7 ms·

Sometimes I’m just amazed that people haven’t risen up in bloody revolt yet. Recently my mother had a flare-up up radiation-induced pneumonitis and the PPO insu

Sometimes I’m just amazed that people haven’t risen up in bloody revolt yet. Recently my mother had a flare-up up radiation-induced pneumonitis and the PPO insurance she pays $14,000 annually wouldn’t approve a single unit of Advair. It took a week of talking to doctors and insurance drones to figure out that they were pushing her to an alternative that cost them $100 less. If I woke up tomorrow and people were burning Wall Street to the ground I’d be less than shocked.

village-idiot 8y ago
Again and again history reveals a surprising fact: you can push people really far before they finally reach their breaking point. And when that breaking point is finally reached, the trigger will not be what you expected.
- api 8y ago
  This is especially true when there are no obvious and politically viable good alternatives. In the US everyone outside the center-left or center-right seems to be an absolute lunatic of one sort or another, and even if that weren't the case the two party oligopoly system is deeply entrenched and guarantees that alternatives can't succeed. There's nobody who is both sane and electable that isn't part of the mainstream duopoly. The more polarized people become between the two major parties the more deeply entrenched the duopoly becomes. People don't dare vote for anyone but D or R because otherwise the hated other side will win. It completely rules out any third party or independent. Only two parties means there really isn't that much diversity of thought beyond a small number of hot-button issues, and it also reduces the work load for lobbyists and other influence peddlers. Fewer parties means fewer people that have to be begged, bribed, misinformed, or blackmailed to get whatever you want. It makes regulatory capture a lot easier to achieve. I really don't think the American two party system is working. We need more of a parliamentary type system where you can have many parties and a greater variety of views can get a hearing.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    Even if we could just find a way to keep people from thinking about political parties the same way they do about sports we could make a lot of progress.
  - existencebox 8y ago
    I'm glad this is finally being discussed cogently. For the longest time one would be painted as un-patriotic or some other slur-of-the-moment for even suggesting there were vicious-cycles of pathologies in the current incarnation of this system. (And in how human psychology/game theory plays into it) But as you summarized, all incentives are aligned to maintain the status quo. How do we break out of this? Expansion of executive/corporate/partisan power is _nothing new_ in American history, and the trends and outcomes are very clear cut. (I do not know the answer, I've been contemplating this nonstop for the last decade at least, and the best answer I have is trying to engage more people to think about it) What's remarkable to me is that very few people are even aware of the sheer mathematical/structural issues at hand: e.g. that we've expanded congressional representation from 1:(max)30000 citizens at the start, to 1:747184 as of 2017. We're engineers. We should understand scalability, and that _alone_ should be a giant red flag regarding its implications.
    - mythrwy 8y ago
      Congress has a heck of time getting anything done right now. I can't imagine what would happen if it were comprised of 20 times the members with all kinds of minor political parties each with their own narrow agendas. Personally I'm hoping at some point evidence based governance takes over. Which might mean it's not people doing it.
      - sjg007 8y ago
        I think it could work. You would get alignment of subgroups and better representation. If say Berkeley wants to be a green party they would be. So the averaging out would take place in Congress vs at the ballot box. This would get more ideas into Congress and blur party lines.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
toomuchtodo 8y ago
What would healthcare-centric revolt look like? You would need to apply pressure to specific congressional representatives, who support a specific ideology and don't believe in universal healthcare (A Crowdpac campaign has funded close to $4 million dollars to challenge Susan Collins when she's up for reelection due to her supreme court vote; that most likely won't scale). I could of course see rouge elements of such a movement using violence (not condoned!), but there has to be something legal that puts fear into Congress to act.
- thrower123 8y ago
  > (A Crowdpac campaign has funded close to $4 million dollars to challenge Susan Collins when she's up for reelection due to her supreme court vote; that most likely won't scale) This sort of thing should be illegal, particularly when it is out-of-state interests injecting money. If you live in another state, vote out your own reps you don't like. The harassment the poor woman has been put through lately is obscene.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    Money is considered speech. The legislative and judicial branches condone such actions, and the example you take issue with is the result of representatives having national impact (in this case, voting for the appointment of a supreme court judge).
    - entee 8y ago
      And the judges she have been voting for (not just the supreme court, but across the federal judiciary where she's voted to confirm virtually every one of Trump's judge nominations) are generally in favor of fewer limits on campaign finance laws. I think if you vote by proxy for less campaign finance regulation, you should be fine with facing the results.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
sdegutis 8y ago
Insurance is a legalized scam and it’s a shame it’s been made mandatory for everyone. Literally just a middleman now that does nothing except steal money from both sides. Edit: wow yall are incredibly divided on this comment. I'd love to see the internal statistics on the upvote/downvotes this got, but it seems like it's something like -12 and +12
- lawn 8y ago
  Some instances of insurance can be yes but insurance in general can make sense for both buyer and issuer.
  - dev_dull 8y ago
    When used as insurance. However health insurance is really just the way we pay for healthcare.
