iamadog1029's comments

Do you happen to know how one would be billed for this if they didn't have insurance?

$1400 for cholecalciferate - aka Vitamin D-3 $700 for sterile water

I don't comprehend how charges like that are even remotely feasible for anything other than the deferal of liability from the hospital to the mfg., who charges a premium. But I suppose that goes under the liability insurance domain.

But that's only half of the story. Billing is a negotiation process between the practitioners or their institution and the insurance providers, so naturally the hospital is going to wring every penny out that they can which means they'll "charge" you $500 for a $10 bag of saline, and leave you at the mercy of wolves.

Just another perverted feedback loop, the insurance industry is so well established that it's become necessity, and treatment is made expensive by insurance, and will presumably continue in that direction because of its huge inertia.

I don't find that voting systems are a positive evolution, generally. It's a non-committal way to interface for people that don't contribute any tangible content to a discussion. I remember when Facepunch Studios integrated it, which was simulating SA. It was years ago and I was a youth, but I remember, in myself at least, attempting to cater to voters. I don't suspect I fall far from the average interaction in that capacity. And I think that breeds disingenuous user interaction. And FP was a bog-standard BBS forum, the only thing that decided the content stream was moderation and new posts/threads; using votes to promote or demote content streams - targeting, [at least] has been pretty widely discussed as a hazard and that's all I see it as. So between those two features, targeting and disingenuous posting (itself a form of targeting), I think that voting systems at large are a real detractor in general conversation. And if we consider malefactors and echo formation... I just don't see a whole lot in the way of good other than streamlining and automating moderation, which is appropriate in some circumstances, in general conversation I think it just compromises the whole thing.

Of course, it's all dependent on the design of the website. If you're there simply to generate reams of data for marketing teams to sop up, that's something you can do with this sort of system. But if you're designing for legitimate vulnerability and honest to god expression 4chan is probably the best model in a sort of ironic twist. It's user-streamlined, no account, setup or email, the page is barebones, you don't need to post anything whatever and there's no history to haunt you. And maybe you could argue you can't trust anything on 4chan, but you could argue the same anywhere, and in fact I'd assume that the quantity of Facebook and Reddit are far more rife with artifice than 4chan. But FB and R aren't actually designed for absolute expression, they're designed to generate marketing feedback.

Not history's, but the present's solution to history is the Lindy effect. I don't think it can be dealt with in the present, truth must necessarily be sieved out and separated from the limitless chaff.

This was discussed years ago, but it's been a reality for a long while. There are articles dating back to 2007 kind of dabbling into this, and I remember years ago a whistleblower, I think she was a journalist employed by one of these companies, and if I recall did a TED talk exposing a commercial enterprise built to both whitewash and smear people, and probably companies alongside it. One of their mediums was Wikipedia. Maybe someone here has a better recollection of it than I do?

But yeah, I don't see that this is novel. There's been both the architecture and the motivation for individual, commercial, and political disinformation since the inception of language. The rise in scale isn't even that alarming, they're probably actually just uncovering activity that started long ago, I mean this is just radical PR or propaganda, which has been around unobserved for centuries. I'd readily agree that the pre-liberal Catholic church, and the clergy under it, were staked so highly in justifying Divine Right that it became a sort of disinformation that had the added benefit of lining the pockets of the Pope down to the parishioner. Dumas and Hugo both had asides in their books, Monte Cristo and Hunchback respectively, both of which expounded that truth is fickle. And if Hugo was being intellectually honest, he had reason to believe that even in the 15th century Paris was rife with disinformation.

It's good to see these sort of things published from time to time, maybe it will breed some more skeptics, but mostly it'll be a talking point.

I do my own dishes now, I'll do my own dishes then.

Your thesis is non-sequitur, and speaking frankly, degenerate and extraordinarily cynical. Communes are experimental, experiments often fail, that's just the way shit works. Out of those failures, there are communes that have succeeded - you fail to mention them. You don't need gods, or leaders, or governance just the instinctual wanting for both community and self-preservation. Government is reactionary, not preventative,[1] and coercion is endemic to the human population it's tit-for-tat, and even more so in the modern era the great equalizer is among us and widely proliferated. It's not a question of genetic lottery anymore.

Money isn't actually the problem, it is disproportion and, duly, the concentration. That concentration equates to leverage, which is influence. Influence has been used to commit atrocities from times immemorial, it is, if not the foremost then among the foremost elements of human oppression. Historically this has been aceded to by the mass population through various modes of manipulation. It is actually exploitative predation which is founded on artifice, suppression and innate blind spots in social and economic cognition.[2] Worker owned cooperatives, at least superficially, seem to be the only structure that isn't human-perverse which promote both autonomy and community without being disruptively disproportionate in their allotment of power - Mondragon Corporation for example.

[1] Think of how often laws are violated despite the possible consequences: murder, neglect, speeding, embezzlement, bribery... [2] Artifice being the hard work fallacy, which is actually predominately luck with lottery ticket odds and personal delusions of exceptionalism. Suppression being the ceaseless toil the masses necessarily endeavor in to support their livelihood. Blind spots in being inherently biased towards trust, economic blind spots emerging out of ignorance promulgated by that status quo and the nigh-complete opacity presented to workers.

It couldn't possibly be that the inertia of the system at large is highly resistant to progressive policy?

That's far more complicated than you'd suspect, at least in the US. There are a litany of policies that criminalize self-sustainment. Granted I suppose one could consume pests without being harangued for poaching, but that doesn't mitigate property laws, and all property is owned if not privately then publicly and in either case most often requires license to be there, whether explicit or implicit. Certainly doing any reasonable amount of cultivation is seriously complicated by this. So you're legally barred from hunting, barred from cultivation, and you're left with scavenging or gathering and that's highly dependent on a number of factors. Granted the probability of being found out in the depths of the wild are minute, it is nonetheless a serious existential threat. Let's just say we're at the mercy of our captors.

Having addressed the question of legality of rogue individuals... And if an individual exploiting the wild is illegal, so is the group. Humans are social animals. Going it alone at length in the arboreal breast of mother nature would be extraordinarily taxing mentally for most people. That alone is a crucial disincentive, and with the legal disincentive it atomizes people and forces even the highest aspirants to dissolution of the ideal. And that's before the process is even allowed to occur. The impacts of each added person to a group of rogues would compound, and I'd posit exponentially. And with that impact the footprint naturally grows, and with the footprint the risk of detection. At the end of the day the risk assessment points to certain failure.

So the next best thing is urbanized scavenging, not because it's the idyllic means, but because it's the only certainty. If you offered these people license to fuck off, I suspect they would do just that, perhaps not all, but most. I know if I was given license, alongside my friends, to get out of dodge we might just take up that offer. But the whole concept of real liberty, real autonomy, real independence - that's an existential threat to the status quo, to the system, and to the policy makers and corporations that own them, and to the very few of those who pull the strings.