I've used many different ones, and find the result pretty similar. I've used Copilot in VS Code, Chat GPT stand-alone, Warp.dev's baked in tools, etc. Often it's a matter of what kind of work I'm doing, since it's rarely single-mode.
Because it’s a moral obligation. The fourth estate is critical to the sustainable operation of our system of government and society. The electorate need to make informed decisions at the polls. In the same way lobbyists inform representatives the media inform the electorate.
He was making a pun on the common practice during COVID of attributing death in death to certificates to COVID whenever the patient presented a positive PCR test, no matter the real cause of death, the actual existence of COVID disease in clinical terms or the existence of more preeminent factors in the death.
This usually happened due mostly as a result of federal policy of paying out extra money for hospitals based on the number of covid patients, thus creating an incentive of diagnosing anyone with a positive PCR test as sick from covid, whether they presented actual clinical symptoms of the disease or not.
Sounds made up to me, too. Unless he lives in some country where that happened.
In many places in the United States it was unusual for COVID to be listed as a cause of death in paperwork. Often it was listed a something coronary or pulmonary. This isn't unique to COVID, but happened a lot more with that disease, especially before there were vaccines and the stigma was stronger.
The actual number of COVID deaths is estimated because policies varied so much among different political jurisdictions.
Source: Work in the healthcare industry, and had relatives die of COVID who ended up with something else listed on their death certificates.
Well, at least they acknowledge there was a pandemic.
There's still plenty of people who don't believe 1,100,000 Americans died of COVID. These same people also wonder why it suddenly became harder to find workers.
my understanding/recollection is that it was necessary for surveillance to note when decedents had COVID; it was listed as a (contributing or underlying, not sure of the jargon) cause, and so depending on how you cut the data you could count it either way -- tally all deaths with COVID as deaths from COVID (bigger), or only those where COVID was the main cause (smaller).
Also, Wendell Berry isn’t exactly just a farmer but grew up one and kept as much as he could while becoming a fine writer who talks about life lessons. More people should read him.
> It doesn’t seem to offer any of the “value” that social networks do, the prime of which being an easy-to-initialize profile with copious features.
It might be this is a feature, not a bug. Making things easy did help a lot of people connect in at the start, but connecting in the careless also has hazards, much less the content casino digital media has become.
Yes, number-wise the wealth gap between the top and median is bigger than ever, but the actual quality-of-life difference has never been smaller — Elon and I probably both use an iPhone, wear similar T-shirts, mostly eat the same kind of food, get our information & entertainment from Google/ChatGPT/Youtube/X.
I fully expect the distribution to be even more extreme in an ultra-productive AI future, yet nonetheless, the bottom 50% would have their every need met in the same manner that Elon has his. If you ever want anything or have something more ambitious in mind, say, start a company to build something no one’s thought of — you’d just call a robot to do it. And because the robots are themselves developed and maintained by an all-robot company, it costs nobody anything to provide this AGI robot service to everyone.
A Google-like information query would have been unimaginably costly to execute a hundred years ago, and here we are, it’s totally free because running Google is so automated. Rich people don't even get a better Google just because they are willing to pay - everybody gets the best stuff when the best stuff costs 0 anyway.
The crucial understanding is that incentives are cross aligned because the product is risk coverage.
The more immediate/pressing your need for risk coverage, the worse it is for them to sell it to you. The less you need it, the better it is for them to sell it to you and the worse for you to buy it.
Pretty different than ice cream or cars or housing. Too many people just think “oh corporate greed” without thinking about the underlying economics (partly because of how us culture pretends markets are magic).
In the past, insurance companies (think: liability, fire, life, shipping) responded to a claim by hiring a lawyer and negotiating down. Like most contracts.
So states began creating insurance commissions, which serve as law firms that defend consumers from insurance companies. In practice, their existence forces insurance companies to pay what they are owed.
We need insurance commissions for health insurance. If there is a reason why the policy shouldn't pay (services received after policy expired, for example), the insurance commission has to sign off.
This is how normal insurance works. Health insurance, of course, is not normal insurance.
My immediate worry is that insurance usually focuses on fixing private harm, not public harm.
If my house burns down, there's both public harm and private harm. The public harm is the danger to bystanders, the loss of neighboring real estate values, etc. The private harm is the fact that I lost most of my equity and have to declare bankruptcy to get out of my mortgage.
Insurance is focused around preventing private harm.
So the state is now on it's own in preventing public harm (already the case), but also now liable to remedy the private harm too.
I personally know many millionaires who lost their mansions in the LA fire. I'm glad tax payers aren't paying to rebuild their $20 million dollar houses.
That's an extreme example, but insurance benefits those who have something to lose the most.
Let's keep government insurance focused on things that private industry refuses to insure, like unemployment and health insurance for sick people.
Yes indeed. Part of the problem is having “insurance” draining part of the resources. Long term care means it isn’t an “accident,” but a constant recurring cost. Saving the money up front, producing income, and paying directly for what you need is often a better strategy.
Companies are not in business to lose money, and you have to fight them to collect. That there are some low probability exceptions is not enough in their favor imho.
The “it is not immediately clear” part should be taken to heart a lot more than it is. Right now I’d bet you could elect Ezra Klein president and he would be as unable to improve things as most, and he probably has a somewhat clearer picture of the factors than your average internet commentator.
Railing against optimizing for caution in a vague sense really isn’t articulating specific dynamics however well it leans into the shallow strawmanification of “regulation” that doesn’t merely dominate lay discourse but has essentially ascended into conceptual godhood without having paid real dues in sacrifice or insight.
There is no respectable theory of why that has even begun to grasp the problem.
no more turgid than the much of the boner for building boosterism, just more notes, which may not be a bad thing if some of the scope of consideration could stand to be inflated.
before I check vital city, should I anticipate that they go beyond articulating “here’s a series of public institutions that took a long time to do things“ and perhaps even into “here’s our theory of the incentives and other motivations that underlie the sociology of this behavior”? or mostly the former?
Theories are hard because the world is complex. I guess that sounds trivial but it really should be said more often. There is no silver bullet with these things, because the systems are so complicated that it is hard to reason about how one thing is the true root cause without implicating another cause. That's also why economics is so difficult I suppose.
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