Acab doesn’t cover judges. Doesn’t mean they can’t be bastards, just means they aren’t cops.
A lot of a judges job is making sure procedure is followed. Police and DAs are generally pretty good at the paperwork, and working with them regularly means they have a relationship, which they don’t with defence.
I’d say all judges are complicit.
It’s one anonymous account saying something, and another making claims out of nowhere without context or proof. Hardly “probably”.
If we’re doing a detailed breakdown of their statement, that statement says that it doesn’t say anything good, not that it says anything bad.
I assumed they were a non-native English speaker who bungled “not good is opposite good, or bad” and instead had “not good is absence of good, or neutral”.
I read it as: the medical system being worse than house says more about the system than it does about house.
They definitely do, but for different reasons.
Hospitals increase prices they send to insurance so that the reduced rate the insurance pays covers their cost+profit. The insurance company wants to spend as little money as possible from their risk pool, and they want to advertise their “massive negotiation powers” to their big customers who have enough members to self fund (the insurance company just manages the money and billing, so zero risk on their part).
GE and the hospital have a much more traditional business to business relationship. GE is actually providing them with a very delicate piece of machinery that is enormous, filled with liquid helium, that produces a preposterous magnetic field and is safe enough to stick a squishy person into.
Their extra markup comes from the certifications that tell you that you can trust that it’s safe for those squishy people. It’s an intangible value add, sometimes legally mandated (FDA approval), sometimes an assurance of quality (all those ISO certifications attesting to quantifiable defect rates).
They’re not charging you more so when you pay less they still make a profit. They’re charging more because there’s only a handful of companies that can actually sell the damn things, and they all also have the same intangible costs.
Medical equipment is expensive because the price jump between “works” and “you can trust it with someone’s life” is a very expensive one. The paper documenting it even more so.
Some tests are legitimately expensive, some are “priced for insurance”, and some are a complicated middle ground where you could reasonably argue either way. Like, an MRI isn’t a cheap machine, nor is it devoid of ongoing costs, and the facility requirements to operate one are also extensive. The actual cost to run a single MRI scan though is materially cheap, ignoring labor costs. About the cost in electricity to power a house for a day. Less than $10 dollars.
On the one hand, taking those upfront, ongoing maintenance, and facilities costs and spreading them out over the cost of each scan seems reasonable. Without that money they can’t actually buy and run the machine. It can add up to $500-$10,000 per scan.
On the other hand, if you don’t get the test and the machine is just idle during the time, their costs only go down $10. You could reasonably argue that they should take any offer more than $10 if they have more idle capacity available than is needed for emergency usage.
Some genetic and nuclear testing just intrinsically involves expensive materials. They’re not done often and the materials are difficult to get together safely. Given the nature of the show, those are going to be represented more often. It’s not nearly as fun to watch the rogue doctor fail to charge $75 for an automated metabolic panel as it is to watch him jam a hamster gall bladder full of neptunium up someone’s urethra while spinning them like a rotisserie in an fmri.
Only note: I think he’s so borderline criminal in his behavior that he never actually documents the insane expensive tests for billing. He just does them without scheduling or booking the machine or equipment. Note how he often has doctors operating the MRI, and not a radiology technician or someone trained to actually take the pictures on the specific machine.
Yeah, the problem isn’t “conditional expressions”, it’s “terse syntax”, and operator rules that you need to just memorize because they’re special and different. Also being limited such that you need to nest the extremely deeply if you, for whatever, you need to have a complex inline condition.
I like the case expression , although I mostly know it from erlang.
100% thought you had done that, and just wanted to ramble some clarification in case. :) it’s pretty easy to focus on the “big” elections, and how what makes them shitty is essentially the “small” elections working properly-ish.
Personally, I’ve always wondered about a system where people directly vote for the representative they want regardless of geography, and then that person represents their constituency.
Geography used to represent a much more significant part of a persons interests, since you likely worked reasonably near where you lived, shopped and everything else. That’s less true now.
