with my insurance I would only have to pay 40 dollars per infusion. So what gives? Well we have to go back to the OOP maximum! Because the insurance company administered the Tremfya program and got the money from them directly, the 3,400 odd dollars for that didn’t go towards my OOP maximum, because I didn't pay anything. So I am on the hook for the co-insurance here, not just the 40 dollar co-pay.
So, I looked up this on some UC forums and discovered this is indeed a thing. Many people have to force their insurance company to let them apply for the program on their own, because if you do that, it counts towards your OOP maximum. As you are billed, pay the balance and then get re-imbursed. So, while it looks like the insurance company is trying to help you, it actually screws you over. I call my insurance company and after two escalations and some back and forth they agree to apply the amount to my OOP maximum. This plus the previous colonoscopy costs means I now don't have to pay co-insurance costs for the rest of the year. Just co-pays.
I guess I'll worry about next year when I get there though at least I'll just be on 17,000 dollars a dose pen injectors by then. I'll hit my OOP max 3 doses in, which should be covered by the Tremfya fund.
Also don’t get me started on what the difference is between Annual Maximum Out-of-Pocket and Total Yearly Out-of-Pocket Maximum which are two entirely different figures and are very unclear as to the difference.
The Tremfya does appear to be working, for anyone in a similar situation. Although improvement in UC is measured in months and half-steps so we will see where I am in a while. Velsiptity did nothing but I also had no major side effects.
I'm not sure the NHS is better than the US system, but it's certainly less stressful and complicated from the point of view of the end user. Slower and less efficient though most likely.
Rov_Scam
9hr ago
Have you actually read the published report on his death? If you haven't, read it before you start theorizing about how he couldn't possibly have committed suicide. If you have, I'd like to know which parts you find credible and which parts you find incredible, and for you to offer evidence as to why you find those parts incredible. And no, I'm not going to link it, because if you're so interested in saying this you should at least do the work of finding it yourself. It's not that hard.
ABigGuy4U
9hr ago
Trump is scared even if he’s not on the list, because a full accounting of the truth would have people seriously calling for revolutionary tribunals and guilotines. And not just the types that are always calling for that.
Rov_Scam
9hr ago
Are you basing this on actual knowledge of the prison system, or your own interpolations based on TV and movies?
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
9hr ago
The point is to ensure students know that there are opposing viewpoints, and that they are mainstream and not "alt-right propaganda". And to do that, the university should break through its own departmental balkanization.
Like many arguments about the liberal bias of college graduates, this is doing immense work of denying those college graduates agency in their own process of academic discovery. But, I guess this is like the "nature" vs. "nurture" debate, except "reality has a liberal bias" vs. "higher education is liberal brainwashing". Maybe somewhere, someone is begging that the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
Every political dialogue I had in college, often frequently with people who I had very little to agree with, was emphatically more informed and nuanced than any YouTube gotcha shitpost (Charlie Kirk) that tries to paint college students as some misinformed monolith. It was a period of rapid opinion changing for me, and I only took one or two "woke" courses. I guess maybe my foreign language classes could be considered woke, as the literature we focused on was mostly from the times of massive political upheaval in those nations thanks to radical reactionary politics (I didn't study Russian or Chinese)...
Most of my opinion changes came from the fact that I went from a town where we could see the stars because there wasn't enough light pollution to drown them out, where people still used the word "Jew" as a derogatory verb, to a college campus where I met (and even dated) a Jewish person for the first time, and realized that I actually wasn't 10% as smart as I thought I was even though I was at the top of my class. Humility and worldliness liberalized me, personally. If I had stayed home I would've continued to be one of the smartest assholes in my hometown, and probably would've made a good chunk of money doing some regional white collar work. I didn't, though.
Principles? Intellectual virtues? Fulfilling the ideals of a university rather than a 4-year vacation?
Okay, once you've stopped laughing- not running the risk of Trump (and possibly Vance) continuing to gut their funding and harass them with lawsuits for as long as they can?
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