[Discussion] Discussions & Debates Videos

videos with subject matter more suited to d&d than everything else. to be discussed and / or debated, with offshot threads if discussion on a particular video or subject warrants it.

OG_slinger wrote:

So it's not that members of Congress are upset that nurses are earning thousands more. They're worried the owners of the agencies are making millions by price gouging and colluding.

This may be true, but it doesn't really detract from her point that they don't seem to care when hospitals and insurance companies do basically the same thing.

I can’t speak to the specific issue so I don’t know if the nurses are seeing some of that increase as well.

I just love the irony that congress would get involved for this issue, but not the countless other ways our system is straight up broken.

PaladinTom wrote:

I just love the irony that congress would get involved for this issue, but not the countless other ways our system is straight up broken.

Because a number of those nurses are coming from already financially strapped and overwhelmed county hospitals in rural areas, meaning they can't afford to pay the higher rates and won't be able to care for residents.

Congress is getting involved because they are trying to triage our broken ass healthcare system and make sure more people aren't dying in this endless pandemic.

...by doing it with a dirty band-aid they found in an alley on K street.

Tom's point stands.

The 10 Worst Examples of Healthcare Profiteering and Dysfunction

OG_slinger wrote:

Congress is getting involved because they are trying to triage our broken ass healthcare system and make sure more people aren't dying in this endless pandemic.

Not gonna lie; that is a weird take.

The number of people in the US estimated to die due to their inability to afford necessary medical care has been accelerating for decades. Doing some searching yielded little in the way of authoritative numbers, but the best estimates I could land on from medical researchers points to an increase from roughly 50k/year around late 2009-early 2010 to roughly 125k/year noted by the start of 2020 -- before the pandemic started, and well before travel nurse pay started jumping through the roof.

And yet, no serious effort at putting any real caps on healthcare costs. In fact, throughout this time, costs have only worsened (especially egregious regarding skyrocketing medication costs as companies pass around drug rights like sports players and jack up the prices after each trade -- with Congress doing a big fat f*ck-all about it) right along with the rate of deaths due to unaffordable healthcare.

2020 came along and actually ended up being incredibly profitable for many healthcare organizations, while simultaneously saddling even more patients than ever with obscene medical debt. Congress fought all year about the issue of surprise medical bills (after failing to accomplish anything about the issue in 2019), finally passing some watered-down legislation intended to mitigate that practice -- we'll see how well that works out in the long run. Still, no sense of urgency about actual overall healthcare cost problems.

Access to emergency care has been a growing issue for decades too. I remember discussions about the closings of ER departments of hospitals in large urban areas back in the early '00's right here on GWJ and the impact that was having on low-income demographics in particular (though everyone suffered from delays in emergency care).

Essentially, every aspect of our healthcare system has been crumbling and falling apart for decades, except for its profitability for the executive and investor classes.

If Congress was sincerely motivated to "triage our broken ass healthcare system," they wouldn't have waited until the value of their healthcare investment portfolio or the profitability of their high-end donors in the healthcare field were threatened by "out of control" pay for travel nurses.

Self-driving car technology is so not there that it literally fails and almost mercs a cyclist while Tesla bros are bragging about how good it is.

https://twitter.com/omedyentral/stat...

Quite simply, self-driving technology needs at least two major things before it can be viable.

1. As sterile an environment as possible. Meaning eliminating human drivers, minimizing the potential for pedestrian interference and the like, etc. So we're talking either their own lanes & traffic controls, or doing things like closing off city centers to anything but self-driving vehicles.

2. Environmental marker technology that is not designed to be read & interpreted by humans. Making AIs learn how to read stop signs, traffic lights, and crosswalks with cameras is a dumb solution. We need lane markers, traffic signs, crossings of all types, etc. to have some kind of computer-read marker that a self-driving car can't fail to identify because lighting conditions aren't ideal, or someone has stolen the stop sign from an intersection, or snow is covering a crosswalk.

We can spend a ton of money on this technology, trying to make it work in imperfect environments for it, or we can introduce reforms to keep people from tying up public projects like good, viable, & useful public transit from happening.

When you see the kind of transit available both in and between cities in Europe, it's more than a little embarrassing how far behind the US is on stuff like this.

Agreed. And people like Musk brute forcing it into public spaces doesn’t make it right or inevitable. It’s just how things work here. There’s an acceptable level of death for profits and he’s taking advantage of that.

NSMike wrote:

Quite simply, self-driving technology needs at least two major things before it can be viable.

1. As sterile an environment as possible. Meaning eliminating human drivers, minimizing the potential for pedestrian interference and the like, etc. So we're talking either their own lanes & traffic controls, or doing things like closing off city centers to anything but self-driving vehicles.

2. Environmental marker technology that is not designed to be read & interpreted by humans. Making AIs learn how to read stop signs, traffic lights, and crosswalks with cameras is a dumb solution. We need lane markers, traffic signs, crossings of all types, etc. to have some kind of computer-read marker that a self-driving car can't fail to identify because lighting conditions aren't ideal, or someone has stolen the stop sign from an intersection, or snow is covering a crosswalk.

We can spend a ton of money on this technology, trying to make it work in imperfect environments for it, or we can introduce reforms to keep people from tying up public projects like good, viable, & useful public transit from happening.

When you see the kind of transit available both in and between cities in Europe, it's more than a little embarrassing how far behind the US is on stuff like this.

