domain:alexberenson.substack.com
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
On the other hand if you’re really overwhelmed with deathly ill patients, it would seem like you wouldn’t have time to elaborately choreograph and perform dances. And the dances I saw were not the kinds of things you might film in two minutes of spare time between patients. They were highly produced, filmed well, and the costumes were coordinated. No one was out of rhythm or forgot the dance. It had all the hallmarks of something people had put significant time and energy into, had clearly practiced, and had coordinated outfits.
That’s not something that you could reasonably do in between dying patients.
Glassnoser
11mo ago
Why not allow people to trade it away?
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
It’s also something you order at restaurants and bars where you have a choice and the choice is publicly known. If I’m in a bar in Mississippi and I’m ordering a beer with my buddies, there’s an element of peer pressure. The controversy over Mulvaney means that especially in conservative circles, ordering a Bud Light is going to be something people pay attention to. It’s the tranny beer. You don’t support that do you?
And I think this is why a lot of boycotts fail. If you can privately cross the line, then a lot of people do. All the people who are concerned about Amazon abusing workers still order from them because the social pressure of potentially being seen ordering from Amazon isn’t there.
Mer
11mo ago
And yet of the people who have made significant and immediate changes to the world, people who wish to make significant and immediate change significantly outperform their percentage of the population
In other news, new research finds that people most likely to complete marathons are those that wish to run marathons. In all seriousness, this isn't an argument in favour of extremism. Of course extremists are the most likely to achieve extreme goals, the only alternative candidates are those whose hands are forced by circumstance and those who unintentionally stumble into it.
Strength, cunning and luck are of course of overwhelming importance as well, but all three together do not change the world if the person possessing them is quite comfortable with the way things are.
This is again true, but also not particularly useful. If you have all the virtures of someone capable of shaping the world around you to your liking and you happen to like things the way they are, then you're going to deploy your virtues in pursuit of that end rather than in direct opposition to it.
It seems to me that the point you're driving at, is the importance of strength of will, or of conviction to your goals. This is definitely a quality common among extremists and it is an important part of managing to stick with difficult goals like shaping the world to match your vision, but your odds of success are a lot better if you also happen to have those other virtues as well. The idea that strength of will alone is enough to achieve your goals seems historically fairly common among those who are at a severe disadvantage in other areas, but cannot accept their disadvantageous position. Imperial Japan springs to mind as an immediate example and look how well that worked out for them.
Forty-Bot
11mo ago
What do you like to do for fun/what to do get up to in your free time
I don't like this question since I spend my free time doing low-status things :)
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
11mo ago
In that case, parents will be making choices for their children that can seriously impact them later in life. It's bad enough now, but I'm imagining a parent running out their children's government bucks on various things, leaving the kid with no social net for the rest of their lives (or until they get children of their own.)
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
Drive to a hospital. Notice the giant office building the hospital is in the shadow of.
I don’t think France or Canada or Taiwan have that.
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
To be clear, a lot of the bud light drop in sales was through liquor stores and grocery retail.
The people who, for whatever reason, wanted to drink bud light, now buy something else to drink a six pack of at home where no one is watching.
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
The EU series itself also had a lot of drek it and the good stuff(like thrawn etc) was much more popular than the generic schlock.
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
I’d heard of them because I was a commercial(trade redacted) who had to do a job where the client was a gay S&M club. They were setting up for swastika night at the time as I recall, but even seeing representatives of them at the time they seemed like some kind of bondage thing as much as a drag group(then again, swastika night).
Regular user, I just like to make new accounts once I start to get too attached to the previous one and want a clean psychic slate.
I'm very curious who and what exactly you think this psyop is. Tell me the whole story, I especially want to see the Dasepost in response.
Edit since banned: Hlykna (and to a lesser extent Amadan): you've perfectly misinterpreted both this (not posted to be racially inflamatory, more Moloch and classic general culture war; I made a mistake with a thin single layer of sarcasm I thought would be obvious enough to everyone here, I was clearly mistaken and I apologize) and that other comment (which is quite literally the exact opposite of "whining about da joos").
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
11mo ago
I have no experience with this: are the contracts for bars and restaurants and other venues flexible enough to see sales drops in one month or less?
If the contracts are long term, you wouldn't see any drop in wholesale on AB's end until the contract is up, even if the consumers have stopped drinking it.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
11mo ago
Perhaps I'm out of touch on this one, I'm pretty price sensitive on razors, I bought a case of razors from the company that supplied DSC for less than a pack of refills from Gillette cost at the time and I'm still not half through with them a decade later.
The razor wars are so confusing to me because I'm out of touch in the other direction. I'm 0% price sensitive on razors, I bought a pack of Gillette refills like maybe two years ago? I don't get much facial hair, and my hair is very soft and fine, so I can use the same cartridge for months at a time. I find the whole discount-razor universe incredibly confusing, like, who worries that razors are too expensive? I spend like $40 every 3 years.
