“It isn’t fair to measure the salinity of the ocean by its saltiest tidal pools.”
an editor for the economist retweeted me do i have to seppuku now
I will bring the ceremonial Number Knife, so that you may carve the Grid of Shame into your body and commit sudoku honorably.
ranma-official asked:
thathopeyetlives answered:
I don’t know. I don’t think it’s hugely disparate.
I… Can’t really confidently accept that. Like, I agree that just criminalizing abortion in a country accustomed to having it legal, and not doing anything else, would be spectacularly ineffective and destructive.
But we have to actually end it. I’m not willing to lie to myself.
Speaking of being honest: actually ending it would require standardized physical or genetic modifications to humans to change how reproduction works such that pregnancy is purely voluntary and disconnected from sex. I can’t see any other way that doesn’t result in illegal abortions being performed which does not require police state theocracy or even greater violations.
That, of course, leaves out the entire discussion on how “ensoulment” works, and ways in which ensouled matter must necessarily behave differently from unensouled matter if souls aren’t just glorified backup devices.
My concern about Anarchism is that it will just replace formal power with social power, and I don’t think that’s really a step up.
First question: What does one even do about Russia secretly interfering with our politics? If people are actually involved (and apparently Flynn was) you can impeach or disqualify them. Trump has been president for a few weeks and has managed to screw up royally, so we could kick him out, but earlier on… you’re kinda out of luck unless you want to totally screw up the politics.
Second question: What is actually going on? Is Trump genuinely trying to be friends with Russia and enemies with China (stupid plan in a world that successfully avoids war!) or just Putin wants to weaken the USA with idiot leaders or what?
My gut feeling is that either that Putin blackmailing/threatening/bribing Trump, or that authoritarian leaders with a socially conservative support base flock together. Or both.
Russia + China is not an unreasonable combination. So yes, I think preventing that is part of it. China is about to enter a period of decline, but it’s still more likely to become a global hegemon than Russia.
I think there are several things going on here.
I suspect that the real answer to ‘why do we need a Metal Gear’ would be ‘because the US Army wants a larger budget and more influence on US strategy’
We can’t kill the metal gear program, the plant where they make the siding employs 1000 people in my congressional district!
An independent review board has ordered an unspecified health insurer in the northeastern USA to reimburse a patient for a $69,500 exoskelton from Rewalk, whose products enable people with spinal cord injuries to walk.
The board found that the exoskeleton was “medically necessary.”
https://boingboing.net/2016/02/19/health-insurance-must-pay-for.html
this is awesome but you know, anyone still wondering why healthcare eats up more and more of GDP
Not that I’ve looked at the math or anything, it’s 2:40 am and no. But unless there’s a digit missing in that pricing, the health economics of that thing have got to be a total slam-dunk. I don’t doubt the payor resisted paying because resisting payment is what payors do. If it’s a novel device that isn’t on approved formulary lists, which probably if new thing and not many candidates, that alone is plenty for at least one line of nope. It doesn’t require an actual rational objection based on the value proposition. SOP would be bog-standard automatic bureaucratic obstructionism framed as a best practice in cost consciousness. It’s only a story because someone got pissed off enough to deploy the courts and a journalist thought the device looked cool.
Try pricing five days in the critical care unit on a ventilator for a dying eighty-seven-year-old with advanced dementia, heart failure, and chronic kidney disease, found short of breath and tachycardic in bed at the nursing home, rushed to the hospital, and admitted with sepsis and pulmonary edema. Including imaging and cath lab. Then get back to me about unjustifiable Cadillac expenditures on luxurious medical devices that enable (a very small number of) paralyzed people with normal life expectancies to walk again, for less than it costs to put a remote monitoring device into a heart failure patient’s chest, which, statistically, costs less than *not* doing that because it reduces hospitalizations by just a tad.
maybe we do need a Muslim registry so we can make sure citizens are obeying Islamic law and only marrying other Muslims, just like in Malaysia
You joke about that, but right wingers think that’s exactly what will happen if Muslims get a majority… and I can’t see anything to really prove them wrong on it.
This is why every political debate feels like arguing with the mirror: why would people who fear and detest Islamic law push for something common in countries which follow Islamic law, and why would their opponents oppose it.
(Rhetorical question, but still).
You already know the answer to this one. American right-wingers want a Muslim registry with fingerprints and DNA samples for testing bombs, not one with marital status for limiting marriages to Muslims. As for the Left, they don’t want Muslims to actually practice Islam; they want Muslims to become the equivalent of non-practicing Catholics or something along those lines.
maybe we do need a Muslim registry so we can make sure citizens are obeying Islamic law and only marrying other Muslims, just like in Malaysia
You joke about that, but right wingers think that’s exactly what will happen if Muslims get a majority… and I can’t see anything to really prove them wrong on it.
aka Decius
Okay this is mostly hilarious as a profile of some NRXer’s online presence in a way that probably feels deeply familiar to anyone reading this from the dashboard of tumblr dot com.
Probably not actually relevant as a political matter, because he was an appointee of Flynn and so unlikely to stick around.
And not to be grinding too much of an anti-right hammer today, you can see how David fucking Plouffe (aka the engineer of Obama’s grassroots army in 2008) was fined by an ethics board for improper lobbying for Uber.
It’s not the individual, it’s the system.
Honestly, I didn’t find anything in there particularly outrageous. Homogenous societies do seem to have the better stats he mentions, Islamist terrorists really do exist and would love to nuke New York. I think the risk he assigns it is overestimated, but potential nuclear attack is one reason I don’t want to live in New York.