How much does point 2 need or benefit from Lidar?

Tesla's vision only system has always seemed like a dead end to me because I don't see how cameras can ever be even close to foolproof in weather, smog, glare etc.

Seems like cameras, lidar and redundant markers gets you a pretty robust system.

Eminem Responds To Rudy Giuliani

The video was made to highlight the plight of the children caught up in Syria's civil war, the anniversary of which falls on March 15.

Fast forward to 8:20.

Bless you, Steven.

Do you Really Need 10,000 Steps a Day?

Probably. It’s a pity that in America our built environments center around driving everywhere.

I like that when they did the research and found out that for men, the optimum number of steps actually was 10,000 steps per day, they backed off with a “whoa whoa whoa these studies are flawed!”

(For women it was 7,000)

Why it's harder to earn more than your parents | The Economist

*posted as I started watching and it is already annoying me but I will leave it.

He says at about the 1:50 mark - people in other countries don't understand how your rights can be determined by your address. This is just untrue. They completely understand - if you live in China you have less rights than if you live in England. Everyone understands that.
What they might not understand is that the US is not a unified country - the US is a collection of states that kind of agree on some stuff but not on others.
It is more like the European Union where states do their own thing but they act as one with regards to treaties/trade/etc with other countries.
And when I think about it that is what I believe the "founding white male land owners who owned slaves fathers" wanted. They were very warry of a strong federal government who might not respect states opinons.
I think after WW2 we got this idea in our head that we were this big strong unified country that could lead the world. It was not how it was intended.

Lawrence: Minority Rule Is Killing The ‘United’ In The United States

farley3k wrote:

He says at about the 1:50 mark - people in other countries don't understand how your rights can be determined by your address. This is just untrue. They completely understand - if you live in China you have less rights than if you live in England. Everyone understands that.

The context of that statement at 1:50 though is not in terms of comparing one nation to another. His point is that people in other countries (I would say "most other countries" to be more accurate) don't have rights that depend upon where you live within that country.

i.e. if you live in Nanjing, you don't have less rights than if you live in Hangzhou. If you live in Manchester, you don't have less rights than if you live in Liverpool. And so on.

He is absolutely right. Can you imagine if you lived in Manchester, you could face the death penalty for having an abortion (or even allegedly having one) even if you traveled to Liverpool to have the procedure done, while residents of Liverpool have the right to abortion procedures without criminalization? That would be the height of absurdity, as it should be here in the US.

Farscry wrote:

He is absolutely right. Can you imagine if you lived in Manchester, you could face the death penalty for having an abortion (or even allegedly having one) even if you traveled to Liverpool to have the procedure done, while residents of Liverpool have the right to abortion procedures without criminalization? That would be the height of absurdity, as it should be here in the US.

But that is because - I am positing - we have come to think of the United States as a single entity when we should think of it more like the European Union.

And as a discussion - I am just wondering if that conceptualization wouldn't be more in line with what was intended.

I don't know that even the nation's founders could truly agree on where the line should be drawn on which rights should be guaranteed nationwide versus on a state-by-state basis. On a strict reading of the 1st amendment, for example, one could argue that while the US Congress can't legislate religion, it doesn't explicitly forbid state legislatures from doing so (nor is it in the list of items in Article I Section from which states are forbidden to regulate).

Sure, we've since had additional legislation and judicial decisions that essentially establish separation of church and state as the law of the land, but was that what the founders as a complete body intended?

farley3k wrote:
Farscry wrote:

He is absolutely right. Can you imagine if you lived in Manchester, you could face the death penalty for having an abortion (or even allegedly having one) even if you traveled to Liverpool to have the procedure done, while residents of Liverpool have the right to abortion procedures without criminalization? That would be the height of absurdity, as it should be here in the US.

But that is because - I am positing - we have come to think of the United States as a single entity when we should think of it more like the European Union.

And as a discussion - I am just wondering if that conceptualization wouldn't be more in line with what was intended.

“One nation, indivisible, with liberty and Justice for all.”

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

People have already studied the US and found that it is deeply stratified in some pretty significant ways, and most of those do not follow state borders. We do have essentially multiple "nations" under a single federal government, and under multiple different state governments. A lot of those regions that might want to work together are dotted in spots around the continent with no real way to unite without the federal government.

The US's time as a single nation is on a clock, for sure. The contiguous 48 will likely eventually end up as multiple nations. Seriously doubt that'll happen in my lifetime - it will probably take the pressures of the climate crisis to even begin thinking about that happening. But it will happen. And it won't be pretty.

NSMike wrote:

The contiguous 48 will likely eventually end up as multiple nations. Seriously doubt that'll happen in my lifetime - it will probably take the pressures of the climate crisis to even begin thinking about that happening. But it will happen. And it won't be pretty.

…so sometime within the next couple decades, then?

With the rate that the underpinnings of our nation are being eroded -- intentionally, I might add -- I think the breaking point is a lot closer than I thought it was even just a few years ago. I thought we had decades, now I fear we might be down to just one decade left before the wheels go flying off if we're lucky. I just keep thinking about how unbelievably contentious the next few elections (both midterm and presidential) will be, combined with all the ways that the economy is spiraling out of control, and the impact that sooner-than-expected climate crises are compounding all of this.

I'm all for extending the British Colombian border south a couple hundred miles kilometers, personally.

Why Sweden is proud to have the world's highest taxes