    - sdegutis 8y ago
      Health insurance drives the prices up for both patients and health care providers by thousands of percent. It's purely a malicious middleman that steals from both sides and does absolutely nothing beneficial at all. Except create jobs I guess, but is an inherently unethical job worth creating? Other insurances like car insurance and renters insurance seem slightly more reasonable (although they're all inherently a form of gambling) and I haven't heard any horror stories about them, but I wonder, if I had saved the money I put into car insurance, would it be sufficient by now to pay damages for any car accident I may be at fault for?
stewbrew 8y ago
In the US, it would have been sufficient to vote for a different party. Enjoy the government, the majority of you people voted for.
- rhcom2 8y ago
  In the US we are currently enjoying the government (at least in the executive) that the majority of people did not vote for.
  - CelestialTeapot 8y ago
    And many states are enjoying the government that jerrymandering and voter suppression efforts provide.
  - CNJ7654 8y ago
    In the US we are currently enjoying the government that the majority of states voted for. After all, states vote for the president, not people, and people are members of their state first and country second.
  - Agathos 8y ago
    Also in the legislative branch.
  - fatjokes 8y ago
    It's pretty close though.
- nicolewhite 8y ago
  The majority of Americans voted for Hillary.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    The plurality did. There was no majority.
  - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
gaius 8y ago
Sometimes I’m just amazed that people haven’t risen up in bloody revolt yet. Well you could have had my man Bernie Sanders, if the DNC hadn't stabbed him in the back. So you know who to put first up against the wall.
- marnett 8y ago
  All of em
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
watertom 8y ago
Half the population have below average IQ's, and even people with above average IQ's still struggle with abstractions. These topics are complex and it's easy to frame the negative state in a way for low IQ and poorly educated people to grasp, so they tend to side with what they "think" they understand.
- expertentipp 8y ago
  Half the population have below median IQs.
  - ThrustVectoring 8y ago
    The average basically is the median - IQ is pretty well normally distributed.
    - ItsMe000001 8y ago
      Just to continue the aside, it actually is perfectly normally distributed, since it is a purely statistical measure. http://michna.com/iq.htm http://michna.com/iq.htm
      - FabHK 8y ago
        hmm, interesting. Case 1: IQ tests are of the form: 100 + 20 x F_N^-1( F_R(R) ) where R is a raw score, that score is then translated into a percentile (by the cumulative distribution function F_R), and that is then translated into a gaussian ~N(100, 20^2) (by the inverse pdf F_N and constants 100, 20). Case 2: IQ tests are of the form c1 + c2 x R where R is a raw score and c1, c2 are chosen such that E[R] = 100, Var[R] = 20^2. If what is actually done is case 1, then what you say is correct, and saying "IQ is normally distributed" has no empirical content. If what is actually done is case 2, then saying "IQ is normally distributed" translates to "R is normally distributed" and has some empirical content. In particular, R (thus IQ) might not be normally distributed. (The article seems to argue, but doesn't make the case that case 1 is the case.) EDIT to add: dunno what the Variance is actually, might be 15^2 rather than 20^2.
twoheadedboy 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses
gerbilly 8y ago
> Sometimes I’m just amazed that people haven’t risen up in bloody revolt yet. The political class just divides us and keeps us fighting over non-issues. We're like crabs in a bucket, fighting with each other on the way to the pot of boiling water.
- fzeroracer 8y ago
  It's interesting because in a prior post I had made illustrating why people have such strong animosity towards the rich it was claimed that I have that exact mentality. In reality, the poor and middle class are the crabs trying to escape the wealthy wanting to boil us is the best way I can put it.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
refurb 8y ago
What's wrong with that? That's how healthcare costs are controlled, by pushing patients to the less costly alternative. If you lived in another country with single payer healthcare, it would be the same, if not more of a push to cheaper drugs.
mythrwy 8y ago
Maybe the reason people haven't risen up in bloody revolt is a good number of them are also engaged in some sort of rent seeking or useless or parasitic endeavor which pays the bills and which, they tell themselves is needed and noble. After all, nobody wants _their_ gravy train disturbed. The gears of the currently horrible insurance/healthcare fiasco are mostly normal, honest everyday people trying to get through life. With everyone trying to figure out how to get just a little bit bigger piece of pie. Gears in an out of control machine. And these gears are just doing their jobs and hoping for their bonus and hoping their homes keep appreciating and going home to their kids at night. It's a horribly broken system in so many ways. But it does seem like the Health/Insurance complex (and maybe higher education) are among the most egregious offenders and are growing more outrageous by the year. I think there is disagreement on what to burn down. Every level will insist vigorously that they aren't the problem, they are necessary and helping and that the problem is something else. It's not just the rich 1% either, the problem is also many of us at some level. If it weren't these things would be fixed.
- sjg007 8y ago
  The problem is that the young are less impacted so they don't care to vote. It's only when you have kids, have a health crisis etc.. that you start to take an interest. First understanding why something is the way it is and then advocating for change. Also, most people don't have major health issues (excluding an accident) until they are older (or have kids) .. And the largest consumer of health care are those aged 65+... So basically it's a hidden cost that people don't appreciate. As an aside, the only good thing about student loans being so egregious is that it will bring out the youth vote.