I assume that for someone with more/thicker/coarser facial hair it's a different animal.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
11mo ago
This piece of flash fiction is pretty low-effort booing. Maybe somewhere there is a nurse neglecting her patients while she does a TikTok dance in the hallway, and it's fine for you to say you hate nurses for reasons, but this is not contributing anything but a snarl in badly written prose form.
ControlsFreak
11mo ago
Drug prices have always been a tiny part of it. The big ones are the obvious cartel-like behavior, restricting the supply of trained doctors and approved facilities. But one of the biggest issues is still price transparency. It's what makes this market feel different to people. Compare to complaints that housing is "unaffordable". Well, the market for housing is abundantly transparent. In most places, people can just go look at the market prices, and they'll see a spectrum of prices from quite high to remarkably low. And they'll notice that when folks complain about "unaffordable housing", they really mean that they just want newer, nicer, bigger housing in better locations for less money. Moreover, because the market is transparent, they can see just how much local government housing policy can restrict/enable supply, pushing prices up/down. So the movement has rightly been able to focus on the underlying issue of restricted supply.
In healthcare, the shell game of price hiding is so advanced, people can't even notice what's going on. The process is, "People go about normal life; sometimes, that involves going to the doctor; poof! Some amount of money is gone. How much? Who knows? Maybe nobody can know." That's what's plaguing the PBMs - everything is predicated on playing "hide the paper". If they keep everyone in the dark about what the numbers mean, they can play four square all the way home to piles of money. And it's what's plaguing the hospitals, too. Of course they want to charge high "facility fees"; these are almost certainly hidden fees! Hidden fees rub a lot of people the wrong way. They feel like when you're in one of those countries where the guy acts like because you touched his product, the culturally-mandated thing is that you've already bought it and have to pay for it. What's the price? You didn't know, could be anything! But you're either a sucker for the paying the number he pulls out of his ass or you're a dick for arguing back.
Healthcare is entirely about hiding every fee possible. So while many people may have experienced a healthcare purchase that turned out to be a little cheaper than their wild-ass guess of what it might be, they've probably also experienced the opposite. And you know they're going to 1000% remember the time they felt they got screwed over wayyyyy more, even if they thought they got okay deals most of the rest of the time. People want a "deal" 100% of the time. They want some amount of "consumer surplus". That's kind of the definition. We turn down buying stuff every day that doesn't give us consumer surplus; we don't say those things are "unaffordable". They just don't bring me, personally, sufficient value right now. But for every single trade I willingly engage in, even if I don't think I got a "great" deal, I think I got more value than I spent. To have a transaction... and then to find out later that it was more expensive than you thought... enough more expensive that, had you known, you wouldn't have agreed to the transaction in the first place? That pisses people off. That makes people say that healthcare is "unaffordable". (That is probably what causes people to go bankrupt; most people don't willingly engage in many transactions that they know will bankrupt them; they have to be blindsided into it.)
I'm becoming more and more obstinate on this point for healthcare. The shell game is too entrenched. The "let's force prices onto the internet" tack didn't work. They're still too good at making it impossible to understand or impossible to access/figure out at the time that you need it. Nobody's going to be sitting in a doctor's office, trying to decide what to do, and say, "Gimme a second, I need to look up on the internet what the price is here and at other locations and.... oh shit, I need to write a JSON parser to figure that out?" Nah. At this point, I can't imagine there's anything we can do besides simply mandate that every single provider of healthcare services must give every single patient a written price prior to performing the service. (Assuming, of course, they're conscious, etc.)
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
11mo ago
This post is bad.
It's bad because you are framing it in a confusing and, I suspect, deliberately misleading way. You clearly think you're being clever with your ironic commentary. You are not speaking plainly. I had to actually go search this story to figure out what is actually going on and determine what point you are trying to make, or pretending to make.
This and several other posts, and the newness of your account, make me suspect you are not participating here in good faith.
Don't do this again. If you have a point to make with a news story, make it clearly and straightforwardly.
Soriek
11mo ago
No disageement with the administrative bloat vs corporate greed comparison, but he does outline an upstream policy driver pushing the bloat: an increasing regulatory load that needs more staff to push papers. No clue if that's right either.
Separately, one of the panelists did recommend strengthening hospital price transparency, but I kind of wonder if it would even be a problem if hospitals weren't de facto monopolies. It's not like we need to legislate normal businesses into telling you their services cost.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
11mo ago
Okay, this bit of personal antagonism, combined with openly admitting that this is a troll account, means I'm just going to retire this one for you. Have a nice day.
people on twitter gloating about posting her home address. for getting emotional (not even being racist or any actual american mortal sin) over a bike. you couldn't think of a better psyop to further annihilate race relations
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