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Texas is freedom land
11mo ago
Chick-fil-a has significantly improved their line experience, for what it’s worth. I think it was when they redesigned drive-thru infrastructure to run double lanes, but it might have just been a training update.
Soriek
11mo ago
I'll definitely be checking out the Simarillion then! Good to hear it's rewarding because I'm pretty sure I signed up for it by accident along with the others when I joined the Book Club - I honestly hadn't realized Tolkien had written anything else.
If you're smart enough [...] you'd be able to do magic
From an empirical perspective, this has mostly turned out to be true. Telephones, horseless carriages, haber-bosch fertilizer, insert here the same feelgood rant you've heard a thousand times. Maybe rationalists would be very different if technological progress were slowed 10x or 100x.
It's hard to predict exactly what form the magic will take, but very predictable that something about the future will feel like magic to us moderns. Probably most spaces don't have a hairline crack shortcut through the manifold -- but it only takes one.
How do you secure your position as the world makes an important technological transition? If you're politically savvy, you'll be as fine as anyone else. For the rest of us, the best bet is to be one of the builders, and that's best accomplished by neurotic high-IQ systematization. Unless you have a better suggestion?
I do feel uncertain, seeing that QC has been through all this and decided to do something else instead. He's smart, maybe he knows something I don't? My current best bet is that he's a tragic case of someone who wandered off the true path, lured by the siren song of postrat woo. But I do sometimes wonder if he's made some Kegan step that I've failed to comprehend.
Gdanning
11mo ago
Diamond says Europeans were lucky to have useful animals hanging around
Eurasians, not Europeans. His book is about Eurasian geographical advantages. I don’t know that any of the major species were domesticated in Europe proper.
Re boars, wild horses, etc, I have no idea how docile they are. I am guessing Diamond knows more than either of, though of course that doesn't mean he is right. But the issue is not whether he was right; the issue we are discussing is whether the book should be summarily dismissed.
Gdanning
11mo ago
He concludes that the species which were not domesticated were therefore harder to domesticate.
No, he makes an argument re why that was the case. His argument might be wrong, but it indeed an argument. He does not simply conclude that they were undomesticable from the mere fact that they were not domesticated.
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
11mo ago
If you're like me, you spend a lot of time trying to talk yourself down from temptations. I think I've found a general method that has more or less solved the problem.
Instead of asking whether you can or can't do something (eg. eat cake), ask only if you can say yes to doing it, or give no answer at present. The problem with "yes or no" is that deciding 'no' implicitly begins a power struggle, where one has to enforce the answer rather than merely understand the issue.
"Yes or no answer" removes the difficulty and makes objective thinking easier, and while it doesn't always stop the problem, it tends to put one in a better position over time. My thoughts are much more accurate and powerful when I try this: instead of "but it's against the rules I set!" I think things like "the laws of health won't go away just because I want them to." You can always try the normal way afterwards.
Consolidated Markets in Healthcare
In the old place we talked about doing regular analysis of emerging legislation / happenings on the Hill, so this piece is in that spirit. Yesterday the Ways and Means Health Subcommittee had a hearing on “Why Health Care is Unaffordable: Anticompetitive and Consolidated Markets.” This isn’t a major hearing or anything, it’s just a topic I’m interested in so I thought I’d share it here.
If you’ve never watched Congressional hearings I actually recommend it. When I started I was surprised how generally intelligent and reasonable most Congressmen appear, even the ones who act like clowns on social media, how much they tend to ask the kind of questions you would want them to ask, how often Republicans and Democrats actually agree. The panelists are listed below, hyper linked with their written testimonies. Q and A is in the video.
Dr. Barak Richman, Professor, Duke Law School
The Honorable Glen Mulready, Commissioner, Oklahoma Insurance Department
Mr. Joe Moose, Owner, Moose Pharmacy
Mr. Frederick Isasi, Executive Director, Families USA
Dr. Benjamin N. Rome, M.D., M.P.H., Instructor in Medicine, Harvard Medical School
It probably needs no introduction how borked the US healthcare system is, but a few stats from the hearing: according to the Kaiser Foundation 30% of Americans say they didn’t pick up pharmaceuticals because of cost, almost half of all Americans must forego broader medical care due to cost, and over 40% of Americans live with medical debt. Other countries often pay half or less of what we do.
Panelists attribute this to anti-competitive practices coming from consolidation in three interconnected markets: pharmacy benefit managers, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and hospitals.