village-idiot 8y ago

Again and again history reveals a surprising fact: you can push people really far before they finally reach their breaking point. And when that breaking point is finally reached, the trigger will not be what you expected.

api 8y ago
This is especially true when there are no obvious and politically viable good alternatives. In the US everyone outside the center-left or center-right seems to be an absolute lunatic of one sort or another, and even if that weren't the case the two party oligopoly system is deeply entrenched and guarantees that alternatives can't succeed. There's nobody who is both sane and electable that isn't part of the mainstream duopoly. The more polarized people become between the two major parties the more deeply entrenched the duopoly becomes. People don't dare vote for anyone but D or R because otherwise the hated other side will win. It completely rules out any third party or independent. Only two parties means there really isn't that much diversity of thought beyond a small number of hot-button issues, and it also reduces the work load for lobbyists and other influence peddlers. Fewer parties means fewer people that have to be begged, bribed, misinformed, or blackmailed to get whatever you want. It makes regulatory capture a lot easier to achieve. I really don't think the American two party system is working. We need more of a parliamentary type system where you can have many parties and a greater variety of views can get a hearing.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  Even if we could just find a way to keep people from thinking about political parties the same way they do about sports we could make a lot of progress.
- existencebox 8y ago
  I'm glad this is finally being discussed cogently. For the longest time one would be painted as un-patriotic or some other slur-of-the-moment for even suggesting there were vicious-cycles of pathologies in the current incarnation of this system. (And in how human psychology/game theory plays into it) But as you summarized, all incentives are aligned to maintain the status quo. How do we break out of this? Expansion of executive/corporate/partisan power is _nothing new_ in American history, and the trends and outcomes are very clear cut. (I do not know the answer, I've been contemplating this nonstop for the last decade at least, and the best answer I have is trying to engage more people to think about it) What's remarkable to me is that very few people are even aware of the sheer mathematical/structural issues at hand: e.g. that we've expanded congressional representation from 1:(max)30000 citizens at the start, to 1:747184 as of 2017. We're engineers. We should understand scalability, and that _alone_ should be a giant red flag regarding its implications.
  - mythrwy 8y ago
    Congress has a heck of time getting anything done right now. I can't imagine what would happen if it were comprised of 20 times the members with all kinds of minor political parties each with their own narrow agendas. Personally I'm hoping at some point evidence based governance takes over. Which might mean it's not people doing it.
    - sjg007 8y ago
      I think it could work. You would get alignment of subgroups and better representation. If say Berkeley wants to be a green party they would be. So the averaging out would take place in Congress vs at the ballot box. This would get more ideas into Congress and blur party lines.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