It’s moot since we’re not changing the fundamentals of our system anytime soon, but it’s interesting to think about.
It appears you’re saying that in some circumstances it’s appropriate to layout voting districts based on the political affiliation of the people who would end up in the various districts, with the intent of ensuring some seats are won by a minority party that would otherwise not hold power.
I’m saying that districting should be based on shared interests, predominantly geographic in nature because that’s how our system is designed, but that it should definitely not factor in political affiliation.
This means that if a political group is spread out and in the minority, they will not be represented by someone sharing their party affiliation, and that’s as it should be in our system.
Yes, that’s how it’s supposed to be. Your regional representative is supposed to represent your region. If you’re the minority in the region then you don’t get to pick the representative.
We don’t have a proportional voting system. The system is not designed to ensure that elected party makeup matches voter preference distribution.
The minority voters in your scenario get their say in the Senate votes where everything is equal and the district is the entire state.
In any case, the scenario you’re describing is more representative of the cracking type of gerrymandering that’s the problem. A collection of voters in a region being split amongst multiple districts to dilute their votes is what gerrymandering is.
The issue is less to do with votes inside a district, and more with the apportionment of the districts themselves.
For something like the presidential election a popular vote makes (more) sense.
Where gerrymandering comes in is regional representatives. I’m supposed to have a congressional representative who represents me and my neighbors.
‘Districting’ is the general practice of defining what constitutes a group of neighbors. When done properly you tend to get fairly compact districts that have people living in similar circumstances represented together. The people living near the lake get a representative, as do the people living in the city center, and the people living in the townhouses just at the edge of town do too. (A lot of rules around making sure that doesn’t get racist or awful, but that’s a different comment).
‘gerrymandering’ is the abuse of the districting process to benefit the politicians to the detriment of the voter. Cutting the districts in such a way that people who tend to vote the same way get spread around to either never or always get a majority share, depending on if you want them to win or not.
The above poster is wrong, and gerrymandering never had a valid usage. If 10% of the population has a political belief but they’re spread out amongst different districts, then they’re supposed to lose, not have the system bend over backwards to give them a special group.
Districting has value though, since it’s the way the system is supposed to allow people from smaller areas to have their voices heard without being drowned out by bigger areas, but fairly, such that each representative represents roughly the same number of people.
Other countries also do this type of districting, they just have other systems in place that keep it from being so flagrantly abused.
Yup.
Using fingerprint/face recognition to access your device is questionable depending on your concern level, since the thing being accessed is right next to the thing that gives you access.
Having that same device know how to recognize those same features so it can use them to access a local system that is used to unlock something far away very securely is unquestionably good. An attacker is very unlikely to have both your phone and your thumb while trying to access your bank account.
Pretty sure bullets are copper jacketed weed nuggets. Grain is a measurement of how seedy the weed is, and hence how much damage it does. 115 grain means it’s a weed nugget with the weight of 115 seeds being fired.
In the beginning, I was trying to explain why some people don’t want to eliminate gender for the same reason racial minorities usually don’t want to eliminate the concept of race.
Now I’m just enjoying marveling at your unwillingness to acknowledge that you might have had room to improve your understanding of something and trying to cast “trans people didn’t choose their gender” as transphobia of all things. And in defense of “socialization is hard, I don’t want to be polite” of all things.
My point was never that gender shouldn’t exist
Just that I think it is a thing that should go away
Aight.
I will have a nice life. I hope you sit and have a good think deaf_fish who likes the C programming language. You might realize you had some misconceptions.
You’re confusing gender expression with gender identity, and not doing a great job at reading comprehension as well.
Transphobes think gender is synonymous with biological sex. People who almost get it think that gender is entirely independent of biology. The truth is that gender is complicated. The link I shared gives a decent overview.
Do you think trans people transition because one day they decided to on a whim?
Do you think if you flipped a coin to pick a child’s gender that that’s what they’d be?
