51–60 of 132 posts
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We have exited the age of information, and entered the age of irritation.
"Rage bait" is 2025 Oxford Word of the Year. We are reaching saturation levels now, I think, where people are becoming aware of it. https://corp.oup.com/news/the-oxford-word-of-the-year-2025-i...
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We have exited the age of information, and entered the age of irritation.
"Rage bait" is 2025 Oxford Word of the Year. We are reaching saturation levels now, I think, where people are becoming aware of it. https://corp.oup.com/news/the-oxford-word-of-the-year-2025-i...
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At that point, why cover anything at all if the doctor could always be wrong?
Stupid question. If you have a better way to make decisions on insurance coverage then state it.
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Pretty predictable what happens when you deny coverage for a treatment someone needs
It would be a clean and compelling narrative, if Luigi or someone he loved was denied coverage for a necessary treatment! But that doesn't seem to be true at all. He just had a whole lot of righteous anger, I guess. Gotta be careful with that stuff.
Academia is basically a reputation laundering industry. If the cigarette people said smokes good or the oil people you'd never believe them. But they and their competitors fund labs at universities, and sure those universities may publish stuff they don't like from time to time, but overall things are gonna trend toward "not harmful to benefactors". And then what gets published gets used as the basis for decisions on how to direct your tax dollars, deploy state violence for or against certain things, etc, etc. And of course (some of) the academics want to do research that drives humanity forward or whatever, but they're basically stuck selling their labor to (after several layers in between) the donors for decades in order to eek out a little bit of what they want.
It's not just "how the sausage is made" that's the problem. It's who you're sourcing the ingredients for, who you're paying off for the permit to run the factory, who's supplying you labor. You can't fix this with minor process adjustments.
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It would be a clean and compelling narrative, if Luigi or someone he loved was denied coverage for a necessary treatment! But that doesn't seem to be true at all. He just had a whole lot of righteous anger, I guess. Gotta be careful with that stuff.
Why does it matter if it personally occurred to him or someone related to him? It happens to plenty of people. You can have empathy for people not bound by blood.
There is a great deal of injustice in the world. Psychologically healthy adults have learned to add a reflection step between anger and action.
By all evidence, Luigi is a smart guy. So one can only speculate on his psychological health, or whether he believed that there was an effective response to the problem which included murdering an abstract impersonal enemy.
I'm stumped, honestly. The simplest explanations are mental illness, or a hero complex (but I repeat myself). Maybe we'll learn someday.
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What counts as research? If I make UI changes, I guess it's ok to roll it out to everyone, because that's not an experiment, but if I roll it out to 1%, then that's research? If I own two stores and decide to redecorate one and see if sales increase vs the other store, do I need government approval? Also I would like an example of something a social media company does that you wouldn't be able to get approval to do o…
I think by now roughly half of us grew up in a world where global reach has been simply taken for granted. I don't think it's particularly onerous to say that there should be some oversight on what a business can and can't do in the context where that business is relying on public infrastructure and can affect the whole-ass world, personally
Not sure what public infrastructure has to do with it. Access to public infrastructure doesn't confer the right to regulate anything beyond how the public infrastructure is used. And in the case of Meta, the internet infrastructure they rely on is overwhelmingly private anyway.
Keep in mind that those qualified to do research in a field typically has worked in that industry. Because that's where people with that expertise work.
This comes up somewhat frequently in discussions of pet food. Most of the companies doing research into pet food - e.g. doing feeding studies, nutritional analysis, etc - are the manufacturers of those foods. This isn't because there's some dark conspiracy of pet food companies to suppress independent research; it's simply because no one else is funding research in the field.
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Large and complex systems are fundamentally unpredictable and have tradeoffs and consequences that can't be foreseen by anybody. Error rates are never zero. So basically anything large enough is going to kill people in one way or another. There are intelligent ways to deal with this, and then there is shooting the CEO, which will change nothing because the next CEO faces the exact same set of choices and incentives a…
I'm not talking about unpredictable tradeoffs and consequences. I'm talking about intentional actions that lead to deaths. E.g. [1] and [2], but there are numerous such examples. There is no plausible defense for this. It is pure evil. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Institute [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purdue_Pharma