PBMs
Pharmacy Benefit Managers, or PBMs, are middlemen companies that represent a bunch of healthcare customers collectively in negotiations with pharmaceutical companies. On net PBMs are believed to decrease drugs costs, but there is no way for PBM customers to see what prices were negotiated, and frequently rebates aren't passed onto consumers. In Ohio for instance PBMs passed on the full difference of what they paid pharmacies to Medicaid managed plans, and in Delaware PBMs overcharged the State by $24.5 million. The latter practice is called “spread pricing” and has become increasingly common as PBMs buy up pharmacies themselves.
Currently three PBMs - CVS Health, Cigna, and United Health Group - control 80% of the market, with zero pay transparency.
Pharmaceutical Companies:
Often drug prices are pretty arbitrary themselves because brand name drugs make up 75-80% of costs, and patenting laws allow pharma companies to raise those prices as high as the market can bear. One panelist cites that in 2015 over $40 million was spent on drugs that big pharma held excessive patents on, and that the top 12 drugs have over 120 patents for 38 extra years of exclusivity.
Clearly some degree of patent protection is reasonable, but I’m not sure why i.e. the 12 year biologic patent period Trump created offered anything better than the previous 8 year period. Also, see one of my favorite old Scott posts, “Busiprone Shortage in Healthcaristan,” for stories of Sanofi protecting nominally off-patent Insulin by issuing 74 patents for the biological processes to create insulin - not to use these processes themselves but just to prevent any competitor from ever using them.
The Inflation Reduction Act changed Medicare’s ability to negotiate prices somewhat, but pharma companies still get their market exclusivity and even then Medicare can only negotiate the 20 highest cost drugs. Giving Medicare greater ability to directly negotiate prices would likely help quite a bit; this is the model practiced in much of the world and by the US Veterans Administration, which also pays about half of what everyone else does.
For context though, pharmaceutical prices are, shockingly, only about 8.9% of healthcare spending...
Hospitals
...with physicians and hospitals making up over 50%. The hospital panelist thought it was funny the PBM folks were complaining about there only being three major market players. Most hospitals don’t even have one competitor!
According to Representative Claudia Tenny from New York, from 1983 to 2014 the percentage of physicians practicing alone has fallen by half, while the rate of physicians joining practices of 25 or more people has quadrupled. Often when hospitals acquire these physicians they charge high facility fees for seeing doctors “off-campus,” even though the services are the same. The very fact that hospitals can get away with doing this only further encourages consolidation, because they know they can mark up prices for any new acquisitions. Representative Kevin Hern from Oklahoma proposed in the hearing a bill that would supposedly combat this practice.
Hospitals typically make physicians sign non-competitive clauses, meaning they can’t leave and work for a competitor, even in areas as large as the entire state. From 2007-2014 hospital prices increased twice as fast as inpatient physician’ salaries and four times faster than outpatient physician’ salaries.
Often hospitals also lobby State Legislatures for monopolist laws. Nineteen state have Certificate of Public Advantage laws allowing hospitals to evade anti-trust laws and merge in already-concentrated markets. Another Thirty-five states (and DC) have Certificate of Need Laws forcing providers to obtain regulatory permission before they “offer new services, expand facilities, or invest in technology”. These laws act as huge regulatory barriers to entry for small competitors trying to challenge major hospital systems, and the DOJ and FTC have long condemned them for their anticompetitive nature.
Interested to hear people’s thoughts and would love if we could get a regular thing going.
_malcontent_
11mo ago
Youtube started hiding dislikes in November of 2021, so this was before. There are plugins that will let you see the dislikes on a video, since they're only hidden, but are still there.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
11mo ago
The issue we are discussing is whether the book should be summarily dismissed.
The details of whether a particular species was domesticable or not is something you can have a conversation about, the broader theory absolutely should be dismissed.
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
So like, where is the money going? If healthcare costs so much in the US, who is getting paid more? Who is getting paid to do irrelevant work? Who is getting massive returns on investment?
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
11mo ago
That isn't at all contrary to the claim, regardless of the claim's truth.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
11mo ago
Didn't administration get bloated over decades? I think this applies to other fields as well, infamously teachers rarely see any of the increases to education funding.
MelodicAthlete
11mo ago
Light beer seems like the type of product that you would never switch once you've made a choice. Once you pick Bud Light in your early 20s, you just stick with it for the rest of your life. So it's a choice that people rarely re-examine and the brand benefits a lot from inertia. I don't think conservatives are going to be upset forever about Bud Light, but getting them to switch back seems like it will be an uphill battle.