Set aside that you’ve decided to argue and actually think for a moment. Where do you think gender dysphoria comes from?
I don’t think your little argument is as compelling as you think. If you ask me to address you by a different name I would, and it is impolite to refuse to use someone’s preferred name.
Let me guess, your one joke is “and I identify as an attack helicopter hyuck hyuck hyuck”?
The crux of the matter seems to be that you think you shouldn’t need to be respectful to people except when it suits you, and you’re irritated people might judge you for that. You’ve also got that trumped up conservative "there’s so many rules nowadays! You can’t just make a joke anymore!” energy.
Yes, if English never had gendered pronouns I’d still think gender as a concept would have reason to exist.
First, I was saying that you weren’t intending on being dismissive of people’s identities that they cared about, but thanks for specifically clarifying that you’re being rude.
you are not putting forth any arguments.
And you’re evidently weak in reading comprehension.
Gender is more complex than a binary. It’s not an inate thing, but it’s also not entirely a social construct.
As you brought up: transgender people. If gender were a pure social construct then they wouldn’t feel wrong with the gender assigned to them by society. Other parts of gender are clearly socially defined.
Even biological sex is more complex than a man woman duality and is partly mediated by social forces. (What biological properties matter for sex, and what variations of those result in being a different sex? Is an individual with xxy chromosomes male?)
I never said you needed to care, I said you needed to be polite if you make a mistake, and that people often take offense to being told that things about themselves they feel to be important don’t matter.
You’re entirely correct that we could all interact with each other only referring to each other by unique identifiers and the “I” and “you” pronouns.
That’s an assinine conclusion though. It kinda glosses over the whole “people like to talk to each other and socialize” thing. People often like to discuss pointless things like “how they’re doing”, “their interests”, “their families” and “hobbies”.
You’re not obligated to care or engage in these discussions, but people will take offense when you tell them that you don’t care about their children because they’re irrelevant.
where does this end? What constitutes which things need to be acknowledged during a social interactions and which things don’t.
I don’t know how to tell you how to have a normal social interaction. If you have difficulty keeping track of what to do in social situations like that you might consider talking to a professional. Most people are able to use context to determine what needs to be shared in an interaction and don’t have a hard rule or checklist.
Typically people start with basic biographical information, then some personal trivia to help bootstrap the stereotyping of what sort of person they are (I like to cook, I work in computer security, and I enjoy nature), and then information about how they fit into the social network (spouse, children, siblings, religious or social organization membership).
gender has value only to people who care about it
And shockingly, a lot of people find their gender to be important to them, and don’t like being told it doesn’t have value. Which is why, as I said before, people are giving you a lot of pushback.
There’s resistance to the notion that the only details about people that matter are the ones that are needed for others to address them. It turns out that people have a notion of “identity” that extends beyond their name, and that beyond having that identity they would like to express it.
Depending on the venue, I end up viewing emotions as a passive indicator of “Internet tenure”. O_o Conveys that someone has been on the Internet longer than 🤨 usage. (In some cases)
You create the impression that you’re opposed to the concept when you say things along the lines of not seeing why it should be a concept.
I know it isn’t your intention to convey dismissiveness. That doesn’t mean that you’re not, which is why there’s a fair amount of pushback.
No one expects you to know, and you can get away with always using gender neutral without any issues.
You are expected to show people basic respect even if you don’t get it and listen if they correct you. If I get your favorite programming language wrong and you tell me, it would be rude for me to keep referencing your passion for intercal or what have you.
So, not agreeing with the premise but: this article is from 2014, written by a legit historian, and is specifically not discussing the short term.
Their premise is effectively that war consolidates power and minimizes violence at scale inside the unified territory afterwards. Further, the things nations do to be ready for conflict, like build roads, administrative statates and all the social structures that accompany a standing army facilitate trade and prosperity.
It’s less that he’s arguing for war, and more just … Describing the historical consequences of war in aggregate.
It was certainly only titled the way it was because he was publishing a book and this is more eye catching.