toomuchtodo 8y ago

What would healthcare-centric revolt look like? You would need to apply pressure to specific congressional representatives, who support a specific ideology and don't believe in universal healthcare (A Crowdpac campaign has funded close to $4 million dollars to challenge Susan Collins when she's up for reelection due to her supreme court vote; that most likely won't scale). I could of course see rouge elements of such a movement using violence (not condoned!), but there has to be something legal that puts fear into Congress to act.

thrower123 8y ago
> (A Crowdpac campaign has funded close to $4 million dollars to challenge Susan Collins when she's up for reelection due to her supreme court vote; that most likely won't scale) This sort of thing should be illegal, particularly when it is out-of-state interests injecting money. If you live in another state, vote out your own reps you don't like. The harassment the poor woman has been put through lately is obscene.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Money is considered speech. The legislative and judicial branches condone such actions, and the example you take issue with is the result of representatives having national impact (in this case, voting for the appointment of a supreme court judge).
  - entee 8y ago
    And the judges she have been voting for (not just the supreme court, but across the federal judiciary where she's voted to confirm virtually every one of Trump's judge nominations) are generally in favor of fewer limits on campaign finance laws. I think if you vote by proxy for less campaign finance regulation, you should be fine with facing the results.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]

sdegutis 8y ago

Insurance is a legalized scam and it’s a shame it’s been made mandatory for everyone. Literally just a middleman now that does nothing except steal money from both sides. Edit: wow yall are incredibly divided on this comment. I'd love to see the internal statistics on the upvote/downvotes this got, but it seems like it's something like -12 and +12

lawn 8y ago
Some instances of insurance can be yes but insurance in general can make sense for both buyer and issuer.
- dev_dull 8y ago
  When used as insurance. However health insurance is really just the way we pay for healthcare.
  - sdegutis 8y ago
    Health insurance drives the prices up for both patients and health care providers by thousands of percent. It's purely a malicious middleman that steals from both sides and does absolutely nothing beneficial at all. Except create jobs I guess, but is an inherently unethical job worth creating? Other insurances like car insurance and renters insurance seem slightly more reasonable (although they're all inherently a form of gambling) and I haven't heard any horror stories about them, but I wonder, if I had saved the money I put into car insurance, would it be sufficient by now to pay damages for any car accident I may be at fault for?

stewbrew 8y ago

In the US, it would have been sufficient to vote for a different party. Enjoy the government, the majority of you people voted for.

rhcom2 8y ago
In the US we are currently enjoying the government (at least in the executive) that the majority of people did not vote for.
- CelestialTeapot 8y ago
  And many states are enjoying the government that jerrymandering and voter suppression efforts provide.
- CNJ7654 8y ago
  In the US we are currently enjoying the government that the majority of states voted for. After all, states vote for the president, not people, and people are members of their state first and country second.
- Agathos 8y ago
  Also in the legislative branch.
- fatjokes 8y ago
  It's pretty close though.
nicolewhite 8y ago
The majority of Americans voted for Hillary.
- mikeash 8y ago
  The plurality did. There was no majority.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y ago

gaius 8y ago

Sometimes I’m just amazed that people haven’t risen up in bloody revolt yet. Well you could have had my man Bernie Sanders, if the DNC hadn't stabbed him in the back. So you know who to put first up against the wall.