Jiro
11mo ago
Mary Sues aren't gendered at the core, but end up gendered in woke works because writing the female characters as having few limits and as being stopped by external oppression rather than internal flaws is encouraged by wokeness.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
No, he makes an argument re why that was the case. His argument might be wrong, but it indeed an argument. He does not simply conclude that they were undomesticable from the mere fact that they were not domesticated.
I didn't posit that he argued it, but rather concluded it. I think someone can argue rationally for a conclusion they've drawn irrationally, a process commonly known as "rationalization". One of the better evidences that this is happening is that their arguments are consistently wrong in their favored direction, ignoring obvious evidence to the contrary, collecting only the evidence that helps their conclusion and repeatedly missing anything to the contrary. If his argument is wrong, maybe that's because he made a mistake, or maybe it's because he's rationalizing. If he's rationalizing, it raises the question of whether he actually has a legitimate argument at all. It seems to me that this is a reasonable question to ask, isn't it?
Notably, I don't actually know, because I haven't read the book and am getting the arguments involved second-hand. This would work better if people would dig into the arguments more, rather than arguing about arguments about the argument. But fuck it, I needed audio anyhow. Piracy time.
No - why would anyone trust an actor, someone who is paid to speak the words of others? I'd trust a healthy philosopher over an obese one.
Edit: Still better would be more substantive counterarguments, such as those Daseindustries has made earlier.
A 30-year-old pregnant nurse attempted to steal a GPS-tracked rental bike from a young black man right outside her workplace, and when a group of onlookers surrounded her and started filming she had the audacity to start acting strangely, call for help, and briefly cry. Don't worry, justice has been served: she has been identified and suspended, and she will never be okay again.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
Do you think any book can be summarily dismissed? If not, would it not be more useful to argue the general case? If so, what's a reasonable standard in your view?
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
11mo ago
My point is that Jews are enormously overrepresented in establishing and developing these sectors.
This is what we call shifting the goalposts.
You made a lot of claims about Jews essentially being responsible for modern hardcore pornography, and when that was knocked down, now it's "Well, they're enormously overrepresented."
How exactly do you quantify "enormously," anyway? More overrepresented than they are in the media generally?
My question for you is the same I have for all the Joo-posters: you play this game of trying to get everyone to Notice things, but never spell out what you think the significance is. Are Jews just natural degenerates with a biological compulsion to subvert and corrupt? Is there something in Judaism that you think is a causal link to pornography? If we agree that yeah, lots of Jews are involved in porn - okay, so what? Lots of Asian women and black men are too, but we can probably come up with some obvious hypotheses about that which do not involve Asian women or black men being inherently degenerate.
You clearly want us to draw conclusions, but you Darkly Hint at them without being willing to spell out what you think the causal link is.
There are a whole lot of racialized theories that are based solely on "Those People make up X% of the population but Y% of this group," but it's only when Y is greater than X for your favorite outgroups where, rather than consider obvious historical and cultural pressures and even happenstance, we're supposed to attribute it to something sinister and inherent about Those People.
And I'm open to HBD explanations, to the degree that I think that IQ has a lot of explanatory power for many things. But I have yet to see a HBD explanation for Jew-Noticing that doesn't boil down to something about as scientific as Hitler's racial theories.
The direction in which they take things tends to be more radical and transgressive. It stands to reason that if there weren't any Jews, then there would be much less in the way of pornography and casual sex generally.
No, this does not stand to reason. Wow, dude, above when it's pointed out that Jews are responsible for some major scientific breakthroughs, you said "Well, someone else would have discovered that if a Jew hadn't." Yet online porn and casual sex, apparently, is something so uniquely Jewish that without Jews, no one else would have ever invented PornHub and OnlyFans and Tinder?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
the term does have gendered forms (Mary Sue/Gary Stu), and one might argue that some of the specific tendencies are also gendered...
deleted
Add me to the list of those taken in by (not so) bad history.
I encountered GG&S in AP world history. I don’t think it was presented very critically. Was that because the teacher bought in, or because he was more interested in training us little shits to write a decent essay?
Other assigned books for that year included Dee Goong An and a Clive Cussler novel. You may take this as evidence GG&S is also a work of fiction. Or that it’s plausible enough to serve as good teaching material whether or not the teacher agrees.
I was hoping to find an official book list for the course, but had no luck. Apparently it’s been split into pre- and post-1200 CE classes, now.
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