marnett 8y ago
All of em
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

watertom 8y ago

Half the population have below average IQ's, and even people with above average IQ's still struggle with abstractions. These topics are complex and it's easy to frame the negative state in a way for low IQ and poorly educated people to grasp, so they tend to side with what they "think" they understand.

expertentipp 8y ago
Half the population have below median IQs.
- ThrustVectoring 8y ago
  The average basically is the median - IQ is pretty well normally distributed.
  - ItsMe000001 8y ago
    Just to continue the aside, it actually is perfectly normally distributed, since it is a purely statistical measure. http://michna.com/iq.htm http://michna.com/iq.htm
    - FabHK 8y ago
      hmm, interesting. Case 1: IQ tests are of the form: 100 + 20 x F_N^-1( F_R(R) ) where R is a raw score, that score is then translated into a percentile (by the cumulative distribution function F_R), and that is then translated into a gaussian ~N(100, 20^2) (by the inverse pdf F_N and constants 100, 20). Case 2: IQ tests are of the form c1 + c2 x R where R is a raw score and c1, c2 are chosen such that E[R] = 100, Var[R] = 20^2. If what is actually done is case 1, then what you say is correct, and saying "IQ is normally distributed" has no empirical content. If what is actually done is case 2, then saying "IQ is normally distributed" translates to "R is normally distributed" and has some empirical content. In particular, R (thus IQ) might not be normally distributed. (The article seems to argue, but doesn't make the case that case 1 is the case.) EDIT to add: dunno what the Variance is actually, might be 15^2 rather than 20^2.

twoheadedboy 8y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses

gerbilly 8y ago

> Sometimes I’m just amazed that people haven’t risen up in bloody revolt yet. The political class just divides us and keeps us fighting over non-issues. We're like crabs in a bucket, fighting with each other on the way to the pot of boiling water.

fzeroracer 8y ago
It's interesting because in a prior post I had made illustrating why people have such strong animosity towards the rich it was claimed that I have that exact mentality. In reality, the poor and middle class are the crabs trying to escape the wealthy wanting to boil us is the best way I can put it.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

refurb 8y ago

What's wrong with that? That's how healthcare costs are controlled, by pushing patients to the less costly alternative. If you lived in another country with single payer healthcare, it would be the same, if not more of a push to cheaper drugs.

mythrwy 8y ago

Maybe the reason people haven't risen up in bloody revolt is a good number of them are also engaged in some sort of rent seeking or useless or parasitic endeavor which pays the bills and which, they tell themselves is needed and noble. After all, nobody wants _their_ gravy train disturbed. The gears of the currently horrible insurance/healthcare fiasco are mostly normal, honest everyday people trying to get through life. With everyone trying to figure out how to get just a little bit bigger piece of pie. Gears in an out of control machine. And these gears are just doing their jobs and hoping for their bonus and hoping their homes keep appreciating and going home to their kids at night. It's a horribly broken system in so many ways. But it does seem like the Health/Insurance complex (and maybe higher education) are among the most egregious offenders and are growing more outrageous by the year. I think there is disagreement on what to burn down. Every level will insist vigorously that they aren't the problem, they are necessary and helping and that the problem is something else. It's not just the rich 1% either, the problem is also many of us at some level. If it weren't these things would be fixed.

sjg007 8y ago
The problem is that the young are less impacted so they don't care to vote. It's only when you have kids, have a health crisis etc.. that you start to take an interest. First understanding why something is the way it is and then advocating for change. Also, most people don't have major health issues (excluding an accident) until they are older (or have kids) .. And the largest consumer of health care are those aged 65+... So basically it's a hidden cost that people don't appreciate. As an aside, the only good thing about student loans being so egregious is that it will bring out the youth vote.